Out late

Midnight has just - I was going to say struck, but in the study we have an RSPB clock with bird calls on every hour - hooted, and it seems a long time since I went shopping at 8am. I emerged frozen once more to thaw outside; it reminds me of the New World supermarket in Cromwell, Central Otago, which was so cold we used to split up and scamper round in the summer clothes that were appropriate outside. I forgot to buy a lemon in today's rush ...

I feel foolishly languid after that; breakfast trails into elevenses, helped today by a lengthy phone call with my sister before she goes off on holiday. I then spent some time trying to find out what one of the pieces played by the band yesterday was - the one with the trills ... 

We ate our lunch outside in the sun; every time we do it I think it's going to be the last of the year. I stayed there and did my Italian before I thought of checking on our vaccination appointment for Monday; I was told by the NHS call site that "as far as they knew" it was going ahead, but a niggle set up and I rang the surgery only to be told that it'd been moved to another venue on Saturday afternoon, when we're elsewhere and otherwise engaged ... Then ensued a flurry of phone calls, hanging on to lines interminably, listening to reasonable voices telling me I could do it online, where I'd just got myself locked out of my account by trying too often to access it. (I've managed it once in all these months.) Eventually I got a sensible sounding Scottish voice who pored over options and asked if Kilmun was somewhere we could get to and put us down for Tuesday. Whew. I even got a confirmatory text ...

Then we felt free to go out. It was far too late, and the sun was slanting and the air chillier than it had been, but it was beautiful. We went to Benmore Gardens, where I took this photo from the bridge over the Eachaig. We didn't meet a soul, and the silence was profound. I do feel, however, that there are fewer red squirrels than I've become used to seeing.

I didn't mention last night that Himself saw the whatever-it-was hurtling across the sky last night as he went through to the kitchen to make tea and nearly dropped a tray. They don't seem to know if it was a meteorite or space junk burning up in the atmosphere, but he was quite shaken by it, possibly because our sky is so dark out the back. Scary stuff, really, to think of so much junk orbiting the earth in decaying orbits ...