Eyeball to Eyeball

I met a friend of many moons standing in town this morning.
We have known each other since our pram pushing days in Hamilton in the 1960s. We were both city girls, she from Aberdeen and I from Edinburgh, both wondering what we had let ourselves in for, living in a new housing estate on the periphery of a town not as well endowed with the finer things in life as were our home cities.
Now she lives 6 months of the year near London and 6 months in the Borders, but we meet up regularly when she and her husband are in residence in Scotland.

Having watched a programme on age related dementia last night, it was somewhat discomfiting to walk into John Lewis this morning and find it so completely changed around that I had no idea where I was.
My old comfortingly familiar restaurant was no longer there and the new one strange, highly technical and noisy with the constant sound of chairs scraping on the stone floor.
The computer and technical department which used to be in the basement is now on level 5 beside the café, all very confusing. It was all too easy to empathise with sufferers of any kind of dementia when nothing seemed to be where I thought it should be.

There is a distinct lack of wildlife in the area surrounding the Dower house and what little there is will soon be diminished when the powers that be give cyanide tablets to the burgeoning number of rabbits that have mysteriously taken up residence.

However we do have at least two squirrels, ( it's hard to tell how many if there are only two visible at any one time), and this bold boy was about to raid a big black bin on a Meadows path. It was happy to stare me out, knowing that if I made a move it would be up the adjacent tree quicker than greased lightning.