Today’s guest picture comes from our friend Gavin. He recently spent some time in Wigtown in the west of our region where he watched the tide come in to fill the little harbour.

With no noticeable improvement in the state of my chest when I got up this morning, I bit on the bullet, abandoned all thoughts of volunteering, cycling and even walking, and spent most of the day sitting around doing nothing.
Mrs Tootlepedal by contrast had a busy day with a Langholm Initiative meeting in the morning and a social stitching gathering in the afternoon.
It was rather chilly and not very inviting outside, so I limited my visits to the garden to one before lunch and one in the afternoon.
There is a lot of promise about . . . .



. . . but we are still waiting for a good spell of warm weather to move things along.
I didn’t spend a lot of time watching the birds but I saw a siskin demonstrating a poor attitude to avoiding food waste . . .

. . . and chaffinches and sparrows flitted to and fro during the day.




Although I complain that there are not so many birds about as there should be, the feeder was empty by the late afternoon and I had to fill it up again. The birds must be waiting until I am not looking before they come and eat the seeds.
The second visit to the garden produced a bit more colour with the yellow azaleas looking better every day . . .

. . . and a promising show by a very late tulip.

In the back border, tiny woodruff flowers are hard for my camera to capture . . .


. . . even though there are a lot of them.
The first polemonium had flowered, and it had even attracted an alert spider.

I took a picture in the vegetable garden purely to have the opportunity to say that it was a lot more full of beans than I was.

It is supposed to be warm and sunny tomorrow, and if it is, I shall go out for a gentle cycle ride just to get my legs moving. I suffer from mild arthritis and if I sit about too much, I seize up. Another day like today might find me unable to get up the stairs to go to bed without a great deal of theatrical groaning.
I wouldn’t like to think that by moaning so much, I have given the impression that I am ill because I am not. But I am certainly not well, and it is very frustrating to be in a sort of limbo between being ill and being well.
The flying bird of the day is a chaffinch.
