Showers.

It's been a day of constant change though mostly warm. Frequent heavy showers including hail stones and thunder. And with the changing weather came the most glorious sea colours.

My reward for being the first up was to look out of the window and see a large black dorsal fin in the water between us and the rocks. My initial thought was that it might be an early surfer but then the sleek black body of a bottle nosed dolphin emerged from the waves. I rushed outside with my camera and binoculars but though the dolphin surfaced a number of times it was heading off out to the north. It reminded me of the sad tale of the Minke whale calf that had made its way up the Thames to Richmond yesterday. From the start the 'rescue' efforts were about cornering it to euthanise it which has eventually been done for welfare reasons. Also interesting and sad were reports last week of  a pod of orcas which had made their way down from Scotland to the west coast of Cornwall (I wonder if they went past us or down the other side of Ireland?) This is our only resident pod of orcas and they have been comprehensively studied. The sad part of this story is that they haven't had any calves since 1990 which is most probably due to PCP pollution. 

Peter took the car into Aber to get the tyres and did a little shopping at the same time. (He hates shopping so I have to negotiate how much I ask him to get.) That left me at home still trying to solve the curtain lining issue. Nothing I had was going to be big enough without putting two pieces together. That prompted me to have yet another check through the unpacked boxes which although did not yield any more fabric did result in more stuff being put away and one more box for recycling. 

In the end I conceded defeat and decided to make the curtains without linings. Both have now had the tape sewn on but I couldn't bring myself to machine stitch the hems or sides. Got all the pressing and pinning done which makes for 35ft of hand sewing (two hems and four sides). When Peter got home there was a long warm spell during which we sat out on the terrace and I hand sewed one of the hems. While we were out there our neighbour stopped for a chat and told us that he had to have one of his dogs, an elderly rescue greyhound, put to sleep yesterday. That's the inevitable price we have to pay for owning pets.