Uplifting

We have new sofas (no, that’s not the uplifting part – they’re nice and all, but they’re still just sofas). And when I say ‘new’, I mean they’re new to us, from one of the the local charity shops that does furniture. We’d hoped to pass on our old sofa to them (if only so they would take it away) but sadly it had lost, or maybe never had, its fire safety label* so cannot be sold. So with the new sofas in situ taking up all of the available room for sofas in the sitting room we were left with the old sofa standing on its end like some sort of sinister black monolith in a corner.

At this point, having checked that, no, you really cannot sell your unlabelled sofa or even reasonably give it away, our only option was the council bulky waste service which for a very reasonable £15 would take the sofa away for us. Even more reasonably, we could book a slot just two days hence, or light speed in coonsil terms. Until, having already paid and booked, I bothered to read the not-even-all-that-fine print about the bulky waste having to be at or very nearby our usual bin pickup point by 7:30 am on the day in question. Which is all still very reasonable if you live in town and your bins are collected from outside your house, but less so if you live in a rural property down a dead end road where the bins get picked up at the road end half a mile away. I’m all for active travel and usually quite enjoy the binday walk, and I’m sure that there are people who will be able to point me to some photo somewhere of a person transporting a three-seater sofa on a bike, but my feeling was that if I could get the sofa to our road end, then I could probably get it to the tip by the same means, and save myself the fees.

Regular readers will know that I’m very quick to point out the coonsil’s manifold failings, especially when it comes to the roads team, so I feel duty bound to report that, one only mildly pained email from me later, an actual named human had talked to her actual supervisor and within a couple of hours had sorted out a special dispensation for us to be able to leave the sofa at our gate instead and they would pick it up from there. Which, yesterday, they duly did.

But that’s not the uplifting part either, gratifying though it was. No the uplifting part is – and Scottish readers will know this already – the fact that Scottish councils do not pick up sofas, or any kind of bulky waste, they uplift them (a usage which as far as I am aware is not the case outwith Scotland (‘outwith’ being my other favourite formal Scottish word which surely deserves a wider takeup)).

So much nicer this way, even if it doesn’t mean it’s been transferred directly to some sort of sofa heaven, rather than landfill, whatever I’d like to believe.

* If you’ve ever thought to rip off the ugly label with a cigarette on it from your soft furnishings then be warned, they will basically have to go to landfill when you’re done with them if you do.

Well, This is Something of a Record …

Last weekend I completed my second-attempt jumper, only eight months after I started it, which is something of a landspeed record for me. I was quite pleased with myself at being able to work out how to adapt it to a smaller size in the body and make it a bit longer, while keeping the width of the sleeves the same as the first attempt as they were a perfect size to fit Scottish levels of layers underneath. So it’s ended up looking pretty much the same as the first attempt, only this time it actually fits.

You’ll just have to trust me on that latter point, because, not being a gibbon, I have completely failed to work out how I might take a selfie of myself wearing the jumper in any way that shows more than a small section of the jumper at a time (not to mention the whole issue of my old-person’s ‘how does this thing work?’ perpetually puzzled selfie face; there are enough horrors on the internet without me adding that to the pile). Actually it could still usefully be about an inch longer but I panicked a bit about running out of wool and because it was knitted bottom up, I couldn’t really tell how long it was going to be once finished (knitting does have this magical property of being a completely different length every time you measure it, which doesn’t help). But the real proof is in the wearing, and I’ve barely taken this one off since I finished it and I can confirm that it’s still lovely and warm.

Fortunately, the cousin (who is a car boot whiz) who procured the last cone of wool turned up with more on his last-visit-but-one which he shared out between my aunt and myself (I think he was hoping for blood on the carpet, or at the very least knitting needles at dawn over who got what, but we were very civilised about it). So now I have some lovely soft mystery lilac wool of unknown composition (other than that it has ‘pure wool’ handwritten inside the cone). Having learned my lesson on length, I’ve found a top-down cardigan pattern which I can make as long as I want. The last one I tried only (‘only’) took me nine months (and also ended up too short) so I’ve got a target to beat here.

