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Another Saturday. Another drive to Brookfield for dance class.

For some obscure reason, I was actually looking forward to today’s dance class!

It started with the Hobie Quickstep which delighted Scamp because she likes it and it pleased me, because I can almost dance it. Just almost, but not quite! However with Scamp hauling me about we just about made it look ok. I find it hard to fit the steps in sometimes, but I actually treat the quickstep like I would, Salsa. I just dance the steps as they come into my head and then hope that Scamp knows where I’m going. Admittedly, sometimes I don’t do the expected move and that annoys her! Today I was trying really hard to do it properly and it almost worked. Probably the closest we’ve come to dancing a quickstep.

Next was a complete change of pace with a Rumba Italia. Very slow and precise movements that I don’t think we are doing properly. Scamp thinks I’m rushing through it and at times I admit I am, but sometimes she’s too slow, or that’s how I see it! It works, but only just. It’s a fairly short dance and I often get it mixed up with another rumba we used to dance.

Third dance of the day was a Tango, a Ballroom Tango. Not to get it confused with an Argentine Tango which is a totally different kettle of fish. I struggled with bits of this one. I could see Jane getting angry when for the third time I finished a figure with my right foot when it should have been my left … or was it the other way round? By that time I was getting lost.

We finished with the Square Tango to the Head Lice song, so called because the line “🎶 Starin’ up the road and pray to God that I see headlights 🎶” sounds like “… I see head lice”. Its real name is Wagon Wheel by Darius Rucker. Find it on Spotify, play it and tell me I’m wrong if you dare. It was a good track to finish on. Dead easy and it just rolls along nicely, just like a Wagon Wheel.

Said “Bon Voyage” to all the lucky folk who are hoping to fly to Calpe in Spain around 6am tomorrow. About thirty of them, off for a week’s dancing in a warm place (20ºc). Scamp thinks it would have been good, but I wasn’t sure I could stand five days of dance classes. So blame it on me. I was the one who said “No”.

The rest of the day was just another Saturday. Scamp did a bit of gardening and I took a camera for a walk. Only really got one photo and that’s what you see at the top of the page. Whin bushes (known as Gorse outside Scotland) with bright, cheery yellow flowers.

High winds and heavy rain forecast for tomorrow. I don’t think we’ll be going far.

I slept well and didn’t wake until Scamp brought my breakfast at 9:20am. It was her turn to make breakfast anyway.

<Technospeak>
Later, after a cup of coffee I explained my plan. I must have been going over the problems with those bloody SSDs in my sleep, because I realised that the common factor in them all was the dodgy SSD. My plan was to buy a new Samsung SSD, not a cheapo Crucial and use a memory stick to install the operating system into that drive. Once that was done, I could erase the new drive and clone my up-to-date backup onto the new SSD which would then be the driver for the iMac. That was the simplified version.
</Technospeak>

Long story short, it worked perfectly. The backup installed everything on to the Samsung drive and I’ve been processing the images for a good few hours tonight. Isn’t technology wonderful, when it works!

I saw a strange sight when we were in Coatbridge to buy the SSD. An African lady walking past Tesco with her message balanced on her head while she held a loud conversation with someone on the phone. I’d never seen anything like that in Scotland, although I had in foreign climes in the past. Scamp said it was a good sign when I showed her the photo. It looks like she was right.

More mince ’n’ tatties again tonight, hopefully without the heartburn this time. Scamp had fish fingers and potatoes for her dinner.

I’m off to bed now, because my wee brain is full!  Still having problems with images. More things to do tomorrow.

High winds and heavy showers forecast for tomorrow.

That was about all you could say about today.

As you’ve probably guessed, the blog posts from Wednesday onwards have been written as catch-ups. Sometimes I manage to scribble down a few notes as the day goes on, but mainly they are written ‘on the back foot’ so to speak. Hopefully most of the backlog is now dealt with and it’s up to date news you’re getting.

With that said, there wasn’t much of interest today. I made a pot of soup for dinner. It was meant to be for lunch, but I was too late in getting it started. It was fairly good and should last until at least tomorrow. I have a habit of making too much soup or putting far too many vegetables in it and the result is a stodgy mess. Today’s was much lighter than normal and that in itself improved the taste.

I got out for a walk in the afternoon and brought back two decent photos. PoD went to the carefully cropped shot of the ice crystals between the wooden planks of the boardwalk over in St Maurice’s. It was really cold out and even with my Down jacket, one circuit of the pond was enough for me. Again I’d left it just too late to catch the good light. I must teach myself that the days are indeed growing shorter every day and leaving it until it’s getting dark just makes the processing take longer.

