After Arwen

I feel that the first named storm of the winter arrived with comparatively little fanfare, but goodness, some parts of the country had a wild time of it - and a tragic time, in some instances. So I need to say right away that the only sign of the gales in the night on our patch was our neighbour's blue bin, which landed on our front steps, and his laurel tree, whose pot was blown over. By the time I was down for breakfast, both were back where they belonged. 

I was quite late coming down because I slept extremely badly. (If I say that part of the reason was wind, you can take whatever you like from that statement and probably be correct.) I was reminded of a horrid night a year ago when the whole crumbling of a family Christmas was becoming unavoidable and seemed a lot worse at 3am. This time it was partly fretting about people's strange inattention to the knock-on effects of so many actions at this time - why does the brain blow things like that up with every passing, dark minute?

I decided that the world might feel a better place with a walk while the sun was still shining, and to that end headed out after coffee to walk along the shore at Toward. Because we were sheltered for much of the way from the still-blowing northerly wind, it was amazingly quiet, and the sea was a flat calm gleaming in the sunlight. The coast road had acquired bright new white lines delineating the edges - a very necessary refinement here - and indeed I came across the white line lorry with a chap apparently replenishing the tank of paint. The blip shows one of the places I bathed in the summer, interesting to me because I could see the miraculously cleared path of firm sand where someone has created a clear run, perhaps to launch a boat down, through the rocks. I've not looked at it at low tide since the day I discovered it by trial and error at high tide. If I were to be as brave as blipper Lady Findhorn I might choose this spot to swim all year round, but I'm not. Now now, anyway.

After that and a bite of lunch I actually felt fit for nothing, and sat for ages brooding over a sermon I've to preach in a fortnight and doing a bit of Duolingo Italian on my phone. I hate that, though, because it makes life hard for me if I make too many mistakes; the desktop is much more accommodating.

Today was my granddaughter Anna's birthday, and despite a FaceTime chat at breakfast I felt the separation  - I consoled myself by remembering our time looking after her sister while her mother was otherwise engaged. I shall never forget the terrifying ice that morning of the drive to the hospital at 5am and the little case left standing in the middle of the car park that I had to slither across to rescue it ...

But all the world was a bit younger then.