My Own Bed and A Pod of Porpoises

Written last night before I fell asleep!

I love being away and staying with friends and family.  Which is exactly what I've been doing since the start of the month.  I also like my own home and friends are always welcome to come and share it with me.  So today I wended my way home from Glasgow and I am writing this at 1am in my own bed.

The journey was pretty awful: the construction of a new length of motorway between Glasgow and Stirling completely fooled me and the sat nav and I couldn't find my way onto it.  Eventually I got onto the Stirling carriageway by following the Glasgow sign (Glasgow being in the opposite direction) and trusting to instinct.  To make everything worse it rained or poured from Glasgow to within a few miles of Ullapool and the end of my Mainland journey where I catch the ferry.  However that wasn't the worst thing.  The average speed of many drivers - and the A9 road from Glasgow to Inverness is not a fast road at the best of times - was often no more than 30 to 40 mph.  That can increase a journey time by at least 25%.  It's a good job I started out early otherwise I may well have missed the ferry.

When I was a small boy my Dad told me always to take my camera with me.  For 60 years I've been obeying that advice and rarely is my camera far from me.  Now with the advent of the 5Mp camera in my cellphone I sometimes don't have the camera slung over my shoulder or have the compact camera in my pocket.  The cellphone camera is almost as good as my Canon compact.

However when a pod of porpoises shows itself racing alongside the boat across the Minch I need my long lens and my 'proper' camera.  Today I left the camera in the car - inaccessible in the boat's car deck.  So it was today that a pod of porpoises showed themselves and it was today I didn't have my proper camera with me.