Walking the streets of the past

This strange weather is breaking, but slowly - there was a little sun this morning, but it vanished just after midday and it kept threatening rain, some of which materialised. It's still very muggy, though - and the upstairs of our house is much less cool than downstairs. 

Theoretically there were no major huvtaes today, so I'd had my 11ses before I did anything useful other than wash and hang out towels (they more or less dried before the rain came). Before lunch, however, I went out for the odd thing, including three kilos of flour (I take a rucksack - it's easier to carry on your back). I noticed an old friend and former colleague sitting with a glass of wine in the window of the local vintners - they've recently opened up the front of the shop with a few tables, chairs, benches and so on - and serve wine by the glass and coffee, which strikes me as very civilised. Anyway, I popped in to have a word, and was accosted by a departing customer who turned out to be our shopping angel of Covid lockdown who only remembered the wine-drinker as a teacher... it was all very jolly. As I then spent ages chatting to Angel Liz outside, it was after 1pm when I had to rush home with the flour as the first raindrops fell.

Late in the afternoon, as it was still not really wet or dry, we decided to go and wander through the area of Kirn, the village to the immediate north of Dunoon where we lived for 18 months in a school local authority house when we first arrived in Dunoon. While Himself was at work, I used to familiarise myself with the neighbourhood by walking miles with the baby in the pram. Although I've driven through many of these roads since - and had several driving lessons there, learning three-point turns and reversing round corners - I've not really walked there since. The photo shows my regular route down to the shops on the seafront - there were more useful shops in these days: a baker, a grocer, a bookshop ...I loved the grimly leaden colours of the sea and sky. 

The main attraction, however, was to have a look at our church's most recent move, which is to purchase a temporary Rectory while we sell the old one and build a new eco-house that will more nearly conform to current specs for clergy housing. It's in a place where I'd never looked, tucked away in a little cul-de-sac, so we rang the bell and found our lovely Rectory couple beavering away with paint-stripping on their day off. We kept them off for a bit, then left to clock up a few more thousand steps before finding the car again. It's amazing how a place can seem to change over time - we found ourselves unable quite to remember how it had been.

One thing I do know: I must have recovered my pre-birth fitness pretty swiftly - these hills are jolly steep. I didn't lose the pram once...

Extra: one of these massive cruise ships, the Celebrity Apex, dwarfs our tiny foot passenger ferry as they pass in the early evening.