Fiddling while Rome ...

It strikes me that we're once more sliding into a morass that none of us blippers can do the least thing about bar taking to the streets along with a few million others, and that it's another case of asking "what can be done, but till our vineyards ...?" - that sort of thing. This feeling of being nothing but a pawn, only pawns sound too substantial, a tiny dispensable speck in the eye of some ideologue with his eye on political advancement - that makes me either sick, or more willing to stick my fingers in both ears and sing "la la la ... I can't hear you". So here's what I did while Rome, figuratively, burned brightly in the background:

I sent a photo of my view from bed - the sunlit firth with a ferry crossing in the early sunshine - on Twitter to Yaroslava, the Ukrainian woman I follow; it got such a string of "likes" from other followers that I was far too late getting started to my day. However, I washed and hung out a load of garments we're going to need on an upcoming holiday, and I went a walk with Himself because it was such a lovely morning and I intended to desert him in the afternoon.

This happened because my bestie, who's been away for just over a week, came home yesterday and we needed to catch up. We met at Benmore Gardens and had a lovely walk among the trees, all just turning to Autumn colours. We saw a young heron stalking cautiously towards a field - and paying us no heed at all - and sat on the top of the garden in the Andean refuge contemplating distant Glen Massan. On the way down we were admiring some fierce-looking hoodie crows when a smallish raptor - perhaps a sparrow hawk - whizzed past our heads from behind, so close that we could hear the wind in its feathers. Rather startling, in a Hitchcockian sort of way. 

I took the blip on the way out, as we passed the pond - the leaves of the acer opposite me are just beginning to turn red, but there's one branch of pure scarlet at the foot of it, just above the water. I can't resist this view; there are probably other blips of it from past years, so I'm sorry. 

And that was it, my day of fiddling obliviously while the UK currency floated beneath the waves. If you keep paddling, do you notice when you're sinking?