The Deep North

I’ m still not sure we have the rights of this. I was in the middle of some not uncomplicated work of my own when I was rung up out of the blue by Microsoft, or ‘Microsoft’, in the person of an Indian guy on an international line. It’s certainly the case that from time to time my adventures on the web have seized up the computer, which has issued an error report. The tale I was spun was that a particular error report was so serious they, Microsoft, had got back to me to look into things. It wasn’t wholly implausible. As the Northern Gentleman, who had been staying, observed, it’s the great goal of all corporations to reduce you to renting something you own, or at least, an aspect of it without which the rest won’t function. Anyway all this procedure of troubleshooting went on and on and, as an interruption to my working day, I was more and more focused on ‘do what you have to do and go away’, and less on the details of what was going forward. However, I did remain somewhat sceptical, and when all this was over, tried it on our local computer consultants. They thought, firstly, that they’d never heard of anyone being targeted that way as a customer. But as a customer for online stuff, I have been used to proactive service — e.g. having bought an airline ticket after not using the credit card for a year, the credit card people have rung up to check it was me, and I have congratulated them on their vigilance. So, that since my computer is registered with my personal details, the initial scenario was by no means impossible. But I was not easy in my mind, and took the computer down to our local specialists. They had never heard of a scam of this kind, but the computer had certainly acquired some nasties. We still don’t know what the point was, but perhaps the key indication that it wasn’t what it purported to be is that the Northern Professor got another Indian phone call today, with the same story. Your system is compromised, etc. etc. To which he replied, truthfully, ‘my system is as we speak, being swept for malware by our local IT consultants’. She put the phone down. So– be careful out there.

Going out to diplomatise with a grass-cutter, we were surprised to find Michael the Postie had left a large and promising box in the garage — we weren’t looking for any parcels this week. It proved to contain several packets of some of the nicest German biscuits there are — mysterious, somewhat medieval objcts called Aachener Kräuterprinten, which slightly resemble the more familiar Nuremburg Lebkuchen but are 1) nicer, 2) chewier, and 3) primarily flavoured with aniseed, ginger and pepper as far as I can tell. Not quite as enjoyed by Charlemagne, since sugar has wandered into a recipe which must have started out as honey based, but splendidly archaic all the same. There was also a huge box of what you might call modern or teatable chocolate biscuits of the most refined variety. The Labrador Nose was whiffling like anything. All these items are a splendid present from the German Guests, who are going to be visiting at the end of the month with the German Guestlets, who have appeared since they were last here. Miss Best Friend says she always thought they were kind and understanding and now she is sure of it. Also, small children are almost invariably more interested in feeding dogs than feeding themselves, and she looks forward to making their acquaintance.

It has rained hard all day (good). Since it has now stopped, I went out with Miss Kit. Wandering around the dripping garden in search of a spot for her to relieve herself on which was not replete with mysterious menace, I became aware that since I last saw them, my Solomon’s Seal has all been stripped back to skeleton leaves. It’s quite dramatic. A little investigation on Google revealed the existence of a beastie called the Solomon’s Seal Sawfly. The little blighters hatch out in May/June, and work away from underneath the leaves, so you don’t see what’s happened until they’ve broken through. Then they disappear and repeat the cycle the following year. But next year, I will be on the watch.

I went down to hoe the dahlias today, and the first of the orange one has come out in a bloom, It’s very small, but the most beautiful and vivid flame-red. When the rest of them catch up with it I think it will be a sort of visual exclamation mark in any bunch it adorns. I’ve lost a few dahlias, but not many. The ground was watered with liquid slug-killer supplemented with the little blue granules, and the tidemarks of snail-shells and leathery black strips of ex slug in the immediate environment of the plants show that the battle was hard fought. Otherwise, we are working on the Collections Book, one of these things which requires one to become an instant expert on something unlikely in the course of an afternoon. Thank goodness for Google. I can’t think how one managed. One moment you’ve stubbed your toe on a book called Catroptum Microcosmicum, the next, you know who Johannes Remellinus was, something about his career, why he’s important, why this book is important, and you can even find some pics on line. As an enthusiastic collector of more or less useless knowledge, I can only say that writing this stuff is providing a good deal of incidental entertainment.

