Living Wittily

Cruciform scarlet!

The photo shows our now annual post-Christmas flower-fest.

Each year ( as the non-surprise part of Christmas) Sheila is given an amarylis bulb which starts life as a big brown lump sticking out of a pot packed with compost. Once it starts to sprout it does the botanical equivalent of Formula 1 speeds, produces impressive buds and blooms in a spectacular display of in your face colour that demands attention from the other side of the room.

Native to South America, produced now commerically in Holland, they are in our shops from early December.

The sight of such a larger than life exotic scarlet flower in our living room in the West of Scotland, early February (when do the clocks change?), is a visual tonic.

Some people try to time them so they open (which they can do almost overnight) during the Easter week-end - you can see why.

Amarylis Haiku

Cruciform scarlet!

Easter annunciation!

Trumpet concerto!

all weather walking.........

Decided to get my walking boots dirty today. The weather forecast was bright, mostly dry - where we went, it was dull mostly wet, at least till about 1.00 o'clock. By then we had just passed Broughton and ate our packed lunch - observing the horizontal drizzle, psyching ourselves up for an all-weather walk along the banks of the River Tweed, doing a self-peruasion act to convince ourselves that the exercise would do us good, that rain is only water without which human life is impossible, and trusting the car thermometer which was indicating a bearable 5 degrees - but with no allowance for wind-chill.

So dressed for all weathers - that is three layers of jersey, fleece and a wind and waterproof jacket, (and a seriously ridiculous hat) we succeeded in two or three minutes in getting the walking boots not only dirty, but clarty, slaighered wi' glaur, ( both Scots terms for impressively muddy!). But we did have a walk, with intermittent slitherings and constant squelchings, along what was probably the recent flood plain. And I believe ( I do, really), that it did us the world of good, that it was healthy despite the chill and drizzle, that the fresh air obliterated all sign of mental cobwebs, that we did more than our 10,000 steps worth of daily exercise - but it wasn't the pleasant wee dauner (Scots for leisurely walk), we had hoped for, to get us back into walking ways.

Instead it was the kind of walk you do when you have some serious guilt to shift and you believe in more than nominal penance, or if you want to train for the 100 metre dash through a slurry sump - not kidding, we passed a huge shed up on the ridge which was full of happy, noisy, excrementally productive pigs. All that said, the rolling hills, the surrounding woodland, the quiet of the river, the company of a heron, a wren, a kestrel and a bevvy of arguing oytercatchers, a hundred sheep, and of course the pigs, followed by a pot of tea at the Laurelbank Tearoom, made for genuine Sabbath - if that word means rest, a halt to productive work, freedom from toil, and time to enjoy what God is doing - then yes, Sabbath. And Aberdeen won!