Oh, to be in April...

...now that Wigtown's here.

We are taking a week's break in Ireland, and naturally the start of our holiday is marked by a downturn in the weather.

It started out seasonal enough: blowy, not warm, changeable, showers and pale sunshine, sometimes at the same time, and plenty of roadworks, because in the spring the Council's fancy notoriously turns to...

There are great swathes of daffodils all along the roadsides, and cowslips thick enough to cast a net of gold over the banks. We followed the Tyne valley through the lush green country and up onto the bleak high ground, then down the other side into rich farmland again in Cumbria. We lunched at an enormous garden centre near Carlisle (out of curiosity, mainly, I chose for my dessert something that looked like a caramel slice, but with a layer of something white instead of the caramel, which I hoped wouldn't be marshmallow. It turned out to be peppermint - durham_rambler attributes this to the proximity of Kendal - and very nice, though more peppermint cream than I could actually eat). As we set off again, it was just starting to rain steadily, and carried on raining more and more heavily as we drove north into Scotland and west, softening the already soft green curves of the landscape, casting a grey haze on the silver gleam of the Solway coast.

We are overnighting in Wigtown, not just because it is Scotland's book town; it's also well positioned for tomorrow morning's ferry. But since we are here, and the rain has stopped, we have been into town, which has some fine buildings (though they don't look their best in the cold grey light), many of them full of books. Of which I bought a mere seven (well, we had less than a couple of hours before closing time), including James White's Ambulance Ship, which I haven't read, Charmed Life, because my copy seems to have gone missing, and David Ker's The Boy-Slave in Bokhara (decorated cover, rather tatty) because really, how not?