It was summer ...

It was summer last evening when I took that photo out of the dining room window - the sun was shining, the flowers looked serene ... what happened? I woke to the wind whistling in at the bedroom windows (yes, I'd opened all three of them) and a distinct chill in the air as the showers came and went in a rising southerly wind, so much so that I was sorely tempted to finish my tea and get back under the duvet...

But I didn't. I got up, shut the windows, made my porridge, lamented the banal awfulness of the music that BBC Radio Scotland plays between perfectly sensible and often serious and interesting interviews on a Sunday morning, and had the usual scamper to be ready for church in time for the organist to change his shoes and play the voluntary. It was halfway through the service that I thought we must have an authoritative-sounding visitor at the back of the church, one that sang audibly and in tune and said the prayers without dragging - and realised when we all turned and shared the Peace that David our Rector had failed to get over to Bute for the service there and had returned in time to join us. (I told you it was windy. The ferry was off - a peril of a shared charge when one is on an island.)

After church we had prolonged coffee and blethers chez nous with my pal and her old school pal who is up for a visit, so that it was two o'clock before I began to think of lunch and considerably later when we decided neither of us was any good at having a quiet afternoon indoors with the Sunday papers and headed out to have a walk somewhere where the wind wasn't such a nuisance. The photo shows the start of said walk: I've often taken this view in sunshine, in snow, in different lights - but this is it in gloom and low cloud with a touch of rain (though we were lucky with the rain and it didn't come to much). We took the track along the west bank of Loch Eck, a road we've not visited much since forestry operations began there a year ago. They've been felling diseased larch trees, and the resulting devastation is rather horrid; virgin landscape is very different from the same landscape after it's been planted and felled and reminded me today of a Somme battlefield.

Just as I was finishing dinner a text came from my older granddaughter: would I take a look at her discursive essay and see what I thought? This led to an entertaining FaceTime while I discussed the finer points of putting a case and highlighting your outcomes - though I was actually well impressed by her lucid and organised prose as she put the case for banning E-cigarettes. 

Have you ever heard of "popcorn lung"?