Multilingual ...

Done it again - really too tired to blip, but I’m trying to beat the dreaded Backblaze, which starts at midnight and freezes things unhelpfully. 

Today wasn’t set to be cheerful as things normally stand - Pilates had been cancelled to give our teacher a week off; the sky was right down on the hills and the sea; the rain fell, not constantly but on and off like a capricious tap; after the high emotions of yesterday all we could do was think drearily of our friends starting their removal in these atrocious condition. 

However, we had a recently-arranged distraction in the shape of French friends visiting their daughter in Inveraray, where she works at the castle. Last year the timings just didn’t fit, so it’s been two years since we last met up. We first met when I was running the school French Exchange and Eric was a teacher in the Lycée de Loudéac, with whom we were exchanging. They gave our second son a place to stay when he had left school and wanted to join us, came to his wedding in Binic, and have kept in touch ever since. This time we met at Benmore Gardens - their request - and spent an hour or so wandering up the hill talking in a mixture of languages, as they had their son with them and he is more comfortable in Italian than in English and I tend to mix the languages up these days anyway … you can imagine. We saw a couple of deer on the hillside, staring at us as we took photos, and talked to a gardener who turned out to be a French Swiss student on horticultural placement - it was fun.

This was followed by lunch in Dunoon in a seafront café and a chance for Jennifer to pick up a cake she’d had made in a local cake-bakery for their daughter’s birthday - and more conversation. By the time we left we were both exhausted and have remained that way, but for some reason it hasn’t brought me to bed any earlier. 

Why, I wonder, can I not get into the habit of blipping earlier in the day?

Photo is of us all in the café, where we swapped some sugar lumps for a group photo. Seriously.