Rainy night in Ullapool

I’m tucked up in bed in Ullapool; we travelled up here today. It has been a rainy weekend and the rain is still pattering against the window now, but the forecast is better for tomorrow. We will be getting internet installed here on Tuesday. We hadn’t intended to, but the phone service is very variable here, and as well as WiFi for our laptops, it will be good to have Netflix etc on rainy days.

However it will still be quite a brief sojourn because James wants to be home on Thursday to sign documents for the handover of Grandma’s house. When we were at Grandma’s house on Friday, Tom followed us along the road and sneaked in through the open front door. Up the stairs he dashed, but came back down very quickly, meowing silently at us with big eyes. He must have got a shock to find out that there was no furniture in the house at all. First no Grandma, now everything else has disappeared too. He really did seem quite upset. 

In other news I have finally finished listening to the audiobook of “God is Not Great” by Christopher Hitchens and I look forward to discussing it with Ewan, who told me about it. Audiobooks seem to take me much longer than reading books. Maybe it’s because I don’t listen regularly, also I quite often have to rewind, because if I listen while I’m out walking I get distracted by the things I see. Anyway, I enjoyed the book and Hitchens made very good points, although I detected some bias, which is to be expected given the subject matter. For example, when he tackled the argument that secular tyrants have committed many atrocities over the years, not just religious tyrants, his response seemed to be that they get all of their ideas from previous religious bad behaviour. Hmm yes, but you could also argue that tyrants will be evil whether they use the excuse of religion or not, so religion is not necessarily the root cause. I found the book very thought-provoking and Hitchens does make a very clear and devastating case against religion.