Weekly Rundown: A Walk By the Sea

Last Monday was in fact a Bank Holiday for me. Despite living in Scotland I get the pleasure of enjoying the English Bank Holidays, which is especially nice for some quiet shopping trips when almost everyone else in the country is at work or school. Last week, however, we decided against a shopping trip in favour of giving our Tara-Tup a little treat.

You see the week before she turned three, so we felt that we should spoil her a little. This took the form of a trip to the very northern tip of the island, a little place called Rhubodoch. It’s actually been over three years since we last went for a walk there so it was Tara’s first time. And she loved it.

Me and Tara, taken by Mr Click.

And so did we.

They’ve opened up a walk route that wasn’t there before so we decided to try part of it (the complete route is three hours long so when we’ve had some dry weather for a few days we’re going to pack a picnic and try it all). The ground got pretty boggy partway up and as it was steep with a slope off to one side we decided to turn back. Tara decided she’d had entirely enough and collapsed into the muddiest bit of the track she could find.

This resulted in me dunking the dirty labrador in a stream at the bottom of the walk. In fact, I nearly got dunked myself while my husband helpfully stood on the bank, laughing at the (admittedly comical) sight of me being dragged into the water by our dog.

The main thing was that Tara enjoyed herself (she slept until 4pm when we got home which is usually a sign of a good walk). And I took a whole bunch of lovely photos with my new camera. Definitely a good day.

Other than exhausting myself with long walks (I was recovering from my weekend migraine which maybe wasn’t the best time to go for a slightly challenging walk) I’ve also been reading quite a bit and doing more work on my Keri Smith books.

Reading material of choice this week has been She Who Remembers by Linda Lay Shuler, which I inherited from my Grampy and had been told that it was like Clan of the Cave Bear (a book he recommended to me and I enjoyed). She Who Remembers was one of those books that I just wanted to keep reading and reading. Normally after breakfast I’ll switch off the light and have a little snooze for half an hour but twice this week I kept it on and kept reading right up until the alarm went off!

Physical copies of the other two books in the trilogy seem easy enough to come by but they’re available more cheaply in Kindle format so I’m thinking that when I get close to that bookshelf again I’ll pick up those as a little treat. (For those not in the know about my incredible anal reading routine, I have different series or sorts of books on each shelf of my bookcases and I work though each one in turn. I’ll read approximately six books before I return to that shelf again).

Next up I’ve moved onto a book of Robert Frost’s poetry. He’s my absolute favourite poet, who I discovered at school but had actually first become acquainted with in a poetry book for children which included ‘Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening’.

We’re still watching The Persuaders and Criminal Minds (what a combination!), the latter one we’re almost at the end of the episodes that we’ve got on DVD so we’ll be moving onto The Mentalist soon (to give the series we don’t have more time to come down in price). I’m not sure what we’ll be watching after The Persuaders yet. It reminds me of the cartoons I used to watch on a Saturday morning so I think we’ll need to find something suitably similar; personally I’m pushing for The Dukes of Hazzard.


I’ve not done much more work on my sock recently; as I said above, I’m more focused on my Keri Smith books. But I’m planning on working really hard to get it all done this week so I can move onto the second of the pair and then something else. I have no idea what yet, but something will come to me, I’m sure.

And you may have noticed that this blog post is a little bit late this week. That's because I've been ordering my gown and photo session for my graduation ceremony. I've also just been informed that my lovely blue dress isn't really suitable and what I need is a plain white blouse and black skirt. Looks like we'll be having another shopping trip soon!