In a Cold Scottish Springtime Garden

April, and I'm thinking about our small kitchen garden, the one we established last year in a couple of raised beds. The beds have been dug over and are waiting to be raked. I've bought seeds - lettuces and salad stuffs of all sorts, radishes, red and white, salsify, kohlrabi, mustard, parsnips. I've planted courgettes indoors - they were hugely successful last summer and for quite a long time we ate courgettes with everything - a friend gave me a pasta sauce recipe consisting mostly of fresh courgettes and creme fraiche and it was wonderful: green and delicate and delicious. The chives are growing, as is the rosemary I established last year. The little blueberry bush has survived the winter. I've bought a white currant bush that I'm hoping to plant this week. But at the moment there seems little point in sowing any outdoor seeds since the ground is just too cold. Instead I planted some lily bulbs, and repotted some chocolate mint (smells just like Mint Chocolates, fabulous!) and a big pot of basil. Can never sow basil without thinking of Isabella and Lorenzo in the story - and in Keats' poem - and the Holman Hunt Picture . Gruesome but wonderful all the same!

Switching off the Lights - A Rant.

Google, please do not sit in your nice centrally heated, brightly lit offices and ask me to switch off my lights for a token hour to save the planet when I have just spent a chilly Scottish winter switching on the central heating only for a scant two hours a day, in spite of working from home, lighting fires (with smokeless fuel, natch) and running about with extra sweaters, Ayrshire blankets etc, because it now costs £429.00 to fill our smallest sized tank with central heating oil in this country. I drive a small, energy efficient car. I live in a listed building which is as insulated as it is possible to be - but of course replacement windows must be sliding sash, and quite right too, otherwise the council will cut up rough. There is no mains gas to the village, and the bottled sort is even more ruinously expensive to run than oil. We close doors, use shutters to keep the heat in, recycle religiously. But hell mend you when you ask me to make empty gestures.
A much better option would be for everyone to agitate for all new houses to be built with solar panels. This is, on the whole, a very sunny country and the new energy efficient houses on the Isle of Gigha - for example - are both cheap to heat, and almost too warm. Yet in this village alone, we have a small estate of new houses, none of which have solar panels as standard. Installing them later is an expensive business, especially for what essayist Slavenka Drakulic calls the already 'ecological poor'.
If developers could be forced to include them from the off, it would make far more difference to the future inhabitants of the houses than tokenism of this sort. But of course that might eat into their already healthy profits. Grrr.

The Mighty Gulf of Corryvreckan - a Scottish Whirlpool

I'm currently listing this dramatic sunset over Corryvreckan for my husband, here, on eBay. In the distance is the notorious 'Gulf of Corryvreckan' or the 'Mighty Gulf' as it is sometimes called - a genuine Scottish whirlpool. You can find some excellent photographs of it here at a website called Hebridean Wild. The name, seemingly, comes from the Gaelic Coirebhreacain which means "cauldron of the speckled seas" or possibly "cauldron of the plaid", the latter name originating with legends of a Scottish goddess who used these turbulent waters for washing her great plaid. You can read more about it on Wikipedia but for many people their first encounter with it comes in that fabulous Powell and Pressburger movie "I Know Where I'm Going' in which it figures at a dramatic high point of the film. It is possible to navigate these waters with care - but you have to know what you are doing. Local knowledge is essential.

Old Scottish linens for the bathroom

Quite often, when I buy a box of old linens at auction, I will find a little pile of Irish linen guest towels at the bottom of the box. Some of them will be well used and rather worn, but just occasionally I'll find some lovely old pieces of bathroom linen with hemstitching, damask patterns and finely hand made crochet edging. I always imagine that they were somebody's pride and joy, eighty or more years ago, perhaps made by a young woman before her wedding, when she was dreaming of setting up house for the first time. Generally, although not always, the crochet is at one end with perhaps the damask and hemstitching continued at the other end. The main fabric of these towels is of the type that I think is known as 'huckaback' in the USA - a nicely textured linen that makes them both useful and beautiful. People sometimes say to me 'but nobody uses these nowadays, do they?' Well, they do. I have a good friend - for instance - with a real flair for interior design. I'm contemplating asking her to do the occasional guest post on this blog. Whenever we visit her lovely old Lancashire house, I notice that she uses these old linen guest towels in her downstairs cloakroom. And I always find myself thinking how beautiful they look, in situ as it were. But I have also known her to use them to line shelves, with the crochet edging visible - particularly if you are displaying old glassware they look wonderful. And like all these old linens, they launder beautifully!

Tulips Tulips Tulips

I love all the spring flowers - but I think that of all flowers I probably love tulips most - and although the verges and parks are currently full of daffodils - a little later than elsewhere in the UK, this being Scotland - the shops are full of big bright bunches of tulips which I find completely irresistable. And soon, the garden will be the same. They are, on the whole, a bargain buy because they look good even when they are slightly past their best. Don't be in too much of a hurry to throw them away. Daffs shrivel and look sad - tulips just open out ever more elegantly, to show the dark heart of each flower. Even their foliage fades to a subtle yellow, and so long as you keep the water fresh, you can get a week or more out of a large and lovely bunch of them. I have an old Dutch Delft tulip holder - a rectangular blue and white container with a removable top, with holes in it, into which you can slot individual tulips - although obviously it looks more impressive with the large old fashioned parrot tulips - the kind that were once sold for a king's ransome a few hundred years ago. Once the bigger, brighter garden tulips are in bloom, I'll add a photograph of it to this blog.

More Naive Art - Scottish Golf - Turnberry

More delightful Scottish 'naive' art from Alan Lees - this time with a golfing theme. These are pictures of Turnberry golf course, with the Turnberry lighthouse in the background. The picture on the left has Ailsa Craig in the background as well, and the kind of stunningly vivid light which is not unknown in the West of Scotland. The picture on the right is a windy day in spring. The gorse is in full vivid bloom, and one or two players have lost their balls among the spikes! An umbrella has been blown inside out and the players are struggling in a stiff breeze from the sea - all too common in this part of the world. I love these brilliantly evocative pictures - there's a lovely simplicity about them, but the memories they evoke, the atmosphere they create is all too true - and in this instance undeniably cheerful - art which may well remind you of happy days, and none the worse for that. Go to The Scottish Home on eBay to see more of Alan's pictures.

Happy Easter from Scotland!

And here's an Easter photograph to go with the wishes. The plate - one of my all time favourite possessions - belonged to my dear late mother, who gave it to me years ago. She had bought it at auction, along with other items, and it was always the thing I coveted most, along with a pair of very old and comfortable oak framed chairs, which now sit in my living room. It looks like Maling, probably is Maling, though it has no backstamp to prove the point. The blue and white jug, the wee bird, and the bowl that you can just glimpse on the right, are all modern slipware, made in the 1980s by a superb Scottish potter called Jason Shackleton. I adored his work and still do, although I don't think he continued making this wonderful slipware, perhaps because not everyone appreciated it with quite my passion about it! We have a number of pieces - these sit on an eighteenth century Scottish dresser, such as Robert Burns might have possessed. We bought this one at auction, in terrible condition. It had obviously spent many years in a shed, and Alan did a magnificent restoration job on it. It is wonderful storage space, swallowing almost anything you might like to put in it. Our other, much older dresser, the oak press cupboard mentioned elsewhere on this blog, is where the rest of the modern slipware sits, in the kitchen. It includes this fabulously monstrous teapot, also by Jason Shackleton, which has, on occasions, been pressed into service, during large family gatherings. Filled, it is almost too heavy to lift. But it is a beautiful, beautiful item and one which I treasure.

