Recovering

Pathetic, I know, but today had the feeling of being a day of recovering from ... what? Too much food? Too much talking? Probably a combination of both - and the fact that there seemed no time to sit quietly during the last two days until the evening. Last night, for example, when I got in just before 10pm, put on my fleecy dressing-gown and sat down to drink a mug of peppermint tea - and woke as the clock struck midnight. I must have drunk the tea safely, for the empty mug was safely on the side, but I had no memory of it. 

So today began a bit later than usual, began in frosty sunshine and two loads of washing to hang out (this sense of needing to make the most of dry sunny days again, even though with no wind at all it didn't dry very successfully). I spoke on the phone to my sister and my bestie. I did some Italian and sorted another poem or two and wrote yesterday's blip. Himself at last got someone sensible - a real, live person -  to deal with travel visas. And I had the time to read The Scotsman from cover to cover.

A quick lunch and we were off out to have an stress-busting walk in Benmore Gardens among the last of the gold of autumn. The pond, which last time I was there was surrounded by vivid leaves, lay black and still under bare trees. We saw no-one the whole time (the Gardens are of course officially closed until the Spring) but met a tame robin - surely the same one who perched on our side mirror last winter? - hopping round my feet as I waited for the car door to open, cocking his head curiously as I tried whistling gently. (You don't hear people whistling these days - have you noticed?) I shall be horrified when I can no longer climb to the top of the gardens - it's something we've done over the past 50 years.

I heard President Macron speak on the Ten O'clock News, about the need for a cease-fire in Gaza; he seemed so mature and reasonable and sure of his ground compared with the Westminster lot. And I couldn't help noticing in Sunday's Observer - which I've just got round to reading properly - had three pieces in it excoriating Boris Johnson and his cronies and lambasting the toxic culture inside No 10 during the pandemic in particular. It's like lancing a boil, after these years of horrified helplessness, to have Johnson roundly condemned as a "frightful" Prime Minister, totally unsuited to the job. Funny how some of us knew that all along ...

Photo today comes not from the Gardens, which I feel I've plundered for so many blips, but from the high road out of Dunoon heading north. On the left, hidden behind the trees, is Loch Loskin with its boathouse; on the right the last houses on the outskirts of Kirn and the beginnings of the woodland of Hafton Estate. It struck me as particularly beautiful as we drove along it this afternoon. We'll be heading out that way again tomorrow morning.

 But that's another tale.