Grey

A week has gone by, singularly lacking excitement. I contrived to damage my ankle, which is now a good deal better, but has acted as an effective brake on doing anything but sit and think. I took the problem to Dr Wu; her ministrations, characteristically, were exceedingly painful but effective. Unfortunately, the Professor tootled off in the general direction of Dumfries last Wednesday, so Miss Dog has had a dull time of it. There has been a daily walk, but it has been limited by my inability to take her to the forest, which requires the car, and my determination to stay on the flat, which from her point of view, means stumping along a tractor path, not hiking about in the woods where the deer are. Boring, boring, boring, from her point of view, and there has been many a sigh and reproachful glance.  Otherwise, I have been cooking the sort of food I cook on my own, which seesaws between roll-and-a-boiled-egg and occasional erratic experiments arising from using up odds and ends.  I made a banana bread which was rather good, i.e. a yeast bread incorporating a baked banana, with sultanas and vanilla, which isn’t at all my usual sort of thing: I don’t cook with bananas in the ordinary way because the Professor doesn’t get on with them. Otherwise, it’s been days of blameless activity, trying to work out how, when and where a whole lot of Mary of Guise’s private correspondence can have gone astray, or – what most of today has gone on – the surreal and/or baroque aspects of fine jewellery of the twenties and thirties. I’ve discovered a very considerable artist called Suzanne Belperron I’d never heard of. Among other things, she made rings carved out of rock crystal set with fine diamonds: games with light, and then some. Never a dull moment, from my point of view, but alas, of no interest to dogs. I haven’t got out into the garden much. There has been a most infuriating weather pattern of days which start brilliantly sunny,  cloud over by eleven, stay grey and cold for the rest of the day and turn into a fine evening.  I don’t want to stand about because of the aforementioned ankle, and it’s been too cold to sit out. Even one of Mme Belperron’s rings would have looked dull.