New Scottish Art - A Day at the Shore

Alan's painting seems to go from strength to strength at the moment. The painting above (acrylics on canvas board - 20 inches by 16) is one of my all time favourites. It's titled 'A Day at the Shore'. A young woman in a long red dress and sunhat, walks along the sand of what is very obviously a West of Scotland beach. She is pushing one of those big, old fashioned, comfortable prams with one hand, while with the other, she holds the hand of a toddler, a little lad in blue, who is carrying his bucket and spade. In the background you can just make out a misty Ailsa Craig, while a paddler steamer motors along on its way 'doon the watter.'

I don't know why I like this one so much, except that there seems to be something wonderfully evocative and atmospheric about it. The composition is lovely - the eye goes straight to mother and child, but then picks up on the paddle steamer - quite detailed - and drifts across to the distant Craig. There is something so typically West of Scotland about this day - warm but not sultry - always a little breeze in the Clyde. And the little boy with his bucket and spade has, I think, had his attention caught by the paddle steamer. (As anyone who has seen the Waverley pass by knows, they are impossible to ignore - just beautiful vessels.)

The painting is currently for sale in our eBay shop - but when it sells, as I'm sure it will, I'll be very sorry to see it go. He'll just have to do me another one like it!

Alan has been fairly desperate to get away from woodcarving for a little while now. It's not that he doesn't enjoy it, and - as you can see if you visit his site - he is very good at it. But he was constantly being asked to make ever larger carvings for ever lower prices, and each time it seemed to effect his health adversely - carving on this scale is definitely a young man's game. He had always sketched - most of his carvings began life as a series of sketches - and painted, but he himself was aware that his paintings were too stilted and photographic. As a sculptor, a certain meticulous quality was in them. I've been bending his ear for ages to try to get him to free his imagination, but it was when he began to paint in acrylics that things started to go right for him. What he was aiming for, I suppose, was that sense of freedom that he managed to encompass when he was doodling and sketching for a carving - the drawings he produced then were lovely. Acrylics demanded a certain speed. He couldn't possibly hang about! And at the same time he began painting not what he saw but what he felt. There is a certain narrative in these pictures - but there is an evocative quality about them - sometimes nostalgic and timeless, as with this one - but sometimes right up to the minute.

Now that he has begun, he has almost more ideas than he can cope with - so watch this space!

Edinburgh - The Royal Yacht Britannia

We're just back from a weekend in Edinburgh which involved a number of touristy things, The Royal Yacht Britannia, Holyrood Palace, The Queens Gallery, and a handful of good pubs.
Britannia is beautiful, particularly the engines (I have a really soft spot for these stunning elderly Clyde built engines!) How could they ever have thought of scuttling her? The tour is well done and informative and because it's still early in the season we had plenty of time and space to look around. You'll find all kinds of useful information on the link above, but I have a couple of personal observations - one is to wonder why on earth, as a Clyde built vessel, she isn't berthed on the Clyde? And the other interesting observation is the relative lack of opulence aboard her. I mean there are some pretty opulent pieces of table silver, usually of some historical significance (they always make me think of that quote from Dickens, I forget which novel, where the silver is assumed to be saying 'wouldn't you like to melt me down?') But the interiors are relatively simple. No gold bath taps here. And all, so they say, at the Queen's behest. No fuss. It is a very restrained interior, much like (one assumes) Her Majesty. The other wonderful place is the vast laundry. All those uniforms, all that linen to be laundered every single day. They never closed. And it still smells of soap powder.
More about Holyrood in another post.

Frost Flowers

These were taken in our conservatory the other morning - and a very cold night it had been too. If I had been just a little earlier, I would have captured these amazing frost flowers before the windows misted over. The insulation worked well - the conservatory was quite warm and the insides of the windows were totally clear - but you could see the most amazing natural forms covering the glass on the outside - like seaweed or ferns perhaps, more than flowers. I remember these beautiful shapes all too clearly from my early childhood. My parents used to say that 'Jack Frost' had been and breathed on the windows in the night, and I vividly remember running my fingers over the glass to melt the patterns. But back then, the frost flowers were on the insides of all our windows - since central heating was unheard of for all but the wealthy few. The water in the glass beside your bed was known to freeze over in the night as well. However did we survive, I wonder?

Steam and Sail on the Clyde and a Wee Observation about the Weather.

Snow is forecast here for this afternoon and tomorrow. Certainly it's cold, and we've had the occasional unpleasant hail shower, but so far the snow has only amounted to a few flakes. And as I type this, the sun is shining. Every single year at this time, we have a wee media frenzy to do with the weather. What happens is this. In February we generally have a warmish spell. The wind blows and the smell of spring is in the air. The snowdrops are in full bloom, the trees are in bud, the very earliest of the blossom, essentially 'winter flowering' is on the trees, and a few timid daffodils are beginning to show yellow blooms instead of green spikes. You may even manage to do a bit of gardening without getting trussed up in warm coat, hat and gloves. At this point there will be a sudden outbreak of articles in the press about Global Warming and the ridiculously early spring and how we are all about to go to hell in a handcart. A couple of weeks later the temperatures will fall again, quite dramatically, and we will be well and truly back in winter. A meteorologist will be trotted out on the television to discuss it. Boringly (from the interviewer's angle) he or she will point out that all this is completely normal, par for the course, all part of a typical Scottish winter weather pattern, and so on, but nobody will really listen.

I actually heard an interviewer asking a seismologist last week if the (quite large) English earthquake had been caused by climate change. No, he explained, patiently, although you could hear his inward sigh. No, that's on the surface of the earth. This is deep inside. Sometimes the media chatter (to which I suppose I am contributing here and now) is so loud that nobody ever stops to listen.

Here, meanwhile, is another picture, this time of Steam and Sail on the Clyde - one for those who loved Para Handy, and his Puffer, The Vital Spark, I think!

Gallus

Now there's a good Glasgow word for you - though it's virtually untranslatable. It means daring, mischievous, cocky, self confident, iconoclastic, all of the above, and more. Often coupled with 'dead' as a suitable intensifier. A story to illustrate: when my son was first living in Glasgow, he and a friend were walking home late one night. They met a man coming the other way, slightly the worse (or better) for drink. He brandished a couple of broken bottles at them and as they recoiled in horror he grinned and said 'Only joking!' and went on his way. That's gallus. In fact it's probably dead gallus.
I've been writing a piece about Glasgow, and the word has been much in my mind. But I was thinking about it even more today, when I posted what I thought was a faintly humorous observation about something on a professional website, to be met with a series of what can only be described as spiky responses. And it struck me that I have been living in Scotland for so long (we moved up here when I was twelve - it's my country, my home) that I now take ironic self deprecation coupled with a certain gallus sense of mischief completely for granted. It never occurred to me that somebody might actually take me seriously. The Scots I know and love regularly puncture pomposity with a few well chosen words. I'm used to it. It's a baseline for all interactions. But I had forgotten that not everyone understands or approves and I do sometimes wonder if this isn't one more symptom of the chasm which seems to be slowly but surely opening between our countries.

Painting Scotland

My husband, Alan Lees, who has spent many years working as a woodcarver and sculptor, is doing more and more paintings these days - although he's working on some carved 'waymarkers' for a woodland walk at Straiton in South Ayrshire, even as I type this. However, it's hard and dirty work, with - as usual for craftsmen and women of all kinds - poor remuneration for the effort put in, never mind the actual artistic skills involved. Increasingly then, he is turning to paintings, and increasingly he's working in acrylics, liking the speed and vivid, 'primitive' colours. The pictures too have a primitive, folk art quality about them, and other people seem to like them too. One of his recent feedbacks, in our online shop, The Scottish Home says that he will be 'famous' one day. We certainly hope so! He's quite famous already for his carvings - people are forever coming up to him and shaking his hand when they find out what he does - but I think at the moment, he would rather be painting, and the vivid, graphic and very Scottish quality of some of these makes them ideal as interior design pieces, as well as for people who may want to be reminded of Scotland - industrial Glasgow, as well as the landscapes of the west.

