A good walk and some good news ...

I'm still struggling to believe that it was warm enough a week ago to sit in Benmore in a T shirt and the thinnest of trousers and now feels oddly like winter. Today was actually rather lovely, though random clouds came by dark enough to sprinkle us lightly with rain that was barely visible if you weren't in it. I finished all the random washing from the laundry basket and dried it on the line, and after fortifying myself with coffee I tackled all the pots in the garden, cutting off all the dead bits and hauling out the grass that was growing rampantly in the pots I'd topped up with my own compost. I also had phone chats (tellingly, I wrote "chants" there) with my pal Di and with my sister, and did a whole chunk of Italian because I reached a 1600 day streak and Duolingo landed me with a whole extra 30 minutes of double points ...

In the afternoon I took off to meet my friend Di for a walk. "Wear your boots," she told me, so duly booted I drove to hers, hopped into her car, and was driven away up the road beyond Ardentinny, the one that goes over the hills to Loch Eck. (All visible on the map!) There she tucked her car into a stony corner off the single-track road and we headed into the hills on an old forestry track. We walked between tall trees, among blazing rowans and gleaming black brambles, past stands of golden grass and distant views of the Firth, following the two black spaniels on their long leads with which every now and then they tried to tie me up. It was utterly glorious, though we both felt a tad exposed to the keen north-easterly wind. 

Himself rang as we were turning down a loop that would take us back to the road, and I had to stop and listen to the good news that we're having all the money we paid for that aborted holiday returned, along with significant enticements from both the travel agent and the cruise company to book another holiday. It's not that I've been thinking about this all the time, especially not on a lovely hike, but it was like a waiting shadow, lurking till dealt with - or what Philip Larkin described in a poem as "a standing chill", which I think is wonderfully descriptive. 

Home to eat curry, to watch a clip of my older grandson scoring a fine goal for his school's 1st XI, and to collapse over a film I recorded the other week about an English tailor in Chicago who makes suits for a mobster - the wonderful Mark Rylance. 

And so, as Pepys would put it, to bed.