Cutting back ...

It's almost half past eleven at night and I'm looking back at the morning and wondering if I really did all this stuff on one day ... It began with a long-awaited hair cut in Greenock, necessitating a business-like time for getting up in the morning and not lingering over odd cups of tea, let alone breakfast, so that we could catch the 9.40 ferry. (Note to self: find out how often the buses run these days - it's high time I got back to these money-saving ways.) This was quite a momentous visit, being the first time in 25 years that I've had my hair cut and not done anything to the colour: I seem to have become allergic to the PPD in permanent hair colour and wonder if it's associated with the Covid vaccination in the way that links are now being made to the same effect of the virus. Anyway, I now have a brilliant cut but an odd pink colour on the top, white down the short sides, and dark brown, bizarrely much as it was a quarter of a century ago, all over the back view. No, you can't see a photo.

Once home and fed, it was back out to the garden to finish off more bits of shrub-taming. Today it was sawing down the trunk of one that isn't thriving and is getting in the way of the pieris, as well as hacking back great strands of that awful acid-yellow plant with the pale silvery-grey leaves that takes over everywhere if you let it. I also attacked the marauding strands of willow spirea, planted long ago by someone else and subject to ongoing warfare, and some long jaggy bramble talons that had reached preposterous lengths in the undergrowth. By the time I'd finished, we'd bagged it all and Himself had made three trips to the recycling centre we were both fit to drop. (This is where I'd love just to be as awful as the neighbours from hell and make a bonfire ...)

But I didn't drop, I made dinner and attended online Compline before the dropping. And I feel strangely revivified by all this - it seems to have banished the growing sense that I couldn't do things any more because of the effect of advancing years. I had a momentary qualm when the pruning saw jammed and I felt my arm might fall off, but I bashed on and I'm still here. And my watch recorded a massive calorie count and a good high heart-rate for two hours of "other exercise",  so that's pleasing.

Blipping the extraordinarily choppy sea whipped up by the NE wind on the Firth. And more blues ...