Last of the summer chill?

It's hard to believe that this evening, with its wonderfully clear sky, is the last such for a while as the promised weather system moves a great blob of rain towards us - but at least it should be a tad warmer. A year ago today was that amazingly hot day when I went on an outing to Kilmartin Glen and spent the night in A&E with the Quorn reaction that they all put down to heatstroke ... 

But to today. I stayed in bed with my Italian till quite late (stop sniggering, Wildwood!) and wasn't really ready to do much till after coffee. Then, however, I tackled the horrid bits round the cooker in our very low-ceilinged kitchen, where the surfaces tend to become coated in gunk partly because of too much stove-top cooking. (I suppose it would all be inside the oven otherwise ...) After several experiments I went back to my jar of Biomex paste (magic product I buy from Lakeland, which seems to change the consistency of grease) and worked off all my breakfast calories rubbing and wiping down. I think it looks better. At some point during all this I managed to tear off a hang-nail which is now unpleasantly painful and puffy - really annoying how such a tiny thing can throb so much. 

After lunch I resisted the urge to fall asleep and got on with the business of renewing the contract for Himself's mobile phone. Years ago I gave him a phone for Christmas, a contract phone with plan, and I've been paying them both ever since, though now we buy the phones from Apple and have SIM-only contracts with Vodafone. I went straight to asking the chat bot to get me a real person, which resulted in exchanging texts with an employee somewhere in Scotland for a change, and a contract that will actually cost less than the current one for a slightly improved set-up. In the light of the current fiasco involving BT and EE, Vodafone proved a model of clarity and common sense - though I have had a contract with them since my phone was a brick!

As a result of this we were a tad late getting out, but the benefit was the cloudless sky we saw to the south and which is a feature of today's photo, taken looking over the recently harvested field at Toward Point. (Silage, I think.) In an adjoining field we saw a large black horse and a much smaller white one seeming to swim through the long grass that has still to be cut, and in the distance the sea was a line of navy blue. We were both tired, but we ambled along for a couple of miles in the sunshine and stopped for a loooong chat with the speedy man we often meet down there, one of these people whose names we never know but who hails us as old friends and embarks on the saga du jour - in this case the battle with the phone lines ...

AAAAAgh! (Just a wee scream)


I need to be brisk in the morning, brisk and with my wits about me. Time to go ...