I’ve decided that cycling 15 kms a day is the limit for me at my age! Besides I can’t think of a good reason to exhaust myself. Not that my exercise is ever particularly strenuous. It satisfies my personal ambition just to roll along the pathway for an hour and half each day. And being here for the season is an unparalleled privilege by any standard! The sun, the azure dome, the palms, the sea birds of every description, just being at sea level not to mention the sea and the boats. The nautical influence is for me largesse personified!

Everything comes and goes, we all know that. There is the good and the bad about everything. Basically things change. That’s the two sides of the universe, the binary view of it all. Keeping the pathway moving towards the good stuff is the challenge. It’s always easy to close a door, to walk away, to forget, to ignore, to pretend you were never there.

It would be an unwarranted extension to proclaim that after having been on Longboat Key for the past month and a half, and having returned here after last year for another season, that I am beginning to blend in with the wallpaper and that my babbling is starting to sound like a television ad. Nonetheless the indisputable truth is that while cycling along Gulf of Mexico Drive late this afternoon I couldn’t help thinking how commonplace everything now appears to me, how my vision of the place has become so astute as to remark upon the lines and crevices in the sidewalk, how noticeable are the newly arrived tourists, in short how “residential” I feel in spite of my foreign citizenship and remote domicile.

We received an invitation today to rally with friends in Naples. Earlier other friends pushed off from Canada to Hilton Head Island; they connected with us en route while driving in North Carolina. Yet another couple is ramping up to a winter sojourn in Portugal. My sister and her husband are making plans to go to California for a brief visit. Their daughter and her husband plan a trip to Taiwan. Meanwhile locally there was a dearth of activity. This partly reflects the uncommonly dreary weather today but more strategically heralds the uptick of anticipated visits from northerners immediately following Christmas. For my part I content myself to listen to Mozart’s Mass in C Minor as sufficient evidence of my preparation for the season.

It hardly seems appropriate or predictable that I should require or relish a recovery from a three-day holiday jaunt to the Southern Florida Keys, yet it is so. There was not a drop of alcohol contaminating or fuelling the furlough – an admonition which historically prevailed. Yet the boon of home is not to be diminished. Among the favours are a clean car, standard fare for the larder, strong black coffee, laundered clothing, the convenience of a laptop computer and re-connecting with friends and associates regarding both personal and business matters.

The humidity would have been intolerable had we not been lounging by the pool, sipping iced water, casually regarding the iguanas scrambling onto the pergola or ferrying across the pool, lying beneath the oven hot sun absorbing the refreshing and decidedly welcome breeze, floating in the buoyant salt water of the Gulf of Mexico or wallowing like manatees in the oblong pool.

We’re off to Key Largo to celebrate my upcoming 71st birthday and to check out the place we’ve contracted to rent next season. We like Key Largo. We’re staying at a hotel we’ve frequented before, Playa Largo, which with some legitimacy is heralded as the Pearl of the Florida Keys. As usual we intend to spend our entire time on the resort. The dining is superb. Typically in the Keys the beaches are nothing special but the pool is very attractive. The views over the turquoise water are always guaranteed to fascinate.

At Bayfront Park today I met a chap who has published a book entitled “Grandpa Bernie’s Bedtime Stories“. He is about 96 years of age and married to the same woman for 67 years. She was sitting on the bench next to him. When I asked the woman some pointed questions about their marriage, she told me she is more negative than her husband who is always positive. She added that he is a good man. They both laughed when I related to them two quips: “If she knows why she loves him she doesn’t” and “Criticism is the best autobiography“.

Breakfast at Longbeach Café this morning in Whitney Beach Plaza near the corner of Gulf of Mexico Drive and Broadway Street (which we take when dining at Mar Vista). Interestingly this old fashioned diner at the northern end of Longboat Key overlooks the innermost inlet of Bishops Bayou. It is decidedly a hangout for regulars some of whom arrived with their dogs and new puppies. I saw a server chat and laugh with a group of guests and pat one of them on the back as an expression of familiarity.

I don’t need to go to Venice for Murano glass or buy Perthshire paperweights to appreciate quality when I see it. The putative instinct is impossible to explain but I have no doubt it exits. So assured am I of this talent that it vitalizes me the same way that innate intelligence promotes confidence in those who have it. I hasten to distinguish my latent faculty from brainpower; the one is artistic, the other is penetration. While I consider both are laudable, I acknowledge their difference.