We can do blue ...

... though you wouldn't have thought so if you'd been with me as I headed out to Morrison's at 8.30am this morning. It was much less cold, but grey and decidedly damp as I trailed about finding a shopping trolley - there were none in the shop entrance, where they're usually lined up, and the trolley shelter at the foot of the steps only had enormous ones that I feel I'm falling into, so I had to trail across the car park again to get one, and then find a man to get me paper towels to dry it off so that my shopping wasn't soggy to start off. And there was no Golden Granulated sugar to be had...I did however get a neat little duster-thing with an umbrella-type handle which may be just the thing to tackle the random spiders' webs that suddenly appear in low sunlight, tantalisingly just out of reach ...

The rest of the morning followed a predictable pattern of late breakfast and late everything else, and it was after lunch before I realised that my aching legs seemed to be as much a hangover from too much sitting around on Monday/Tuesday, especially in the cramped position in the aircraft. I noticed the gleam of brighter skies to the south, and we drove through some rain and emerged in sunshine at Toward, where we walked round Toward Point as being the most sunny part of the area. There was a stiff wind blowing by this time, but we headed round to the lighthouse to watch the high-tide waves crashing on the rocks and marvelling about the northern quality of their blueness. The photo above is one of many I took: I'm a sucker for waves and had difficulty in reaching a choice. We were under a pale saucer of sky which included the declining sun and the hills of Arran, though they were under their own cloud by the time we left. The noise was incessant in the same way as it had been last week along the sea front in Funchal, but there was no cafe offering espresso along the way. 

I felt much more normal after all that. We had salmon and Moroccan grains for dinner - and wonky fruit poached in gin along with ice cream, and then we had a phone call with #2 son, whose birthday is this weekend when he'll be travelling. 

I promised I'd tell you the book I started while we were sitting in the hotel waiting for our car transfer on Monday. It's called Eve/Her Story, by Penelope Farmer, and was first published in 1985. As the back cover tells us: "Frank and sensuous, irreverent and witty, Eve's story suggests that even Paradise may not have been all it's cracked up to be."  The description of what happened to the Serpent, which comes in near the start of the book, is haunting in its viciousness, and yet the book is beautifully written  - a New Statesman critic suggested "It is as though Mrs Milton slipped in a few pages of her own while her blind spouse had tapped down to the pub".

I'm loving it - though tonight I'll have trouble staying awake long enough to read much!