Dealing with jet lag.

It's light at four am. This is as good a reason as any to get up. It seems we're both still firmly hooked on Tokyo time.  Last year we went to Japan  for ten days and easily shucked off jetlag. This year, after the better part of  month away, adjusting to the time difference is not proving to be so smooth. The breakfast radio says the leaders of the UK, France, Germany and Poland will all be in Kyiv tomorrow.

The village V E Day event was well attended. A combination of celebration and solemnity ( or what passes as solemnity in a small Scottish village).  The weather was postcard perfect - cloudless and warmish . The air clear enough to see the trees on the hills on the far side of the bay. Perhaps because there's not even the hint of a breeze the lark song is spectacularly clear and loud. Fifty or so folk traipse out of the village hall, through the old school house garden, up the brae past the potato barns and then through the bluebell wood to the war memorial in the garden of the auld kirk. Three girls - of varying competence - pipe  us  along. The village labradors are delighted to get an unexpected evening walk. One old fellow is overcome and barks with excitement. He becomes the centre of attention - which he loves.  As we walk we chat about the new Pope, the Water Board blocking the road, the trade agreement with the US and whether mulberry trees should be planted round the doocot. Would they survive the coastal winds ? The American couple are packing up and will head to Austin when the school term ends. One of the farmers tells me that the wife really, really, doesn't want to go back. The children love being by the sea and she adores her job at the primary school. The house they've rented has already been let to a young New Zealand couple. Our third in the village.

There is a sense that this is the last time that V E Day will be remembered like this. The village doesn't have any surviving war veterans but it does have a lot of folk in their eighties or late seventies who who were brought up in the harsh post war years. There are three main village farming families. One of them lost two sons while the others were left untouched. In the previous war it was the other way round.  The names of the fallen are read out and dimly remembered  family histories retold. These are the nations quiet people who have always stood on the right side of history before it becomes fashionable. There is a poem about valour and sacrifice. No one is quite sure what to do after that so we wander back to the village hall for a wee dram. Another of those moments in society where what has gone before fades away and things imperceptibly move on. Strangely, the village teenagers are out in force.  I put this down to the power of the line ' Your grandmother would like it if you were there '. Some forces are irresistible.

Hard to see them but there must be five hundred eider ducks in the cove below the castle. We lean on the railings and look at them.

A young German couple with a toddler are proving that teething and sleep are incompatible.

In our absence the Victorian gas lights on the street that runs beside the sea have been replaced by hideous modern stainless steel things. The old gas lights have all been cordoned off in readiness for being taken out. The new ones have a stainless steel sleekness to them that couldn't be more different from their cast iron predecessors.  Not all progress is good.

We wander down to the harbour where a gull pointedly ignores us.

At the village V E Day service this - or something like it - is played. A reminder this is the Scottish heartland . I'd never heard it played on the violin. It's simplicity makes it beautiful :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER-t2DUOqGY

Wind farms :https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20250506-renewable-energys-trouble-with-wind-theft