Shipping

After a wet night, I headed out for the early morning shop into a mild, damp world only slightly later than usual despite a sleep filled with dreams - not bad, not good, but interminable. I guess I wasn't sleeping very deeply. Morrison's was a nightmare today - echoes of shops in the Soviet Union or in The Handmaid's Tale, with great empty swathes of shelving (no cucumbers, no blueberries except expensive organic ones, no happy chicken packs of a sensible size, no happy whole birds ... ) I was told it was a system glitch last week that had caused a knock-on effect. We'll see. My bill appalled me: over £100 for a week's shop for two people, with no booze and no luxury items.

To remedy the shortfall, despite the cost,  after breakfast, paracetamol (which is back up to 67p a pack after a few months back down at 35p) and strong coffee I had to go out again to buy some missed stuff in the Co-op. Walking back with a bag of rice and a pot of yogurt I realised (a) it had become warmer and (b) I was feeling I might drop. The jags aren't done with me yet.

Later, we had a short walk in the sunshine that had become warm enough to tempt me out to sit in the garden. It was just after we'd got home that I looked out at the sunlit firth and saw one of our neighbours going out - a Trident sub sliding down past the Cloch light. They're big creatures, dwarfing the ferry and the attendant tugs, pilot ships or whatever, but not always immediately obvious because they lie so low in the water, and I felt the usual frisson of awe and dread at the sight. It's horribly real again, in fact - even compared with the early '80s - with the nuclear sabre-rattling in Moscow and the realisation that we can't let Putin get away with annexing neighbouring countries and go back to the former status quo of trade and money-laundering. I looked at the sub, thinking of the crew hidden in that long black hull alongside their WMD and I felt hollow inside.

Now, at bedtime, I think I mostly feel tired again. I stuck my nose outside as I was locking up - it's a real nippy autumn night, the coldest I've felt in months. 

<shivers>