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.

Scottish Country Living

The little cottage which used to belong to my dear mother in law has just gone on the market, and there has been lots of interest in it. My sister in law is busy showing people round, all of whom say how much they like the place. Many of the potential purchasers have been middle aged or older women, or couples, looking to downsize, and settle in a village. The setting is positively idyllic, and there is a great deal to be said for village life, as you head for an active retirement. I'm not advocating moving miles away from family and friends, to a house in the middle of nowhere. But a cottage in a reasonably peaceful village (or on the picturesque edge of one, like this) can be a good move if you are planning to downsize. For a start, village life can be infinitely more sociable than town life. You will have lots of invitations, and there are all kinds of things going on if you want to get involved in the life of the place. The rhythm of the passing year is more noticeable in the countryside, and each season has its traditional events. But perhaps most of all you will probably find supportive neighbours. It's a truism, but people do tend to look out for each other more in villages. We still have a village shop which acts as a dispenser of information. The postman still says hello, and knows who lives where. There's a well attended church, and a caring minister, as well as a pub that serves good food if you don't feel like cooking - and the nearest town, with a small supermarket, an excellent deli, and rail and bus links to anywhere you might want to go, is a mere 10 minutes drive down the road. Add to that, a low crime rate (You can walk home from a friend's house at midnight without fearing that somebody will mug you) and there's a lot to be said for country living.

Scottish Home Website Coming Soon

I posted about our brand new Scottish Home website some time ago, but it won't be up and running for a few weeks yet. One of our problems is that The Scottish Home is intended to pull together the various aspects of our businesses - my creative writing, my husband's woodcarving, whether sculptures in wood, or restoration work, and our joint interest in Scottish antiques, interiors, arts and crafts, and everything else connected with Scottish homes, traditional and modern. Added to that, we both have websites which are desperately in need of updating. The task is to link all three sites, changing where necessary - no career in the arts stays the same for very long - and including a brand new Scottish retail idea, of which more in due course. It is no easy task, and we are currently working with a web design company to find the best solution to all our requirements. In the meantime, of course, The Scottish Home blog will be continuing - and will continue after the website is launched, because it is here that I can write longer and more informative pieces about various characteristically Scottish antiques, crafts and collectables, as well as Scottish interest posts of all kinds.
This year, September has been unbelievably wet, even here in rainy old Scotland. We usually have a soft, sunny spell about the middle of the month, but it hasn't arrived yet. Instead, I sit here with the rain coming down, and the washing machine full of old linens, which arrived with the marks of years on them. I never know, till they are finished, if the various whitening treatments are going to work or not. Sometimes it takes two or three washes and drying in the sun. But right now, there is no sun!
Last month the hydrangeas in the picture above were in full, astonishing bloom in the garden of a seaside restaurant where I often go for lunch. But there has been so much rain that the blooms are battered and beaten now. It's berry time - rowans, hawthorns, rosehips, elderberries and luscious blackberries - and it has been a spectacularly good year for them too - splashes of colour, scarlet and glossy black, are everywhere. But if the weather continues like this, they will rot on the bushes and shrubs. If the sun comes out for long enough, I'll take some photos and post them - along with some recipes - over the weekend.

Pictures of the Scottish Cottage

My last piece about this delightful little cottage which we are about to put on the market, wouldn't let me post pictures, but for some reason a new post doesn't have that problem, so here they are - You can see the front, which is quite deceptively small - like the Tardis, the cottage is much bigger once you get inside it, (two bedrooms, brand new kitchen, shower room, very large living/dining room) and all the best bits face this most wonderful view, looking across to the ancient woodlands of Kirkmichael House (and south facing, so there's plenty of warmth and sunshine to enjoy!) There is a feature staircase and a delightful hand built bridge across the small stream which is also a feature of the large garden. Most of the garden is down to grass, but if you wanted to grow your own vegetables, and live the good life, there would be plenty of room to do just that.
The whole place is so pretty, and with such a lovely atmosphere, that we would prefer not to sell it, but needs must. People keep asking us if we are going to become property developers, but I suspect not! This was very much a labour of love, and probably a one off. On the other hand, you should watch this space for lots more information about life in Scotland, urban and rural. I'll be featuring some very special gardens, just for the fun of exploring them, so watch out for future episodes.
PS If you like the fish carved newel post, they are a speciality of my woodcarver husband, Alan Lees. They can be customised to suit your particular tastes - he can carve whatever you want. He built the bridge as well, but don't think he wants to go into bridge construction just yet! Visit his website at www.woodarts.co.uk to see more of his work.

