Of walking and war

Today I went back to my Covid-conscious early morning shopping, scooting down through the traffic lights in the new car (did I tell you it's great for scooting about town?) to Morrison's before breakfast. The nightmare maze that the shop has become has developed further; conversation with one of the managers who happens to be a former pupil of mine told me that they're installing something like a million quids' worth of new eco-fridges and the consequent temporary use of the displaced ones is the result (and presumably the juxtaposition with spices with paracetamol). The entire shop, therefore, was perishing cold - usually you can warm up a bit once you get away from the fridges, but just now there's no escape. I was relieved to get home to some porridge, just as in winter.

I seemed to achieve little else all morning. I don't know where time went; it just did. But I did manage to have a word with pal Di, as a result of which I got a decent walk in the afternoon, only slightly hampered by her two black spaniels who would occasionally entrap me in their leads. We marched up the hill of Glen Massan into the hanging valley, which is where I took today's blip from the bridge over the river high up the road. The dogs, having already had a potter in the burn much lower down, seemed less interested in swimming in the top pool, so they're just leading Di back up the bank. I was wearing shorts and had forgotten to apply the anti-tick spray, so I tried to avoid the long grass: ticks love me, and I removed one from my ankle only two days ago, while Di tells me she's never had one in her life. Is it blood group that determines this?

By the evening I was so tired that I felt guilty watching the news from Ukraine while sprawled listlessly on the sofa: the missile attacks on civilians would seem to ask more of me in the way of attentiveness, somehow. I was interested, however, to hear the interview, voiced by a translator, with the mother of a missing (and then confirmed dead) Russian soldier, who was listened to in sympathetic silence by the wonderful Steve Rosenberg of the BBC. Her misery and deep anger at Putin, her vision of a whole army of mothers rising up against him, brought home once more what Wilfred Owen talked of: War, and the Pity of War.

And meanwhile Westminster is absorbed in navel-gazing.

*The red car is nothing to do with us. We'd walked up from the village.