I emailed Alex and it looks as if he’s free on Wednesday for a photo walk or maybe just a wander followed by a blether in Paesano. The frosty weather looks as if it might last until Saturday without much let up before then.

I think we’re meeting Shona tomorrow for coffee. I might even come along just for fun.

Yesterday it was blue skies all day long with an aurora later to put the cherry on the cake. Today it was sun, then cloud followed by rain and that was just the morning.

Scamp went out to FitSteps and I stayed home to sketch today’s prompt which was “Snacks”. I chose a double decker sandwich, mainly because I’d drawn it last year, or was it the year before? A lot of the time they just repeat. The sketching was a bit ropey, but with a splash of W&N watercolour it brightened up. By the time I was finished, Scamp was back home.

After lunch Scamp did a bit of reading and made some veggy mince to go with tonight’s ‘tatties’. Meanwhile I walked over to St Mo’s and got today’s PoD which was the leaf of a Lady’s Mantle plant spattered with that morning rain. The great thing about Flickr is it encourages you to find out what these plants are called. As usual, the photo is an amalgam of two different but not too dissimilar views of the same leaf, joined together seamlessly in Photoshop, then Lightroom.

On the way home I visited the butchers in Condorrat and bought 500g of real mince. Back home I separated it into two halves. One went into the freezer and the other half was cooked for my dinner. I’d also got a bag of Cyprus potatoes. I didn’t know you could still get them, but there they were, all the way from Cyprus.

Once the two mince lookalikes were cooked and plated they looked surprisingly similar. Mine was minced meat and Scamp’s was made from barley and brown lentils. Both plates of ‘mince’ had carrot, turnip and onion in them and, of course, the ‘tatties’. The taste of Scamp’s was impressively, very like my ‘real’ mince.

That was about it for the day. The blue sky never returned, but the rain did. We can’t make up our minds on a destination for tomorrow. It looks like it will be dry, but cold. Sub-zero temperatures forecast even down to our elevation of 150m.

One last photo from the room with a view over St Helier. Then the taxi arrived a few minutes late and we were driven to the airport.

No spitfire to wave us goodbye, it had flown over to Guernsey at the weekend to fleece the unwary of their £3,500 for 30 minutes of adventure.

After having both my bags searched for illegal substances the lady at security reluctantly allowed us to go on our way. Then it was just a case of getting on the plane and off to a Scotland with blue skies for a change. The landing was the least bumpy of any flight we’d been on, partly because this looked a very new EasyJet aircraft.

Drove home with some pretty pictures of South West Scotland in the bag. That almost made up for being back to “auld claes and purrich”.

We caught the minibus down from the hotel to the town. We’d heard so much about Locke’s food shop, we visited it first. It was a bit of a disappointment. My coffee was bitter and thin and Scamp’s wasn’t very hot. Style over substance again.

We got the Liberty Bus to Gorey. Gorey was a fishing village with a castle, a dragon and lots of rain. We sheltered in a bus shelter and were entertained by a wee boy explaining to his dad, exactly how he would deal with dragons. Basically it meant kicking them in the head and then being friends with them. Sounded like a plan. The rain was fairly light until we paid our entrance fee and started walking up the terraces of the old castle. Then it just got heavier and heavier. I was glad I’d bought a brolly before we got on the bus!

Halfway up the terraces there was a room for children to dress up in historical outfits. On this day it was more like hysterical outfits, because it was teenagers who were caught by us dressing up!

Further up and in to the castle proper we found the dragons. One was in a glass case. Another was very metallic looking and hung from the ceiling. Both scary beasts. More climbing took us to the old fashioned cannon battery and a great view over the battlements to the village below.

We walked down a slippery looking paved slope that took us down to the village and in to the bus shelter again. Where we caught the bus back to St Helier, where the weather was more forgiving.

Late lunch/ Dinner was in the Italian restaurant called Rigatoni. Then we walked back up the hill again to the hotel.

As has become traditional when we’re away from home, the write-up is more of a place marker than anything else. With bullet points to keep the memories fresh without taking up too much writing time.

• A different route to the town
• Millennium park with water curtain
• Man with golden dress (statue) in town square
• Found I could hire a Brompton folding bike
• Jersey Botanic Gardens with Japanese garden
• Giant carp in a lily pond
• Jersey lilies
• Lots of apple trees
• Too many flowers to list here
• Dined at Izakaya at night
• Peruvian & Japanese restaurant
• Wagamama on steroids!
• Walked back to the hotel through the town

– Big day tomorrow for Gillian & Ed