We went to our favourite antique shop today, because we were in sudden need of a christening present (we found one, a very suitable string of pearls). On the way there and back, we pass through an odd little village called Stuartfield — odd because its layout is so very suggestive of the Six Counties that it doesn’t look Scottish at all. Anyway, one of its great sights in the summer months is one particular bungalow garden, beside the village pond. The owner has a passionate fondness for old-fashioned park garden style carpet-bedding of the most pulsating variety, and somehow manages to maintain his plants in a state of vibrant health and completely covered in blooms for weeks on end. I don’t know how he does it. It must be he, I think; something about the whole set-out has a masculine flavour. Anyway, it’s all in full, living colour, and I think the same public-spirited individual has filled a series of troughs suspended from the duckpond railings — certainly, they express the same taste. They are filled with alternating yellow and red begonias, and the main (circular) bed in the garden is solid red with yellow at the edges. I can’t help feeling that in the circumstances it’s just as well Spain won the world cup, but all this must have been in preparation for months. How did he know? Is there a psychic octopus in the duckpond?

I’ve sent the new novel to my agent. Always very hard to do, especially at this risk-averse juncture. Candles, anybody?

The hedgerows are (somewhat belatedly) foaming with elderflower. The other day, we had a major picking session with a friend, and set to to make elderflower cordial. Actually, to make two, a short term one, and a keeping one. The Professor made the first, I made the second. Both have turned out very nice, and have scented the fridge for days, though I found that at every stage of the process, I kept on adding more and more lemon-juice to mine. If you don’t sock it with enough lemon it’s one of those things like coffee which tends to smell better than it tastes. The Professor soaked a whole lot of left-over half lemon shells, and has achieved a jug of bitter lemon, which I feel rather calls for GIN. Since I’ve also made enough strawberry jam to last us the rest of the year (two jars) that’s probably about it for preserving summer’s bounty, though I might make some more raspberry if I’m in the mood: there’s such a thing as Bakewell Pudding in the world, and you need half a jar per pud.

I don’t often blog on a news item, but this one delighted me. Bullet-proof custard! — a weapon of mass depression in the days of that extinct species, the Seaside Landlady of the old school, has been reinvented in a new and exciting guise. Bullets lose a lot of momentum in liquids, or even liquid-ish materials, such as custard. Some boffin, who was probably not, but should have been, called Professor Branestawm, has combined Kevlar with a secret ingredient perhaps not totally unlike cornflour and achieved remarkable results. ‘”It’s very similar to custard in the sense that the molecules lock together when it’s struck,” explained Stewart Penny, business development manager in charge of materials development at the company.’ It’s a while since I hit custard with a spoon in any kind of experimental spirit (some forty-five years, I should think), but I don’t recall any element of custardial self defence back in the day, perhaps because my mother made rather good custard with no armourplated qualities whatsoever. Still, remembering certain experiences at school, it seems to make some kind of sense. Perhaps our brave boys and girls will be protected henceforth by custard inside and out.

