The Allt an T-Siomain and Ben Lora

It was a dreich day, one on which I wanted to go to town and check out the Oban museum (mainly about Oban's role in WWII, where troops practised for the D-day landings) but neither Tanya nor Steve wanted to bestir themselves. so I settled for a day of moaning in the kitchen. It was wet and the internet was down all day (the signal comes by satellite and is affected by incoming weather fronts).

"Just pretend it's 1975 and the internet hasn't been invented" said Tanya brightly.

I did nip out to the compost a few times, and managed this briefly illuminated shot of Ben Lora, our nearest mountain (just squeaking through at 1007 ft), Loch Etive and 'our burn'. Allt an T-Siomain. This flooded spectacularly last year while CleanSteve and I were visiting. This year we were saved, but the rocks were hurling around in the bed every time the water got high. As you can see, it flows directly into the sea loch.

The garden of my mother's house, before it was hers, was once much larger and extended all the way to the nearby Achnaba kirk, in the parish of Ardchattan. The great storm of 1953 washed away a great chunk of it, turning it into foreshore. This much I was told by an old man who visited the house in 1993.

Later, we popped over the glen to Barcaldine to see my uncle and aunt, who are visiting from Surrey, and my other uncle and aunt who live there. My grandparents lived there, too, until their death in the 1980s. My cousin Clare and daughter Florence were there too, getting ready to go out guising, with Florence dressed as a bat. It was such a wild night, and the distances between Florence's school friends so great, that they were planning to go by car!

Steve and I, Tanya and my mother went home for a Chinese-style supper that I'd cooked, then I sat around avoiding the dreaded task of packing to go home, while Tanya read aloud from a book of Victorian housekeeping receipts from Ochtertyre house that she had found in the attic. It was highly entertaining. We haven't watched an ounce of TV all week, just been sitting around talking and listening to radio 3, as is often the way at my mother's house. Of course, there is no fire at the moment in the living room because there is no chimney, because my younger sister is working on it, so we rarely even enter the living room. In any case, my mother has forgotten how to operate the TV...