Out to lunch...

I've been seeing some lovely photos on Instagram today, photos of blue sky, of sunshine. It's as well I wasn't actually feeling the need to walk through sunlit fields today, as the only glimpse I had that reassured me there was still a sun rising somewhere came at 7.45am and lasted for all of six minutes as the invisible sunrise illuminated the clouds across the Firth and turned the sea pink. That's my extra: I leapt out of bed to capture it. 

Our day, however, was for the most part focussed on Glasgow and one of our regular lunch dates with my cousin and his wife. Despite Roger's helpful suggestion of The Ivy in Buchanan Street - handy for the Buchanan Galleries car park where we always leave the car - we were a tad late in arriving, the morning having taken a complicated turn before we left home. I'll come back to that. However, lunch was lovely - see the second and third quadrants of the collage - and the surroundings charming and conducive to chat and jollity. I had duck followed by ice cream on frozen fruits with a lemony sauce (very yummy), and Himself and I shared a starter of a pile of courgette strips in a whispery batter with a yogurt sauce... and I had prosecco ... and some nice Montepulciano ... We talked non-stop, as usual, and already have our next booking, in the same place, in March.

So what made us late? Well, I went for the shopping, but was home again for 9.30am, to find that the gardener had arrived (he was originally booked for yesterday) to tame the huge privet hedge between our garden and the next - it had grown beyond our reach, somehow, when we weren't paying attention. And then there was the small matter of the rotten potato in the vegetable rack and Himself's compulsion to wash every other potato that might have sat next to it ... We were last onto the 11.40 ferry and the traffic in Glasgow was rather dense. 

We completed our day with a visit to John Lewis so that I could buy myself a new pillow; I'm very fussy what I lay my head on these days. By the time we'd finished it was almost dark and we drove home into a fine drizzle that made the lights dazzling - not the speedy journey down the M8 that we enjoyed on Monday. 

Anyone watch Day of the Jackal? I've recorded it - worth seeing?