Chilling

Another glorious morning saw me - rather rashly, because it was chilly - in the garden in my dressing gown, playing with ice. To be exact, I was coming back from depositing last week's Sunday paper in the recycling before buying todays, when I saw that the water in an empty pot had a layer of ice. I don't know what made me poke it carefully out, but I'm really glad I did when I realised that though the upper surface was flat, the underside was anything but. So that's my blip sorted, just after breakfast - the wonderful ferns on the range of delicate ice mountains lurking in my pot.

Thereafter Sunday unfolded as we've come to expect - church, coffee with my pal, tear ourselves away from the paper, walk. Another wee drive down the coast for the last of the sun at Toward, this time the triangle of road that leads out to the lighthouse. We were discussing the amount of time we use up walking about; does anyone else feel that they became obsessive about it during the first lockdown? I'm sure it wasn't quite such a mandatory part of my life.

I'm posting an extra of shots taken from this week's local paper - The Dunoon Observer and Argyllshire Standard, to give it its full name. The editor has clearly relished having  a local angle to the national news, choosing to focus on the oligarchs' yachts that have been seen here in recent years and the Russian tanker that was escorted out of Loch Long on Tuesday. There was also a feature of an old photo, taking up half a page, of Knockdow House, subject of several of my past blips and currently owned by the rather well-off son of one of Putin's old KGB pals. 

What I've not included is the heartbreaking photo from today's Scotland on Sunday of a little girl in a bright pink parka being helped over a ruined bridge by two Ukrainian soldiers as her family flees bombardment. There was something about that photo that moved me unbearably. 

And finally: has Clive Myrie made it home? Or is he simply having a rest somewhere, unlikely though that seems? And where is Lyse Doucet now?