Some days you only need the sky...

...and a couple of sheep, oh, and some birds - did you spot them?

Being a Scot with my roots in a sour Calvinism, I ought to have known last week while sun bathing on Arran that 'we would pay for it'

It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. 'What a day it is!'
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
and she spoke with their ancient misery:
'We'll pay for it, we'll pay for it, we'll pay for it.'

And pay for it we did - with a late fall of snow and bitterly cold wind. I started the day thinking I would blip the white stuff, but frankly, there was not much of it here and what there was did not impress.

Spent the morning in a traffic jam and the afternoon discusing a new project with an old colleague then visiting a pal in her new extension. Took my camera along intending to get a portrait of her leaning on her new Aga, but got so wrapped up in conversation that I completely forgot. Hence the hasty sheep shot ( I said SHOT) out of the car window on the way home. But the image speaks to me nonetheless. I spend a lot of time these days just looking at the sky. It is astounding. Up there above us all the time, always changing. And most of the time we don't even notice it.