A Burns Supper an Amazing Damask and a Spooky Observation

A few weeks ago, we hosted a Burns Supper for a group of sixteen friends. The table took a bit of time and trouble to get right - what with candles, Burns napkins (had to scour Glasgow for those - couldn't find any in Ayrshire, though doubtless there were some, just not where I was looking!) tartan ribbons for the whisky bottles and heather from the garden - there is always heather of some sort in bloom in the garden even in February. I used one of the Scottish Home's tablecloths, an enormous banqueting cloth which has been sitting in my 'stock cupboard' for a couple of years, and which I have not yet brought myself to sell, partly because I always suspected it would come in handy one day. It is a lovely, lovely old damask, with a stunning design of game birds, stags and so on woven into it, and I reckon it probably came from a hunting lodge somewhere, and was used for those mammoth dinners that people would once have had after a day out on the hills. It is truly enormous - you can see just how big, from the picture on the left: 12 feet long by just under 8 feet wide. Unfortunately it does have a little damage, mostly along the edges, one or two worn places, and a few very small cuts, but nothing that anybody noticed while it was in use.
We provided the venue, the cock a leekie soup (traditional, with prunes) home made oat bread, potatoes and cheese. The rest of the meal was brought by assorted friends, including haggis, home made steak pie, and three spectacular trifles, all different. As we sat there over coffee, there was a sudden power cut, but since we had a great many candles already lit, nobody much cared. There is a sense in which this old house comes to life when the electricity goes off. I always feel it, and it seemed peculiarly powerful that night. When our guests had left, I pottered about by candlelight, gathering up glasses and dishes. I paused in the sitting room, listening - and as always, felt that there are people living here still who prefer candlelight. The next day, I wrote a poem about it.

Arran from Maidens Bay

Alan titled this recent picture 'Digging for Worms' and it reminds me of doing just that, years ago, when our son was a wee boy, and we spent a happy but hectic morning on the beach at Ardminish, on the Isle of Gigha, digging for worms in the sand to use as bait for fishing. Not, mind you, that they ever caught very much, he and his dad. My own father was a more successful fisherman and used to take his beloved grandson to local trout lochs, with the permission of various owners (my Polish dad used to be able to charm the birds out of the trees, as the saying goes, so getting permission to fish was a piece of cake. Or trout. ) But whenever Alan and our son went sea fishing they very seldom caught anything. They did enjoy the process. And digging for worms was peculiarly satisfying, though not - I suspect - for the worms. But most of them escaped as well. And at least our son liked to eat the fish that he did manage to catch - usually barbecued with herbs and lemon and black pepper.

Today feels like the first day of spring, although it is still January - but for once the rain has stopped, the sun came out (briefly) and the hedgerows seemed to be suddenly full of snowdrops. The colours in the picture above - although they look exaggerated - are, as anyone who has visited the West of Scotland will know - absolutely true to some days and times. Lovely!

New Scottish Artworks Available Online

Here at The Scottish Home we have decided to take the plunge and devote a section of our online shop to Alan's artworks. We've tried selling them this way with varying degrees of success but feel that we've never been wholehearted enough about it before. And besides, he's working in a new and interesting way. For the last six months or so, he has been painting in oils and acrylics rather more than he has been woodcarving - although he hasn't abandoned the carving altogether and is still available for commissions, here. He has worked his way through horses and cattle, tackled the odd illustration for Tam O' Shanter, painted a selection of boats and is now obsessively painting scenes from Clydeside and Glasgow - semi-industrial scenes, with various 'naive' figures going about their business. Of everything he has done, I find I like these pictures very much - there is a sort of primitive, folk art quality about them which seems quite original to me - most commercial Scottish art these days tackles a Scottish rural landscape, particularly that of the highlands and islands. But these are urban, full of life and interest and charm (like the picture of a football match in the snow above) and I suspect they might appeal to a worldwide audience, particularly of people with a Scottish ancestry - and there are a great many of them about!

The prices, at the moment, are exceedingly reasonable, mainly because we are aiming to build a market so have a look at them and let us know what you think.

Still January, Still Raining, Still Cold

But two signs of hope this morning. As we lay in bed, my husband and I, wondering which one of us would get up and make the tea - actually, I'm fibbing, because it is always him, but just very occasionally on Sundays I do it instead - we heard the unmistakable cadence of birdsong from the garden. It was thin and half hearted and it didn't go on for very long, but it is still a sign that spring is on the way. Yesterday, on my way to town, I drove past a few little drifts of snowdrops at the side of the road.
On the other hand, real snow without the drops is forecast for tomorrow, and I am writing this with a fan heater blowing on my feet, but my hands are still freezing. This is mostly because those of us who live in old houses and attempt to make a living from the creative industries can barely afford to heat our homes in the UK at the moment.
We have double glazing where we can. We could do with replacing the upstairs windows, with double glazed units, but since this is a listed building, they would have to be sliding sash windows and we can't afford them. Downstairs we have lovely old shutters, which we use as soon as night falls, and they are a godsend. We have put secondary glazing over the upstairs windows, but it is never as efficient.
We have insulated our loft. Cavity wall insulation is not an option, since our immensely thick stone walls do not have cavities. There is no gas in the village. We once lived with a multi fuel boiler for several years, but it had to be fed constantly, and the house still felt cold. Now we heat the place with a mixture of oil central heating, oil radiators run on electricity, a hugely efficient multi fuel burner in the living room, which we mostly feed with smokeless fuel - and the odd fan heater to keep the workers' toes from freezing off. The oil is so pricey that we can only afford to run the heating for a few hours morning and evening, and even then the bills are appalling. I scatter vintage blankets about the house and use them. I wear layers. I wear woolly socks. And some days I am still cold.
We are hardly souls in Scotland.
On New Year's Eve, we visited some friends in the village, who are living in a lovely new build house. It looks very like one of the old cottages, it is quite small, and exceedingly well insulated. All those of us who live in the more 'historic' properties were, within minutes, fanning ourselves and saying things like 'My God it's so hot!' Body temperatures adjust. But sometimes it does cross my mind that a nice, small, insulated city flat might be the answer...

January in Scotland

Not a good time of year, on the whole. Also, I've been neglecting this blog, in favour of wordarts because I've decided to post a whole novel on there, a bit at a time. It's called The Corncrake, and I've only got as far as posting Chapter 4 (although the whole book is written). It's something of a Hebridean homage to Wuthering Heights so if you like that novel and/or if you love Scotland, you might enjoy it. I'm already working on something quite new, which I hope will be sent out by my agent in the usual way. But, for reasons too complicated to go into here, involving extensive rewrites, she can't really send this one out. I reckon it's a good commercial tale, and I've decided to post it and see what happens. But it will take a long time to get through it - midsummer by my reckoning! When, hopefully, the rain will have stopped.
Early in December a friend told us that the autumn had been the dryest for thirty years, here in Ayrshire. Since by that time the fields around the village were a sodden mess, he got fairly short shrift, while stoutly maintaining what his rain gauge was telling him. He may have been right, but the statistics were only an indication of the thankless task of judging the weather here in Scotland, because it hardly seems to have stopped raining since he first mentioned it. Predicting droughts from dry spells lasting a few weeks is impossible in this country. Right now, it is dark, wet and windy. In between times, it is cold. You would not want to be here.
Meanwhile, I have decided to broaden out the scope of this blog a bit, and post the odd reflective piece about what is going on in Scotland just now - socially and politically, as well as all the nice stuff about houses, gardens and antiques - in fact a little more about what it means to live and work in Scotland in the early years of the twenty first century.

