She that hath clean hands ...*

I'm feeling exceedingly virtuous tonight, not to mention so worn out that for the past half hour or so I've kept telling myself to get off the sofa and up the stairs without any effect whatsoever! Looking back over the day, I can see half an hour in the sun eating a (very small) lunch, and that was about it. We didn't even go for a walk ...

So. I was out just after 8am to go shopping, as usual. Morrison's is less odd now, in that the baked beans no longer share an aisle with the paracetamol, but it still took me about 30 minutes longer than it used to because some of the aisles are completely different and I can no longer speed round on auto-pilot. And it's so cold - the new fridges seem to be more chilly than ever, and all the staff now wear uniform fleeces in the middle of summer.

Once I'd thawed out, had breakfast, washed up and had coffee, I spent about two hours and a great deal of money on the costly arrangements for holidays that are the result of living in Scotland and wanting to travel with a specific guided walking company. But now we have flights to Gatwick (BA seem to have cut several flights from that route, so we have to travel Easy Jet, and their online booking with all its add-ons is very confusing) and two nights - one outward, one homeward - in an airport hotel - one because it'd be stressful flying down early enough to make the connection and would necessitate a hotel in Glasgow as the ferries don't start early enough, the other because we don't get back to London until evening.  I'll leave Himself to deal with a car to the airport; we're now leaning to the taxi from Dunoon rather than the faff of car-parking.

It was 2pm by the time I'd done all that; we had some bread and cheese and then I tackled a strange and jaggy little chore that I've had my eye on for a couple of weeks: I weeded three flower pots. Sounds crazy, but when we put in the patio the roses were simply pulled out of the flower bed with their accompanying soil and parked in a corner of the garden all winter. I realised the other week that they'd grown great unruly heads of hair, as it were, with grass up to 10" long sprouting round their stems. It is seriously hard to weed a flowerpot, and very, very jaggy when it's a rose you're dealing with. I also cut the grass and used the big scissor edging thingmies to tidy the edges. 

The reason my hands look like that it that my gardening gloves prevented me from gripping the grass tufts properly. I've not had nails like that for a very long time ...

And this, O Best Beloved, is the only photo I took all day. Imagine. 

*Ps.24, v4.