Next, please ...

We seem to have been waiting all day for the next round of stormy weather (I'm sure naming the storms makes them worse!) but so far, despite our cancelling choir tonight and bracing ourselves again, Jocelyn seems much tamer - though as I type that I hear a gust barrelling past the house and wonder if it's our position that's not so exposed. The barometer has gone birling back, giving me (at least I think barometric pressure may be to blame) a sudden ear pain that's been coming and going since lunchtime. 

We were in all morning - a planning meeting for church over Lent and Easter with regard to music, as well as a lot of interesting other stuff - but by afternoon I knew I'd be unliveable with if I just sat moaning about my ear. So - you've guessed it - we put on our Paramo jackets and waterproof trousers and headed inland to Loch Eck again, thinking that the west side would be out of the rising wind. It was, but it was rather wet - my photo shows what happens along that road to the many small burns that drain the hillside to the left of it. Swollen with the sudden shocking amounts of rain, they were purling down, filling the ditch and overflowing on to the road; in the picture that mossy wall is the side of a bridge which in normal times carries the road over the burn which here is pouring round the side of the wall which is usually a couple of feet above the water. Further along, a similar overflowing had left the road so comprehensively and deeply flooded that we turned round, meeting on our way back a man who'd been creating drainage at the side of a huge puddle that we'd had to wade through (in walking trainers - my feet were squelching). This lone figure was now toiling to dig out a burn carrying water down to the fields beneath so that the road wasn't flooded above it - we don't know who he was or if this was just something he was doing because it needed doing, but his labours on the first flood had let all the water drain into a field beside the road and we could walk on dry land. 

I'm adding an extra that I took from the window before dinner, when the moon looked as if it was cloud-surfing over the Firth. It seemed quite calm at that point ...