Making the right choice ...

Not as existential a question as you might imagine; my heading refers this time to the choice we make every time we go out for a "purely exercise" walk. Today's choice was made by the usual glance out of the front and back windows to see where the worst cloud/rain/mist lies, and today it was definitely greyer - not to say invisible - to the north. We drove down the road through torrential rain, and arrived at Ardyne just as it went off. The photo was taken some five minutes later as we marched up the road; the rain came on again just as we returned to the car.

My extra photo is a screen shot from Google Maps, in 3D mode, showing the back of the Hyndland tenement where I grew up (well - till I was 10). I reckon my bedroom was one of the top flat windows at the rear of the building just opposite the "N" of Novar, and the area just to the left of the front of the house was empty but for an over-ground, brick and concrete air-raid shelter and a rubbish dump full of the remnants of a tenement along Polwarth Gardens (as it was called then) which had been destroyed by a landmine. Chimney sweeps would dump their soot there; we used it as face paint ... And that neat little park, Novar Park, was rough grass with two paths through it and  a row of hawthorn trees in which we would climb and build houses and round which we would run "long-distance" races. And just under the row of trees, which weren't there at all, nearest to the bright, new tenements, there was an underground air-raid shelter in which we sometimes played - and lit fires, hoping our mothers wouldn't see the smoke from, in my case, the top floor windows across Novar Drive.

It's amazing the memories that bit of map brought back; I was looking elsewhere on the map of Glasgow and marvelling at the detail that 3D brings to the areas where it really applies and couldn't resist a visit, as it were, to my life as a 50s kid. 

And today? Well, I found the black shawl I thought I'd lost, and a pair of black linen baggy trousers that I felt I might need soon ... and now they've joined a pile on the spare bed that I'm scared to put away lest I lose them again. 

After all, it's only for 10 days ...