A lovely birthday

I had a great time at Gleneagles, only slightly marred by the hair in the bath (don't worry it was dealt with), a card addressed to Dr and Mrs F and a very over salted piece of turbot for dinner.

I had a beautiful room with a large and very comfortable bed and I even had my own fire, which was just lovely.

Lots of comfort to spread out on

Toasty warm

Which was just as well as outside it was snowing and bloody freezing.

The view from my window

I had massages, hot tubs, swims, steam rooms and just general lazing about reading time and then I had my golf lesson - which went very well considering I've never played golf before (apart from on the Wii, which frankly I don't think helped matters at all), but Kirsten the Instructor said I did brill as I only missed a few and by the end of the hour I was smacking that dratted little ball in generally the right direction.

Apart from the salty fish, the food was lovely and I even had a champagne cocktail on my actual birthday. I'd forgotten how much I like those!

All in all it was a lovely birthday even though it was marred by lack of attention to detail.  When I was leaving the Guest Relations Manager asked about my stay and when I told her about the bath and the card I got the full on 'you must come back and we'll do everything to make sure you're well looked after' treatment, however, I think I'd have been more impressed if they'd taken money off the bill, so on thinking about it I don't think I'll bother to make the effort to go back.

I got back on Monday afternoon with enough time to play with the dog and then get to bed as I had a very early start yesterday as I needed to get the train to Glasgow for an all day meeting. That went well, but the journey home was a nightmare. After getting into Edinburgh at about 5.30 I walked to get my car in the snow and then it took me an hour and a half to drive back to the Borders. There'd been snowfall on one bit of the A68 and the gritters had obviously not got out in time and so there was 5 miles of going at about 10 miles per hour... not the best.

Today I had another work meeting, but the rest of the week is going to be taken up with poetry and No. 2 Son coming for a visit, so that should be fun.

So that's my birthday for this year. 63 years old (how the hell did that happen?) and now we're almost half way through January. Yikes, scary or what?!