Spring flowers in the Tain garden

I'm just back in the Edinburgh flat after a very long day. I sat down at my desk in Tain around 8am to do some emails and then a couple of Teams meetings, which morphed into a few more meetings as the day evolved. Quite a lot of problem solving, with positive outcomes, which was nice. The team for next year is coming into position. My only fear today was offering the wrong person the wrong job.

Around 5.30pm, we set off by car for Inverness, for me to catch the 1852 back to Edinburgh. The train was not too busy, and I had a lot of work to do, so the journey did not drag too much and felt productive. Towards the end, I turned to my novel, having run out of things I felt I could productively do on a train. Today is the beginning of what is, in effect, weekly commuting from Tain for the next month or so. At some point I guess the journey will go disastrously wrong. But that's one down and six to go. I made a really smooth transition at Haymarket on to the tram, and then walked back through the Park from Balfour Street. Plenty of people around, and also plenty of light in the sky, even at 10.40pm. I wouldn't do that in the winter, but in the summer it makes complete sense as the shortest route home. I'm not sure how much the petrol for a trip into Inverness and back is (just under 80 miles and the car does about 50 mpg), but the train cost me £9.70 and the tram was free. So overall a pretty good value journey.

Today's blip is a collection of spring / early summer flowers from the Tain garden. Some of these flowers are plants we brought up from Edinburgh, including the Tutti Fruiti Lewisia and one of the aquilegias (the one in the bottom right corner - the other aquilegias are self seeded all around the garden). In the centre are flowers from the strawberry plants we were gifted by meles and daveH. They are doing well in the warm wet environment (it rained again today, on and off...). Others are more recent acquisitions last year and this. It's looking good!