It is mid-February, Valentine’s Day, and the day is calm and quiet – the sea like silk. Red roses are in a vase in the kitchen, and I feel piano, and a little lacklustre. My bones ache a little from Pilates, and apparently I have arthritis in my neck, which is an unwelcome visitor to my once agile skeleton. I suppose the poor neck is a bit like a fragile drinking straw holding up a ten pin bowling ball, so on the whole, it does do a good job – most of the time. I am conscious of my bad posture, and am seeking to right the wrongs caused by my bad habits. I have ordered a shoulder brace that I shall wear a bit like a gun  sling, and walk about in military style. I shall look up to the branches of the trees and not stare at their roots. I am full of good intentions.

These last few weeks John and I have been pencilling into the diary walks and climbs for the coming year. We have both bought new boots, and in order to wear them in we have been on low key walks round Dalmeny Park, and Limekilns, admiring the fancy estates owned by Lord Rosebury and Lord Elgin.

Snowdrops are peeping  through the tired winter grasses, and sheep and crows dot the landscape like a wintery wash painting. On Monday we ventured back to our old stomping ground in Balerno and followed the Water of Leith. It was rather like meeting up with an old friend.

I found a fabulous walk to do in the borders in the Galloway hills, which we hope to do this weekend. It has a very dubious sounding description. We are to walk the ‘knuckle of the Merrick’, and the ‘branched finger’ is the highest in the so-called ‘Range of the Awful Hand’!   How wonderful is that!

I did visit a gallery in Edinburgh showing the photographs of Robert Blomfield. They were wonderful, and so evocative. Fabulous faces, of old and young, and I can imagine the cheeky boys shouting, ‘Take one of us, Mister!’

Babies left out to take the air on streets, children wandering about free, and sitting on door steps.

I looked at them, and could imagine being given the task of writing a short story about any of them; so much could be read into a face, a street, a man waiting for a bus by a corn field.

I have been sewing, and this time I have made a trapunto picture of trees and snow drops. I quite like it. Next one is to be trees and bluebells, that is if I get a chance to take off my boots!

My course at the University is going fine, this year it is Shakespeare in the time of James 1/V1. It was Antony and Cleopatra last week and I was supposed to meet Dilly for lunch after. She had to smile when she got a text saying I would be late as I was Cleopatra! Couldn’t leave until my part was done… get thee gone vile asp! This week is Coriolanus. Don’t know much about it, but will watch the film quickly and see. I know it was banned in China for a while. All about questioning the establishment.

Well it is done! John has just shouted that we are  going to climb Mount Toubkal in Morocco! OH my goodness… be strong, my sturdy new boots. It is 4000m high and when it is over we can lounge about in Marrakesh and watch belly dancing and have a Turkish bath. But the mountains are calling, in all shapes and forms.  A couple of years ago I read a book about the Cairngorm mountains here in Scotland by Nan Shepherd, a school teacher living in Aberdeen. It is called ‘The Living Mountain’ which is a reflection of Nan’s experiences walking in all weathers. Her descriptions of landscape, weather, flora and fauna are inspirational. She wrote it in the 1940s but it wasn’t published till 1977. I loved her words:

“It’s a grand thing

To get leave to live.”

To ‘get leave’ in Scots means ‘to be allowed to’. My mother used to shout at my kids when they were little and moaning that they were starving, ‘You don’t get leave to starve in this house!’

She turned 95 on 30^thJanuary. I didn’t take a picture of her the last time we visited her as the hairdresser had her all done up in curlers. Instead I shall include a picture of her in her Prime!