Acclimatising

My first thought when I woke today was that I'd lost my Apple watch - when I'm away I tend to wear it in bed to avoid the need for a bedside alarm clock, but when home I charge it overnight. I don't really like having it on all the time - it makes my wrist too thin! I hopped out of bed to take a photo of the line of red sky between the grey clouds already over us and the dark bulk of the hills over the water, then hopped briskly back under the duvet to drink my tea and catch up on everything on my phone (as well as the Early Bird Italian exercises!). So I was late down for breakfast, late finishing off, late clearing up - but I did shove a great load of clothes into the washing machine. They've annoyed me ever since, hanging around with nowhere to go because ... it started snowing hard. It lay for about an hour and then became heavy rain. 

Lunch was a fat slice of Christmas cake. I know: sinful. But it's best when I'm actually hungry, rather than feeling I have to eat it in conjunction with something more sober. And then we decided the rain was going off and the snow was gone and we needed a walk - our first since Boxing Day. The sky to the south looked slightly brighter, so we drove to the Ardyne, parked there, walked up the hill between the fields, spoke to some sheep, observed the river running down the road from the farm on the hill, looked at Arran's snow-clad mountains barely visible under a cap of cloud. Then we returned to the Ardyne, just as a fabulous sunset began to light up the sky over Bute. 

We walked out along the beach road to the end, stopping every minute or so to take photos of the sky, out of which angels might well have appeared in hordes of glory. The colour changed, changed back, lightened, darkened, spread to the clouds behind us over the hills, retreated, shrank, and gradually vanished, leaving us in darkness with only a faint line of pink along the top of a long cumulus cloud. 

We finished the day with a fish pie made by my daughter-in-law, the one who always ensures we don't starve when we return home from a visit. I felt truly spoiled!

I've had such a job choosing which photo best conveyed the moment; I'm attaching another two from today as extras, one of which shows my view out from the dining room in mid-morning, though it looks more like evening.