As it was left ...*

We came home today - not yesterday, as we'd expected: weather and hospitality readily kept us in Edinburgh for another night, so that we came home not along flooded roads but in sunshine and just a few gusts to remind us of what had been. The boys left for school just as I got up - how did I manage when I had to be out by 8.20am? Funny how retirement changes one. 

Packing took the usual trips up and down stairs with stuff, but we were away by 11am, bearing with us the goody bag/food parcel that our daughter-in-law miraculously provides for us before heading to her office as well as a collection of mysterious parcels for my birthday at the end of the week. We stopped briefly at the only service station on the M8 so that we could remove some twigs from under the windscreen wipers - a token of the wild night under the trees round the house - and arrived at the ferry in perfect time to sit and eat our picnic lunch partly in the ferry queue and partly on board as we heaved gently in the swell left from the storm. 

We both felt desperate for a walk, but first we had to deal with the man supervising the path/steps (he's not satisfied yet) who had brought the ironworker who's going to make the handrail so that we and our aged visitors don't totter off the steps in the night after socialising. I rang a friend, the last but one Bishop of Argyll, who'd left a message about the latest events and with whom I had a long and enjoyable conversation, so by the time we did get out the sun was showing signs of vanishing and rain was threatening. However, we had a lovely walk along the old road at Benmore, where we saw one red squirrel making a daring crossing of the raging Puck's Glen burn, skittering over the steep mossy rocks and leaping the torrent at its narrowest point, and another making the same crossing high in the trees, delicately leaping the branches and coming down on the other side. Any walk with red squirrels is a good walk ... That's where the photo comes from, an extraordinarily colourful tree, recently planted; a variety of Acer. 

Then it was home to unpack, put a washing on and sit down to shepherd's pie provided by Mary along with some raspberries which miraculously had not gone soft in the fridge. Result!

*My title comes from a line in a memorable short poem by Philip Larkin, Home is so Sad. Quotes keep surfacing in my addled brain; maybe by the end I shall be speaking entirely in the words of others... Extra shows the old road among the trees.