Real life again

The seagulls were the first thing to impinge on my consciousness this morning - we both slept in till almost 8am and it was the noise outside the windows that took the place of the alarm. I don't know what had got into them, but the sky was full of wildly circling gulls screaming their heads off in a disturbingly Hitchcockian manner. They put me off so much that I didn't 't do my usual batch of Italian in bed, and in fact I forgot all about it till the afternoon, missing out on a whole slew of double points as a result. (Sally M will understand if I say I made up for it with the bonus from a completed Friends' Quest...)

When I finally got my act together I decided to chance the grey sky and the forecast and do the towels we'd had away with us. They blew about on the line as if eager to please and were indeed dry before the rain began some time in the early afternoon. I also was seized with a revulsion at dust - an old house with few fitted carpets tends to collect dust from the walls which seeps out at the foot of the skirting boards and drifts onto the varnished wooden floors, and there were also things like banisters and dado rails and ... anyway, I did the hall and the staircase and our bedroom, by which time I was half dead. To think I used to employ someone to do it for me!

Real life continued after lunch, when Himself went off to play the organ in the church, where I joined him later to go through a song, walking up the hill in the now teeming rain feeling smug because I'd thought to take an umbrella. There was no wind to speak of, and it was  a rather splendid long umbrella with a wooden handle that I've had for years because I don't think of Dunoon as an umbrella-ish place. I also christened the trousers I bought for half price in the Rohan sale the other day - they're amazingly light and comfortable and repel water rather than soak it in, which was interesting. I sang quite well and walked home again.

And that is normality. Meanwhile one family has finished a week of pre-season football training in Spain while the parents relaxed, while the other has arrived at their favoured holiday let in the south of France. And I remembered that I have to book an overnight hotel at the airport for our departure in September - a departure which seems strangely unreal, given our recent holiday history. 

But let us not think on't so: it will make us mad ...*

Tonight the garden is peopled by long, yellow slugs. Yuck.

Photo of the nasturtiums I picked from the plants that the caterpillars were eating. They smell delicious.


*Not quite Shakespeare; sort of Lady Macbeth but distorted by my memory.