Day begins, day ends

On what should be the shortest day (although I think this year it might be the 22nd) and what is certainly "the solstice", the time between sunrise and sunset is just 6.5 hours. With the weather as it is at present, with very little light, it feels much less than that. The top photograph taken with the camera around 9am as the sun was rising opposite us perhaps gives a sense of how dark it is at that time. The bottom photograph, taken with the phone, which gives an artificially cheery feel to most photographs, conveys a sense of much more light than there was at 3.30pm when I went swimming (very briefly) at Inver with L and R. I followed them shortly thereafter into the water, but it was a very brief dip comprising around 10 actual "strokes" of swimming.

We're feeling the full brunt of the unnamed storm, which means that even in the sheltered bit of Tain where we live, it's quite windy (and very wet, of course). None the less, small posses of crazy people have been swimming in various places. I was planning to join a group from Inverness at Dores on Loch Ness. Some people did turn up there, and the videos of the loch waves were quite epic. One friend went to Dores with a view to swimming with the group and decided against as she was worried about being hit by a log in the water. Sensible.

Anyway, apart from that and some residual coughing, it was a quiet day, with the light bookended as shown. In the evening, we watched several episodes of the latest series of A House Through Time. I have a tendency to forget that we are equipped with a TV and a licence up here, so there really is no excuse not to spend some lazy evenings slumped in front of iplayer.