Tide's out ...

When I was a child on holiday on Arran - where we used to take a cottage in Brodick for two whole months - I always knew the state of the tide. It made all the difference to our beach experience: were we going to be making castles on the damp sand of the beach at low tide, or building dams and waterways for the incoming tide to fill and then overwhelm in the tidal lagoons behind the beach? I was reminded of that today, when, back at the Ardyne, we once more found the enormous beach of a fortnight ago, with distant figures playing with their dogs apparently halfway to Rothesay...

A surprisingly lovely afternoon, with an abundance of roadside flowers and the incredibly lush fields where the black cattle feed. It followed a morning of shopping- related waits and mysterious deliveries ( a golden pot rose, delivered as a gift with absolutely no note telling us who had sent it) - and a touch of horror, as I discovered the scene of a murder on the back grass. Our sonic cat-deterrent lay broken on the grass, a small ring of grey feathers nearby. The opinion was that rather than an undeterred cat, the murderer had been a sparrow hawk and the victim a plump pigeon; there must have been quite a bit of thrashing around the break the plastic of the device.

Oh - we discovered who had sent the rose: my sister-in-law was anticipating our forthcoming Golden Wedding!