My Week In Pictures – Born To Be Wild

I went viral this week, but not in an internet way. In a sore throat, go home two hours after arriving at work and sleep for three days way. It’s amazing how the mystery virus (I’m sure the doctor said there were over 200 types) can knock you sideways and make you sleep for hours. But the rest did me the world of good and I managed to read a brilliant book (pictured) while laying around. I even squeezed in listening to some Radio 4, so maybe going viral wasn’t so bad after all.

Despite being knocked out for half the week I still managed to cram in a lot for the remainder of it. In my year of new experiences, I was interviewed for my first ever podcast. For the sake of The Mothership and Father Bear who are no doubt reading this and wondering what a podcast is, its an audio file that people can download and listen to. So in a couple of weeks time, you can all tune in and listen to me waffling on about, guess what? sea swimming of course! which I managed to do for well over an hour the other evening whilst occasionally drawing breath and allowing the interviewer to speak. You’ll be pleased to know she’ll cut it down to a more manageable length to listen to. I’ll keep you posted.

Orkney Beef and I are often ships that pass in the night. We are frequently so busy with all that life throws at us that it can be hard to find time to spend with each other. At Christmas I bought Orkney Beef a voucher for a two hour trip on a trike through Orkney Trike Tours and it’s taken us until now to find two hours to do it. But it did not disappoint and I would highly recommend this as a novel birthday, anniversary or retirement gift etc. We thoroughly enjoyed ripping up the roads and showing our wild side with our granny blankets. It was completely tailored to our needs with door to door service and a chance to view many places in Orkney that we never normally have the time to visit. A five star trip.

To be honest, I was glad to let someone else do the driving yesterday. On Friday I kicked off the weekend in a very uncool way. I had left work and gone straight to this bodacious swim spot.

and it has limited parking places. I steered the car carefully away from the cliff edge and ended up with my back wheel in a ditch that I couldn’t get out of. In my defense, the ditch was pretty overgrown and hard to see but it still involved what felt like a mammoth rescue operation with kindly people coming to help including Marylin and Kevin who were innocently sitting in their campervan but ended up pushing and shoving valiantly. If anyone recognizes them from Orkney please can you steer them to this web page because I really am so grateful and was pretty flustered at the time and didn’t catch their last names?

In the end my friend’s husband came with a fourwheel drive, a tow rope and a ‘get on with this and non of this I can’t do it nonsense’ attitude and pulled me out in no time and I calmed my flustered self by having the swim I had originally turned out to do an hour before.

As we approach summer the nights are light, light, light in Orkney. This photo was taken the other night at 11.00pm and look how light it is! I quite enjoy sleeping with the curtains open at such a time but can only get away with it once in a while when Orkney Beef is working late and goes to bed in another room so as not to wake me. Tonight is one of those nights.