Distraction techniques...

On this brightly sunny, rainbow-girt day of sudden showers, I went over the water for a hair cut. In some ways it felt like too much - we've been over that ferry more times in the past fortnight than we have in months - but the distraction of having someone else to talk to and the boost to morale of the new colour proved welcome after all. I had a FaceTime call with my pal while the colour was taking - she seemed better than yesterday, and quite cheerful.

I started the day with a text chat with my 10 year old granddaughter who tested positive yesterday. I asked her how she was: "Locked up" came back, followed by "blocked up". Seemed a concise description of the nastiness of it all. Later, on the phone to my sister, we were discussing the horrid ailments of our youth: the temperature so high that I was hallucinating, the Disprin crushed in raspberry jam, the time our GP visited on two consecutive evenings to administer penicillin via injection. A particular memory of mine is that even before Covid my sense of taste altered - the toothpaste tasted wrong and I knew I was ill. We always had to stay in bed if we were ill - the house was never uniformly warm enough for a feverish child to potter about in, and with no TV to curl up in front of there seemed no point in leaving bed. You lay there, you read, or slept, or - when feeling better - stuck stamps in the album or drew in an old jotter (My dad was a teacher). When I ran out of my own books I read all kinds of stuff, from Whymper's Scrambles Amongst the Alps to John Buchan to books my father borrowed from his school library to keep me going. (It was a boys' Junior Secondary; I would be certainly younger than 10. Interesting variety!) I certainly had all the range of stuff - chicken pox, measles, rubella, whooping cough, mumps - with all the enthusiasm of the firstborn child. But nowadays children seem not to be stricken thus for weeks on end, so this Covid malarkey is a horrid flashback. Thanks to all who wished Anna well. 

The photo is of a common feature of life here - the ramp down onto the Western Ferry taking us to Gourock. They swallow up a surprising number of cars these days; when they started in the early 1970s, just before we moved here, they took 3 lines of cars only and it was quite common to have to wait for the next boat. It's not as expensive for us as for visitors - with the locally-bought 10-journey book of tickets and the concessions for the aged it is probably about half what the casual car driver has to pay.

I will get back to going over on foot for the bus - but not just yet.