Up ... and down

I've just been reading a post on Facebook from a much younger friend who says she's too tired and too worried about the effects of the current situation - on income, on family - to take exercise outside her own garden. I find this upsetting on several levels - not least because she's been put off by the proliferation of busybodies criticising everybody else to the extent that she thinks she'll be criticised for going for a walk. Tonight, as the news that the PM is in ITU darkens the horizon even further, I am buoyed up by the fact that I'm so physically tired that it'll be all I can do to finish this and stagger off to bed - and as my main photo shows, I didn't achieve this entirely chez moi.

I began the day, right enough, with my Pilates class in the extremely close confines of my study. (Go on - have a laugh at my extra photo). There is just enough room if I'm careful, and there was a judicious mix of stretching and strength work this morning so that I warmed up and felt I'd really worked. After coffee, I got round at last to tackling a couple of small tasks (the kind that end up taking ages) in the front garden: I gave the heather a haircut and pruned the rosa rugosa that I was foolish enough to plant at the edge of the grass when we had a whole rosa hedge uprooted. Then I had to pick up all the bits and stash them in a bin bag cos the recycling centre, aka the tip, is closed ...

A short walk seemed in order in the afternoon. After all, the sun was splitting the sky, even if there was a brisk wind. Up the back we went. The main photo was taken at the highest point of our route, before we turned into the Bishop's Glen. It's Dunoon again, and on the original photo (did I tell you I'm loving the camera on my new iPhone?) if you enlarge it you can actually see the back of our house. The walk was scenic, but not really peaceful: timber lorries crashed past, raising great clouds of dust from the track and forcing us to walk with our jackets over our heads. When we got into the glen there were groups of people, all of whom seemed to have dogs. And none of the dogs was on a lead, despite the clearly worded advice on the Government website. We had to keep ducking off the track to avoid getting too close to either dogs or owners, most of whom seemed serenely unaware of the fact that I was seeing them with round red heads with blue spikes ...

But we survived, and came home hungry. We ate far too much, and then attended online Compline. And since then, I've sat in a semi-comatose state, only rousing myself to watch a very powerful piece from a hospital from the BBC News at Ten with the BBC Health correspondent. And I caught some of Have I Got News for You, at which I laughed aloud. Laughing is good. Exercise is good. Sunshine is good. 

Life is good.