Goodbye to an old friend

One storm down, another to come ... it's getting a bit much, all this weather. Happily we didn't seem to lose anything from the house overnight, though the bird table blew over and was leaning on the wall, and the top of our neighbour's waste pipe, which protrudes above the eaves just next to our house, is now leaning at a sufficiently crazy angle to bring down the gutter on the bathroom roof, so I hope he gets it fixed and that tomorrow's storm doesn't finish the job!

Pilates class as usual this morning - I was hoping it'd be on after the relatively sedentary nature of the weekend. Much stretching and holding poses - we were all pretty knackered by the end of it. Because Himself had driven me and my usual chauffeur this morning, we didn't go home afterwards but joined three other classmates for coffee downstairs until his class was over. Great reminiscing when I discovered that one of the other women had gone to the same dancing class as I did when I was 15 - Roger McEwan's Dancing School, just off Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow. We remembered going in a gang after school on a Wednesday, our stilettos in our school bags, taking off our school ties and putting on a smear of lippy before the class ... I met my first boyfriend there, a hapless youth called Robin who once phoned me up and got my mother; I came downstairs in time to hear her say, in utterly frosty tones: This is her mother! God knows what he'd said...


It was after Pilates that I got a text message via a friend that one of the big old trees on the church driveway had fallen in the night. We went for a walk in the rain in the afternoon to have a look for ourselves - you can see from the collage that it was a really old, tall tree and that it had been very swiftly and efficiently dealt with in the morning. It had fallen down into the next-door's grounds, but was all neatly logged and off the road. It's been a feature of the driveway for all the 50 years we've been going up to church, and it feels strangely empty without it. Notice how suddenly summery the weather looks - it lasted about five minutes.

Tonight it is quiet. We've cancelled choir practice for tomorrow evening because the next storm is scheduled to be at its peak then and we have one singer who lives some 10 miles away along the coastal road. 

And right now I ought to be in Dubai. Ah well - think what I'd be missing!