Memory Foam Mattress - an update

Those of you who follow this blog from month to month may be wondering how I am getting on with my loathed memory foam mattress. Not very well is the answer. I am now beginning to wonder if it wasn't all a plot on the part of my insomniac husband to inflict the same problem on myself, except that he's far too nice to do that to me. But sleeplessness induces paranoia you know. If pushed, I would say that I have 'got used to it' to some extent. That is to say that the smell has disappeared, and I also manage to fall asleep on it. But this is because I delay going to bed until exhaustion really sets in, and then read for half an hour or so. So I fall asleep at one or one thirty ....and then I wake up again. You know that feeling when you look at the clock, hoping and praying it will be morning, only to find it is three thirty, or four at the latest? At that point I will be (a) so hot that I feel as if the whole bed is going into meltdown and me with it (b) utterly uncomfortable with pains in various joints and (c) stuck. I now think that whether or not you can get on with these mattresses depends very much on the kind of sleeper you are. Some people move around more than others. My husband lies like a stone. I fidget. But you can't toss and turn with any ease on memory foam so you don't fidget, you struggle. It's like lying on very firm mud. It also seems to have the same effect on my lovely duck down pillows, so that they start to feel as though all the individual feathers have solidified. So I toss and turn (with extreme difficulty) and alternate between extremes of heat (under the duvet) and cold (outside the duvet). In the morning, Alan's side of the bed looks as neat as when he got into it. Mine, by contrast, looks like that scene in the M R James ghost story 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You' - you know - the horribly crumpled bedclothes in the spare bed. My sister in law, well warned by me in advance, tells me that they have just bought a new sprung mattress with a thin layer of memory foam on the top. She tells me it is extremely comfortable. This does not make me feel any better. I need sleep. I need to knit up my ravelled sleeve of care a bit. Dear God, I need a new bed.

Dry Rot - The Joys of Owning Old Property

Apologies for long silence on this blog. We have had dry rot. Invasion of the body snatchers. The curse of old houses everywhere. Dry rot was a late introduction to Britain and came in on imported timber in, I believe, the nineteenth century. If I could find the grave of the man who first imported it, I would dig him up and kill him all over again.
The spores lurk in the structure till conditions are just right. Then they germinate, and set off in search of water, through whatever happens to be in their way, stone walls in this case. When they find wood, they suck it dry (much like a Doctor Who or Star Trek alien) and continue on their merry way in search of more. The big 200 year old oak lintel over one of our windows was badly infected and had to come out. One end was like cheese. Unfortunately, the other end was rock solid and took forever to remove. The whole corner of the downstairs study had to be opened up, the infected wood removed - the stuff looks and smells alien as well as causing so much damage - and the walls treated with fungicide (and a blow torch, just to make sure!)
The only saving grace was that the chemicals are much less noxious than they once were and don't smell at all. Was this introduced for the benefit of humans? Not on your life. It was because dry rot treatments were adversely affecting bats. Call me old fashioned but I'd put human health before bats any day, but hey, what do I know?
We thought for a while that we would also have to dismantle our son's room - only just redecorated - but because ours is a very old cottage, with a great deal of space inside the walls, it wasn't necessary.
I think if I were starting all over again with this house (heaven forbid) I would open the whole thing out, taking much of it right back to its original stonework, which is beautiful. It would make a much bigger house, and there would be nowhere for the dry rot to hide. But since we have neither the time nor the money to do that, we'll just have to work with what we have. Even as I write this, my husband is starting to attempt to rebuild that corner of the room, and the window. And when he's finished what will amount to three week's intensive work, the room will look pretty much as it did before. Soul destroying or what?

Afternoon Tea

Had the pleasure of a real old fashioned 'afternoon tea' last weekend, courtesy of some friends who live in an old farmhouse. The home baking was fabulous - scones, several sorts of cake, buns, home made jam, clotted cream, millions of mouthwatering calories heaped on one long damask tablecloth! (and a perfect use for these tablecloths, I might add.) Among the offerings, all served with pots of good leaf tea, was a chocolate cake so rich and dark and dense and gooey that somebody aptly described it as a nuclear reactor among chocolate cakes. Not that anybody could manage more than a thin slice. This lead to speculation about a possible 'chocolate cake' diet - one slice of said cake for breakfast, with a couple of indigestion tablets for good measure, and you wouldn't want to eat anything else at all for the rest of the day. Worth it though. Definitely worth it.
The other revelation was to do with the classic British 'cream tea' which is normally a combination of home made scones, good jam and clotted cream. There are regional arguments as to which goes on first, cream or jam, but it does rather depend upon the consistency of the cream, which can vary from very thick and buttery, to slightly softer, depending upon where y0u acquire it. Either way, it's a delicious dish, but another one that does rather take the edge off any desire to eat for many hours afterwards. As well as the traditional scones, however, our friends also served small, fluffy, white rolls (freshly home baked, naturally, with just that faint tang of yeast that seems to be disappointingly absent from bought bread). A 'cream tea' on a bread roll instead ofa scone is a revelation. Light as a feather, not remotely sweet and sickly. It should have a name all its own but I can't think of one at the moment.
Afternoon tea seems to be making a bit of a comeback here in the UK: a very civilized meal although , unlike our more robust Victorian and Edwardian forebears, most of us can't really manage to eat dinner or indeed anything else, for the rest of the day!

A Scottish Cottage Wall

A few weeks ago we stripped all the plaster off one of the walls in our old cottage sitting room. This was a wall which had been slightly damp for years and years, and every possible cure had been tried, inside and out, on roof, chimney, walls. Eventually our friendly builder intimated that the plaster itself had turned 'sour' and the only cure was to strip the whole thing off, with the possibility of adding a false wall, with a space behind to allow air to circulate. In the event, the stonework behind the plaster (which was indeed very sour) was so beautiful that we decided to point it up and leave it. It became clear, moreover, that when the cottage was built (some time between 1808 and 1811) it was never intended that these walls should be plastered at all - hence the problems on this, the chimney wall. What really fascinated us though, was the sight of the 200 year old lintel stone, which had once sat on top of an enormous old fireplace - you can see it in the picture, with a layer of ancient soot along the edge. This would have been the kind of fireplace where all the cooking went on, possibly, back then, with an old fashioned metal 'swee' to swing the pans in and out, over the flames. High in the wall to the left is a very definite space - either for a lamp, or a candle, or just possibly for keeping the salt dry. We're not sure - but a candle looks very nice sitting in it!
The other surprise is just what a change it makes to the room - opening it out somehow, and making it, possibly the darkest room in the house, seem much lighter and altogether warmer. The stonework will, I hope, look even nicer at Christmas time, when I get going with the holly and ivy!

Scallops

Went out for a very posh lunch yesterday. My main course was salmon with 'scallop' which turned out to be just that: a single (albeit delicious) scallop, used as a garnish. And no wonder. Commercially, they cost a fortune.
Which took me (inevitably) back to Gigha, earlier this summer. We were given a large bag of cleaned scallops by a fisherman friend. We took them to our self catering cottage, and Alan cooked them, flash frying them in a little olive oil and pressed garlic. We ate them at the picnic table outside the cottage, looking down into the bay, at the turquoise blue waters from which they had been dredged. We divided them between five of us, one each, and another, and another, until they were all gone. Fortunately the teens in our party didn't like the look of them. We didn't press the point. We must have had about seven or eight each. They were completely delicious, tender, and with a real tang of the sea about them - that faintly astringent taste of really fresh shellfish from clean salty waters....
Afterwards it struck me that all my most memorable meals seem to have been fishy: sardines with salty potatoes and spicy sauce in a small restaurant in Candelaria on Tenerife, mussels in Bruges, and again, this year, in the south of France, fresh crab on Gigha, and now scallops from the same place. But the scallops were most definitely the winner.

