Midweek

Wednesday has acquired a new sense of centrality in my week, post-pandemic - a feeling of being a breathing space between the busyness of Sunday, Monday and Tuesday and the recently fixed necessity to shop on a Thursday before the descent (that's what it feels like) into the weekend. When shopping was more random - as in "I'll go today because we've run out of x  so I may as well get the rest of the regular stuff ...". It's often a peaceful-feeling day, ending with one of the best things to come out of lockdown, online Compline. 

This Wednesday I had a really lazy start, lingering over breakfast with the radio on, though I was moved out of my idleness by Himself's deciding that this was the day he was going to replace the worn and mildewed silicone sealant along the back of the kitchen sink and it was time to get dishes done and out of the way ... 

And that spread on into the afternoon, while I chatted to an old friend on the phone, hung out some towels, did my Italian, and decided that whatever was going on I needed a walk after a day with very little exercise. So there I was, all alone under a wide sky in the south of the peninsula - a much brighter sky than in Dunoon - in such wonderful silence that I gave up my thoughts of walking along the shore track and instead walked over the hill between the farms of the Ardyne. There were only intermittent vehicles passing, three at least of which were tractors trundling serious-looking tanks of stuff from farm buildings to fields or scratching along the surface of a distant patch of land. I could hear birdsong everywhere - the loud insistence of a great tit, more than one robin, as well as indeterminate twitterings and the odd squawk. In one field black cattle lay alongside the small shapes of their newborn calves; in another the sheep stared at me while their lambs lay around on the grass like discarded dishtowels. I walked as far as Knockdow, the big house currently owned by a Russian, the son of one of Putin's pals. The gates were padlocked and there was no sign of life, but the grounds were immaculate and the ornamental lake weeded and calm, with a duck gliding purposefully over the still water.

I've chosen to blip a photo I took of a favourite field, if I can say that about a field I've never actually gone into. It sometimes has beasts in it, and it seems to be entirely enclosed in trees so that I've never really worked out where it is from the road other than at this wee lane. It strikes me as the epitome of rustic charm, especially with a wide blue sky overhead. I've added an extra close-up of the Knockdow duck because I'm rather pleased with the lines of the reflections.

I said earlier that the little lambs looked like discarded dishtowels. Tell me, please, why it is that men can't hang up damp dishtowels properly?