Trapped

The other half is off all day, and - more to the point - has taken the car with him. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere as I have plenty to do at home, but suddenly all I can think of is the places I can’t get to today. I can go for a walk - I can even walk a couple of miles down to Nearest Village and get a bus into BigTown or I could if I had thought to ring in advance and book the Ring’n'Ride service. I can get on my bike and buy a paper and a pint of milk and even a tin of beans. Other than that, I’m stuck. The coast might as well be on the moon, the reservoir and the forests and the surrounding hills are all more or less unreachable. My bike gives me a functional radius of about 10 miles, unless I want to make the day about going on a bike ride, rather than going and doing something by bike (there’s a difference). Yes, there are buses - there are even buses that just turn up and don’t have to be ordered like a big and inconvenient taxi - but they’re infrequent and they mostly get you from town to town or village to town, not from one bit of the middle of nowhere to another. So I’m just going to have to enjoy the bit of nowhere I’m in, and not set my sights on the bit of nowhere I’m not.

Looking on the bright side, I can’t get to Tescos either.

 

What is the Point…

… of quitting your job and doing what little work you do do at home if you can’t watch Andy Murray being taken limb from limb / surprisingly going through to the next round* because the only channel you can get on your telly is a very fuzzy Channel 4? Our broadish band means Radio … five … live … sounds… a little… stuttery on the internet (my DAB radio has become welded to Radio 4 and refuses to be retuned) and besides, tennis on the radio doesn’t make much sense. Cricket on the radio, now, that actually makes more sense than it does on TV, but not the tennis.

Hopefully it will have started raining (our aerial only seems to work in the rain) up here and not down there in time for the actual match. So far - as far as I can make out - they’re just doing the court-cover hokey-cokey.

Someone let me know if he wins, will you?

*delete as appropriate

 

Looking on the Bright Side…

…The steady light rain that starts whenever we head out for a walk does at least keep off the worst of the flies. We have yet to encounter the dreaded midge - a beast that looms as large as some mythical monster whenever this part of Scotland is discussed - but the flies seem irritating enough, at least to us newbies. They seem attracted to walkers and gather over our heads in columns as we go, so that from a distance we must have the appearance of being trailed by a pillar of smoke, like the Israelites in the desert, only without the sunshine. When it is not raining, I try and cultivate a stoical indifference to the flies - teeth clenching is good for the jaw line after all - while the other half opts for a maddened hand waving, which presumably tones the upper arms. Either way, I’m disappointed that the presence of such an abundance of insect life in our vicinity does not mean that we are also trailed by swallows, swifts, martins and flycatchers who are all surely missing a trick here. If rhinos can have oxpeckers, and even crocodiles their own personal toothcleaning avian companion, why cannot walkers attract a companion bird or two to keep them insect free? I’d even put up with the poo.

 

This is Just to Say…

…it’s been a busy couple of days in the town mouse household, what with a trip to BigTown’s small cinema and taking the train for a day trip to Edinburgh, not to mention a spot of extreme ironing, rural style - all of which I might write about one of these days. But not right now because we came back home last night to find our connection kit has arrived and we are on broadband once more. Well, broadish band, but let’s not get picky - after two months accessing the internet through two tin cans and a long piece of string it feels pretty broad to us. And so I’ve got the whole wide world of the internet to catch up with - or at least those bits that require a decent connection.

Back tomorrow, after I have had my fill of sneezing pandas.

 

Back on the Bike

‘That won’t last,’ the neighbour apparently said to the other half, referring to my regular cycle ride down to Papershop Village. So now of course I have to go on, winter and summer, through rain and shine, sleet, snow or hail. There’s nothing like being told I won’t persist in something to make me never, ever give up.

Of course it was only after I’d wiped the three days’ worth of accumulated swallow poo off my saddle, cycled five miles down, picked up the paper and - as it happens - rolling papers for the other half and cycled five miles back again that I realised that a) the other half knows this about me and b) I have only his word for it what the neighbour said and c) that he’s onto a nice thing here.

 

Flaming June

Today marked my first failure on my great cycling-to-get-the-paper project. The problem is the weather which is I hope going through a bad patch but I suspect has simply reverted to normal after an uncharacteristically dry and sunny May. We had visitors at the weekend and the rain started at the point where we had committed to go to the beach on the Saturday morning, and continued until we dropped them off at the train station on Sunday afternoon. Since then it has stopped occasionally - usually to lure us out of the house or kid us into putting some washing on - but it is never long before the clouds regather themselves and resume the deluge. This morning dawned misty and continued with the sort of steady rain and gusts of wind that signal a determination to go on all day. I did get as far as choosing a particularly light patch of rain, putting on my shoes and trying to nerve myself up to get out the bike and head off, but the other half took pity on me and gave me a lift down to the shop instead. I sense a slippery slope ahead, and that’s not just the run down into Papershop Village, either. If I can’t get on my bike just because it’s raining then I’m not going to do much cycling at all around here.