I Hate My Memory Foam Mattress

A few weeks ago, we finally bit the bullet and got rid of our much-too-old mattress, replacing it with a brand new 'memory foam' mattress - hyped to the eyeballs, Nasa technology and all that.
If you google 'memory foam' in an effort to research your purchase beforehand you will find lots of positive comments, most of them put there by the manufacturers. In the interests of fairness, I have to report that my husband loves it. He lies very still, and he has arthritis. He thinks it is wonderful. I, on the other hand, toss and turn. And I cannot tell you how much I hate, loathe and detest it. It is like sleeping on warm quicksand. It sucks you in. It moulds itself to your body, right enough, but when you move, or try to turn over (difficult, on this awful stuff) you find residual lumps and bumps in your new position. It is incredibly hot. And it stinks. In fact this disgusting smell was seemingly why Nasa didn't use it on the space shuttle for which it was originally intended. They tell me the stench fades with time, but two weeks have gone by, and in spite of frequent airings, it's still there. Fly tipping is beginning to seem like an attractive option, but hey, this ghastly thing cost a lot of money. This wasn't the cheapo option. If you are considering one of these, try before you buy, and I don't mean a three minute 'test' in the shop. You have been warned.

Swallows

Have just spent the last fifteen minutes watching an aerial ballet of a dozen or more swallows, catching small insects, above our garden. It was a dazzling display of skill, making the Red Arrows look like rank amateurs. Often you thought they would collide - air misses all over the place - but they didn't. Sometimes it seemed as though they were almost skimming my head, deliberately, and joyfully, just to demonstrate their own extraordinary deftness. Meanwhile, the multitude of sparrows that throng our hedges at this time of year (hedges = sparrow high rises. Too many people grub them up these days. Sad, sad.) could only look on with what seemed like avian envy!

The Weather

Everyone up here has been complaining about the wild inaccuracy of our official weather forecasts this year. I know it's a thankless task, predicting the weather in the UK, but this summer there have been complaints on two 'fronts' so to speak!
Firstly, our London centred media keep banging on about the truly awful summer (and it has been and continues to be appalling in parts of the UK) that we have had, as usual lumping the entire country into one sweeping assessment. This can't be doing our Scottish tourist industry much good especially since here, we have had reasonable weather - reasonable for the West of Scotland anyway - our usual mix of sunshine, rather frequent showers, some lovely days, some downpour days, and - with a couple of chilly exceptions - quite a bit of warm weather. Condition normal, in other words. Not a brilliant summer, and absolutely no sign of the drought that was confidently predicted by those same knowledgable media types (what price all those 'plan your drought friendly garden' articles now?) but not the worst I have seen either. And I believe that some of the Scottish isles have had lots of wonderful sunny weather - which never gets reported at all.
The second complaint though has been about a frustrating day to day inaccuracy. You look at the TV weather forecast for the next day, plan accordingly, and then find that - in Scotland at least - none of what has been predicted bears any relation to what happens in reality. Worse, even their real time forecasts can be wrong. I have often watched a television weather forecast, which is confidently telling me that it is pouring with rain outside, while in reality the sun is shining fiercely from a blue sky. Strong winds are forecast and don't arrive. Sometimes too there is a complete discrepancy between the forecasts on different TV channels. On the whole, the trend seems to be to predict much worse weather, here in the Scotland at any rate, than we are actually experiencing on the ground. All of which leads people to wonder if there is some conspiracy afoot to deter tourists from heading north. Which can't possibly be true. But why are they hedging their bets so much?
One more little thought.
The terrible flooding will no doubt be labelled as 'climate change' related. Of course it could have nothing whatsoever to do with greedy developers increasingly building on the flood plains of rivers, and planners allowing them to do it. Could it?

A Quartet of Old British Teddy Bears

Have spent most of the afternoon gently cleaning up a quartet of very old British bears, with a view to listing them on eBay, some time in July. To tell the truth, I quite often buy them and then find myself hanging onto them for a while, like rescue dogs in foster homes, getting to know them better. Sentimental, I know, but there you go. The one on the left - in good condition, though he does have a little trouble with his neck - is probably an old Chiltern. He has a little sewn in label at the back, which only says Made In England, but he is very like my own, elderly Mr Tubby Bear (who I would never ever dream of selling) and he (ie my own bear) is definitely a Chiltern Hugmee - with typically grumpy good looks. The bear in the picture looks as if he once had a solid nose, which has fallen off. His mohair is excellent, thick, and in good condition. When I was cleaning him, I turned him over, and he gave a little grunt, so his growler is working - sporadically. None of the others have labels of any sort and I've spent time with reference books, considering what they might be. The two in the middle could be old Chad Valley teds - they have that look, particularly the sweet faces and the rexine pads. The big bear on the right is difficult, because he is missing an ear, his nose is replacement felt, and so are his pads. A tiny bit of archaeology, at the side of one of the felt pads, reveals what looks like a knitted pad beneath - but there could be something below that. His head with its broad benign forehead, and low set eyes, looks like a Merrythought, as do his chubby legs and well shaped ankles - but - he has a very definite hump on his back, which I didn't think Merrythought bears had! It can be really hard to identify old bears, particularly when certain recognisable features are missing or have been replaced. Quite often I'll list them on eBay with some question marks, and people will email me with information about them.
If they are very grubby clean them gently with a soft cloth with foam from the top of a mild soap solution - you should never soak old bears. Then I wipe them with a clean damp cloth and dry them with a hair dryer and a very soft clothes brush. A bear collector tells me that she sometimes gives them a little final spray with a weak solution of fabric conditioner before drying, and I've done this on long haired bears, with great success. If a bear is very dirty, you may have to repeat this process a few times - it can be very effective.

Old Roses

I've been neglecting The Scottish Home for a while, partly because I've been away in France, and partly because I've been too busy with various writing projects. Now I'm in the process of getting my eBay shop up and running again and plan to add a few textile articles to this blog - but meanwhile, the roses in the garden are at their very best. I love roses, though I must say I'm not the world's best at looking after them, don't use chemicals on them at all, but tend to feed them and let them get on with it. Which is another reason why I grow nice, strong, old roses! Some of the best roses I have ever seen can be found at Holker Hall near Cartmel in the North of England, which was where I got the idea of growing large Himalayan roses through trees. The simple flower illustrated is from a bush called Rosa Richardii, or the Crusader Rose, also known as the Holy Rose of Abyssinia, one of the oldest roses in the world, with a fascinating history. I bought it years ago from the wonderful David Austin Roses. It forms a low, dense bush, like a wild rose, and although it doesn't repeat flower, it does remain in bloom over quite a long period. Every so often I grow impatient and hack it back a bit, but it always comes again - and like the historian I am, I appreciate it as much for its history as for its unique beauty!

Apple Blossom, May Blossom and Golden Trees

We have a very old apple tree at the bottom of our garden. It is now on a two year cycle - perhaps because of its advanced age, it paces itself, and only fruits every second year - in between we get the odd apple, but that's all. This year, I'm happy to relate, is definitely an apple year. Usually our tree is very cautious - only bursting into bloom when the much more impulsive ornamental cherries are long gone. But we have had a very mild and sunny spring, and the apple tree is full of the most beautiful blossom. At the same time the big hawthorn or may tree at the bottom of the garden is just blossoming, so the whole place smells fabulous. This blossom is the source of the old saying 'Ne'er cast a clout till may be out' which means don't take off your winter woollies till the may is blossoming, and not, as people sometimes think, before the end of May. So if it's a warm spring you can cast a few clouts a month earlier!

Meanwhile, the tree at the top is growing a few hundred yards from here. When the leaves are new, it looks golden - and always reminds me of those Mallorn trees which Tolkien wrote about! I always found that bit of the Lord of the Rings incredibly sad - the fact that once the elves were longer on Middle Earth, the magic of those trees would fade and die. Celts loved trees, and sometimes worshipped them - or the spirits which inhabited them. Anyone with a knowledge of Celtic history will realise how much of his inspiration for all things elvish Tolkien took from the Celts. I have no idea, incidentally, what variety the apples are. They are what are known in the UK as 'cooking apples' ie quite large, greenish apples, which are good in pies and puddings. But they aren't Bramleys, which are the most common cooking apples to be found in our supermarkets. These are a bit smaller, and much sweeter than Bramleys. When the autumn sun gets on them, the skins have a golden tint. The flesh cooks wonderfully - at once juicy, sweet, fluffy - and has the advantage that you hardly need to add any sugar at all!

