Not a family heirloom

Apologies to those expecting an inanimate family heirloom in today's blip, I ended up coming back up to the mainland sooner than originally planned, so in the rush forgot. The heirloom will appear on Blip one day, though I need to do a bit of research to do it justice, so the delay is probably a good thing!

This is my Mum's dog, Ranza, looking very brave in water up to her ankles - considering she's a Golden Retriever, she's not fond of the wet stuff. We had a lovely walk along the shore after church this morning, and yesterday she negotiated the stile at the bottom of the glen with a level of self control rarely seen, so is very much in my good books at the moment. She usually freaks out at the stile as it goes over an electric fence which she has been shocked by twice to my knowledge, so I can see her point to an extent. She's also just completely lovely, walking her is one of the best bits of being home. She also enjoys it as we only let Mum walk her along the road, and I take her all kinds of interesting places up the glen, along the shore... Reading back over that looks a bit odd and should probably be explained. Mum has type 1 diabetes which is not well controlled through no fault of her own, so we'd much rather if she had a hypo while out walking the dog it was somewhere someone would find her fairly quickly, hence the rule about only walking along the road. Ranza is not on a lead most of the time though (just to get down the lane without dashing onto the road from excitement at the thought of getting a walk, which she is prone to do) so gets to wander fairly widely, so it's not as bad as it sounds!