Still, this particular cloud did have one silver lining. Coming back from the shop we found a tree down and a dapper but rather frail elderly couple (she in a tweed skirt and pearls, he in a dashing hat) attempting to move it out of the way. With the other half there,the four of us managed to shift it out of the road (it was quite a small tree) and, our good deed done for the day, we headed home hoping it might atone somewhat for our contribution to global warming. And, to anyone sharing the sneaking thought I had - as I watched the ragged grey clouds fail to clear the local hilltops - that Scotland could do with a touch of global warming, shame on you. Global drying, though, that might be an idea…

 

Local Food for Local People

In our bid to savour the finer things of our new life - and ward off that deep-fried Mars Bar moment as long as possible - we made the trip to Notso Bigtown in search of good food. Notso Bigtown fancies itself as a foodie haven and it has no fewer than four butchers which we’ve been working our way through gradually in a spirit of elimination. It’s complicated, being green in the country. Driving to Notso Bigtown takes more petrol than just heading to the Bigtown Tescos (whose commitment to local produce doesn’t extend beyond slapping the Saltire on anything remotely Scottish) so we have to weigh in the balance all the putative foodmiles of the actual food, versus the known personmiles of ourselves getting there and back. Throw in a detour to the local creamery - which sells delicious cheese and sourdough bread produced on the premises but also organic new potatoes freighted in from Egypt - and it’s all just too complicated to work out, so we said what the hell and went anyway. The last butcher we had tried had sold us 28-day aged ribeye steaks so good they could have airfreighted them from the moon and I wouldn’t have minded. This time we wandered into a different butcher to give him a crack at winning the coveted town mouse household meat supply contract, and I asked if he had any free-range chicken.

‘Not free range, as such,’ he said, prevaricating and pointing to the chicken he had. ‘That’s better than free range, that is. That’s Scottish.’

 

Like a Bird on the Wire

Chilling out after the paper run this morning, with a cup of coffee and a couple of slices of cinnamon raisin toast with extra butter*, I noticed the swallow family, supplemented by a spotted flycatcher and a pied wagtail, arranged on the telephone wires. Just as I was wondering what tune they would play if they were to be transcribed onto sheet music, they all disappeared in a flash. A sparrowhawk had flown over and was immediately surrounded by twittering maddened birds. A few seconds later and it had been seen off. Swallows one, sparrowhawk nil. Or was it? Because when they first emerged a couple of days ago, there were definitely six little swallows disporting themselves on the wires. And now there are only five…

*You know, I’m doing all this exercise and yet I’m piling on the pounds. Just can’t work out why that should be…

 

Kitchen Cabinet

Woo hoo. We finally have our kitchen table and two chairs, which means we have achieved the ultimate metropolitan middle class domestic fantasy: the dine-in kitchen. Throw in the Rayburn and we’re in Country Living heaven, although of course you can’t throw the Rayburn very far because it’s made of cast iron and weighs a ton. Unfortunately this simply opens up new hazards, the chief one being that once you have a kitchen big enough to sit down and eat in, you never use any other room in the house. All we have to do is move the bird feeder so that we can watch babybird tv* out of our front windows as well as our back ones, and we’ll be all set.

And, in continuing proof that blogging really does get results, after the great pine nut fiasco of last week there was a nice lady at Tescos yesterday introducing the masses of BigTown to the delights of low fat Creme Fraiche. I can confidently predict that the supermarket aisles will soon be ringing with the sound of the local kiddies, demanding the right kind of pesto to go on their Turkey Twizzlers.

* The real TV doesn’t get much in the way of reception so we have to make our own springwatch up here. The other half does a good Bill Oddie although I’m not bubbly enough to be Kate Humble…

 

Awwwwwww

Look, I know this blog is going soft, and I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. Going out to get my bike for the paper run this morning, I noticed that two of our baby swallows had ventured out of their nest and were sitting on the rafters of our outbuilding, no doubt planning where to plant their next poo. And yesterday we spent a good fifteen minutes watching a young dipper bouncing around the rocks in the stream. In fact the whole countryside around us is full of ever so slightly crap, fluffy young birds who don’t know the meaning of fear. It’s just too hard to keep up urban standards of disgruntlement with this level of cute going on around us…

The other half took piccies, but you’ll have to wait until we get broadband before you can see them. That should be good for a rant or two, at least.