The Scottish Cottage (2)

Fay's Cottage - the house I was blogging about back in July, is almost finished, and about to go on the market. It has been a long haul, but worth it I think, and nobody who has been in the house has failed to say what a pretty place it has become. Not that it wasn't always a warm, pretty, welcoming cottage - just that now it is a brand new, warm, pretty, welcoming but infinitely bigger cottage, so subtly renovated and extended that it still has something of the character of the much older listed building that lies at the heart of it.
The work involved changing the layout of the original house, to give a bigger bedroom at the front of the house, a brand new shower room, and a small but pretty kitchen with fresh white units and a window (where the fireplace once stood) looking out over the open countryside on the edge of the village. The kitchen itself opens onto a very large sitting/dining room (so you could cook and talk to your guests at the same time) with double doors opening onto decking, and spectactularly beautiful views over the ancient woodlands of Kirkmichael house, just about to be tinged with their autumn colours at this time of year. A hand built staircase (complete with carved newel post) leads upwards from this living room to a light filled upstairs bedroom (though I think if it were mine, it would immediately become a study!) and there is plenty of storage space where a door opens onto the roof space of the old part of the cottage.
Although it retains the look of the original cottage, everything that you would want to be new (like the sewage pipes and the central heating) is completely new. There is a brand new combi boiler to provide oil fired central heating (there is no gas in our village). The interior is fresh and light and clean, carpeted throughout in neutral shades, the whole thing a pretty palate upon which you can impose your own personality.
Outside, there is a long back garden fringed by lush hedges, a big plot of land to one side with off road parking, and space for a garage and workshop. Ricketty old wooden garages once stood here, and although they have been demolished, and the ground turfed, there would be no problem with replacing them with a newer garage. The piece de resistance is the tiny, picturesque stream that runs through the garden, with its rustic wooden bridge (Like a willow pattern garden, as a neighbour remarked) constructed by my woodcarver husband. There are even new metal railings, courtesy of my brother in law. The garden is largely grass at the moment, but there would be plenty of room for a vegetable garden and a greenhouse, and even a summer house. These ancient cottage gardens are very fertile, and the garden and the house gets the sun all day long. At this time of the year the house martins are soaring over the garden, preparing for their long journey south - and sometimes from the upstairs window you will see the heron, from the heronry up at Kirkmichael House, flying lazily past, trailing his long legs behind him. In short the cottage, which is close to some of the best golf courses in the country, or indeed any country, is an idyll, a dream place, on the edge of one of the prettiest conservation villages in southern Scotland. As you can imagine, we can hardly bear to sell it, but the right person is out there, and we feel quite strongly that the house itself will surely find them. I would show you a picture, but at the moment, Blogger doesn't seem at all inclined to let me post one!

Mountmellick - Irish Whitework, Naturally.

I had been hoping to find a piece of genuine Irish 'Mountmellick' embroidery for some time, and suddenly there it was, right at the bottom of a cardboard box of old linen, bought at auction recently. This was a nightdress case, heavily embroidered with whitework flowers and leaves on a heavy, almost satiny cotton. It even had the characteristic fringed edge, although that had suffered some damage, as had the body of the case, which was missing a corner. It looked a bit as though someone or something had taken a wee bite out of it! But the embroidery itself was mercifully free from faults, and as beautiful as I had hoped it would be, complete with oak leaves, acorns, grapes and passion flowers.

It was, seemingly, the natural plants which grew along the Owenass River which inspired these designs: blackberries, oaks and acorns, roses, woodbine, wild clematis. Passion flowers seems to have been a favourite cultivated plant to be depicted, while butterflies and seashells are sometimes found. The pieces were useful as well as beautiful, and most Mountmellick can be washed, even at high temperatures. In fact you will often find that the more a piece is laundered, the better it looks, with a softness and patina that is hard to fake.

The history of Mountmellick, is part of the wider history of lacemaking in Ireland. One Joanna Carter received an award in 1816 for developing new embroidery stitches and by 1825 she had set up a small school in Mountmellick, County Laois, to teach the skills to the young women of the district. Like many of these industries, it was thought to be a good way of encouraging women to contribute to the economy of the family. In the early 19th century we find a genuine movement to set up schools of needlework and lace in Ireland with Limerick and Carrickmacross Laces, as well as impossibly fine Irish crochet, Irish whitework, and of course, Mountmellick itself.

It fascinates me how much of this obviously Irish embroidery and lace turns up here in the West of Scotland. Sometimes it seems as though every other piece of lovely old linen is decorated with shamrocks, or of obvious Irish provenance, like my piece of Mountmellick. I only wish the textiles could tell me their stories. But somewhere at the back of my mind is a vision of a woman who learned her craft at home in Ireland, but who - like some of my own forebears - crossed the sea, in search of work, a viable way of life, or even an escape from famine. I think about her quite a lot. Was she homesick, here in Scotland? When she stitched the flowers of the Owenass River, so beautifully into her nightdress case, did she still think of that place as home? When she worked those fine white shamrocks into the fine white linen of a small tablecloth, was she thinking of Ireland? Who was she? And above all, why did nobody remember, and keep these precious textiles in the family? It makes me quite sad to think of her, but at least the work of her hands is still loved and appreciated, usually by other women, all these years later.
For more information about Mountmellick embroidery, go to http://islandireland.com