Shhh...

It happened again. A whole day, drifting past and over before I knew it. And yet there were a few things ...

Like sitting up in bed drinking Darjeeling and watching a huge cruise ship glide up to Greenock in the early morning haze, dwarfing the Western Ferry as it passed. Like having a word with the printer and ordering another fifty copies of Washed Up because, pandemic or no pandemic, the first 100 are almost all gone (three of them in that fire!). And like having a three-voice rehearsal for a change in the church - lovely to have the full sound for the round we're doing.

It went to pot after that, I reckon. Our singing meant lunch in the garden was later than it might have been, and then I fell asleep in a very odd position and woke up feeling stiff and sun-drunk. I had thought of going for a swim, but I didn't really feel up to it at the crucial moment when I should have found my cozen. Instead I poached some bullet-like pears to tender deliciousness and this took longer than it might have had the pears had a chance to ripen a bit more, or something.

We got out at last. The first moment came when Himself got out of our car, locked it, and made to join me - leaving, as I thought, the engine running. But no, it was the car parked beside ours, same model, same smoked back windows, apparently empty, unless there was someone lying in the back - maybe trying to kill himself? What to do? But then a man appeared as from nowhere, wild camping along the shore, to explain that he was charging his phone. With the car. Solar chargers, anyone?

Another moment. Five minutes along the shore road, I realised that I had no memory of turning off the heat under the poached pears. I had been so distracted by a text message from #1 granddaughter to say she'd been made class captain in school that I'd sashayed out the door with nary a backward glance ... Himself offered to go back and check. Reader, I let him. Bisom that I am (how do you spell that? Besom? Not how I pronounce it) I set off on my own, walked out the Ardyne, sat on the shore, played with my phone, threw stones at a stone tower of the unloved kind that Monroist and I destroy, had a call from Himself saying he was heading back to me and would meet me halfway. 

The photo shows where he found me. Think silence, the slight burbling of a flock of black ducks in the distance, the glint of sunlight on the water. I am standing as far out as I can without soaking my short skirt. There is the odd small crab scuttling by my feet, and a solitary sea anemone. I am cool for the first time in hours. 

The rest is predictable. Himself met me, we went home, I made dinner, we just made it to online Compline, we had the pears after it. I watched the last episode of The Handmaid's Tale.

And I had put off the heat after all ...