Going swimmingly…

What a day! Cloudless for the entire time? Like the summer of 1955? Well, yes. How did I spend it?

At first, lazily. Tea in bed; leisurely breakfast; Italian exercises in the garden; coffee. Then back to the Co-op for a Sunday paper and some strawberries and other fruit, and back to the cottage for lunch. But then we headed down to the beach where I learned to to swim so long ago. The demographic has changed, oddly - we reached the beach by the access at the castle end of the bay, where in the 50s and 60s the Duke had two white bathing huts in a fenced- off bit of beach and hardly anyone ever went there. Today that’s where there were actually lots of people, and as we walked along the sand to where my family always sat, they thinned out to a few solo bathers and a dog or two. The sand was different too - a pinker colour, and finer in texture - and it turns out it may be augmented by sand excavated from the new harbour area.

And I had a swim. Not a long swim, and a careful one - I didn’t want any water to get into my eyes, for obvious reasons - but one of those days when the top layer of sea feels warm, like a tepid bath. Very cheering.

Right now we’re wrestling with an apparent limiter on the hot water system. Reminds us of the gite we stayed in for #2 son’s wedding in Brittany …

Collage shows Himself on the beach, a’Cruach, which was the hill I saw from my childhood bedroom window here; the jagged tooth of Beinn Nuis; the Rosa Burn from above. The latter two were taken on a pre-dinner stroll up Glen Rosa.