There is a cracker joke which goes “What’s yellow and dangerous?” answer – “Shark infested custard”. Actually custard presented a real and present danger the other day. I went to see my mum in Rhu, and as usual I ordered her a nice lunch (to tempt her to eat as she doesn’t eat enough). For […]

I’ve produced some more coloured drawings/watercolours – that is they are drawn with watercolour pencils onto stretched canvas panels, and then brushed with water to blend in the colours so that they look like a painting. This one came from a Christmas wrapping bag. It looks like Lucky, so I redrew it with a spring […]

I put R’s rug onto the bed while I hoovered underneath it. The cats found it shortly afterwards and found it a great place to sit. Although the ladies don’t like cardboard boxes, they do love to sit on anything placed on anything else (a towel, a suitcase etc.). The latter behaviour I have seen […]

While I was partially incapacitated I tried to find a hobby to take up. I looked for things “middle aged people could do with one hand” (no rude remarks here) and decided that “rock painting” was a good one. In fact it was great fun, but with one big disadvantage (which I will come to). […]

Lucky is a very strange cat. He is definitely “ours” now in the sense that he lives here most of the time – but he still unpredictably vanishes off for up to two days at a time. This may be a co-incidence, but a large number of these disappearances happen at weekends or at public […]

The village was out of power for about 15 hours – the longest outage since we have lived here. Normally we use a lot of electricity (21KWH plus), due to the facts that we have a lot of computers, heat our offices with electric heat pumps, and cook with electricity. On the day of the […]

Big storm has arrived here tonight. R had the foresight to suggest this morning that as power cuts were likely, we should put the battery into storm mode. This means that instead of running itself down during the day to maximize our cheap off peak electricity, we have had it hold its charge. We are […]

I went to see the consultant at Ross Hall yesterday and have been formally discharged from wearing my sling (actually I had stopped wearing it full time a few days before). My arm is a bit restricted in movement and very weak, but it is not painful and I can now do most things that […]

Saphy had a bird today. She played with it in the hall for a while and then took it into R’s bedroom and onto the bed. Then she sat and purred at it for a while. Poor little thing… It has been so cold recently that we have clouds of birds and squirrels competing for […]

I’m sad to have to report this in public, but I fear that R has joined a religious cult, or even worse has formed one of his own. He is responsible for feeding Lucky as the cat has a special technique for avoiding getting swiped by putting the plate down very quickly at an angle […]