The Professor pointed out that we’ve been here for ten years to the day. It’s quite a thought. We haven’t entirely fought the house to a standstill, but mostly it’s sorted out, and thinking about the rural slum it was, I don’t think we’ve done too badly. The garden is foaming with roses and delphinium and alchemilla. Miss T’s Dad has just replaced the curtain poles in our bedroom which have driven me bonkers for ten years. They were Wee Stoned Mark’s idea; a wooden pole with rings, standing about four inches out from the wall; we came back one day and found he’d done them off his own bat. Unfortunately, with windows facing south and east, in the summer, you get blazing light through the unavoidable gap which exists at either end because the curtains aren’t flush with the wall, so in the summer I’m woken by the light on my face in the small hours. We have finally got around to dealing with it, with help from our friends. One story of the week rather sadder than ours relates to one of the neighbours — we first met in that summer ten years ago, when he was the local blacksmith, a chap of enormous energy and likeableness, who sorted our our grates and other metalwork. We were pleased by his success when about two or three years later, he moved out of town to become one of our immediate neighbours, and ended up with a sizeable set of premises which seemed to be continously active; it all got bigger and bigger, he was getting work from the oil companies, there was a suite of vehicles with vanity plates with his initials and so on, but then he split up with his wife, probably because he came home only to sleep. A second wife turned up the other year, a younger, high maintenance wife. He took to taking a lot of money out of the business which, I presume, went on Dubai, lifestyle, and shoes for the Second Missus. The bank called a halt, and on Friday, the engineering firm went into receivership and closed its doors for the last time. I think there are a lot of magazine-readers with a very poor grasp on the fact that just because millions pass through a man’s hands in the course of a year doesn’t mean that all that much can be diverted. It does seem a shame.

Last Monday we were passing through one of those ambiguous little towns on the English-Scottish border — we were on the side of the bridge that was Scottish — when the Professor fell in love with a very nice young man with a fresh complexion, a frank expression, beautiful blue eyes, and discreetly fashionable clothes. Fortunately, he was painted in 1827. Despite the call to fiscal prudence represented by the fact that the exodus from the Royal Highland Show (see previous blog) did something pretty terminal to the car’s cooling system, and Cairn o’Mount took the rubber off its tyres, we have decided that he belongs here. The dealer will accept payment by instalments. You never regret buying a really good picture.

We have been having a very complicated few days – last Thursday I was due to fly to Galway, from Edinburgh, while the Professor was also due to give a paper in Glasgow on the Friday. We were somewhat delayed setting off due to having been asked to source a Suitable&Appropriate retirement present at 24 hrs notice, which involved a fair amount of people saying they’d ring back in 10 minutes and not doing so. Under some pressure of time, we therefore bucketed down Aberdeenshire, discovering on the way, two major sets of totally unannounced Road Closed/Diversions, and arrived in the environs of Edinburgh airport only to find about 1000 cars trying to exit the Royal Highland Show or some such, simultaneously, from a venue immediately next door to the airport entrance. Harrassed, semaphoring policemen were to be seen on all sides. After a prolonged and unamusing interlude, he Professor was ultimately forced to let me out in the car hire return area from which I could walk back. My plane was late, as it happened, and I tipped up in beautiful downtown Galway towards midnight. The following morning, I took collateral damage in the War Against Handcream – the ‘100 ml bottles’ rule is very difficult for contact lense wearers. I had, I thought, a mini bottle of buffer solution, which I had preserved against just such an emergency. Well, it turned out to be cleaning solution, which is caustic. So immediate and violent was the reaction that it took me another ten minutes to get the lens out of my eye, by which time quite a lot of damage had been done — no’ideal as they say in these parts, since I spent the rest of the day weeping scalding tears and scurrying between patches of shade, and I was due to give a big public lecture in the evening. The lecture was fine, they usually are. My next problem was the Northfield Wedding. I had a taxi from my Galway hotel at six, caught a plane to Dublin, another plane to Glasgow, took the bus into town, caught a train to Edinburgh, found I had a spare hour and a half so cunningly got a somewhat overdue haircut, and took the last public transport of the day to Prestonpans. I walked down through a completely deserted town – I think the World Cup might explain that – and found the church. Posh Scots on parade look very nice on the whole: there were a lot of kilts, a becoming garment, ladies who had, by and large considered their figures rather than contemporary fashion, beautiful girls wearing beautiful girl stuff, and so on. I don’t much like weddings but this was about as good as they get. We hit a moment of complete surrealism on the get-out: the fixture was in the Parish Church, about ten minutes’ walk from the house (the do was being thrown from the house rather than from a Venue). A piper tuned up, and started a slow march (very slow, given the number of ladies in unnegotiable footwear), and at a funereal pace, Pipey, Bride and Groom set off down the road, followed by a disorganised procession of wedding guests. There seemed to be a surprising number of people about; people sort of like weddings, and, as the Professor commented philosophically, that in that part of the world, people quite possibly emerge at the sound of bagpipes just in case (Prestonpans is the scene of one of the most notable Jacobite victories, when the forces of Sir John Cope were marmelized by those of Bonnie P. C.). But I became aware of odd chaps wearing favours in their buttonholes, who looked unlikely members of the wedding partly, not least because of their air of complete bewilderment. All was suddenly made clear when, with a squee-squee-squee and tuck of drum, an entirely other parade got under way, on , as the ambient marshals made clear, the same route. The Professor, along with half the posh Papes in Scotland, ended up inadvertently heading up an Orange Parade, which I suppose thus ended up as the only ecumenical Orange Parade in the history of the Order. After that, there was champagne in a garden for hours, dinner and dancing –or for some of us, feeling our age, or simply knackered, ignobly running away. We went down to Northumberland on the Sunday, and had a lovely quiet time: we went a very peaceful and beautiful road, down the side of the Whiteadder. There’s a nice Thai restaurant in Duns, of all places, should you be passing that way. We went to Bamburgh and sat on the beach under the castle, then to Berwick, had dinner, walked the circuit of the walls, spent the night in a B&B, and started winding back towards Aberdeenshire in the morning. (By the way, if anyone’s worried, 48 hours sufficed to recover the contact lens crisis).