Of course all of this is largely irrelevant in a world where an infinite variety of jumpers can be had in moments for really quite reasonable sums of money. So let’s draw a veil over the fact that the other jumper that’s on heavy rotation this year cost me precisely £3 in a local charity shop and is wonderfully warm, a beautifully speckled shade of grey, and probably fits me slightly better than the lovingly handcrafted one I’m wearing now.

Interlude

Given the weather we woke up to on Saturday, it’s fair to say I wasn’t expecting to be out and leading a bike ride yesterday.

The forecast was for temperatures to rise well above freezing but there was more snow on the ground than we were expecting and conditions were slippery enough underfoot, as our new neighbours up the hill discovered the hard way. The other half and I decided this was not the weather for going anywhere and hunkered down to wait out Storm Bert. Our visiting relatives were made of sterner stuff and made it safely down the hill to have lunch with the Pepperpots and return with supplies for dinner, for which this cyclist, for one, was extremely grateful.

But then, unexpectedly, the picture was transformed by Sunday morning. The only clue that we’d had any sort of a named storm at all was the fact that the swans were swimming in the field rather than the river. We weren’t that many for the ride, as I probably wasn’t the only one who had been expecting we’d have to cancel, but the weather was actually jolly pleasant, seasonally adjusted, and there was still a pearly afternoon light in the sky as I got home – just as the winds started to pick up once more to batter around the house.

I’m chalking that up as another win …

Seize the Light

You don’t need me to tell you that winter is almost upon us – the first ‘snow and ice’ warning is looming tomorrow, and it feels like we need to be making the most of any daylight and specifically sunlight that comes our way. Which is why Thursday morning saw me improbably sitting outside in glorious sunshine reading an unimproving book, even though I had many more useful and productive things I could be doing. A couple of hundred feet below us, Bigtown was blanketed in thick fog, which at one point was lapping almost at the garden hedge before retreating. It’s not often that we win at weather around here, so when it happens – especially at this point in the year – I’ve learned to down tools and take full advantage.

I suspect that will be the last outdoor basking I’ll manage in 2024, but it hasn’t been the last of the sunlight. After a grey start to November, I have been struck by the beauty of the light when it has put in an appearance, all the more so for being so fleeting, and doing my best to coax my phone into capturing it. Like this last hurrah from the afternoon sun as I raced the light home yesterday …

… or halting gardening proceedings just now to try and record some faint echo of the glory of a rainbow as it arcs over the hill.

Bigtown’s Christmas lights were switched on on Friday evening, complete with festive tractors strung with fairy lights, and while I’m normally something of a premature Christmas curmudgeon (Advent exists for a reason, people), this year I can see the point of wanting to face down the looming gloom as soon as possible with a bit of sparkle, wherever it can be found.

Bogged Down

Great (well, mild) excitement in the Town Mouse household today as it was septic tank emptying (akin to all your bin days coming at once). We’d remembered in time for the other half to get the strimmer out last week and make sure we could find the septic tank, not in itself a given due to how lush everything grows in this garden the minute you turn your back on it.

Last time we got it emptied, the driver took one look at our drive and decided to park the honey wagon (as we used to call them as children in Kuwait, where you never wanted to get stuck behind one due to the smell and the fact that we didn’t have air conditioning in our car so were obliged to keep the windows rolled down) on the road outside. This was, it turned out, a wise decision, as exemplified by today’s driver who boldly attempted to back in the gate, missed the edge of the drive, and ended up thoroughly stuck in the soft grass off to one side.

This wasn’t exactly his fault; the drive, like everything else in our garden, yearns to return to its original state as a silage field so has a lot of grass growing on it, making it hard to distinguish from the lawn, which also has a lot of grass growing on it plus added badger latrines. I’ve been attempting to keep the two distinct, but like the rest of the garden, the minute you turn your back it’s overgrown again.

