Home

We're home again, and I have to go shopping in the morning, for the first time in two weeks. Thus does reality hit, and thus I mustn't spend too long on this journal entry! I always feel sad when this long-anticipated time with the family - and in this case it was both families - comes to an end, and this was no exception. We had the usual scurry round making sure we weren't leaving anything behind (I did, but we were able to turn round and drive back in five minutes to fetch it), and we had time to chat at the breakfast table and try to stop the puppy from pooing on the floor - you can imagine. Ewan and Anna dropped round with a birthday present for Himself (he inconsiderately has his birthday far too soon after Christmas) so I was able to fit in an extra couple of hugs; our older grandson carried both our cases downstairs simultaneously, which made us feel very old and feeble; we managed to get our stuff into the car in a gap in the torrential rain.

The M8 was very windy up in the upper reaches, the car rocking gently as we drove, but nothing compared to the rocking we got when we drove onto the ferry at McInroy's Point. My extra photo was snatched as we drove from the heaving ramp onto the equally heaving car deck, just to try to give a sense of what it's like. The most sick-making bit was as we docked - I was trying to do my Italian on the phone and it nearly finished me off.

A last, ludicrous footnote: many of our gifts this year, given and received, have been comestible  - in a family of foodies this is perhaps not surprising. But I had left our house in the slight disarray of a hasty departure, and I felt impelled to accommodate all the new items carefully in sensible places. And so it came about, Best Beloved, that the pair of us were emptying stuff out of the larder, chucking out the items that should have gone long ago, washing and rehousing others, sorting paper into recycling, general waste, and personal recycling (ie putting it away to reuse it!), and generally doing housekeeping that ought to have been done aeons ago ...

Quite a good feeling after we'd finished, but mad. Quite, quite mad. 

Blipping one of my original tree decorations (top left) from 51 years ago - glass, slightly broken, but precious.