Grapes in Carrick

Some varieties of grape vine do rather well in Ayrshire. We grow one under glass, in our cottage garden, but not fully indoors, and the root is outside. Frosts don't seem to do it any harm. It is an old vine, which originally came from a cutting from an even older vine which grew in the garden of a big house in Maybole. Artist Gordon Cockburn who has just moved into the flat above his art gallery in Maybole High Street tells me that there is an old vine in his garden too. Wouldn't it be interesting if some of these grapes date from the years when Maybole was home to the town houses of the old Scottish Kennedy family?

I have no idea of the variety, but it gives many bunches of sweet black seeded grapes, which if I can be bothered to prune the fruit out, grow very large and juicy. Usually there are far more than we can eat. One year somebody made wine from them and gave us a few bottles. More often, we eat what we can, give some away, and leave the rest for the blackbirds who become adept at flying up into the glass roofed 'arbour' where the vine grows, snatching a grape, and flying away to eat it in peace.

Of course at this time of year our vine is only just coming into green leaf. At Culzean, the National Trust for Scotland has restored the lovely old glass houses in the walled garden - and the gardeners have planted many interesting old varieties of grapes in there. The photograph was taken a week ago. The notice reads

Buckland Sweetwater.

Bunches - very large shouldered, ripen early.

Berries - large, round, thin-skinned, golden or amber.

Flesh - melting, juicy, and richly flavoured.

And if that doesn't make your mouth water, nothing will!

More Pictures of Culzean

Looking utterly beautiful at this time of year - the gardens of Culzean Castle, here in Ayrshire. It's a busy place at the weekends, but go early, on a week day if you can, and you can imagine that the whole place belongs to you. We skived off work the other day - myself, and my husband, and wandered through the gardens to admire rhodies, and camellias and magnolias in full bloom. Much is being made of how early spring has come to the UK this year, but it doesn't seem that early to me, here in South West Scotland - a week or two perhaps. We often have mild springs, and although scaremongering journalists are trying to tell us that the daffodils should still be in bloom just now, there is an old English nursery rhyme which goes 'March brings breezes, loud and shrill, stirs the dancing daffodil' while it's April that 'brings the primrose sweet, scatters daisies at our feet.' OK, so the fleecy lambs have been here for some time, but then early lambing is pretty much commonplace! So I don't think the spring has come unnaturally early. In fact there has been no sign of our swallows and house martins yet, and I'm beginning to wonder what has become of them - you usually see a few of them some time in April! Meanwhile, we are also being told that bumblebees are under threat - and so they are in parts of the UK. But we have a bumblebees' nest somewhere in the garden and they seem to be everywhere at the moment: huge, furry, noisy and beautiful. We seem to be on constant bumblebee watch, rescuing them from our conservatory - my husband had to close his workshop door because he was spending so much time assisting panic stricken bees.

Magnolias at Culzean Castle

Culzean Castle, the National Trust's top attraction in Scotland, has a fine display of Magnolias and Camellias at this time of year - although it is always a bit hit and miss as to whether the late frosts will turn the flowers brown before you can get there to admire them! This has been a wonderfully mild spring. I refuse to moan about global warming in this respect, since we so often have these lovely, early, mild springs, in the West of Scotland, but they can just as often be interrupted by sudden and unexpected frosts. The good thing about early sunshine is that it seems to prolong the summer so effectively.
Culzean, one of the houses of the Kennedy family, and a very beautiful one at that, is pronounced 'Cullane'. You often find this 'z' pronounced as a 'y' or some variation of it, in Scottish names. (eg Menzies). It's because the original letter wasn't a 'z' at all, but an old, now obsolete letter like a 'z' with a long tail, known as yog, and pronounced as a 'y'. Not a lot of people know that.....

The Before and After Bathroom

So here it was, left, our cottage bathroom, about fourteen months ago, and there it is now.

And yes, that is the lavatory that you can see perched in the middle of our much loved Victorian cast iron bath, in the 'before' picture. It even has ball and claw feet - the bath, I mean, and not the loo. Bathroom renovations are horrendous to live with and this one involved moving all kinds of plumbing about, rescuing some rather nice vintage Laura Ashley tiles, that we didn't want to lose, and replacing our tired old flooring with ceramic tiles. The Edwardian sink had a crack in it, which became terminal as soon as it was moved - but we found a reasonably priced (and suitably old fashioned) replacement from a company called Screwfix.The sink taps too came from Screwfix, and cost so little that I couldn't believe they would work - but they have, and they do, and they also look suitably vintage. The bath stayed, of course, although it had to be moved, a major undertaking. My husband spent hours and hours on his knees, doing the floor, and we spent January and February 2006 trotting along to the cottage next door for showers. (Bracing!)

This was the start of a year long period of renovations for us. We've proved that you can make a vast difference without spending a fortune and we've learned a huge amount in the process. In fact in the course of the year, we have sometimes realised that we knew more about some of the projects than the so called professionals. This is alarming and reassuring at the same time. The single piece of advice we could give to those embarking on this kind of project would be to learn all you can about what you are going to do - even if you are going to be employing somebody else to do it!

A Tartan Quilt.

It's in bad condition, the backing cloth - a big printed paisley - almost in shreds and even the front is sadly faded in places. But I bought this fascinating old textile at auction today - a patchwork quilt, constructed of pieces of tartan cloth, which are said to be pieces of kilt which date from the First World War, and which were worn by soldiers of the time. The cloth is fine wool, and I wonder if some of these tartans date from the nineteenth century - people would often keep kilts for many many years. There is a thistle emblem embroidered in the middle. I've never seen anything like this before, but there is something indescribably evocative about such pieces of textile history - as though events themselves were somehow woven into them - their emotional charge is unbelievably powerful.

Many More Signs of Spring

Lots more. And since our year long attempt to renovate and renew our 200 year old cottage is almost coming to an end, I should be able to spend a little more time on this blog, in tandem with many more listings in my eBay shop. I have a cupboard full of wonderful embroidered tablecloths which will look fabulous on an Easter or summer table. Even nicer, though, is the possibility of using them for picnics - classy picnics of course, with wicker picnic baskets, real glasses, and perhaps the odd bottle of champagne. Not, mind you, that I manage many picnics of that kind. I suspect that the box of sandwiches, and the flask of coffee, perched on top of a heap of old stones, with the wind blowing the rain into horizontal lines is more my style, but one can dream!

Yesterday a friend invited us to her annual 'crocus' party, which is always a herald of spring. It was a fabulous afternoon, with good food, and good company, and the cheering sight of drifts of purple crocuses in her garden. There are so many signs of spring in our own garden now, that it is impossible to count them all - snowdrops in the hedges, daffodils almost in bloom, and the birds courting each other in every tree and shrub. There are sticky green buds everywhere, and the smell of fresh green in the air. Sadly, our internal renovations (not quite finished yet!) have created mayhem in the bit of garden near the house, and since we're sociable, and like to sit out there with friends right through the summer, we are going to have to get going on it. Even as I write this, my husband is out there labouring with reclaimed Victorian flagstones. More, meanwhile, about our 'Country Kitchen' as soon as it is finished.

Signs of Spring

I hesitate to write about early spring, because I know that somewhere the climate change doom mongers will be down on me with a vengeance. But it generally happens about now, at least it does here in the mild West of Scotland. One day you will be driving along with nothing but naked trees and mud to look at, and then overnight or so it seems, the verges will be white with snowdrops. It happens just as the sparrows, which like to nest in the old house martins' nest just above my study, start to sit on the roof and make a noise (hardly singing, but it is a very welcome sound!) and just about the time that you glance outside at five o'clock in the afternoon and realise that it is still (more or less) light. And it happens at about the same time every year. Not much earlier, not much later.
Of course there will be frosts and winds to come. Of course there will maybe even be snowfalls. But we have seen the signs and we know that the year is on the turn.
Meanwhile, here's a lovely Scottish village sunrise for you. We look forward to the sun coming up each day, because Scottish Power, a company with little efficiency, and less customer care, has seen to it that our street lights have been off for four nights now. South Ayrshire Council tell me that it is Not Their Fault. They wash their hands of the matter. They have reported it to Scottish Power, or Scottish no-power as it is beginning to be called round here, but they have done zippo, zilch, nada about it. When one of my elderly neighbours keels over and breaks a leg, who will be responsible, I wonder?

