Song for Neist Point: "I Promise" by Radiohead.

Blue blankets have a way of simplifying sunlight. The light comes through the window, so golden and pure that it's hard to believe it's not oozing through, and as I watch it in the air I can see where the Greeks got the "nectar of the gods" idea from. Then it hits the blue-covered duvet that keeps the cold out and the germs in, and the light becomes a pale, chalky, sickly thing, rather unfortunately similar to your author. I woke up this morning with a tacky throat and aching joints, my body giving me enough information that I was confident that today was the inevitable worst day of my cold. I took a hot shower, my sinuses thanking me while my rubber limbs softened and screamed, and brushed my teeth using Tom's and willpower. I tripped into some clothes, retrieved from the kitchen a cup of my camomile and from the breakfast buffet the two croissants (one for each bed I made yesterday), and forced them down with the aid of two tangerines and a banana.

Right, I thought. No outside for you, chippy. Wrap up nice and warm, do some arcane sacrifices to the wifi so you can watch some TV that buffers at the rate glaciers sprint, and spend your day trying not to feel sorry for yourself, which is hard because trying not to feel sorry for yourself is so much work that you start to feel sorry for yourself.

"P'raps if I knock, 'e'll--" *knock knock*

"'lo?" I croaked cheerily from the ground, where I crouched, beblanketed, poking my laptop with a stick. Hailey the hostel-runner buzzed in, and in tow: Carol!

"Oh, he's sick, isn't he, poor dear?" she said (I'm translating from the Aussie).

"Yeah," I intoned.

"Ah, that's such a shame, innit? I was a bit coughy yesterday, Sammy, it's no fun at all. Well I was going to invite you along to Neist Point" [the one major Skye destination I haven't been to] "to try and find some seals. It's not a big walk, and the weather's good, but if you're too poorly--"

"G--" I started, and cleared my throat. I tried again. "I would love to!"

"Are you sure?" Her face a kind crinkle of grandmotherly concern.

"G--It'd do me a world of good."

An hour later, Carol was breakfasted and I was "rugged up." We went on the getting-lost navigational principle, chatting about that, and, occasionally, this. This and that, you know. Carol is fun. She fed me lots of oranges and apples and bananas and pears, and two paracitemol tablets that took much of the awful away.

We got out to look at a very pretty crescent beach--looked positively tropical--and engaged in a footrace with a young man in a wheelchair, who won :( but he and his dad were very pleased with their victory, so good on them, say Carol and I. The walking brought a lot of phlegm up, and every time I started to politely suppress a cough:

"Get it out," commanded Carol, her eyes going black.

We drove behind an old man named MacDonald to our penultimate stop, a seal-viewing beach on which one could view no seals. MacDonald had been in the convenience store while I bought a bag of crisps, and had offered to guide us there in his car. Upon our arrival, he shook my hand twice for my being named Sammy.

"Me dad wus a Sammy. Thei're prrroper claiver, them."

"This young man is more cultured at his eighteen years than I am at my sixty-three," said Carol.

"Aye, that's cuz he's a Sammy."

Our last stop before we journeyed back was Neist Point. Neist is the westernmost point of Skye, looking out on the Pacific with no further peninsulas.

High noon. Mist was rising off the sea, thinly spread but thick enough that the horizon was a gorgeous semicircular haze of whiteish-blue water bleeding into a blueish-white sky. Neist Point, a jutting row of green-growing cliffs painted green, looked like the last real thing there was. It looked like the end of the world.