Pictorial blethers

By blethers

Hangin' out

Last night - for the first time since last winter - I shut my bedroom curtains. Victorian houses with large bay windows, be they never so expensively double-glazed, develop draughts from around the whole assemblage, where the wood poles (well, they look like poles) finish off the woodwork at its join with the plaster of the wall, and when the storm-remnants are still scooshing in from the East and the temperature is 5º lower than the usual midnight winter reading, it's time to take drastic action. Normally I prefer to lie in bed and see the lights of the other side of the Firth, and the occasional ship heading down to the sea, but last night I slept in total darkness and woke ... late.

I achieved less in the remnants of the morning than I'd hoped, but then I didn't know there would be the massive distraction of the news and the live reporting of the Westminster bear-pit to stop me being the domestic goddess of my dreams. I did, however, make a cake - not a Christmas cake, for that is dreaming in its cake-tin, but a marmalade cake. Why? To use up some marmalade that neither of us is particularly fond of. It tastes fine in the cake. And I had a long phone call from a friend who moved away and whose life is currently very hard. 

We went out in the afternoon because we could, and it was quite clear and quite still despite the rapid sinking of the sun. Benmore Gardens was exciting, briefly, because there was a man in a towering tree cutting off branches and we had to wait till he'd chucked one down. The gardens aren't actually open just now, though we did see three other people and a robin. I've put my best photo of the robin as an extra, because it flew into the Andean refuge where we were having a brief seat till Himself pulled his socks up (literally) and sat down on the bench beside us. Really. I wonder if it was the same robin we've met there - and blipped - before.

When we arrived home it was almost dark, and a blackbird was singing gloriously in a tree beside the lane. It's hard, at moments like that, to think of the plague stalking the land and the desperate efforts of dangerous megalomaniacs to hang onto power.

Main blip was taken, as you may have guessed, from my usual position hanging out of the window this morning. because the snowy hills to the north looked so dramatic against the still-gloomy sky. 

And now I have to brace myself for Thursday morning. Again.

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