And Silence Fell....

 Sorry. 

Sadly the loss of my previously intended post was followed by a few other frazzly things, which led to me doing one of my 'withdrawing into myself and not engaging with others' phases. I'm a bit like one of those flowers who curl their petals up tightly if you touch them - more so at some times than others. I try very hard not to be like this, as it's a bit pathetic, but sometimes I can't help it. 

So the two minor frazzles which led to me deciding I was never putting my toe into the water of social media in any form ever again were; a comment the OH made about the blog. 'It's quite fun some of the time' he said 'when you're not banging on too much about books', and the reaction I got to posting a photo of a recent knitting project on Facebook. I rarely do this, as it smacks far too much of the childhood sin of Showing Off, and after the comments on this I'm not in a hurry to do it again. I can hear my mother's voice in my head 'Well it serves you right, if you hadn't been showing off they couldn't have made those hurtful remarks' and the voice is of course right. That won;t stop me posting the project here in a few days time with a bit of explanation about what' it actually is, rather than what some mucky minded people might think it is. 

The major hassle though was doing without the car for a fortnight. We had not of course, planned to do without the car for a fortnight particularly as the two weeks we were without it were the busiest we've experienced since the beginning of Lockdown 1. We were told it would be in the garage for three days and experience led us to add another day to that. Experience did not lead us to add 11 days, and so we limped on, every day expecting to see the car back with us. Two hospital appointments, two trips to town with large bulky parcels for the post office and several trips for less than a full week's shop all on a limited rural bus service did not add up to a barrel of fun. I have no objection to using the bus, in fact given that it is free due to my advancing years I embrace it, but it has to be said that the timetable doesn't necessarily fit in all that well with arbitrarily timed hospital appointments. And it fitted so badly with the time and site of the UHI Awards ceremony that I was unable to present the prize I give each year  for the Gaelic Legacy Module in person. I found this more upsetting than all the rest, since the rest could actually be done on the bus, albeit not necessarily conveniently, but the prize giving would have meant four hours out of the house and a lot of hanging around, for  ten minutes of masking up to award a prize and get my photograph taken for the local rag (shudder), and all that seemed a bit disproportionate. 

So I was very pleased indeed when we finally had the car restored to us. It's all very well governments banging on about how we all need to give up our cars, and I'm in favour of anything that helps with climate change, but they need to do a lot of thinking about how we can recalibrate the way we live and move, especially in rural areas, before it becomes something that people can really get on board with. Just now being without  car just makes life difficult. . 

On that note I shall go, with every intention of coming back on a more or les daily basis until I'm caught up with everything!