13 April

Wake up late, lay about most of the day. Lounge and loaf.

Read a bunch more of Life: A User’s Manual. The premise of the story is interesting, and the constraints Georges Perec imposed upon himself in the writing are novel and intriguing (even if it seems like it sometimes just leads him to list a bunch of incongruent stuff at the end of a chapter, just to fit in the certain things he’s demanded of himself that he include in the chapter.

Sometime in the later afternoon Sam decides to go for a walk and I go with her. We hem and haw about where to park to climb a hill with a number of cairns on top, which we’ve been ogling with investigatory eyes basically all week.

Upon investigation, however, it turns out that there’s a puny-looking barbed wire fence around the whole of the hill. As tourists we’re not particularly inclined to rock any Scottish boats, so we wander off to another little dale (glen?) between two other sgurran. We encounter more of that scorched heather here, making me wonder if brush fires are a regular occasion.

Wander back along the lower slopes of Sgurr na Dubh-chreige (“Peak of the black crag”) and posthole through a bog. Everything becomes muddy.

Supper at the Arisaig Hotel. Steak and ale pie.