Return to Face-Plant Road

The wind is howling intermittently in the chimneys as I head for bed tonight, and it's been raining steadily since lunchtime, and I'm completely shredded. Again. I decided over tea this morning that actually I couldn't face the day, couldn't face tomorrow, didn't feel up to thinking about food or marmalade or ... anything. And then I thought of my suspicion that life ends with a succession of ready meals and realised that if this is so, then I know why, and almost got back under the duvet. 

And that, O Best Beloved, is why when I did fling off said duvet and emerge into the morning I threw myself into making a loaf and getting down the runny marmalade and retrieving the preserving pan from the loft (well, Himself went for it) and going through the whole sticky palaver again, plus pectin out of a bottle, at the same time doing two loads of washing with the thought that I could at least get some of it out on the line before the rain came ...

And then another domestic disaster struck. My whirligig died. It was all of 43 years old (I have a reason to know this fact) and the actions of the gardener trying to take it out of its socket last week had killed it. The metal broke clean off at the base, leaving a rusty mess embedded in ancient concrete (from an earlier installation) and a sagging whirligig like a dead umbrella. Catastrophe. The washing ended up on hangers dangling from the loft ladder while some of it tumbled. 

My bestie texted me during lunch. Did I want to go for a walk? (It was raining steadily by this time). Cautious acceptance on my part: Where to? And back came the question: fancy going up FacePlant road? Avid readers of this journal may recall that on a similarly foul day in spring I slipped on a dislodged stone on a muddy forest road and ploughed up the ground with my face - and I've not been there since. But we went, and I was careful, and it was just as wet and just as muddy and that's where I took the only photo of the day, looking down to where you can just make out the Holy Loch through the mist. Four miles, just, but strenuous - and a great blether.

And the good news is that the builder who does just about anything is going to send someone round next week with a new whirligig, someone who will be able to deal with whatever needs to be done. Whew!