Low ebb ...

Another day, another bed ... I didn't know if I'd sleep last night. I really find it hard when you can't open a window even a crack, and the room we were in had the noisiest air-con you can imagine, so it had to go off before we could consider sleep. But exhaustion won, and it was growing light outside when I became aware that I was me and promptly went back to sleep again. I normally enjoy breakfast in this particular chain, and though the food on offer was as agreeable as ever, the breakfast area was bedlam. (Remind me not to stay in an Edinburgh hotel in the holiday season, someone ...). There were groups of people yelling at each other - a table of Italians behind us, a strange man - Korean, perhaps, in a woolly hat perched precariously on his head so that it stuck up in the air, mustering a group with the aid of a clipboard ... We left as soon as we'd eaten.

Paying for our free parking at Ewan's by walking a half-mile with our overnight bags, we arrived in time to say goodbye and leave that family to get on with a busy day while we headed off to have coffee with our #1 son and younger grandson (and Po the collie and Oreo the delinquent cat - see extra) before leaving for home. We took with us a substantial food parcel in the form of a casserole of beef, new potatoes, carrots ... and a chocolate cake, and a sweet post-dinner delight ... so we weren't eating bottom-of-the-fridge pasta after all this evening!

The drive home was relatively speedy despite roadworks shortly after we left, though I was still not in time to log in at home to an online extra meeting of the church vestry, and had to do it from the car, on the ferry, on my phone. Halfway across, the signal was so poor that everyone was yelling at me through a thunderstorm (well: it felt like that!) Once in the house we put things away, had a cup of tea, opened the parcel I'd been expected to... I'll return to that another day: I'm rather pleased with it.

Then, as the rain appeared to have stopped for the day, according to the forecast, we went for a shortish walk along East Bay to give ourselves a stretch after the drive. The photo today comes from that walk as we headed towards home again: the clouds over Ayrshire, as well as those to the North, were luridly threatening but somehow didn't come to much over our bit of sky and didn't rain on us.

Later, a strange thing happened. I put on the telly to find a film about the catastrophic floods in Spain last year, and didn't have the energy to find something else to watch. Besides, it looked interesting and would lead straight on to the Ten O'clock News, which I wanted to see ...

I woke up to a film about a youth in some kind of prison. I hadn't a clue what it was or why I was watching it. What happened to the floods in Spain? And had there been news? And I realised I'd been dead to the world for over an hour, with no recollection of anything - not even what day it was, at first. Himself revealed he'd done exactly the same. I was appalled. In an effort to see something of the day's events, I put on the rolling BBC News channel - and found the news from Palestine being delivered with much more incisive reporting than we're used to on the BBC 1 version. And then, just as I'd scraped myself together to go to bed, I saw a clip of The Orange One getting into his helicopter or whatever - he was about to go to Europe or something - and as a result the newscaster woman remarked by way of commentary that that was "a rather potty-mouthed President"...

I wonder if I could get all my news thus ...