The gas man cometh ...

...and will have to come again tomorrow, for the fan in the boiler now won't go off! And we had to be up so early for him, too - he came at 8.02am and as the boiler is above the breakfast table we wanted to be finished before he arrived - and we were so tired! This made the morning quite long, long enough to do a washing, long enough to write up yesterday's blip, long enough to phone a friend whose husband died recently and whom I'd not seen since. I failed, however, to get to the post office parcels place in time to make a noise about the non-arrival of a small parcel whose journey, on the Royal Mail tracker, seems to have stalled once it arrived in Dunoon. As the parcels office is five minutes' walk from my door, it's rather frustrating.

After lunch I left Himself making a batch of chickpea dahl and went off with Di to walk round the reservoir in the Bishop's Glen. It's beginning to look rather autumnal - great clusters of toadstools or mushrooms or whatever they are that I'll not be putting to the test, along with the first hazelnuts. We also came across a great wall of cut logs, with the huge swathe of felled forest on the hillside just above the track. I've not been there for a few weeks, and it's suddenly changed from its familiar, wooded self to a new, open and currently desolate battlefield of scattered grey branches and churned up soil. 

I was so hot when I got home that I couldn't settle to read till it was dinnertime, so instead I cleared out the drain in the ensuite shower - what a beastly job that is! But it's as well I did it, or I might have been having a flood tonight. And I've fixed a dinner date for the two of us with one of Himself's first pupils when we first came to Dunoon, making a flying visit from the USA where he now lives - I'm delighted he got in touch and looking forward to it immensely.

Online Compline after dinner, and then dozed over the telly till I came up to write this. And the gas man should be back tomorrow ...