Not waving

Well that was a long, hot day! Actually it's now Saturday, and I'm going to be even later in bed than I was last night and Himself has just appeared and asked if I'm actually going to go to bed at all, but that's the way with compulsions ...

I wasn't quick off the mark this morning, so the morning saw very little achieved other than cooking some delicious runner beans brought from our guests' garden last night; we had them tepid, anointed (I like that!) with som melted butter as part of a salad with cold poached salmon for lunch. Oh, and I chatted with my sister on the phone, mainly about the possible holidays we might go in our declining years. 

The afternoon brought one of these pleasurable revelations which aren't new at all, merely forgotten: I sat outside under the parasol (once the blasted cement-maker had finished for the afternoon - maybe they were getting sunstroke) reading my book, Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven (extra photo) for over an hour. And at the end of that hour I realised how much I'd missed doing just that: spending prime daytime reading fiction for my own pleasure and nothing else. That used to be a big part of every holiday, a huge part of everyday life, and somehow I've allowed myself to be seduced into thinking I had to be doing something. It doesn't help that I don't live with a reader - losing yourself in a book is harder when someone else's life is marching to a different drum. I'm going to remedy this.

It was after 4pm when we left to drive to my favourite beach, an hour away over undulating and frankly terrifying roads at Ostel Bay. I've blipped this beach before, but never when the tide was quite as low as it was today. My photo was in fact taken by Himself, and shows my tiny figure walking as if to Arran (blocking the end of the bay) to have a swim. It was actually easier to find depth of water when I finally got in - usually I'm swimming over all that sand and it's uniformly shallow. I would have stayed in considerably longer had it not been for a seal sharing the bay with me; every time he popped his sleek black head out of the water a dog on the left-hand yacht started to bark and I had no wish to encounter a seal's very dirty teeth under water. 

We were back at the car by just after 8pm. It was still warm and quiet except for the hum of the tractor in the field, cutting and baling hay in a great cloud of dust. The grassy machair over which we walked was hopping with tiny frogs - it was most disconcerting. 

We ate curry at 9.45pm, and now I'm off to bed. I have sand between my toes ...

*If you're puzzling over that title, it's a poetic reference to Stevie Smith's Not Waving but Drowning. I didn't drown.