I’ve just been out with Miss Kit, at twenty past twelve at night. Sitting along the horizon line, behind the skeleton branches of trees, is a broad band of lime green, with French navy clouds above. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as lime Angel Delight, but if there is, that’s the colour. Lime, but pastel. Key lime pie. I find it quite hard to account for in terms of bending light and setting suns but it’s certainly found in art. I can now witness in my own person that it’s also a phenomenon found in nature.

We’re wandering off till Monday; I’m going to Galway, which I’ve never visited before (though I had a friend from there once who said ‘it’s not that they’re medieval in their outlook. More like hunter-gatherers’, a memorable sentence which I will doubtless find doesn’t reflect today’s Galway in the slightest). The Professor is giving a paper in Glasgow. We are convening on Saturday at a posh wedding in the Lowlands, i.e. Ho for marquees, more-or-less champagne, poached salmon and strawberries, and ladies in hats. I’ll try and stay awake through the afternoon, having left Galway at about 7 in the morning, which will doubtless entail getting to the airport quite a bit earlier. I’m a bit bewildered by weddings — not by getting married, which seems to me perfectly rational, but by weddings as a concept. It’s infernally difficult having a pack of people on the loose at about four in the afternoon, it’s not an hour when anyone sensible wants to drink, and tea for multitudes is amazingly difficult (I know, I’ve done it). Anyway, I’m sure this particular wedding will be fine, given the Napoleonic tendencies of the groom. After that we’re going down to Berwick for a night, because we have a paid-for night at a B&B which we were too snowed-in to make use of at the time we paid for it, and then we’ll come back home to the beasties. The Northern Gentleman is in charge meanwhile.

Something more like sanity may set in: final exam boards have happened, the official end of the year, and I’ve finished drafting the novel, which at least now makes it possible to think about other things from time to time. It’s the longest day, but the weather is grey and dreary with intermittent rain. However, we went out to dinner last night, and drove home, as it came up to eleven, under pale grey skies, and subsequently, walked the cat and the dog in the dim half-light. The Professor put lanterns in the trees by way of a small festive gesture, and very beautiful they looked. We did the beds in front of the house this week, and have put in burgundy-coloured petunias and bright pink dahlias, which should be quite merry and bright altogether, even if the sun isn’t shining.