Gifts from Scotland?

Just after Christmas, a friend from England told me how she had been given a beautifully packaged set of soap, body lotion etc purporting to be 'naturally Scottish.' It was only when she examined the bottles more closely that she saw the 'Made in China' label. A quick scan of the company's website revealed that although they have premises in Scotland which work on synthesising and creating these 'naturally Scottish' scents, the products are made elsewhere.
This is relevent to The Scottish Home for several reasons. One is that we are exploring the possibility of including some Scottish made gift items with the lovely old Scottish and Irish textiles we already sell. To that end, we visited a Scottish Gift and Food Fair in Glasgow, last sunday. It was a huge show and we tramped doggedly around, trying to be inspired. But the truth was that so much of it wasn't Scottish, in fact wasn't even English, but consisted of stalls full of imported 'stuff' - the kind of things that my dear late mother used to call 'toecovers' - those utterly useless articles that people bring back from holiday. These are known as 'wee minds' in Scotland, as in 'Och it's just a wee mind.' Which is nice, but it would be nicer still if the wee mind hadn't come half way round the world to the gift shop in Inveraray, Braemar, Pitlochry or wherever else you might chance to visit, only to return half way round in the other direction, in the baggage of some unsuspecting visitor.
Don't get me wrong. There were many stalls with beautifully (and genuinely) Scottish made pottery, knitwear, and jewellery. Actually, there was lots of jewellery - it is a rather oversubscribed area. But we know from past experience as crafters (my husband is still working as a woodcarver) that this is a very expensive show. Not only does it cost a good deal for a stall, but for a small crafter there is the added burden of losing several days' work, as well as the cost of transport, and possibly accommodation.
I'm not talking about the one off artwork, high value end of the craft spectrum here. Such makers are never going to benefit from what is essentially a trade show. And in fact the Scottish Arts Council caters for them reasonably well since they are viewed as part of the arts establishment. But still, there must be many small indigenous businesses - soap and candlemakers, textile artists, cheese makers, honey producers, to name but a few, who couldn't possibly afford to attend. A quick trawl of the internet proves this to be the case. People are out there, making genuinely Scottish, genuinely desirable items. But I wonder how many busy buyers from the various gift shops are prepared to go online, in an effort to support their home industries, when they can buy so many cheap imports in spuriously Scottish packaging.
It would be nice to see the Scottish Executive putting a little money into a smaller scale 'real Scottish Gift Show' for a change. If we don't value our home grown product, who else will?

Blow the wind....

So far, it has been a windy winter here in Scotland by any standards, which may go some way towards explaining why we have had more power cuts than I can remember for a very long time.
The latest was last thursday night, when everything suddenly went off at about two o'clock in the afternoon. I had been planning a whole lot of work on my PC, so was fairly frustrated. We got out the candles and the gas ring again, lit the fire, and waited. The wind howled and wailed dementedly around the house. At times like this, it does more than just howl. It rattles at the sash windows, creeps inside and raps smartly on the doors, like somebody demanding immediate admittance. Doors swing open unexpectedly. Bits of the roof creak and groan. Sometimes you would swear that you can hear footsteps rushing up and down the stairs. Which is all decidedly spooky.
I wrote by hand, but sitting upstairs in my study was like being on the bridge of a ship, in a storm. I went downstairs, read, listened to the radio. We took a couple of flasks through to the elderly lady next door. She has a gas fire and plenty of candles, so was very cosy, but there is something about a power cut which instantly makes tea a necessity.
It grew dark. And cold. Had to don cardigans and blankets for sorties out of the living room, into the rest of the house. This old house had no central heating when first we lived in it. Had forgotten just how cold these old stones grow, and how quickly, particularly when there's a wind chill factor involved.
At about 6 o'clock the lights suddenly came on. Not fully though. All the bulbs were dim, slightly better than candlepower but not much. Enough to watch TV but not enough to boil a kettle. At the other end of the village my sister in law could use her PC, but down our end, a couple of hundred yards away, there wasn't enough power. The phone in the kitchen, which has a base unit, went haywire and had to be switched off completely.
We went out to visit some friends. No streetlights. What with the wind and the dark the village had assumed a strange unfamiliarity. We passed a gate behind which a dog was lurking, but he too seemed thrown by the darkness and only wagged his tail, tentatively.
Half way though the evening, everything went off again. And just before midnight, quite suddenly, it all came on. Another friend got home to his farmhouse a little while later, to find that everything had just gone off and stayed off for some twenty hours. They have horses, and he said mucking out in the early morning, with lanterns in the stables, gave him a good idea of what it must have been like years ago. We have, of course, got soft and spoiled, but at least as rural dwellers we know that we can cope if we have to!
So far, we have had few explanations from Scottish Power. The winds were, of course, a factor, but Christmas Day was calm and we were still without power for half the day. A few years ago, there were loud protests about rural powercuts in our neck of the woods. Scottish Power vowed to improve matters and for a few years, everything went smoothly. Now we are back to the bad old days. Right through the autumn, there have been series of mini powercuts, in the middle of the night. Now, a completely disrupted holiday period. Even making allowances for the high winds, somebody somewhere must be cutting corners with manpower and maintenance.

New Year, New Book, New Home

Well not quite, but my explanation for my long silence - more than a month - is that we are still involved in major renovations to our very own 'Scottish Home', then Christmas happened, and now I am in the middle of revising an old novel, and writing a new one, as well as formulating an idea for a brand new (and related) non fiction project. When you add to that the fact that we are also working on a relaunch of the whole 'Scottish Home' business, of which more soon, you can see that our feet have barely touched the ground although we did manage to celebrate a traditional family Christmas, with a real tree, holly and ivy, home made Christmas cake, mulled wine and all, in the midst of the upheaval.
To facilitate this, we moved heaven and earth to restore order to our poor house in time for the holidays. The new conservatory is finished, and our conservatory company have moved on to inflict their own particular brand of misery on some other householder. The building itself (more accurately called an 'orangerie' I'm told, because of its construction, though so far I haven't managed to acquire an orange tree) is beautiful. We had no quarrel with the tradesmen; just with the way in which the project was managed, or not managed to be more precise. It was worth it though, just to see it in all its glory with a traditional Christmas tree, big jugs of holly and ivy, fir boughs, candles, pine cones and all the trappings of a rural Scottish Christmas.
The candles came in really handy on Christmas day and again on New Year's Eve, when we had massive power cuts. On New Year's Eve, it was understandable, because it was blowing a gale right across Scotland. Christmas day, calm and fine, was far less explicable. There were several power fluctuations on Christmas Eve. Then we woke up on Christmas Morning to find all the power off. It came back on at 8.30 and went off again at 10.30.
There is no piped gas in our village, only the bottled variety. A few Agas. People were rushing about with turkeys and other joints of meat, like in Dickens' day. My sister in law, who was doing the family Christmas Dinner was one of them. Her daughter has a gas oven, but it's hard to light them without ... well yes, without electricity. Power was restored at 1.30pm in good time for the sprouts and the bread sauce. Still no explanations forthcoming from Scottish Power.
Our old house looks lovely by candlelight, as though this is the way it was meant to be seen. The four hundred year old oak press, with its rich and varied colouring, and wonderful patina looks even better. We set small candles carefully along the 'candle shelf' for Christmas Eve. I remember sitting chatting to the last few guests, watching it out of the corner of my eye, and thinking how very alive it looked at this time, and in this mellow, magical light. When first we bought this piece of furniture, I said that it felt like having an elephant in the kitchen; it was so huge and so strange. There was something very disturbing about it. Now it has settled in, and I find it not just beautiful but inexplicably comforting. There's a tactile, human quality to it. You can lean against it, breathing in the scent of ancient oak and beeswax, and feel in tune with its intricate past, with the hands that made it and polished it. Time has no meaning, and there is something infinitely reassuring about such a presence in a domestic setting.

