Today was one of those “Goily” days where the sun comes and goes. Our solar production can literally go from 12kw to 0.5 within the space of 2 minutes. Having said this, we are doing pretty well with the solar in general – we have produced more electricity in total than we have used since […]

These were ready for harvest today. I have been nurturing them for months now, and in the end I got about ten chilis off them. This was growing them indoors under grow lights (outdoors they never even flowered), so sadly they are not worth the trouble of growing here. Over to ASDA for our future […]

The sign on our spare room used to say “Roddy’s Room” (ok – I have to admit that this is our friend J’s real name). However, we thought Saphy used it more than he did (this is a hint that he hasn’t been over to stay recently), so I renamed it. I also put a […]

It’s been a while since I went to the big city. With one thing and another, nearly four years in fact. So considering we have a holiday in London booked for Sept, I thought I had better get some practice in by going to Glasgow first. It was J’s birthday on 6th so we made […]

Part of this is the hillside, and part is its reflected image in the loch. But the question is – which way up does the picture go? I have never seen the loch as completely mirror-like as it was today.

This is R’s Totem pole (it is literally a curtain pole in his office). The “scalps” adorning it are the speaker’s lanyards he has acquired from all the conferences he has given talks at for the last ten years or so. He is (rightly) very proud of it – but to me there is something […]

We have christened a little black and white cat which keeps visiting us “Lucky”. She first started coming regularly a couple of months ago, and at first she was so timid that we couldn’t get to within 50m of her. But we have partially “tamed” her, and she will now come into the hall for […]

Iris by the pond today. We are going to have to do something about the pond because it is increasingly overgrown. The trouble is that getting it properly fixed professionally would cost a fortune because the stream that used to feed it inexplicably dried up. We think tree roots cracked the pipe it was running […]

I went on a little trip to Helensburgh today. The weather was really lovely and Helensburgh was looking very fetching. The thing about British holiday towns is they look great when the weather is fine… But are surpassingly awful as soon as it isn’t (and it very often isn’t). The nastiest day I remember was […]

Cobwebs all over the garden this morning – you can only really see them when they are wet with dew. Rather like the cobwebs in the garden of my parents’ old house in Mossdale the morning of R and my wedding day.