Saturday.

As I sit in the study at 11.30 this evening, the rain is washing down our front (East-facing) windows as if the monsoon had arrived, not battering so much as fulsome, like being in a car wash. Lord knows what our back garden will look like in the morning if this goes on - that border that floods will probably be demonstrating why the patio we want to replace it with will need to have good drains installed...

It wasn't like this all day. The morning was grey and quiet and I even hung out some washing which was almost dry when I took it in at lunchtime. I had a chat on the phone with my daughter-in-law, who was up a ladder painting a ceiling, and, briefly, with my son (not her husband - t'other one) who was outside painting the garage. I had a nagging sense that there was much I could be doing, and took myself up to the loft to find the extra pillows in their sturdy zip bag which I felt sure had not been removed in the recent purge. I threw them triumphantly down the ladder and followed them, rather less precipitately. I made up the spare bed (how do you put on a double duvet cover single-handed? I stand on the bed and shake it ...). I found the two single duvets to join the retrieved pillows; the spare room now looks like a bedding store.* Himself and I had a quick sing, in French, in preparation for tomorrow. 

After lunch we went out. This was not a joyous outing, the kind that you look forward to; this was a duty walk for the good of our health and nothing more. However, I was damned if I was just going to trail round Dunoon: that smacks of desperation, of lockdown at its strictest, of last resorts. Instead, we returned to Benmore Gardens to let them work their magic, arriving at the same time as the rain. We took rather different paths up the hill from our usual route, and were rewarded in the Andean shelter by the company of a robin, completely unfazed by our presence, making good use of the shelter with its beams and perches. I took my usual crop of autumnal photos, even in the rain, of which I chose the above because these particular shrubs hadn't really changed colour the last time we were here. 

A random thought for today: in addition to the sombre news about the murder of Sir David Amess which is dominating all media today, have you noticed how dark some soaps and serials seem to have become in these post-pandemic times? Some of the story lines in Eastenders, for example, are much grittier than they used to be - though as I write that, I remember various deaths and the domestic violence in the story of Little Mo - and Granchester is powerfully dominated in this current series by the unfolding of the dreadful treatment of gay men at the time when I was just beginning secondary school, as well as the revelations of post-war mental anguish that have me wondering what my own father never told me. Are we all less susceptible to froth, or is it just that I can't be bothered watching it?

But these aren't thoughts for bedtime, and bedtime it most assuredly is. 

* I'm expecting family this week. Usual caveats to self about possible sudden upsets to arrangements in these chancy times ...