Reflections

My main memory of today is of rain, though when I really think of it there were quite long spells when it was more or less dry and even some sunshine. Perhaps it's the sound of rain battering the back of the house as I came up to the study just now, just before bedtime ...

Just as yesterday I felt quite energised, with the satisfaction of achieving some work (not housework!) and of a walk made meaningful by conversation, today I felt tired more or less the whole day. I felt I took an inordinate time to mix some sourdough in the morning; whatever ails it, it's not sufficiently risen to bake and I'm going to leave it sitting till tomorrow. But I've begun to ask myself if this is what is to be expected. When one is my age, should it be a perfectly reasonable expectation that I will sit and read the paper, or do Wordle or whatever other passive sort of occupation old people do, and not feel I should be doing something constructive? Is it ok just to do nothing if one feels like it? And will the time come, as I remember it doing with my mother (who lived on her own till she was 92), when I can't face cooking meals from scratch and seek out the better of the ready meals to pop in the oven or microwave? Will I find bending down to put something in the oven quite enough activity, and consider climbing the two flights of stairs chez moi as reasonable exercise only if not undertaken too often in a day? 

See the gloomy thoughts that float along when I'm not using my brain ...

However, I managed to stop the treadmill in my head and so several Italian lessons - suddenly I can remember how to cope with prepositions and odd words that had me foxed before, though I'm still having trouble with my subjunctive endings. Even when I download a table to learn, I find it so much harder to make them stick than I did 60 years ago.

We also went out - not for very long, it has to be said - expecting to be soaked but in fact returning to our car just as the rain returned with a vengeance. The weather app said the wind was in the NW, but by the time we got down the road to Innellan, where it should have felt sheltered, the waves were driving up the firth from very much a southerly direction and it felt chilly. That's where I took the blip for today - looking up the coast towards Dunoon (in the distance) with a foreground of gorse, daffodils, and several crows picking at heaven knows what on the grass. Further along the road, the flagpole outside the village hall was flying both the saltire and the Ukrainian flag.

Appalling images continue to haunt the news from Ukraine - I hate it when the news is so compelling in this way - and I've just watched a Channel 4 documentary about the history of relations between Putin and Ukraine, including fascinating reminders of what happened in Georgia too. The man's ubiquity in Eastern European politics is suddenly very obvious - and so is the continuing excellence of Channel 4 which that awful woman is going to sell off to the highest bidder. 

Our beautiful world is horribly fractured.