Bleak, with palm trees

Today has had all the ingredients of a miserable day. It rained a great deal, especially in the afternoon. It had me wondering if weather like this is just as depressing elsewhere when one isn't working - at least when I was teaching I did so in a bright yellow classroom and was so occupied with over 100 pupils per day* that I had little time to notice the weather.

You can also take from all this that I felt I was in the horrid limbo before going away, with fiddly little last-minute stuff to remember and the lost umbrella to find. I had a couple of brief phone-calls, but otherwise nothing to distract me. We argued irritably. I even began to wonder if it's worth it any more, this travel malarkey. 

True to form, desperation drove us out to walk a mile in the rain before dinner. So here is Dunoon at teatime, complete with palm tree (it looks like a palm tree...) on the bleak, gleaming expanse of the prom leading to the largely redundant and crumbling Victorian pier. (The tiny ferry that now connects town to railhead uses a slip between the old pier and the new breakwater where PS Waverley docks.) You will notice that there's not another pedestrian in sight, though in fact we'd just passed a wee woman pushing a trolley who'd stopped to tell us that we were as mad as her. 

Sums it all up, really. 

*Between 20 & 30 pupils per class, depending on stage, and five different year groups per English teacher.