A quick trot down to the neighbours enlisted the help of the brothers who farm it, who came up on their ancient tractor and with some impressive knot tying skills and a lot of spinning wheels, extracted the lorry from the mire. At that point, a complicated rural sliding block puzzle ensued, as our gate is at a junction on our tiny dead end road and suddenly we had a timber lorry, cattle wagon, septic tank lorry and the farmers’ tractor all trying to get past each other. Just like Picadilly Circus, as they say, but with more mud.

The tank was then emptied with considerably less drama and pronounced to be digesting well. Clearly our commitment to keeping cleaning to a minimum is paying off. The other half managed to scrape off enough churned up wannabe silage field to get our own car out safely, and we’re left with nothing but some impressive tyre tracks on the drive to remind visitors which bit to drive on. Once that fades will have to figure out some more permanent demarkation so drivers don’t stray off it again. I was hoping this might involve planting things but will probably just involve more gravel. With any luck, delivered by someone who’s a bit more aware of what happens to neglected driveways in these parts…

One Sheep at a Time

Shortly after I stopped to take this photo – marvelling at the disconnect between the grim news I’d woken to this morning, and the continued beauty and tranuqility of the Bigtownshire scenery – I heard a plaintive baaing. A sheep had got its head stuck in a fence, which is a fairly regular occurrence due to the fact that the fences round here seem to be carefully designed to have holes in them that are just large enough for a sheep to stick its head through – but curiously just too small for the same sheep to get its head out again.

My normal fence-de-sheeping technique is for me to approach the sheep with my bike, which panics the sheep so much that it miraculously discovers how to get its head free and runs off leaving both of us looking slightly foolish. However, this morning the magic failed to work so I was forced to try Plan B, which was to somehow push the sheep’s head down a little so I could pull the wire out a bit and get its ears through the gap. I’ve watched a few sheep rescue videos (what can I say, the algorithm has decided I’m interested, keep your comments to yourself) on social media and all I can say is either these people are sheep whisperers in some way, or the sheep in question are professional stunt sheep, because they’re always amazingly calm while being rescued (the sheep that is, although the rescuers seem to be too). I’m clearly not a sheep whisperer because I found myself being repeatedly butted by several kilos of wildly panicking sheep while trying to say soothing things to it and reach the wire without having my fingers broken (perhaps in retrospect I might have been more reassuring to the sheep if I’d thought to take off my sheepskin gloves). Fortunately, the sheep then reverted to Plan A and panicked itself so much it fell over, which twisted its head enough that its ears could get free and it was out of the fence (and, fortunately, back on its feet because a fallen sheep, especially one with a full wet fleece, sometimes can’t get up and that’s as much a sheep emergency as being stuck in the fence). It ran off baaing, leaving nothing but a trace of wool behind and I was able to cycle on to town with the feeling that I’d at least done one tiny thing to make the world a better place, if only for one sheep.

All of which lasted until I was cycling home again, stopped to take the photo of the fence above … and noticed another sheep had got out of the field and was wandering along the road looking lost.

A sheep rescuer’s job is never done.

Close Supervision

All gardening these days is done under the watchful eyes of our garden robin, who arrives in a flurry of wings to make sure I’m not digging up any worms without him (I think it’s a him because apparently robins in gardens usually are more likely to be male) but is usually too fast for me to catch on camera.

The robin might be hoping for worms but I’ve been excavating for more useful things – like potatoes which I swear to god just spontaneously generate themselves in old potato beds because however many times you dig them over, there will always be some – and sometimes quite large ones – ready to sprout in spring. I’ve also been digging out compost from the other compost bay, which unearthed more lost treasure.

I then disappointed the robin by taking myself off to the fruit cage to try and make some sense of the jungle in there. Last year we planted a plum and cherry tree which hopefully will reward us with some fruit next year. The cage hasn’t proved quite as birdproof as we hoped, as evidenced by the rapid disappearance of our redcurrants, but I plugged a few low level gaps and cleared some space for more planting next year.

All of this may not make much difference to the garden’s fruitfulness next year, but was at least 100% better for my own well being than spending any more time scrolling for hopeful news about the US election (the other half has voted and there’s nothing else that we can do now other than wait).

