Visitors

I may have mentioned previously the interesting fact that our piano-tuner, who comes to us twice a year, lives in Brazil. It's not as odd an arrangement as you might think; he is a Dunoon boy, one of Himself's earliest pupils in Dunoon Grammar, who played in the band and studied music. He was also my first private tuition pupil during the eight years I took off teaching to have my babies and see them off to school or - with the younger one - nursery. None of that was yesterday, but today that period came in for much retrospection as he and his Brazilian wife, whom we've not met, came for coffee. 

Entertainingly, three of us (not Himself) are on Duolingo, and are "friends" in the Duo setup - my Italian, Raymond's Portuguese, Renata's English. We discovered that many of the things I might say in Italian are more readily understood by a Portuguese speaker than the English, so there was a deal of language being thrown around, translated, compared, as well as memories and photographs from 45 years ago. Great fun, and very touching, really, that they should want to spend time with us on a relatively short stay in the area.

We both fell asleep over lunch - all that polyglot chat - but the sun was coming and going outside in the brisk East wind and we decided to make the most of the dry weather while we have it and headed down to Loch Striven, where the shore road turned out to be as sheltered and as sunny as we'd hoped. We heard the visitor to the fuel depot pier before we saw it, but when you round the corner and come across a ship such as RFA Tidesurge the size of it in the quiet loch always comes as a surprise.  As Himself pointed out, the stern view as we came back along the road made us think of a giant Apple adapter plug floating offshore ...

The loch side road was at its absolute best as regards flowers and fresh green - flag iris, thrift, purple rhododendrons, japonica, little delicate wild roses, blackthorn - and the sun beat on us so that I was far too warm in a sweatshirt that the temperature in breezy Dunoon had suggested. We walked just over 2.5 miles before we gave up and made it back to the car before one of us collapsed with exhaustion. All that gardening is catching up ...

We had salmon and samphire for dinner - the samphire is at its perfect best just now, with no woody stems or tough bits. I love it, but its season is all too short. And we finished a batch of surprisingly good Angus strawberries which were going relatively cheap in Morrison's - did all that warm weather bring on a glut in the north-east?

Writing this at 11.30pm and there is still light in the sky where in the winter I look for the Aurora. It'll be like this (except when it rains, which seems to be every day for the next two weeks at least) for the following two months.
Must be summer ...