Star-Crossed

Commonly applied to lovers, but more generally inferring ill-luck or mis-fortune, this is actually a rather self-serving description of our day. A trip to Tobermory (which Mrs M called "the capital" - possibly a bit much for a fishing town with a population less than half our home village, but certainly the commercial centre of the island) to attend a talk about coffin roads - the tracks along which the deceased were transported to often remote graveyards. Interesting - at least I assume it was when it took place yesterday! Not so much star-crossed as wires crossed

No matter; we had a lovely lunch at an art centre cafe (An Tobar), stocked up at the co-op, took the mandatory picture postcard snaps of colourful seafront houses and fishing-boat bobbing sea. The serpentine drive there and back is a joy in itself - every imaginable mixture of lochs and rocks and mountains and moorland and cliffs, with shifting clouds and light striving to flatter it

Just as we were leaving the town, a commotion beside the car park caught our attention. A melee of people around some trestle tables with a canvas canopy to ward off the showers. A little market perhaps, a charity sale, a cake stall...? None of these. It turned out to be an orderly, but cheerful and excited queue of parents and children, each with bucket in hand, to collect a marine animal of their choice from one of several tanks on the table. Having selected crab or fish or urchin or this intimidating (and so late-chosen) starfish, they marched seriously along the pier and boarded a boat that was to take them out of the harbour to a suitable site to release their charges back to the ocean. It turns out that Mull Aquarium has a policy of putting its exhibits back where they came from, after a period in the tanks, and use this as an opportunity to engage with potential future marine biologists - and give them further encouragement with home-made cake

So I may be none the wiser about coffin roads, but I now know what a "release party" is, and maybe that is more life-affirming knowledge. It was written in the stars

(Thank you to all the nice people who have given me stars and encouragement in the last few days)