We’ll be sorted against any witchcraft activity here this year – I have never seen anything like the rowan trees around the village. They are dripping with berries, to the extent that some of the branches are dragging down to the ground with the weight. I’ve never made any use of them in cooking myself, […]
Well thank goodness that is all the excitement over with for the time being. Between work, new floors, visitors and R being away it has been chaotic here of late. So it was nice to have people, but also nice to get back to normal. I’m also going to do another “Clean” for the next […]
I’ve been frantically busy over the past week. Firstly we were having the carpet in the hall replaced with wood flooring. The sales guy told us it would take “two days at most” but when the men turned up to install it, turned out that they thought it would take five. So I was all […]
In the rather turgid “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” by Proust, the narrator dips a madeleine into a cup of tea and the smell and taste bring back a vivid memory of his childhood. I had a similar experience with a pie the other day (luckily it only has inspired me to write a […]
This is not as rude as it sounds but refers to our walk this afternoon when we climbed “Cruach Nam Miseag” – rocky hill of the Nanny Goat. This is the one next to Beinn Bheula, and isn’t high enough to rate even as a Graham. Nonetheless I have often thought it would make a […]
The autumn harvest has started with the plums. Last year we had about six in total – this year I have already picked more than 20lb. I’m having to pick them as soon as they are anything approaching ripe, because otherwise they are eaten by a combination of deer, jays and wasps, so rather than […]
Three red deer have moved into our garden. I think they are a mother, her fawn of this year, and a yearling stag who is presumably her fawn from last year. I guess he will be leaving her to look for his own herd soon as his antlers are just coming through. All three of […]
I made J a birthday cake – this was what the lemon curd was for, but I didn’t want to say in my article before because he reads this blog and I wanted the cake to be a surprise. J is a big fan of Qonqr – which is a location based mobile phone wargame […]
Many years ago my friend J and I used to play a very good board game called Imperial Governor. We played it so much in fact that when J came across our single copy of the game a few weeks ago, it was literally dropping to pieces and not playable in its current state. So […]
We have a variety of foodstuffs out for the birds, one of which is a fat ball feeder which until recently was used only for its designated purpose of feeding the tits (we have blue tits, great tits and coal tits in great numbers). Not even the squirrels could manage to get to it – […]