Tomorrow I’ll be at the bike workshop and if nothing else, it will mean a good solid few hours away from news, screens, and speculation. For which relief much thanks.

How are you all keeping sane?

You Said It

The Pepperpots have got themselves a shiny new downstairs bathroom, complete with a fancy toilet with all the bells and whistles (literally, given the amount of beeping it does when you sit down). They’ve been having a few teething troubles with the technology and yesterday I was deputised to be there while the man came to show them how it all worked again. It turns out it had disconnected from its remote (yes, it has a remote control, for ease of use, and we can only thank our lucky stars that it neither forces you to download an app nor scan a QR code before activating the coyly named ‘lady wash’ functionality) and once he’d got that sorted we went through the various buttons again.

Me: How long does it run for if you don’t press stop?
Toilet man: Three minutes
Me: Holy crap
Toilet man:
Me:
Toilet man: Not really sure how to respond to that.

Change of Scene

Saturday saw us properly test the range of the new electric car for the first time, as we set off for a week in Northern Ireland on the ferry. Technically this should have been a doddle as we set off with around 200 miles in the ‘tank’, allegedly, with just over 100 miles of driving to do. But the range anxiety soon kicked in as we motored down Big A Road, eating up our range far faster than our miles traveled, to the point where it was beginning to look like a close run thing. Fortunately, a complete lack of any serious traffic, and my habit of adding in lots of contingency when deciding when we should set off, meant we could slow down with no risk of missing the ferry, and things then got considerably better. Lesson one when driving an electric vehicle – there’s a massive difference in range between doing a steady 60mph, and easing back to around 54mph.

The satnav then did its bit by sending us on an unaccustomed, direct, and even more scenic route than usual down a variety of tiny back roads (and up and down any number of hills – I was extremely grateful _not_ to be cycling it) which meant we got to our destination with plenty of juice to spare. Phew.

I always joke that it’s only the inhabitants of the West of Scotland who can consider a trip to Ireland a sunshine break, but once more the weather has so far been beyond kind. Even Storm Ashley didn’t do more than blow us about a bit. Indeed it gave me a chance to relive one of the great pleasures of childhood half-term trips to the town: watching the waves crash over the sea wall in high weather. I was pleased to note from the number of people risking a drenching on the sea front that this remains a thing.

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Long may it continue.

Happy Puncture Season to All who Celebrate

Technically speaking, puncture season runs from the beginning of January to the end of December (she writes hastily, before the Puncture Fairy hears), but it really gets into its stride from August, when farmers can start cutting their hedges again after the birds are deemed to have stopped nesting in them. So I was congratulating myself, having overtaken a hedge-cutting tractor, on getting half way through October with no actual punctures. Obviously, I didn’t say this out loud – I’m not a complete fool – but I did let the thought enter my head and that, it seems, was hubris enough. The very next morning my back tyre was flat as a pancake and it wasn’t even a slow enough puncture to allow me to nurse it along until a more convenient time for sorting it out.

On the plus side, I’ve recently had enough practice in fixing flat tyres that I was actually able to sort this one out in reasonably short order. I’m still heading down to the weekly bike workshop where I have gradually been promoted from patching tubes to doing basic repairs, including showing some of the guys how to sort out punctures themselves. Coaching one young man through the mysteries of tyre levers, the use of a bucket of water to find the hole (it’s fortunate in a way that the building we work in has a leaky roof, so there’s always a handy bucket), and the creative application of swearing in getting the tyre back on again, I was actually feeling quite good about my bike repair skills. I’ve long thought that what I’ve needed was just a lot more practice, and in the past few weeks, this is exactly what I’ve had. Having removed the shard of metal that had caused his grief, patched the tube, and refitted the tyre, we got his back wheel back on and tightened the nuts while making sure the wheel still ran true and the brakes were still properly aligned to the rims. It was all looking good, until we thought to test turning the pedals. And that’s when I noticed I’d managed to put the wheel in the wrong way round…

More practice is clearly needed. But if you’re reading this, Puncture Fairy, please not on my bike though.