Another Ark needed

I don't think the rain let up all day today until now, which I suspect is the lull before the next storm - is it Katherine? - arrives; when I locked the front door the night was still and dry and silent, and considerably milder than it was in the afternoon. Last night was another matter - that delicious food I listed so greedily in yesterday's blip proved to be a bit of a challenge, and I woke from a rather fitful sleep sometime in the night with rather fearful stirrings and the horrid feeling that I was going to have to get up ...

And when I returned to bed and did eventually sleep, despite the noise of sleet washing down the bay window, I must have been cold, because I woke in the morning feeling sore all over, as if I had flu; I eventually figured it out, that I'd been holding myself together for hours. So that put the kibosh on any thought of doing the shopping that I'd not done yesterday and I didn't get up till after 9am. After a morning of moping around feeling sorry for myself I did eventually get to Morrison's for a fairly cursory shop in the realisation that having become accustomed to the early morning experience before other shoppers have taken all the decent veg I resented having to rummage. 

The morning having been such a washout (as you might say, tediously, given the weather) I resolved to go out with Di as tentatively arranged yesterday, and met her at the Puck's Glen car park (the moss is looking very lush and totally undisturbed, by the way) to walk along the mile of the old road and back. We chose this because of the relatively sheltered areas under the big trees, though as the rain by now was coming down in stair-rods it didn't really make much difference, and the two areas that flood were ... well, flooded. You can see the flooding in the last two photos of the collage above; the other two are of an almost-flood next to the road (top) and the Puck's Glen burn (bottom left). You can perhaps make out Di clinging to an iron fence as she makes her way along the edge of the flood in the bottom right photo - it was the shallowest bit of the flood. I was completely drookit by the time we got back - apart from everything else, I'd not managed to locate my waterproof trousers when I went out. Still, I'd had a walk, even if it was only a couple of miles or so.

I feel slightly sick at the way the reaction to the deaths of Brits and other Europeans in Gaza has been so much more pronounced and had apparently more effect on the IDF than the western media reaction to the deaths of the citizens of Palestine. I'm trying to rely these days on the accuracy of my own moral compass and my gradually expanding knowledge of recent history ...