Finn Lom and The Battle to stay out of school as long as possible.

It was a fantastically lovely day today. Warm and sunny, tempting even me to don hill running shoes. I came home at mid day from a sleep over at work, determined to get up the zig zag track behind the distillery that leads up towards the CIC hut on The Ben. I knew Finn was home for his 2nd day in a row with a nasty, racking cough. I asked him if he minded and he kindly said it was ok. But he also said it would be nice to have someone around!!!! So the hill running shoes were on, but they only walked up a couple of zig zags (there are about 8). I decided that if he wanted someone around he could come with me. So this is him sitting on Ian Lom's stone, the Lochaber Bard who sat here and wrote whilst watching the battle of Inverlochy in 1645. I'm not quite sure what he is thinking about, but his High School sits on the edge of the battle site (pictured) and he should have been in it at this time. I suspect he is wondering if he can push it for another day.

Spook has gone back up to the CIC hut with John. Amanda and Kieth were not in the competition for the 40minute time scale as they ran from their house, carried milk, orange juice, and most of the other items on the extensive shopping list, including 2 old style ice axes for filming purposes. Spook and John chose to take another lift to the top of the climbers road. That takes off at least half of the distance. When we arrived up there we doused the lights on the car and the stars were really bright. We could see a very bright, yellow star which was different from the white ones. No sooner spotted than he whipped out the fancy phone which was able to pick up our position and identify the stars we could see. The yellow star was Mars! John whipped out his fancy phone and had the same system. I left them to run up to the hut and hoped that they wouldn't spend too much time star gazing as it was pretty cold. They had a cup of tea in the hut. They are not actually providing food for all these people - just 5 of them. The others are French climbers who are obviously part of the exclusive club that gets access to this hut. It is clearly not your regular mountain bothy which sits nestled very discreetly at the foot of the Ben's north face.

I have finished work for the week now and have a day to plan for Skye. We are all looking forward to it.