Well, it turned into a beautifully sunny day after all. The hills and the river are alive with the sound of outboard motors and I've relocated my laptop and myself onto the sunny verandah. Adieu, Tristesse!
This is the end of the first week when the only thing that's been on the television is dust. Not even the news which, according to Hegel, seems to have replaced religion as a modern society's source of guidance and authority to become its "prime creator of political and social reality".
There's too much news already and we've become addicted – news junkies - to this relentless bombardment with stories designed to make us fearful or angry. We seem to have lost our ability to compare an apparently traumatic event in the present with the experiences of humanity across the whole of its history. With the right perspective in mind, we soon realise that hardly anything is totally novel, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely terrible.
The economic indices may look grim but we have weathered similar situations many times over the last century. Floods may look dramatic but in the end they will affect only a proportion of the population and recede soon enough. Cancers and heart attacks have multiple causes that we may never understand completely, but eternal life was never on the agenda. And even after the eternal city of Rome fell, some 600 years later everything was back to normal again.
"Riverbend" brings some relief from the news-fuelled impression that the world consists only of wars, riots, economic catastrophes, and rogue missiles fired off by some silly kid with an even sillier haircut.
Living here alongside the mighty Clyde, the views are expansive (and expensive for those buying into it ☺) and the only sounds are those of revving outboard motors as they pass the 8-knot speed limit sign and speed off downriver towards the sea.
