Aftermath

A strangely benign day in which we looked round at the mess left over the weekend and earth-moving equipment converged on the Argyll roads to try to get them re-opened. In a small way that happened to us in that the builders returned and confessed that they'd boobed in covering over the drainage vents under our front door - they've removed the offending material, but we're now left with a sort of mini-moat which wasn't quite the idea. They said they'd be back; I'll believe it when I see them.

Pilates class in the morning, sparsely attended because the school holidays have started (don't ask me why that should affect our class of granny-aged people, but it is a trad time to go away on holiday here); we all agreed on the mental benefits we got from our first morning of the week class as well as the health benefits, painful or no. 

I went for a walk with Di in the afternoon, around the area which seems to have suffered most damage on Saturday. I won't put up the sad post of a red cabin cruiser upside down in the buses beside the River Eachaig, nor of the four bridges in this river-crossed flood plain damaged or swept away by trees and boats being driven against them, but have chosen the drama of Puck's Glen, a narrow gorge with a spectacular waterfall that is often just a trickle. The main burn down the gorge was roaring through its rocks, and the path looked smaller than I remember, so we didn't go far. We had the added bonus of seeing several red squirrels ...The extra picture shows the sunny tranquillity of the sodden fields, and later we crossed the road to Uig, where, unable to cross the river, we found a way over a broken iron fence to the field between the river and the road. We squelched through this, over great banks of silt from the river bed, and realised we could actually access the car park at Benmore Gardens, where we'd left our cars, through the end of the field and a small wood. We felt we'd had quite an adventure; it was the kind of thing you only do with your pal to share the madness. There's more rain forecast for tomorrow.

Back home, we finished the champagne and felt mellow enough to face the evening news on the telly, though in truth it feels wrong to watch the destruction of Gaza and the plight of the women and children taken hostage by Hamas. But the preceding drama, if you can call it that, was hideously disturbing in another way, showing as it did the genesis of the monster that was Jimmy Saville. Brilliant acting to bring back to life a man who always made me shudder - but why did I watch it? 

I used to think old people led placidly untroubled lives compared with the stresses of being an exam-and-adolescence-burdened teenager. How wrong I was ...