Quietly busy

First things first: I appreciate all the good things you chaps on here say in the comments section! It's a whole new community of encouragement on here, and the longer I'm here the more I realise it. Today felt a great deal more me, somehow - and it can't surely be just because the sun came out in the afternoon?

For a long time now, I've treated Saturday - unless we're going somewhere - as The Day Off. That means that there's no pressure, real or imaginary, to get things done, to be somewhere at a given time, to finish breakfast at a respectable hour ... So today, I sat over what is actually a very small breakfast, listening to the radio and catching up on Twitter, which is where I often catch the news before anywhere else. To redress this sloth, I cleaned the bathroom while chatting on the phone to my sister (I laid her down, so to speak, on loudspeaker) and did a hefty chunk of Italian which took me to number 2 in the Diamond League, where I stayed until mid-afternoon. (Duolingo alerts you with a hortatory text when someone topples you from a perch).

We spent some time on fruitless online activity after lunch, of which I may speak again, but then noticed that the sun was coming out and the afternoon looked decidedly cheerful. Time to go out and enjoy it. We went to Benmore Gardens, where we've not been at all for a couple of weeks, arriving about 4.30pm when everyone else was leaving. We met a friend who works in the office there and chatted for quite a long time, so that the shadows were lengthening and the light absolutely lovely as we headed up the hill. By the time we were coming down again, I'm sure there was no-one else in the whole garden; we saw several red squirrels scampering over the grass and up the trees - the first we've seen in ages. My photo comes from the one flower border left in what used to be called the Formal Garden, where there are masses of these golden flowers in a border full of colour (extra photo). Several of the flowers had bees on them, and every bee was noticeably still, not buzzing, not vibrating, but as if in rapt attention to whatever the flower was giving up. They paid absolutely no attention to us. The visit seemed to cast a glow over the rest of the day, and it didn't matter that dinner was going to be absurdly late.

That said, however - it's church in the morning, and once again it's nearly midnight. I'm off ...