Phew ...

Having bored everyone with my hypochondria for the last couple of days, I'll get this in first: I haven't got Covid_19. The results of my test came in while I was at online Compline this evening - you can make of that what you will. My main remaining symptom is the painful swollen glands, particularly noticeable because it's such a long time since I had such a thing, and the feeling of not being quite here. Better, anyway - and thanks to all the solicitous!

I made sourdough today - it rose alarmingly, presumably because the house is still warmer than usual after all that weather. Looks jolly good anyway. Today we had to eat fried sourdough starter with bits of cold chicken because I really ought to have started making the bread yesterday and felt too poorly to be bothered. I rather like the strange pancakes it makes - they are so amazingly lemony in flavour, despite being only flour and water. 

I also had time to read The Scotsman from cover to cover - if that's what you do online; I like the virtual paper rather than the web version of the news. I was interested in this business of the slower uptake of vaccination on the part of the under-50s, and particularly the younger end of that group; it does seem odd to me to lambast the FM for promising that everyone would be vaccinated by now. How would people have reacted, I wonder, if she'd said instead that everyone would have been given the chance but because they were free to turn it down it was unlikely that we'd ever reach that goal? And now we're apparently enrolling rôle models to encourage uptake among the young - I'm feeling a Victor Meldrew moment coming on. On another tack, it's pleasing to read that several Scotsman journos are in the running for awards ...

Another strange effect of the extra time in the day created by viral lassitude is that I picked my ancient, childhood copy of King Solomon's Mines off a top shelf and have started reading it for the umpteenth time (the other times all being, I should think, before I was 10). It's quite extraordinary to read nowadays, and to realise that I knew bits of it so well that I could quote them - as well as realising how much I've changed. Tempora mutantur and all that ...

My blip today comes from the moment just before dinner time when I felt I had to get out for some air - it had been too chilly today to sit in the garden as I did yesterday - and bashed round an energetic circuit very close to home. This view was taken from the east-facing slope of Castle Hill (I couldn't take it from the summit because, annoyingly, there were some people there) and shows the back of the statue of Burns' Highland Mary staring longingly across the water to Ayrshire (though she really needs to turn to the right a bit) as well as the poor remains of the lovely Dunoon pier, with the breakwater to the right, built for new ro-ro ferries that never materialised. Instead, miserable little passenger ferries dock at the ramp to its left; the car queueing area is a car park; the Waverley is the only steamer to use the new pier properly and the old pier is mostly shut off except for people on foot, while its buildings are apparently too at risk from tidal incidents to be used for any commercial or recreational purpose.

I think ...