I realise I’ve been neglecting the blog. To be precise, I’ve been neglecting everything. My beastly novel is on the home straight, 136,00 words since the beginning of March, only four chapters to go. Since I seem to be psychologically incapable of doing anything else till I finish the damn thing, I am desperate to get rid of it. The Northern Professor went off to Finland for a few days, and once I was left to my own devices, I wrote 7,000 words in a day and went to bed at three o’clock in the morning in a very strange state of mind. I have, I think, started dreaming that I’m Helena, it’s all very odd. Meanwhile, almost everything I don’t have to do anything about isn’t getting done. — What’s happened? Well, the NP came back this evening, with a good many lumps and bumps: they have mosquitos the size of swallows in Northern Finland, and thanks to the International Campaign Against Terrorism (huh) & consequently not being allowed to carry liquids, he couldn’t take a bottle of Avon’s Skin-so-Soft (which works, see previous blog on the topic). Mosquitos aside it sounds as if he had an interesting time, and caught up with our friends in Tromsø, which is always nice. My bright vermilion, fringed poppies (Turkenlouis is the variety) have come out side by side and simultaneously with the Tibetan poppies the colour of Morpho butterflies, you’ve never seen anything like it. Our new gardener is planting the dahlias, a bit overdue but the season’s been so late, cold and wet. Otherwise, if anything at all has happened, I haven’t noticed.

Miss Best Friend is suffering Political Disillusionment. Naturally, being a Labrador, she voted for the Food Party, who ran a most successful campaign under the banner ‘Chicken For Dogs’. Chicken there has been, but as she has gloomily discovered, not enough of it, and accompanied by brown rice. These meals, moreover, are sprinkled with some kind of brown powder which Richard the Vet thinks good for her liver. He retains a touching faith in the principle that once a dog starts to snarf down its tea it becomes a mindless eating machine and continues regardless till the dish is empty. Not this one. The result has been is that Miss BF daintily picks the bits ouf chicken out, and eats as little of the contaminated rice as she can possibly manage, given that the Labrador Snout is designed on the general principle of a shovel rather than a pair of tweezers. In fact, out of sheer stubbornness about medication, the animal has imposed a low-carbohydrate diet on herself and is actually losing a little weight. She clearly feels most ill used, and is inclined to blame the usual suspects; Socialists, Food-Faddists, and Protestants.

I was just out in the garden with Miss Kit when a couple of geese landed on the lake. I’ve never seen that before. Geese fly fast and high, talking all the time, so I was surprised, and Miss Kit rather frightened, when a pair of large birds shot over us only about a hundred feet up, leaving gabble behind them like a contrail. It quite put Miss Kit off her ablutions. As I could hear from the noise they were making, the geese were flying in a big circle, which proved in fact to be a great spiral, since on their second overpass they whizzed past us and smacked into the lake with an audible splosh. They took a moment to settle their feathers and then started paddling about quite happily. I beat a discreet retreat so as not to disturb them, but I must say, I do hope the lake’s long enough for them to take off .

We’ve been having a proper old three ring circus with Miss Best Friend. She’s got very set in her ways. I can’t remember what started the being sick, but it was probably eating something she shouldn’t. Then we went onto this regime of eight pills a day, each one a battle, in case it was the Palatable Pills upsetting her stomach, and she decided we were torturing her and got hysterical. For the duration of the Professor’s time away she ate almost nothing (at least as far as the dog dish went), but lost neither condition nor weight. Since then the heaving has got worse, while the dog dish remains almost untouched. No sign of blood, just old fashioned biliousness. We ended up taking her to the vet for x-ray and ultrasound, in case there was some serious underlying condition, which revealed absolutely nothing wrong, from which the vet has concluded that it’s nothing more than a slightly upset liver due to eating something horrid, combined with Psychology in large doses. He recommended a light diet, rice and scrambled egg in the first instance (eggs are good for one’s liver), then rice and chicken. I made both the rice and the scrambled egg with chicken stock to make them smell nice. All dogs like chicken and rice, and this one is very partial to scrambled egg. Of course, she won’t touch them She has become so embattled that she is now apparently convinced that all food offerings are an attempt to poison her (or to medicate her which in her view amounts to the same thing). However, it’s quite obvious that she’s eating something, somehow, from somewhere, because she hasn’t lost an ounce. She heaved three times yesterday evening, on each occasion revealing that what was sitting badly on the old tum was cat food. But where is she getting it? Meanwhile, of course, she is sure in her possession of the high moral ground. She is slinking about, rolling her eyes with an early Christian martyr sort of look, saying ‘you may be starving me but please don’t beat me’ in an absolutely maddening fashion. We’re on the whole feeling that there’s nothing much to be done but keep the cat food under lock and key, and wait for her to come off it.

