If all the year were playing holidays ...†

Can you finish that? It's a line from Shakespeare's Henry IV part 1, and one that my father used to quote at me long before I studied the play, in the days when I moaned at the end of our 8 week holidays on Arran. Today I was thinking of it again, now when we don't have official breaks from work because we're not working in paid employment and theoretically can choose whether or not to be industrious or slobbish. Half of my family are away now, driving down to the cross-Channel ferry on their annual visit to France; the others leave next week; we pretend to go on holiday by spending a week in the French family's flat in Edinburgh. In a sense, of course, it is a holiday - we eat out more than we eat in; Himself isn't practising the organ or fretting about what to play; I am unavailable for meetings ... 

It's hitting me particularly hard this year, the me who had these two months in Arran every year till I was 14; the me who then had a fortnight abroad and then a month on Arran till I was in my third year at University; the me who resumed foreign holidays, now with my own family, from the moment I started making money again, first by tutoring and then by returning to full-time teaching. I still have the itchy feet, but lack the drive to take them away again right now.

Today was much better, however. I got a huge washing dried in no time as it swirled about in a warm wind on the whirligig; I threw out the recycling that was cluttering the kitchen because I'd lacked the willpower to take it out in the rain; I did my Italian sensibly and realised I'm still learning. But in the afternoon the irritation returned and only a walk would subdue it. Today's photo comes from that walk, from the path along the west side of Loch Eck, looking towards the chalet park at the loch's edge where the water mirrors the blue sky. We passed only two people with a dog (the woman greeted me by name, but I haven't a scooby who she was) and a red squirrel scampered across our path at exactly the same spot as I saw one the last time we walked here. As I rarely see any these days, I was particularly pleased to see this one. 

We walked back in the dawning realisation that not only were there midges in the shadow of the trees, there were also clegs. I killed one that had settled optimistically on my knee (I was wearing trousers) and Himself was too late to get the one that stung him on the knuckle. We marched on...

And now it's midnight again, and I'm still here and Himself is playing the piano below me. 

Too bad.

† ...to sport would be as tedious as to work.