Strangely restful ...

That's the description that comes to mind when I look back at today, though having a surgery appointment (more blood testing ... much less bruised than last time!) before 9am didn't strike me as restful at all. Having slept with great difficulty last night - I heard 2am strike before sleep came - I found it hard to waken; we were both struggling, I think, to digest the rather delicious ratatouille I'd made for dinner last evening. 

Once home again, I had a leisurely breakfast and did my Italian before coffee, though I kept finding my eyes closed in mid-exercise and - even more annoyingly - my finger slipping onto the "check" button with only half a sentence written - so that the Italian took me an absurd amount of time. After coffee and a phone call to Di to arrange the afternoon, I started sorting through my file of poems on the desktop with a view to bringing out another anthology. Long ago I produced a couple of small pamphlets of 30 poems each, but they have almost all been sold and I think I'd like them in a bound volume along with the 30 or so I've written since the last book came out just before lockdown. I'd forgotten what a faff it is sorting them out - to say nothing of the forthcoming proof-reading!

After lunch I went off into the rain to pick up Di and two small dogs - one absolutely tiny - to go for a walk. The rain stopped rather miraculously as I drove along the far side of the Holy Loch, and we actually had a lovely walk in the woods behind Blairmore, though we stopped well short of the walk we used to do. Our excuse was a couple of large fallen trees across the road - we could theoretically have scrambled round the root-plates - and the shortness of the dogs' legs ... nothing at all to do with the advancing years. We ended up back at her house for a cuppa before I came home. 

The photo shows a rather nice gate in an old wall near the start of the forest road, with a couple of blooms of the ubiquitous rhododendrons.