A virtual world.

Sometimes it's worrying that Apple appears to be controlling us and taking over our lives.  Sometimes I feel as though I am losing my grip on reality.  A new app appears on the scene and we're all clicking away, obsessed.  The latest waste of time is Candy Crush and everyone seems to be playing it.  I am no exception despite the fact that in my more paranoid moments I fret that it is some kind of mind-control experiment.  I even dream about moving little coloured blobs and I know that isn't healthy. There was a film in the eighties (I think it was called The Last Starfighter) that suggested that space invader games had been put on earth by aliens looking for people to fight in space wars and I wonder what skill the aliens are testing us for with this app.

This afternoon I was about to go swimming, to carry on with my Splashpath Swimming App challenge to swim Loch Ness.  Obviously, you don't take your i-phone in the water with you; you have to trust yourself to to honest about the number of lengths you say you have done.  Even though, I get excited that I've nearly swum the length of Loch Ness I do know it's not real.  I do know that I couldn't  swim 1455 lengths of the pool in one go and so I would  drown unless Nessie herself allowed me to rest on her back.

Then I remembered that the pool is being used for the Swimathon so I couldn't go.  I did think about doing the Swimathon this year but in the end that seemed far too real.

I settled on the sofa, checking facebook, twitter and playing as many games of Candy Crush as I could before I had to wait for new lives, ate a piece of the worst cake I've ever made.  I knew I needed to get off my backside and do something but I seem to have lost the ability to make any decisions for myself.  Luckily, I noticed a facebook posting of a MapMy.... variety and thought, "I know I'll take the dog for a walk and I can measure how far we've been and how fast we walked."

I walked for 7.8 miles along the seawall into the middle of nowhere.  It was bliss, miles away from anyone else, just me, the dog and a strange American woman's voice in my pocket telling me that I'd been walking for 20 minutes, 40 minutes and so on.  What I love about walking in this way is that you have time to think.  You can make things up in your head and nobody is there to tell you not to be so silly.   You can look at clouds and imagine dragons and knights and when you see a stile in the middle of the path for no reason you can go into flights of fancy about what used to be in the field behind to warrant a fence on the footpath.  I eventually decided on Bulls, bread for the local weekly bullfight in the High Street.

When I saw these 21 square water-filled pools I wondered if they were Oyster beds but that would have been far too sensible for the kind of walk I was having, so I imagined they were water-sprite swimming pools.

The dog even imagined with me.  When we saw this egg, he was terrified, skitting around it.  I asked him what the matter was and in his husky, Scottish accent that he only uses when we are alone he told me that something evil had come out of that egg and that it smelled of death.

As I walked back I started to see more people.  There were the teenage boys, gamboling along towards the causeway to the island in their swimming shorts and t-shirts.  One was wearing a T-shirt, proclaiming a huge cock, and checking with one hand that it was still there.  They seemed to be planning a swim but changed their mind when they saw there were two girls nearby.

Then I saw a couple with a metal detector and I started to think, "I quite like people because they're funny but I'm not sure I want to be one."