Threatening

I think today's blip is perhaps a good metaphor for our lives just now, with the sunny foreground of Loch Striven, the road lined with wild flowers, the small boat at peaceful anchor - but in the distance, over the hills, the purple clouds that will in the next hour advance down the loch and engulf us. We were pretty drookit by the time we reached our car again. 

And our lives? After the scenes of violence and mass lawlessness at Wembley as people broke in, we were surely back in the land of Trump? With the English Mini-Trump courting popularity with reckless abandon, announcing the end of restrictions even as the infection figures rise and the disturbing details of long covid begin to emerge, where will all this end? God knows that as a nation Scotland has done its best to distance itself from the government it never voted for, but as long as there are mobs to please and votes to be garnered that man is going to rampage on through all the protests of the sensible ... Except that protest is illegal, no? Or about to be? 

But in the meantime, we fill our lives as we may. So I went to Pilates, despite initial foreboding about my knee, which I seemed to have done something dire to last night. I was putting on my leggings to go out when something clicked and said knee was back in alignment: huge relief, even though I was careful what I stretched this morning. I had intended having lunch in the garden, but the moronic neighbour had lit a smelly fire in his bin - getting rid of waste materials from his work - so we had to retreat. Then it rained, went off again, rained again ...

Until we ended up walking along Loch Striven. The scents are amazing - these uncut verges mean there are sights and scents I've never experienced there before - and the air was warm. When the rain came, the temperature dropped by 4 degrees. I was irresistibly transported back well over 60 years to childhood holidays spent entirely in shorts, come whatever weather - because I've at last found a skirt that I feel happy walking in, and it was amazing to feel the rain on my bare brown legs instead of soaking a pair of trousers.

But there was a difference: when I was a child I didn't have to come home and cook a chicken ...