Natural highs and lows

We've been on holiday, experienced some rather pleasant weather, caught up with family and friends and returned home just before Storm Whoever hit Orkney. Now, here I am writing a blogpost whilst rain lashes the windows and all thoughts of colourful leaves have disappeared downwind at a rate of knots.  In our absence, Cookie and Mocha were well looked after in the comfort of their own home by Auntie Kat who, despite an allergy, is not anti-cat. It all started very early one morning, bleary-eyed and barely awake, stumbling out of bed at 5am to catch the morning sailing from Stromness to Scrabster. This was followed by a chilly drive to Inverness as the climate control module doesn't work in my car and, although at any point during the Summer I could have arranged for it to be fixed, we're now into Baltic season and a second hand unit off Ebay is awaiting the services of a skilled mechanic. Once in Inverness, I dropped off some books at Leakey's Bookshop and we hit variou...

One day much earlier in the year, in a flurry of activity, we began work on digging a pond in the front garden. For a variety of reasons, only one of which was the weather, things did not progress any further, leaving a bank and ditch in the middle of the lawn. In fact, there was another thing which didn't happen through the Spring and Summer, our walk around the three mile loop of the Stromness Loons. It's weird, we'd both been keenly looking forward to see what birds would breed in the wet pasture of the Loons, but Life just seemed to get in the way. One afternoon last week, we did finally have a wander around the loop, six months on from the last time, although of course the breeding season is well and truly over for 2024. Passing the poet's house, we noticed a riot of colour at one side of their garden, then noticed said poet mowing his lawn and remarked upon the profusion of gorgeous blooms. It turns out that he had begun to dig a pond, failed to get much further, ...

Gazing up into the night sky is quite a good way to ground oneself, if that's not too contradictory a statement. Letting ones eyes become accustomed to the darkness, picking out some of the more familiar celestial bodies  like the Moon, a few of the observable planets, particular stars and, with a bit of eye straining, the odd galaxy, well, i t all helps to give a sense of being a very small cog in a huge universal machine. This contraption could be, I suppose, a pocket watch, but I don't have much time for that theory. Image courtesy of Wallpapers.com And we mustn't forget atmospheric phenomena like the Northern or Southern Lights (Aurora borealis or australis), meteor showers and noctilucent clouds. All wonderful life-affirming experiences, as long as one is not a slightly inquisitive dinosaur. However, all these things require a clear sky, which in my part of the world is not a given. So much not a given, in fact, that I have turned off the aurora alerts on my phone. And...