Visit to the Borg ship ...

We had to go Over the Water today, to The Other Side. The forecast was grim, and promised even grimmer as the day progressed. The so-called "black gusts" (shown as black blobs for the wind speeds over 40mph on the BBC app) were due to begin at 4pm, and it was raining, wetly if not heavily, all day. But I had a long-overdue appointment at Inverclyde Royal to have a photo taken of my eye (don't ask - the symptoms vanished long before I got the appointment) and I'd arranged, in mitigation as it were, to have my hair cut while I was over there. 

The hospital stands on a hill above Gourock, or perhaps more accurately on a high plateau of moorland, with drifts of housing schemes making their appearance on the fringes as if lapping up from the town. The car park right in front of the hospital is always full, so we tend to settle for the overflow across the road which runs over the top of the moor. As we battled our way out of said overflow, dodged the puddles at the pedestrian crossing, and marched through the hospital grounds, we reflected that really it was going for a walk in the hills, in the rain and wind. And indeed, most people arriving at the main entrance, if not carted out of an ambulance, had a dishevelled, outdoorsy sort of look ... and it was to convey some of the atmosphere that the first photo in the collage earns its unlovely place. And isn't it like the Borg ship?

The photos were taken in the space of ten minutes. We trudged back through the weather to the car, drove back down the precipitous road, drove along the coast road to Greenock. I had an hour before my hair appointment. Regular readers of this journal may remember the excellent Tonino's, an Italian pizzeria just next door to the hairdresser and the second mitigation built into this potentially horrid day. So the other two photos show the strange non-lunch we shared (it was by now after 2pm) of fresh focaccia with two dipping oils and a plate of grilled mixed vegetables, followed by a single, sinful cannoli (I'm sure there must be a singular) filled with chocolate nut paste and an espresso (one each - we didn't share the coffee). There was an Italian radio station on in the background, the waitress was hanging little panettone boxes from the ceiling as decoration and it was warm and cheerful. I left Himself there and went for my long-overdue haircut.

We drove straight onto the ferry and realised how windy it was becoming as we moved out into the Firth. Happily it's blowing at the back of the house - we shouldn't hear it tonight.

The strange extra photo is cropped from a school orchestra photo taken in my last year at school. It's there because that was what I was like 60 years ago when Kennedy was shot. I remember that reading the papers on the Monday morning, the day after I'd seen Jack Ruby kill Oswald live on TV, I felt so physically sick that I didn't go in to school until mid-morning, and even then couldn't face classes. Instead, I hid myself in the little room where the banda machine (remember them?) lived, and printed off copies of orchestral parts for the PT music who regarded me as one of his cohort. (Prefects who already had their University entrance, as I did, had a fairly independent life in Hillhead High of these days.) As Wildwood said the other day, I can remember the whole occasion as if it were last week. 

I think it was possibly the end of my childhood.