Simply the best ...

Every morning, if I'm not in a hurry to be off somewhere, I like to come to slowly, still in bed, drinking tea with lemon and looking at my phone - at Twitter, inter alia - and occasionally posting a reply. One of the accounts I follow belongs to a woman who lives in a block of flats in Kyiv, who decided when the invasion began to keep a war diary on Twitter, with the hashtag #warcoffee. She now has a large following, and as she shares her daily life she draws comfort from seeing what people elsewhere are doing. Today in Kyiv it was raining and grey - what was it like where others were living? And I got up, took a photo of our rain and mist - I couldn't see the other side - and posted it. 

Our weather improved; the rain stopped gradually, with fewer showers; the cloud stayed away for longer spells. By the end of the day we were once more down at Toward, walking very sedately round the lighthouse and actually taking time to sit on the shore (I found a couple of good rocks to sit  on) in the warm wind. That's when I took the main photo here, looking south towards first Bute and then, further south, to Arran, whose mountains are blue to the left of the horizon. The light was dazzling on the water  and I felt sure that I live in one of the most beautiful landscapes in the country. 

Before this happy realisation, I'd been at my morning Art class, painting a beautiful little African statue. It took me two hours to paint three neat little heads and three pairs of slender arms of this family group; there's a challenge in painting a representation of what is already a representation of reality. It's such fun, this - soon I may have the courage to do some at home, but I need my model for this one!

Extra photo was taken earlier than the main one, on the other side of the Lighthouse point, looking north. This is one of the places the red sandstone that links us to Arran comes ashore, and I absolutely love the colours of red stone, green weed and blue water. As I said, one of the most beautiful ...