The Professor was in Edinburgh at the weekend, premiering the Ice Opera all over again, which was a somewhat more socially complex affair than doing it in Aberdeen. Having had a taste of the Whig ascendancy on parade in the capital, he then went to Fife where he was talking about a distinguished old Catholic sculptor he’d known in his declining years, and found himself facing a goodly number of the posh Papists of Scotland. I gather this involved rather a lot of meeting self-effacing silver-haired gentlemen in good suits who politely murmur ‘Mungo Strathbungo’, from which you are supposed to divine that you are talking to Lord Strathbungo, and that sort of thing. That sort of thing is all right up to a point, and he did meet some old friends of whom he and I are fond. We remain, however, convinced that we have yet to meet anyone rich whose life we could put up with for so much a week. I was at home, getting on with my book, but not by any means in a spirit of martyrdom at being deprived of anything. I forget who recommended distrusting any enterprise which requires new clothes,* but I find myself more and more in sympathy with the principle. I took the old dog for a walk down the burn the other day towards evening, and saw a young deer standing among the trees about twenty yards away, staring at me. For some strange reason, she was quite fearless, though clearly she knew I could see her. I stopped, and we looked at each other for a minute or two. I know they’re a bit of a pest, but I still find the deer ever so slightly magical. A happier memory, on the whole, than the Professor retained from spending the evening in a roomful of people called Torquil McCorquodale.

* Thoreau, I find. I would add as a rider that I distrust even more any enterprise which requires uncomfortable shoes.

Miss Best Friend hasn’t been having her best week ever, despite the appearance of Dr Biswell and Mr Wil. There have been what are in labrador circles referred to as Hilarious Vomiting Episodes; not the sort which result from self-catering ( a term of doom in doggy contexts) but clearly, the sort which result from having trouble with the basic Griblets Du Jour. We took the old coot to the vet yesterday, who thought that her new arthritis medicine (it was changed recently) was proving a bit hard on her stomach. Unfortunately, it’s at the same time, self-evidently terribly good for her joints. Miss Best Friend is an old dog, a stubborn dog, and a cunning dog, and she has a deep and profound aversion to being medicated of a kind more normally associated with cats. She’s not the sort of dog who’s fobbable-offable with a chunk of cheese with a pill in it. Cheese disappears, a thoughtful expression flits across the old countenance, then with a little sound of ‘ptui’, the pill pings off a kitchen cupboard. At the moment, the regimen amounts to: 1. Thyroid pill (small, acceptable concealed in a bit of dog paté from the vet’s). 2) Three squirts a day of Doggy Milk of Magnesia to calm the stomach. A horrid emulsion. You can squirt it to the back of the throat, but all the same, droplets of this substance can now be detected all over the kitchen. 3) Three — I think — antacids, at any rate, also aimed at calming the tum. 4) One and a half of the Palatable Pills which have caused all the trouble in the first place. Having previously been most acceptable, they are now tainted with the suspicion of being medication, and unfortunately, they are rather big. Thus we have eight hilarous medical episodes per diem. It’s quite tiring really, though not all of it will go on inefinitely. I won’t be sorry to lose the Milk of Magnesia. I’d never known dogs could spit.