SSE decided in their wisdom to take the entire village off grid all day today. This is stupid in many ways a) it is cold b) it is dark c) many people have a lot to do with Christmas next week d) children are off school. Say they did this work in June – there […]

J turned up here in a jumper with a hole in it, a stain down the front, and a logo which had so disappeared into the fabric that it looked like another stain. Bear in mind that J is moderately wealthy – a new jumper is not in any way beyond his means. So I […]

Went to London with R for a few days to deliver a workshop on computer security. That went pretty well but I won’t burden you on the contents of it as this blog is supposed to be about Highland Life and not Kubernetes (go look it up). After the workshop we went for a walkaround […]

Sorry to harp on, but the freeze continues. R and I went round the Inverlounin loop this morning to search for icicles. We found some. I had been a bit worried about the paths being slippy – though it has been so dry that they weren’t particularly. It is supposed to thaw tomorrow – but […]

The weather is still extremely cold today. It was -6C first thing this morning and I put a bowl of warm water out for the birds with their seeds. This afternoon about 3pm when I went out again – the water from this morning had completely frozen over – so temperature had not risen above […]

It was -5C this morning early when we set out for Helensburgh to get the car serviced and go to the dentist. This was our driveway at 7:30 It was spectacularly beautiful all along the road. We took this picture when stopped at traffic lights, but it doesn’t do it justice. Then we walked along […]

After my first abortive operation I was pretty much convinced I would never walk normally again. My foot was basically a fair degree worse than it had been before the operation and was so tilted over to one side that I couldn’t put it flat to the floor or walk without considerable pain. Several weeks […]

The house J has inherited has an annoying feature (well several actually but I’ll talk about this one right now). The front door of the house is on Cleves Drive, and the back door is on Wells road. This back door is highly unsuitable for deliveries as it is up a overgrown path and is […]

I heard a (possibly apocryphal) story once about someone who was moving house to a building which had been converted from a farm. Some time after they moved in they received a letter from a credit card company offering a platinum credit card with a £10K limit to a “Mr Pygg, The Stye” So on […]

We went to see the Christmas Lights at Holkham Hall tonight – this is a truly magnificent indoor display where many of the state rooms are opened up and decorated in sumptuous fashion (it has been on TV multiple times). According to the website it was “15 to 20 minutes gentle walk” from the bus […]