A day with Alasdair

Alasdair and I went on a few errands today, mainly to do with Ally's upcoming holiday with his school friends to Magaluf. This celebration of the end of his school days sounds horribly like the film "The Inbetweeners" which amused us last year, except that Ally will be in the company of a nice group of girls as well as boys, including lovely Cat, who will hopefully keep him on the straight and narrow. Ally is looking forward to it and felt the need to purchase some new clothes at TKMaxx. We got on very well during our trip; I didn't try to accompany him to the changing rooms and he was very pleasant. It was really nice to spend some time with him; what with my trip to Holland and then his D of E expedition to the Summer Isles and Mull we haven't had a proper chat for a couple of weeks. He was telling me all about his expedition and when we got home he showed me the photos. He had a great time sea kayaking and camping on uninhabited islands; one of them was in the mouth of Tobermory harbour so they had fantastic views of the village. They saw lots of seals and also porpoises, and one day a huge sea eagle took off over their heads. The weather was warm with a bit of rain in the middle of the week, some of his photos have gorgeous rainbows in them. His group all got on very well and they passed the expedition section of the Award. Ally has not only become very good at kayaking, he has seen some fantastic sights and had a proper adventure. I'm very  proud of him. I like to think that James and I have helped to instil in him a love of his native land which has been developed by these expeditions; he certainly knows his way around the north west of Scotland from many family holidays and has now paddled around a good deal of it!