Drop, drop ...

No, not the slow tears that one familiar with that lovely hymn might think, though they'd be appropriate enough; no, I'm referring to today's temperature, which was a good ten degrees colder in the afternoon than it was yesterday or indeed all weekend. The rain held off till early afternoon, after which the heavens opened, not dramatically as in London on Friday but just quietly and wetly. It felt like November.

Most of the day was occupied by our compiling a letter to go to our travel agent in an attempt to salvage something from this week's fiasco, and by the first of the phone calls in response to it. I've learned a lot about the wiles of the travel industry: we never knew, for example, that though our first cruise, abandoned because of the Houthi and their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, was a package, the one we chose to replace it was not. Who knew?

Eventually we gave up both that and my attempts to collaborate on live editing of a church document and went for a two-mile walk in the rain along the old road at Benmore. I took the photo through the windscreen of the rain at the head of the Holy Loch - there was very limited visibility so that we couldn't see our destination - and of the outside temperature gauge, while the third picture is of a symmetrically split tree beside the old road, part of which has come to rest, rather terrifyingly, on a think overhead cable ... We hurried on. On our way back we had a strangely prolonged and pleasant conversation with two absolute strangers, here on holiday but hoping to move here from the area round ... Heathrow Airport. You couldn't make it up.

And now for another shout-out for kindness and wonderful service on our evening of hell. When our Hoppa driver had left us at the door of the Renaissance Hotel in Heathrow, we were immediately aware of several people who, like us, were clutching hotel vouchers from BA. However, a young man - Indian, I think - approached us immediately and took us under his wing, sitting us down at a table in an area clearly dedicated to processing the stranded.He filled in a form for us, asking us only to check and sign, and explained the options we had for eating at this hour - by now coming up for 9pm. When I said we couldn't face coming down to eat in the dining room, and could we have something in our room, he took us over to a buffet table, brought boxes, and helped us to select from a variety of covered hot dishes that he opened ceremonially - several curries, chicken legs, vegetables, rice. When we had enough, he pushed our luggage in one of these fancy high trolleys over to the lift and personally conducted us, with a degree of ceremony, to our room, where he brought the cases in and made sure we had everything we needed. I realised that there were in fact benefits to being old and looking half-dead...

So a big thank-you to this charming young man, and high marks to the Renaissance Hotel, taken over by another group in the time since we last stayed there, for two large beds with four-inch thick toppers on the mattresses and the lightest and softest of duvets. We ate our dinner and fell into bed - and didn't have to go for a 3am check-in, as had been proposed. 

The Ancient Mariner will return ...