Walking ...

For the first time in ages, I had real trouble getting to sleep last night. Lack of real exercise? Staying up too late? Too much computer before bed? Something I was annoyed by online? Who knows. But I tossed about until well after 2am, and then I dreamed and woke up thinking I was in quite another house, which in turn was an amalgam of two other houses - and I didn't know where the bathroom was! 

I'd really intended writing a sermon today, but that sleepless nonsense put me off. So when I had arranged to walk with my pal in the afternoon and Himself wanted a walk this morning before he got down to work, I said I'd go with him. Two very different walks that between them clocked up 14,780 steps and quite a steep hill; one of them on the shore and along a very rocky, seaweedy beach in almost-sunshine, the other in a half-felled forest stricken with larch disease and resultant mud in persistent and very wet rain. I've put up a photo from each, demonstrating the variety in this part of the world: Toward lighthouse from the beach just as we turned up the grassy path through a field to return to the road, and Kilmun Arboretum, with a tall eucalyptus and wonderful russet bracken.

Close friends of ours used to live in a house on that little bay beside the lighthouse; my sons enjoyed bonfires on the beach, croquet in their garden, and rowing in the bay where I once swam, watched by an almost-white seal on a rock. The sky this morning was amazing - a livid purple to the north, but blue and bright in the south. And the Arboretum is somewhere I've not been since before Covid - it was out of bounds during lockdown, and there tend to be free-running annoying dogs. But the fact that my pal had two small, free-running King Charles spaniels with her meant that I'd not be the target of any we happened to meet ...

I came home and had a shower - I was soaked and frozen - and then bashed on with photo-uploading, Italian and - later - the dreaded physio exercises. Then curry, a doze over the TV, and an utterly gripping episode of Babylon Berlin, during which I felt no inclination whatsoever to doze. And now I think I may sleep properly!