Hoverfly and Mint.

Pentax K1000, Kodak BW400CN, ISO 400.

In work early today to work on that long-running project... Only to face difficulties with access to the online part of the application in the afternoon. It worked out OK for me - I could sneak off at earlyish to go and make dinner for some friends! R and G arrived at 7.30 and I’d made figs wrapped in parma ham, served with a warm goats’ cheese, balsamic and rocket salad for the starter. The main was a chicken, white wine and pea risotto, and dessert was black velvet cakes and Kirsch-soaked cherries. It seemed to go down quite well! We played some table tennis and had a good catch up over a couple of bottles of wine.

R used to live in Glasgow, and it was his flat M took over when he briefly lived in the city and studied at the Nautical College. I do not remember Glasgow with fond memories. M lived there from September to January in 2010-2011 before the flat that he'd taken over from R, which was over a restaurant, caught fire while he was sleeping. The fire alarms had been deactivated by the restaurant, and if it hadn't been for his neighbour breaking into his flat, finding M's bedroom and banging on the door until he woke up, he might not have been around today. The neighbour and M didn't even know each other at the time. The months before that horrible incident were awful really - I was working on my dissertation in Aberdeen and spending all the time I could in Glasgow, but it was the winter that Scotland was buried under foot-upon-foot of snow, and the central belt was the worst-hit. I was lucky to hang on to my part-time job in Aberdeen, given the amount of shifts I missed because I was stuck on a snow-bound train just outside Glasgow. Funny how it all works out in the end - we're now living together and planning to move to Norway next year, with jobs that mean we come home to each other every night. If I'd have known how quickly it was all going to work out for us, I might not have felt so upset at the time. Funny to reminisce about something that happened only 2 and a half years ago and feel that things are so dramatically different these days.