shopping, drinking, fighting, overcoming the Welsh

What we do on our holidays. Well, not really, apart from the shopping bit. We are doing a great deal of planning, too - to make a stained glass fanlight for over my front door (talked of for years and never got round to) and our trip to Mull at the end of the month. So far the latter has entailed buying a suitable wind-and-waterproof jacket (hurrah for TK Maxx, where real bargains can be found in the outdoor wear line if you aren't looking for - or even able to recognise - this year's model). My old jackets have been relegated to dog-walking outfits, and you know you can only be seen in those if you have a dog to produce as an excuse. The dog doesn't travel because of her carsickness problem, but will move in with her other family two doors down to be spoiled rotten.

Most of the ladies' outdoor jackets were in rather un-serious shades of lavender or pale blue. Can one be a convincing walker-type in lavender? I'm not a convincing walker, but I'd like to look like one. I may even carry an OS map to add to the image. In the end, I was very conservative and bypassed the fashion shades as well as the hideous construction-worker orange one, going instead for stone with a red trim. I may not be spotted if lost in the Scotch mist that has marked so many of our holidays in the West of Scotland, but at least I won't attract surprised attention by looking like a traffic cone when dog-walking once I'm back home.

I've been awake since 3.40 a.m. thanks to my next door neighbours, one sober, the other definitely not, who were having a disagreement, sort of sotto voce, in the back yard - there was reference to "a whole bottle of 15% red since 2 o'clock", and the words "you have 2 hours to sober up" uttered in a penetrating hiss. Their back door, which has to be shut fairly assertively, was eventually shut - very assertively - and all went quiet.

I was particularly interested in the emphasis on the 15%. As a non-drinker, I never give such things a thought, but clearly it matters if you're having an all-night one-person drinking session and don't want to stop. I wondered too about the 2 hours - doesn't seem long enough to sober up, really.

Of course I couldn't get back to sleep after that, and finally gave up on the wall-to-wall radio coverage of the Afghan elections, and went downstairs to watch a history programme about Edward I and his ruthless subjugation of the Welsh before taking on the Scots. Quite a feat for a man with such a sissy hairdo.