Knowing your happy places ...

I think I mentioned the other day how Arran is definitely one of my longest-standing happy places, and I have to say it makes me smile every time I remember we're going back in August. However, there are places nearer home that can bring on that sudden rush of contentment, and that's what I'm referring to in tonight's header.

I definitely wasn't in a happy place this morning, when I realised that with a push I could take the surgery receptionist's advice and try turning up to queue when it opened at 8.30am. So there I was, before breakfast, trotting down the road in the slight drizzle to join a strangely third-world-seeming queue in the street outside the iron gate that protects the surgery door. When it opened, the favoured ones who already had an appointment (pre-booked, as I'd failed to achieve) were ushered past the rest of us hoi polloi into the waiting room while we waited our turn. And yes, it worked, and I was given an appointment an hour later - just time to pech (sic) back up the hill for some breakfast before I set off again. More tests, more bloods ... and a bit of poking and some reassurance. We'll see.

The rest of the morning passed in dealing with the full laundry basket and finding drying places (it was still drizzling), reading and doing Italian. Himself was batch cooking - the spice mix first, and then the chickpea curry - but we had some lunch in medias res while I ...wasted time, actually, half reading the paper, half doom-scrolling. However, by 4pm we were ready to go out, the rain had stopped, the dinner was made and ready to be reheated. As the sky was clearing from the south, that's where we went - despite our having been there recently. And it was as we left the main road and set off down the road to Toward Point, between the fields and then the trees, that I realised that this too is a happy place for me - not just for the memories of the friends who lived there once, but because of the ever-present sound of the birds in the trees and - on a day such as today - the amazing scents from the verges and the woods. The two photos in the collage come from there - the road itself, and the detour I like to make round by the lighthouse and the foghorn house (on the left) to look at the rocks, the sea, the mountains of Arran silhouetted in the distance. It didn't disappoint.

My trombone-playing granddaughter has been playing tonight with the Ivy Big Band, of which she is a founder member, in Edinburgh. Her father sent us a clip or two - I wish we'd been able to go. But physically and mentally I know we need some time just to be, and standing for two hours in a crowd isn't really the best solution . Still ...

And now, somehow, it's well past midnight. Again. 'Night!