It turns out that reports of absence of internet were exaggerated: a cable has definitely been severed, and a trawler has owned up to severing it, but we have internet, and shops seem able to take our plastic money. Taking nothing for granted, but all well so far.

Two very different days. Yesterday a long drive north under milky skies. Dinner in Pitlochry had been richer than it should have been (I blame the raspberry cranachan sundae, and I should have known better) and neither of us slept well: so I snoozed through the first stage of the journey, as far as the outskirts of Inverness whre we charged the car and drank coffee at the adjacent garden centre. This revived us enough that we accepted the satnav's suggestion of an alternative route, slower but more economical - also, it turned out, more scenic:



We weren't sure - and in part are still not sure - whether we had ever been this way before. We drove through places with unfamiliar names, and saw sights we surely couldn't have forgotten. That view above, though, wasn't entirely unfamiliar. And we have driven to and from the north coast quite a few times. Not far short of the coast, just before we came out at Bettyhill, we realised that this stretch at least we had driven before, in the opposite direction.

I had wondered whether we would leave the rosebay willowherb behind as we drove into the highlands, but no, it continued as impressive as ever, great swathes of pink piled high on the verges (but never quite where the drives could be persuaded to stop for photographs). The further north we got, too, the more pink there was in the heather: can it really be past its peak further south? That seems impossibly early... One last twist as we drove along the ramp towards the ferry, and the rosebay gave way to great willowherb (which I had to look up, since I always think of it as codlins-and-cream...). And then we were on the ferry, and the less said about the catering the better, but we had a fine view of Hoy as we rounded the souh of the island and passed the Old Man.

Today we planned to take it easy, and went to Stromness for a little light shopping. We were distracted in Stenness village by the Maes Howe visitor centre, and though I'm not at the moment brave enough to crawl into Maes Howe, they had a very interesting display (mostly about the Ness of Brodgar, which they had offered a home when the dig on the Ness closed down) and we were glad we had dropped in. The shopping: durham_rambler bought an old-style bladed razor at the Co-op, I tracked down the hardware store which replaced my watch battery (and in the search for it dropped into a gallery or so); I succumbed to temptation and bought a couple of tote bags (prints by Jeanne Bouza Rose); books don't count, do they? (an Ellis Peters from the cats' charity shop, and Harry Josephine Giles Deep Wheel Orcadia from the Stromness Bookshop); we popped into the Pier Art Gallery because we could, and finally we returned to the Co-op to buy a picnic for our tea.

Come to think of it, it must be nearly tea time now...

The Guardian Letters page recently published this from Blake Morrison: it's a letter, but the bulk of it is a poem (if you don't want to visit the Guardian, search on the title - A Compilation of terrorists - to find it elsewhere).

I like it better as a letter than as a poem: your mileage may vary. It's a list poem, and I liked it best as an invitation to add your own entries to the list. It didn't take me long to start thinking "Adrian Mitchell reciting 'Tell me lies about Vietnam'"

I was run over by the truth one day.
Ever since the accident I’ve walked this way...

- only of course, the title of that poem is To Whom it May Concern - which makes it another letter to the press, doesn't it?

And here it is: