Category Archives: Personal

A Winter Walk

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Our usual morning walk for The Guardian has been somewhat fraught this week as each day the ice underfoot just got thicker, smoother and more dangerous. Crampons would have been the best choice of footwear, but not having those we just had to hang onto each other and hope that we didn’t both skid at the same time. Thankfully neither of us fell as obviously a visit to hospital with broken bones would be even more dangerous in these Covid times.

The path across the nearby golf course resembled a bobsleigh run, and we stuck to the safer option of walking on the iced up grass.

Icy Golf Path, Balbirnie

The recently flooded area due to all the heavy rain that we had had was very popular with ice skaters and ice hockey players though, and the sparkling landscape was pretty too, but I’m glad that a thaw is predicted for next week. Apparently the temperature here is set to be around -7 overnight tonight, which is 19.4 Fahrenheit – according to the internet.

Ice Skaters

Ice Skaters, Balbirnie Park

On a similar topic, I’ve really been enjoying a BBC 4 TV programme called Winter Walks. It doesn’t seem to be on You Tube though. In each walk a well known person takes a winter walk in the countryside while holding a small 360 degree camera, this week one of the walks was through the North Yorkshire Moors, there was also a coastal walk in Yorkshire, the Yorkshire Dales and Cumbria in the north of England. They’re all such restful viewing.

Perhaps Winter Walks is also on a channel near you.

What’s going on?

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In my very small and rapidly shrinking world there isn’t a lot going on at the moment. In Scotland we have a lockdown again and we’re supposed to stay at home, unless we need to go out for food. At this time of the year that’s not too awful, especially as we have really cold weather at the moment and our walk for The Guardian every morning (as essential as food) is a treacherous one with any paths we use swathed in layers of ice. It’s safer to walk on the crunchy icy grass when possible. Otherwise we are seeing nobody and giving any oncoming fellow walkers a wide berth.

Normally by this time I’ve read a couple of books, but I’ve been reading The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt since before the new year and I still have thirty or so pages to go, that’ll be my bedtime reading tonight. This is the first book by A.S. Byatt that I’ve read and I must say that I love it, but it is over 600 pages long and the print is quite small. I have already flipped to the back of the book to see if there was a bibliography because I am so impressed by the amount of historical detail in it, but according to the author she was greatly helped by knowledgeable members of her family, friends and acquaintances and she read too many books to mention them all, but she does mention a few. This one was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, the year it was won by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. How unfortunate for Byatt as surely in any other year The Children’s Book would have won it.

Anyway, more on that subject tomorrow. As it looks like we’ll be stuck at home possibly for months depending on what happens next to the stats, I think I’ll be catching up with my Goodreads challenge, apparently I’m one behind at the moment!
On a completely dfferent topic – I just have to tell you that today I spotted a red squirrel running around in the woodland this morning, that’s the second one we’ve seen within about ten days – and we hadn’t seen any for about three years before that. There are of course loads of grey squirrels which are nothng like as elegant and charming as the red ones. Of course, I didn’t manage to get a photo of it.

You can see some images of red squirrels here.

Happy New Year!

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Happy New Year, I hesitate to say that it must be better than 2020, I don’t want to tempt fate I suppose, even although in some ways the news has been more hopeful in recent weeks, the new variant seems to be ploughing its way through Fife now so we’re still staying well distanced and safe – we hope.

But it hasn’t been all doom and gloom for me/us anyway as we were eventually able to meet Isobel Skye who was born last month. It’s great to be a granny!

Isobel

Anyway, like everyone I hope, we stayed at home on our own for ‘the bells’ at midnight.

Happy New Year everyone.

Merry Christmas!

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Merry Christmas to you from me and my Merrythought Lads! It’s not going to be the Christmas that any of us were expecting or planning for, but there’s no doubt that keeping everything quiet and socially distanced this year is the sensible way to go. Then with any luck we can look forward to a more normal celebration next year.

Merrythought Bears

Geoff Farley on the left was named Farley by his original owner. I wonder if he was called after Farley’s Rusks. When I acquired him I added Geoff in memory of a great gardener – Geoff Hamilton. There’s no doubt that he is stricken in years, as many of us feel after such a rough year of bad news in the UK with Brexit and Covid to contend with.

Armstrong McGregor on the right is dapper and young in comparison to his companion, but not very young, and he’s been named after two great-grandfathers. Jack had one whose first name was Armstrong, and I had one whose surname was McGregor. I like the combination.

Fingers crossed that we all feel a bit more like Armstrong McGregor looks this time next year! Come on, own up – does your home shelter a teddy bear or two?

Meet Isobel Skye

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A few days ago we were woken early in the morning with the phone ringing. The call was from our very happy eldest son to say that his wife had given birth to a wee girl, all are well and they’ve named her Isobel Skye. I particularly like the name Isobel. She arrived three weeks early and weighed in at 6lb 6oz. It’s great to be a granny at last! Here she is at just a few minutes old. She’s apparently a very calm baby.

Isobel

I never dreamed that our first grandchild would come along during a pandemic, the upshot is that we haven’t seen Isobel yet as we aren’t supposed to travel outside Fife. We’ll wait until the restrictions are lifted – and then we might be meeting her outside. In the photo below she is a few days old and looking like she’s wondering what’s going on. She looks very serious. We’ll make up for lost time when things get back to nornmal. How times have changed though as I’m 16 or so years older than my mother was when she first became a grandmother.

Isobel

Garden room

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Way back in March we ordered a new posh shed – what the sellers all insist in calling summerhouses, and so began a four month long nightmare before the delivery (due to the pandemic). Then when it was delivered several of the parts were wrong, we were putting it together ourselves as we had done one before in the old garden and had no problem doing it. Irate phone calls led to new parts being delivered a week later – still the wrong parts!! Then exactly the same thing happened the following week, I think it’s fair to say I was fuming. So we demanded our money back – and got it. The only trouble with that was we had to start the whole thing again, but this time we chose a local company – not one in distant Cambridge, and they were going to erect it for us. Great, but the trouble was we had to be even more patient as – you guessed it – due to the pandemic the factory/woodmills had locked down. The upshot was that we had to wait until October before taking delivery of our posh new shed, which we’re calling a garden room. It reminds me of a wee Victorian shop, like something out of Cranford. We’re happy with it anyway, it fulfills two functions, blocks off a view of the spa tub next door and stores some things I didn’t want to get rid of and didn’t want to stick in the garage.

New Summerhouse/shed

This area of the garden is very much a work in progress – as all gardens always are I suppose. I’m getting rid of the grass here and extending the gravel area. That will still leave plenty of grass for the birds to mooch around on in the rest of the garden, but will make the grass cutting job less onerous for Jack, he hates doing it.
New Summerhouse/shed

I’ll have fun sorting the wee garden room out internally. If you’ve been reading ‘Pining’ for years then you might remember that when we moved to our present house we bought a summerhouse/shed, mainly because there had been one in the situation before and we couldn’t budge the concrete blocks that had been cemented in as a foundation, the previous people took their summerhouse with them. The photo below is from July 2014.

summerhouse (gazebo)

That summerhouse was a disappointment almost from day one as it leaked and leaked, despite having two layers of roofing felt on it. We had intended sorting it out once and for all over this summer but it rained and rained in June, July, August …. well it’s eaier to say that it was only in May that we had decent weather this year. But we did manage to get a damp proof membrane on the roof of that one followed by heavy grade roofing felt, no nails involved, only stapled edges and glue. Fingers crossed the wind doesn’t do its worst! I do think it’s crazy banging nails in roofs, having said that as you can see there are loads in the new garden room roof, but so far all seems to be well with it. I’m going to use the old summerhouse/posh shed as a sort of potting shed and for overwintering some not so hardy plants. It gets plenty of light and heats up quickly when the sun does come out, so it can double up as a greenhouse for germinating seeds, well that’s the plan anyway. We’ll see how it goes.

You can see what the old one looked like inside here when we first got it, it’s needing some TLC internally now, that’ll be the next thing to tackle. I had to take the books out as I didn’t want them to get damp.

Peace Celebration, Moscow – a jigsaw puzzle.

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The first jigsaw puzzle of the winter season has been completed. It was a lot easier than we thought it would be, but still challenging enough to be fun. The design has so many different and often unique shapes to the pieces which helped a lot.

The original artwork was painted by Sir Claude Francis Barry. If you’re interested in seeing more of his work you can do so here.

Complete Jigsaw

Covid-19 days

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From tomorrow we in Scotland we will be able to meet up with one other household, outside and socially distanced – a maximum of eight people. That seems a bit excessive to me, I think it’s the eight people bit that scares me a wee bit. However I don’t think we’ll have to cope with that many visitors as our family members don’t live locally, and as we’ve been asked not to travel far – mainly because we shouldn’t be going into the house to use the loo – I think it’ll be quite some time before we are meeting up with our immediate family.

Speaking of loos – we had a bit of a domestic disaster about a month ago. While settling down to drink our 9 pm coffee and preparing to settle down to watch something on TV I discovered a puddle of water on the hall floor, while looking at it with puzzlement a drip splashed into it. I dreaded looking up at the ceiling, but it had to be done and it was even worse than I had feared. There were lots of bubbles in the plaster and in two places water had broken through it, it was even seeping down the walls. At first we couldn’t even figure out where the water was coming from but I tracked it down to the en suite shower room toilet cistern. It’s one of those supposedly water conserving push button efforts that must have been designed by an idiot as they have two holes in the cistern, accidents waiting to happen. The water was dripping straight down a pipe so showing no trace in the actual shower room. This is the second time one of them has malfunctioned here resulting in a soaked ceiling below. We couldn’t get a plumber into the house due to the lockdown and there was not enough space to fit a spanner in to fix it ourselves. After many views of You Tube videos and several trips to tool centres (wearing masks) and a DIY store which thankfully had just re-opened Jack managed to fix it. It took him about three weeks, I think he was determined it wasn’t going to beat him. I’m hoping we can fix the ceiling ourselves too, I’m quite good at that sort of thing.

We locked down a wee bit before we were told to by Nicola Sturgeon, it just seemed the sensible thing to do and after eleven weeks or so I’m well used to it, I’m amazed at how quickly the time has gone and also appalled that I don’t seem to be getting on with many of the things that have been getting put off for ages, they’re still being put off. I seem to be brilliant at dodging unappealing tasks! I have been reading a lot, especially in the early days of the lockdown, now gardening has taken over. Our weather has been scorching over the last few days and we haven’t had any rain to speak of for ages, the ground is like concrete. Actually our weather is a bit of a worry as it’s still only May and we’ve already had temperatures of 25 centigrade / 77 Fahrenheit. I think that’s a record for May, it’s definitely global warming.

Our jigsaw season is over I think. If I can get my hands on some fence paint I’ll be doing that instead, in common with half the country. I’m just so thankful that we have a garden to spend time in. When I think of some of the places we’ve lived in over the nearly 44 years we’ve been married (I know, I can hardly believe it) lockdown would have been absolutely hell in some of our early homes as they weren’t places we enjoyed living in, but were all we could afford at the time. I recall the first house we bought which was in the south of England which only had a plasterboard wall between us and the house next door, apparently absolutely legal in England! In those circumstances I might have been close to murder by now.

The only occasional strange thing that I have been experiencing is flashes of places coming into my mind when I least expect it, like picture postcards of places that I love visiting. They’re all rural scenic places, no shops involved. Hills, beaches, stone bridges, castles and riverbanks, but I’m in no great rush to visit any of them soon, just in case hundreds of other people are having the same idea. I have compiled a little list of new places that I want to visit – if life ever does get back to what we regarded as normal. What about you? Are you raring to go out and about or will you take it easy and be safe rather than sorry?

The photos of packed beaches in England horrified me – what are they thinking of?!

beach