Conservatory Horrors (2)

Still trying to write, publicise a new book, and set up a new Scottish Home website in the middle of a building site! I had a week's blissful respite, while I tutored a fiction writing course at wonderful Moniack Mhor in the hills above Loch Ness (see my other wordarts blog, for a fuller account.) My husband had done his very best to clean up before I came home, doing sterling work with brush and mop and duster, but no matter how often you clean up plaster dust, it tends to settle all over again within the next few hours. The low point came on wednesday when the concrete arrived for the base. Actually, the concrete didn't arrive for several hours. The workmen who had been building the walls waited and waited. Eventually they left and an hour later two more workmen turned up, nice polite lads both of them. (All the tradesmen involved have been fine - it's the organisational skills of the company itself that we keep calling into question. ) They waited as well. I made them a cup of tea. At last the concrete lorry turned up, several hours later than planned. 'Are all those pipes to be concreted over?' asked one of the big young men, innocently.
'I don't know' I told him, exasperated beyond belief. 'That's what I'm paying the company many thousands of pounds to tell you!'
Normally I'm not quite so prone to irritation, but we have done so much of our own project management on this job that we feel we ought to be somehow billing the company in return. We have just had to organise our own builder to restructure the drainpipes above the proposed conservatory - a necessity which these so called specialists never even mentioned.
Yesterday I was about to write a cheque for the second slice of money when two thoughts struck me. One, we have had nothing in writing about additional work which the company have agreed to do on a couple of upstairs windows, so I have no idea what they are planning to charge me for this. And two, we haven't seen hide nor hair of a building control officer, when we know that they usually come out to check work in progress, particularly on - as this is - a listed building. Have they even been told that work has started? Until I get the answer to both these questions, I find my hand curiously reluctant to write out a cheque....
There is only one element of progress to report. Several young men energetically barrowed concrete through the house (and were touchingly concerned about not walking on my kitchen floor in dirty boots) Now the new floor has set solid ('turned to stone' as my son described it, when he was a very little boy) and - praise be- I can get into my kitchen without negotiating a piratical plank.
More as it happens.

Conservatory Horrors (1)

Late last year, having had a number of quotes from several companies, we finally decided who we thought might make the best job of putting a convervatory on to the back of our 200 year old listed, terraced, Scottish cottage.
They came highly recommended by friends who I shall be having words with when I see them, although oddly enough, I don't seem to have met them for a good long while.....
This was to be a replacement for a much smaller conservatory, which had been built by my husband some years previously, and was all we could afford at the time. It was nice enough, but Alan has always felt that it was a 'bit like a corridor' and as our antique Scottish textiles and interiors business is about to expand we felt the need of a bigger room - somewhere to store our lovely old linens, somewhere to dry herbs for our own pot pourri, somewhere to sit quietly with a glass of wine, on a summer's evening, and come up with the next good idea. Somewhere to entertain in comfort. Well, that was the theory anyway.
The conservatory is only part of a much larger plan to renovate the whole house, something which we knew would take a year, and most of our savings. However,since a house is the biggest investment most of us will make in our lifetimes and - when you work from home in various ways as we do - somewhere you will spend a great deal of your time, we thought that major renovations and refurbishments were well overdue. On the first working day of the year, we took our deposit and the completed plans in to the company in question, and signed on the dotted line. Then we turned our attention to our bathroom, which I have written about elsewhere on this blog, and spent some three months turning it into a small paradise. It is now the nicest room in the house, and one where I am inclined to spend more and more of my time for reasons which will soon become obvious. The rest of the house is rapidly turning into a cross between Steptoe's living room (for those of you who are old enough to remember) and a reclamation yard.
The first hitch came with planning. We know from long experience that getting planning permission for alterations to a listed building can take time. The conservatory company should have known that too. To save a little money, we had our own reliable architect draw out plans to the company's specifications. We were also planning two new upstairs windows, which we said that our own builder (who was working on another project for my husband's family) would tackle, although planning permission would be sought for them at the same time as the conservatory.
We had already told the company that my husband would be making a long trip abroad in the summer, so the conservatory would have to be completed by the end of May, or mid June at the very latest, so that he wouldn't be leaving me in the middle of a building site with so much other work to be done (I was on the final draft of a commissioned book, and knew that I would be busy.)
Weeks passed. Then months. The end of March came and there was no sign of planning permission and no word from the company. Eventually we phoned up our local planning department to be told that no plans had yet been submitted to them.
At this stage, when we threatened to withdraw from the project altogether, the company offered to throw in the taking down of the old conservatory, since it was likely that Alan wouldn't be around to do it by the time planning permission came through. They also offered to include a window at a very good price. Our builder went in and ordered it. Planning permission, after a little negotiation, was granted, just as Alan was about to depart for foreign shores. We had tentatively proposed September as a new start date and we were told that the company would 'look after Catherine if you're not back by then - don't worry.' No firm date was mentioned by either side.
After that, we heard nothing from them whatsoever for the whole summer. Nobody told our builder that the window was ready for collection. Nobody phoned me. Nobody emailed me. Nobody wrote to me.
Alan came back much later in the summer, and we wrote to the company more in sorrow than in anger. The response was immediate and irritable. The window had been awaiting collection for months. (But if that was the case, why on earth had nobody phoned me about it? They had my address and phone number. I had been at home, writing hard, all summer.) Moreover, the conservatory panels were already under construction. They were planning to start work on 7th September.
Says who? Nobody had thought to tell us that.
Once more, we capitulated. Trading standards told us that we had so little in writing, that they could sue us for the balance if they wanted to. And they already had about £2000 of our money.
They actually began work during the last week in September. Two nice young men came to dig the foundations of the new conservatory to find the old one ( which they had agreed to take down) still standing. Nobody seemed to have passed that message on to the workforce. Besides that, although their surveyer had visited twice, they seemed completely unaware that there were electrical cables to be isolated.
As I write this, the entire contents of the old conservatory are piled in my boarded up study, there is a large hole outside my back door, and to get into my kitchen I have to walk the plank. Since this is a terraced cottage with a huge garden which borders on a field (no back access) the skip is outside the front door, so everything is being barrowed through the house. You can imagine the mess. We have no idea when they plan to finish. We are not unreasonable. We know that the Scottish weather causes delays. What we didn't realise was that they were going to pass other people's delays on to us. We thought we were employing quite a big company, with enough manpower to cope with autumn rainfall.
The final straw was when the woman in the office told me tetchily that it was taking so much time because everything had to come through the house. As soon as I had hung up the phone, I realised that the inconvenience is all ours. The skip is some 20 feet away from where the men are working, down a nice straight corridor. There can be very few projects where they are so close to the job in hand. Most conservatories are, after all, built onto the backs of houses, so building will invariably involve much greater distances.
No, it is we who have to put up with the mud and the muck and the dust and the noise, and - now that autumn is upon us - the wind and rain and cold. My conservatory plants are all huddled together for warmth under a little glass roofed arbour at one side of the house. God knows if they will survive. The plan is now to finish the conservatory, and the upstairs bedrooms (decoration only!)before Christmas, and tackle the kitchen after Christmas. The bill for the second tranche of payment arrived last week. It said 'Balance due on commencement of works'. The contract I signed, on the other hand, reads that the money is due 'on completion of ground/building works.'
Are we there yet? No way. Are we paying yet? No way.
More as it happens.