Here comes the sun ...

After the battering hail storms of the morning - to say nothing of the lightning and thunder - it seemed miraculous that the sun should appear and stay out until it set behind the hills. Until it did, however, I improved the shining hour by some hard work on the book - re-inserting the illustrations after the printer had worked on the colour variations of their backgrounds, re-aligning the poems so that they were all at the same position on their pages after the shifts that followed every change. I discovered the joy of using the Invisibles ...

But after lunch we joined my pal at Kilmun Arboretum and followed the forestry track high above the Holy Loch and on towards Puck's Glen. That's where this blip was taken, when I noticed these sparse red berries still clinging to their bush in a snowy hollow beside the burn. We walked 7 kilometres with plenty of ascents and descents, and felt we'd had some decent exercise. 

When I came home I phoned friends who've spent the last fortnight sailing around the South China Sea in a cruise ship which in the end was only allowed to berth in Vietnamese ports at the start of the cruise. Eventually they were ordered to return early to Singapore and arrange other transport home. It sounded nightmarish, and such bad luck. Sometimes I feel we should all just hibernate in our relatively unpopulated countryside and wait till everything blows over ...