CATCHING CLOUDS

Evening cloudscape at 8:30 pm when driving home when, for once, the camera was handy in the car. Photo taken from the Tickled Trout pub carpark with two astonished fellas looking on at this daft female jumping out of the car, camera in hand!

"Skies must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition." wrote John Constable in 1821. "It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment."

John Day, known round the world as The Cloudman writes about the earth's great skyscapes and gives Ten Reasons to Look Up in order to use our inner eye to perceive.

TEA WITH THE NEIGHBOURS

Out into the garden next door (view looks back our house).

Out with the tea-trolly loaded with Sandy's scones, Margaret's plum jam, using my 'Bad Boy' coffee beans from Commercial Drive, Vancouver and Lesley's red and white napkins.

That is a real, genuine, high latitude blue sky (minus the Emirates jet heading for Glasgow airport).

A solitary apple blossom.

CAMELIA CELEBRATION

Time to slow down and smell the flowers, or at least, sit on Adam's bench and view the flowers with my morning coffee, toast and marmalade.

To see ourselves, or rather our property, as others see us.

Loads of lovely flowers from these two bushes.

MORRIOSN'S RED ROSE

This red rose sitting in a jam jar with some weary daffodils has given me months, quite literally months, of pleasure.

It was presented to me as part of a bouquet of red roses as a Thank You from the Kilmardinny Music Class, i.e. Alastair C. and co., when I offered the use of my living room for our last class in December as the water was coming through the ceiling of our Kilmardinny House classroom.

Alastair said he bought them at Morrisons en route from Millport, the day of the class which was December 14th. I duly put the bouquet of 12 roses in a vase of water and placed them in the porch. With the central heating on flowers do not last long.

Well they stayed in perfect condition until about the end of February when I started to remove them one by one. But the remaining ones were still there mixed in with another bouquet and giving colour in the grey days of winter.

Finally in the second week of March, Mairi was tidying the flower vases as I was ill in bed. She gathered up the last of the flowers and placed them in little vases around the house. This one ended up on the kitchen window ledge. To my amazement there was still one remaining red rose!

So there is the proof – my compliments to Morrison's stores, and most particularly to their supplier of supermarket flowers!