Back to The Port

That seems to be how Portmahomack is known around here. I'm happy to adopt it.

The Saturday swim at The Port seems to be becoming a regular feature for the Shandwick Beach swimmers. For me and Mr A, today, it was preceded by a trip to the builders' merchant in Alness to source some highly utilitarian concrete slabs to edge what will become the newly "raised" bed in the front garden. Previously, it was a sort of raised bed, edged or supported by some large stones, which spread right across the crazy paving. And was completely compacted and full of corms and roots. We've almost finished digging it out, although to be fair to me that has mainly been me doing that job. Two of the slabs are now in situ, which can be seen from my collage photograph in the extras. The collage includes a couple of wider angles of The Port, almost making a pano, plus the sweet treats that one of the swimmers brought (the previous sweet treat was tablet), and the Carnegie Hall cafe sign, where we had brunch after swimming.

I made it the buoy and back again and made up for the fact that the tide was further out, thus making the swim shorter, by swimming diagonally from where we emerged from the car park. A 20 minute swim. As I said to one of the others, I'm just a bit slow these days. I think my breaststroke is (even) slower since my knee replacements because the kick for breaststroke is an unnatural action for someone with prosthetic knees. I now am that old lady I used to rail against who clogged up the lane I wanted to use in the swimming pool to do moderately fast front crawl. But they were very kind and stayed in the water until they were sure I was in my depth. I was just slow and stately and it was very enjoyable indeed.

After our brunch for about 15, which almost, but not quite, overwhelmed the café, Mr A and I headed home in order to get the concrete slabs out of the boot of the car and two of them in place (well, he did that....I spent the time wrestling the twigs and branches he cut off a tree he wants to get rid of in the side garden into bin bags....but note the comments above about digging). While we had originally thought of stone edging, that would be hugely more expensive and probably hard to source the right size, whereas concrete is just fine at least for now and will largely disappear as we will plant trailers at the front.

So that's about it for the day, apart from an additional trip down to the supermarket for me as limes had been forgotten yesterday. A sad state of the affairs. And the usual domestic stuff. Quite different to Easter Saturday last year, but equally, if not more, satisfying in its own way.