Both wind and rain ...

Back to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner again - I'm sure I've used that quotation before - but honestly, today was so beastly I'm almost lost for words. Not only was there snow on the higher hills to the north - not that we could see them today, not in that cloud - but there it was sprinkled liberally on the Bishop's Glen hills at the back of the town, just peering down under the lowering sky. And it was bitterly cold, so that when I was out shopping before breakfast - I know: wrong day - I'm busy tomorrow - the car thermometer read 3.5ºc. And there was this biting wind, from the east, the wind that blew bins over in the night and even ripped up new plantings in a garden nearby ... Yuck.

Wednesday turned out to be a poor day for shopping - big gaps where I like to find things like Pak Choi and rhubarb, and shorter best-before lives than on a Thursday. I was also not in the right frame of mind, somehow - it's terrible how set in my ways I have become; you'd think I was a wee old lady. Oops ...

The rest of the morning passed in its customarily pointless fashion: breakfast, long phone call,  tidy up, coffee, Italian practice - and suddenly it was lunchtime.  I fell asleep after lunch, as I'd already done during the Italian, and it was that that persuaded me that no matter how foul it was I had to get out. Himself was going off to practise the organ; bereft of the car I just went out the door and started walking. Down to the East Bay I went, and bashed north along the promenade as far as Kirn shops, the rain and wind hitting me from the front (and slightly to my right). It hadn't really been raining at the point of my leaving, but five minutes later it was quite seriously wet, so I too was quite seriously wet as I'd not put on waterproof trousers. By the time I turned round I could feel the water running down my legs under the sodden trousers, and my shoes looked as if I'd been paddling in them.

Turning round at least gave me a change of side, and it was then that I noticed the line of bright sky to the south - even a hint of sunshine on the southern tip of Arran.My walk home was broken by a delightful interlude in the kitchen of my friend Paddy, drinking coffee and catching up, and by the time I left the wind had dropped, the sea looked calm and blue-ish, and it wasn't raining. Crazy.

The collage shows the stages of that walk, though the only photo I took on the outward leg is of oyster-catchers on the shore. At least you can see the dreary greyness of the sea, and the waves breaking. The second photo is of the scene that greeted me when I came out of Paddy's, the third of the low-tide beach and the light on the other side, and the fourth one I took from the bedroom window not long after I got home, when the clearer weather had spread to the north with rather dramatic effect. 

I have another earlyish start tomorrow. I'd like it not to rain, please.