I just spent another two hours with these apples. I made a large apple sauce cake, a pie and a large pan of puree which will become apple sauce. I was sort of hoping this would see the end of them, but there are still hundreds on the tree. I might just need to give […]

The summer flowers being over I bought some winter pansies and some little alpines for Schrodi’s garden. Blow me but having planted the pansies, they had all totally vanished within two days. I’ve no idea whether this was squirrels, birds or the four red deer which have been in the garden recently. Anyway, when the […]

We (myself R and J) were driving back from Glasgow last night about 10pm in our 8 month old (very expensive) BMW. We came off the Rest and got about a mile down the road to the village. All of a sudden the engine cut off, luckily when we were next to a passing place. […]

I had to laugh at this a bit. I’ve been on the Northern Belle a couple of times with my Mum at Christmas, but £225 (this is the reduced price) to travel between Dumbarton and some unspecified destination on the West Highland line is a bit steep even for me. The Northern Belle train is […]

Our 16 year old cat has just had one vole and two mice. The latter were half consumed. All three brought into the utility room within the last hour. Poor little creatures.

So funny to see a Badger and a Fox peacefully grazing on the nuts together. I would have thought that two top predators would have hated each other. Actually badgers seem to be pretty laid back creatures as they have been driven off by Tora a few times. Sadly I don’t suppose the poor wee […]

R and I are off for a visit to the Lake District in a few weeks time. We will be climbing Scafell Pike and a couple of other peaks and visiting some of the places I knew well as a child. This was our house between Egremont and Whitehaven taken from Google as it was […]

I would not have believed this, but J, who is the source of all general knowledge (I noticed this when we were on the Camino and he was a fount of information about a) religion b) architecture c) Spanish history) informed me that robins do not in fact have red breasts, but are orange. The […]

Believe it or not we had two martens at the same time on the webcam. I think it is Mum and child as one is much smaller than the other. Doubtless Mum will be seeing her offspring off shortly as pine martens are very territorial.

I’ve been watching the Great British Bake off since its inception 10 years ago and have always loved it. I was terribly sorry to see it move over to Channel 4 – I detest advertisements and in fact would definitely never buy from any company that force them in my face. One thing I do […]