Back to auld claes ...

And tidying the garden! After the high life of yesterday, the warm glow of the restaurant and the bustle of the streets, today was the day I'd earmarked for sorting out the pots on the patio and doing something about the mossy, earthy mess that inevitably appears under them after the summer. In addition, the gardener had done a neat job on the hedge yesterday - we'd had to move all the pots first - and the increased daylight over the much lower top of it highlighted my task ...

It took an hour and forty minutes - between coffee and lunch - to wash, scrub and rinse down the slabs, to weed/trim/remove the extraneous stuff like dead nasturtium stems, to haul/lift/drag the pots back into position. That last almost finished me off - my Pilates teacher would have been proud of my braced core muscles! I was completely worn out and desperate to sit down and eat bread and cheese and damson paste and fall asleep ... except that I didn't, because church business was hotting up (remember, we're looking for a new incumbent) and the phone was pinging and the stress rising unhelpfully - 

So we went for a walk. It actually seemed more sensible than sitting slumped in a chair after all that exercise. We drove down to the Ardyne in the gathering gloom of four in the afternoon and walked with great briskness to the far end and back again. By the time we were finished, it was almost dark. Himself had made the curry while I was gardening, and we had a glass of gin just because. 

I'd forgotten how intense Shetland was, and how easy I always found it to be slightly lost by halfway through an episode. I recorded it the other night; I'll need to do the same again and watch it when I'm feeling more alert. I like it, though - all that bleakness. Fine in art; less so in life. Now trying to be early in bed; it's a busy day again tomorrow. 

A last thought: I'm a year older than the President-elect of the USA, and I'm knackered. How can he be bothered - or indeed: how can he?