It’s getting late

It was rather a nice day out this morning when we took off to let Tan out for a breather. Tan’s mum is away at the County Show today. This is a fairly startling fact to one who is still internally waiting for Summer to arrive. The County Show means we are now officially at the back end of the year. There is an Orkney saying: first the County Show, then Winter.

After letting Tan out, and stopping both to grab a snapshot of the sunny outlook and enjoy Gill’s fragrant roses, we went to the Community Shop to pick up one or two things that Mr L had not brought home from town yesterday. We purchased a bagful of shopping, plus some and when we emerged the weather had gone. The air is thick and humid and the sky is overcast, with some heavy and dramatic cloud showing. On the way home, I saw two large skeins of geese flying over, outlined against the heavy sky as if to underline the state of the year: it is getting late. In fact, it’s too early for the migratory geese to be arriving from Iceland. These may well have been induced into moving locally by the arrival of shotguns for the cull.

Last year we were extremely fortunate in having some wonderful late summer weather and we had a series of weekends with Brunhilde in which we enjoyed some glorious sunsets. I suspect that this year we shall be less fortunate. We have had years here where the old saying has proved only too true and cold wet and windy weather has followed hard on the heels of the Show season.

We hope for the best and that we shall have some reasonable use of the van in the coming weeks – especially if getting her through her test proves to be an expensive business. Time will tell.

Bruni has been left for her examination and Mr L brought home a large rucksack of shopping last night. He was triumphant about his scoring a pack of Paneer and thus today we look forward to Matar Paneer for dinner. A dish of Aloo Saag to go with that, we think, and some naan (though I wanted to make Chapatis, he wants me out of the kitchen!). Tomorrow will be my turn and I think we shall make pizza as I have some Mozzarella about to go out of code.

We are still entertaining ourselves by learning more about Brittany and Normandy and I must confess to having been so carried away by my language-learning research yesterday that I totally failed to finish my Pavonated curl. There’s only a few rows left in the yarn and it won’t take long to do at all – I just need the free time and the spare hands.