Sink or swim?

After the euphoria of yesterday's successful trip over the water, the hairdo, the warmth in the air, today was sure to be a bit of a let-down. Funny: I've always suffered from the aftermath of events, good or bad; nowadays there's so little happening (though obviously I'm only talking about us, and the life we've led for the past 18 weeks) that a haircut and a new colour count as major life events. For a start, of course, it was considerably cooler, and there was a lot of cloud and spasms of unexpected rain, so that I had to rush to rescue my washing just before it was totally dry. And then there was the lack of purpose, renewing itself with horrid familiarity ...

I attacked the back garden this morning. This is the way we come into our house most of the time; the drive-in is there, and since the pandemic panic set in we've left the front gate for the contaminated visitor and used the back gate no matter how inconvenient. So it has mattered that everything grew with great enthusiasm and then prostrated itself all over the path when the rain came, and it was that growth that I started on. Later, I moved onto the hedge, which has been worthy of the Sleeping Beauty's garden since the motor in our electric hedge cutters blew and fried the insides of the machine. It's quite a big hedge in a small garden; it's tall enough that we both need a wee ladder to cut the top of it and until this morning it looked wild and bushy and I felt the neighbours were, as it were, pushing it further into our garden by dint of cutting their side ever closer ... Paranoid? Moi? Anyway, I tackled it with the manual shears, having first anointed them with WD40. The result reminded me of my hair pre-haircut: superficially tidy, but with ... anomalies. And tufts.

This was tiring, made me feel I'd had a workout. But after that I began to sink instead of swimming, and pondered yet again the utter futility of life, the universe and everything, as Boris Johnson fills the Lords with a mob of new peers including his brother and other enthusiastic Tory yes-men and -women. In an attempt to remedy my failing mood, we went out; driven away from our destination of Benmore by the sight of curtains of rain over the hills we ended up walking along the north shore of the Holy Loch in fleeting sunshine.

My blip shows the loch at low tide; in the water just offshore you can just make out a boat lying on its side in the mud. The extra photo shows it in close-up. Just before lockdown this boat arrived in the Holy Loch, was carefully anchored and secured - and sank the next day. A man we talked to (actually he came to reassure us that his two deerhounds wouldn't eat us despite the noise they were making on top of their garden wall) told us that apparently the interior of the boat was beautifully appointed, and that the owner said it was there for the taking ... It all sounded very fishy.

The deerhounds, by the way, looked like animated grey hearthrugs.