Fetching stuff

We made a first visit of the year to our favourite garden centre, Highland Liliums, which involves quite a long drive out the other side of Beauly. Even so, it's definitely worth the drive. The blip shows just a small proportion of the excellent stock they carry.

We went quite early because I decided not to swim today. I'm still coughing quite a lot, and I've decided that the second "cold" I had, which struck me down in the first week of April, was probably not a separate cold, but rather a recurrence of the infection which I went down with in February. H and D, who visited us a week or so before I went down with something (and four days before Mr A was struck down) turned out to have covid, which they have also been struggling to throw off completely. D was quite ill at the time and H suffered a recurrence of symptoms about a month later. As my sense of smell has disappeared completely and my sense of taste is not too much better, I've reluctantly concluded that I probably had covid in February (hope I didn't give it to anyone), and I had a recurrence of symptoms when I had a "cold" just over a month later. I was suspicious about that "cold" as it immediately went onto my chest, rather than going on to my chest a week or ten days later. I've basically been coughing for the whole of the month of April so far, and I'm pretty fed up with it. I don't feel really bad right now, but despite having had a more restful two weeks, I don't feel completely right. Of course, all of this is just idle self diagnosis and I will never know for sure, but working this lot out yesterday actually made me feel better about the fact that I've not been too good these last two weeks (and consequently, I've got less done than I hoped).

Anyway, going swimming would have meant going to the garden centre in the early afternoon, which would have meant much busier roads and a busier garden centre. It made sense to cut swimming (I wasn't feeling the love, anyway) and go early. We picked up a couple of pond plants for A and N, and after planting out the various things we brought home including a mahonia in a lovely new pot which L has bought us (see extra), we dropped the pond plants round to them, picking up another four bags of wood chippings in return. We sat at the bottom of their garden, with Elmer who was quite well behaved, drinks and bits of cake. It was positively balmy in the sunshine. On the way back, we saw L and J outside their house, having just come back from Easter Sunday lunch at L's parents' house in Inver. They were unloading their Easter eggs from the car!

A second extra of rape seed flowers in the fields near the Cromarty Bridge.