Antidote

I promised an antidote to yesterday's dismal blip, and in a way it's turned out to be an antidote to a rather dismal day today, so I think I can be forgiven for using today's collage of yesterday's photos ...

Arriving in Edinburgh in time for coffee, still slightly shocked from our early wakening, we called a black cab (using the excellent Gett app) to take us to the St James' Centre (the one with the golden whatever-it-is on the top: I was never sufficiently far from it to get a photo). I felt fine about the shopping mall aspect of crowds, somehow, but still drew the line at buses. We had lunch in the food court - it's quite a palaver! You check in in the usual Covid way - queue briefly, given a phone number, get taken to a table - and then have the explanation if it's your first visit. Using your phone to scan a QR code on the table, you log in to the site that comes up and use that to order drinks from the menu that appears. The drinks miraculously materialise, and using them as placeholders, you are then free to wander round the various outlets and order ... whatever. They give you a device that flashes red and vibrates when your food is ready for you to go and fetch it. As it was Catriona's birthday outing, she chose - so we used the Hong Kong street food stall. I had the kind of lunch that as the basis of a diet would have you suffering from scurvy in no time, but the chilli king prawns and salt and chilli fries were delicious ...

Then we hit the shops, the shops that I don't really go into any more (Zara and Pull & Bear, since you ask). Catriona sailed round with growing armfuls of jeans - this being the priority item - discarding all but one pair , along with a tiny black top, when she realised that Covid has shut the changing rooms. She seemed pretty confident in her sizing, so we self-checked out (trauma getting the security tags off) and set off in search of something that could be worn over the top. (The discerning reader will have realised by now that we were creating An Outfit)

The resulting outfit is in the right hand photo above. The jeans, interestingly for me, were all flared or simply wide - I knew they were around these days, but not that they were pretty ubiquitous. They had unfinished hems; she's going to get her mum to cut off an inch or so and finish off the side seams. She was happy, in a wonderfully generous manner that made us feel our presence and our present were just what she'd wanted. 

The afternoon ended with a little party back at the house - curated, as they say, by her wee sister Anna and latterly her Dad, who'd been working in the study. My belle-fille was home from work (do all schools in Edinburgh stop at midday on Fridays?) and we ate a tall striped chocolate cake and drank fizz, alcoholic and non, and Catriona opened the rest of her presents. She'd postponed her family celebrations a day, and celebrated the actual day with her bestie from school. 

It was hard to leave, but the roads were quiet after 7pm and we whizzed along the M8 to the ferry, arriving home just before 10pm. The darkness hid any signs of the trauma of the morning, so we ate oatcakes and grapes ( a belated stab at healthy eating) and went to bed with slight indigestion ...

And today? We slept in. I made bread. I went a walk in a misty forest in the rain with my pal and her two dogs. We pondered how Himself could readily acquire a new pair of shoes in which to play the organ. And now it's midnight.

Again.