The Deep North

On Saturday, we had a particularly favoured friend to lunch. Sadly, she did not bring her youngest, whom Miss Dog adores — the young Corinthian in question was off playing cricket, or football, or both for all we know — fond though we are of the lad we do not attempt to keep track of his sporting fixtures. Instead, she brought her godmother, a perfectly charming lady who will not see eighty again, which was absolutely fine by us, but not quite so interesting to labradors. However, a slightly oldfashioned menu of quiche Lorraine, new potato salad and green salad, with a carrot and almond cake to follow, definitely had the canine vote, all bar the salad, so there were compensations. BUT. On Sunday, we had another lunch guest, a German arts person we hadn’t met, friend of friend. This delightful young woman emerged from her car, followed, to all our surprise by a ballistic Labrador: a half grown pup of about one. Miss Dog was enchanted. They took one look at each other, bounced on their front feet, ran round in circles, rolled each other over, ran in figure-eights, turned somersaults, and generally, had a lovely time. For hours. Neither is a brainy dog. On the odd occasions when they rollicked inside and played fighty-fighty in the drawing room when we were trying to talk about arts projects, they fell for the old ‘rush to the front door, crying “Look!!!” “What is it?!” — doggies then tumble out in naive search for the object of this excitement and you craftily shut the door behind them. I fear Miss Dog may be lobbying for an apprentice, but to be honest, the experience convinced me that one dog is enough. Even in a house this size, and solidly built, they seemed to crash about like a regiment of Uhlans.

I became aware the other day that there was something a bit odd about Miss Kit’s tail. To be precise, there was a sort of notch out of it, as viewed from above, which resolved on close inspection into a bald patch about an inch long and a third of an inch wide. The skin was quite undamaged, so my best guess is that she got it paint on it while Tony was working on the greenhouse, and in trying to pull the paint off, took the fur with it. It’s a little unsightly but will regrow, and if the story is a little more exciting than that, I doubt I will ever know. Miss Doggie, meanwhile, presented herself this morning fruitily scented with sheepshit. We have a nice old lady to lunch tomorrow, so Miss D. has been given a bath. It struck me that the timing indicates the little animal’s basic lack of guile: if she had been more Macchiavellean, she’d have left the luxurious rolling in forbidden substances till about twelve o’clock tomorrow.

We got some photos in the post this morning: our friend the sculptor decided to he wanted to use the Professor as model for a lifesize statue of a saint some while ago — the saint in question being St Alban Roe, who is noted for — apart from being a saint — bad attitude, disrespect for authority, and a sense of humour. We can’t think why the Professor popped into his head. Anyway. There was our friend putting some final touches to a statue in fine, silvery-grey Caen limestone which looks really very like the Professor. Unfortunately, just as we were saying ‘how nice’, we looked at the next image. It has been decided that the statues (there is a row of six martyrs, St Alban Roe being one of them) are going to be polychrome. Now people keep telling one that all kinds of statues from Ancient Greek kouroi onwards were polychrome. Polychrome is authentic. But it remains sadly the case that everything from the Peplos Kore on down actually looks better in plain stone, and the fact that these days one is conditioned by various types of fiberglass and plaster model to have unfortunate associations with naturalistically-painted statuary just makes it worse. Doubtless he is right but we do wish he wouldn’t.

We took delivery of the Greatest Living Shakespearean yesterday. Since he is ever intrepid, when we said a little diffidently that there was a student production of the Magic Flute on offer, he agreed to go. The Professor felt somewhat honour bound to give it a go, since one of his own students was conducting. Actually, it was astonishingly good. Someone had had a Concept at it and so it was set, in theory, in the 1890s, and related to a moment when Victoria was trying to prevent one of her younger daughters from marrying. Thus the Queen of the Night became a sort of vampire version of Queen Victoria, small, dumpy and in black, with a weeny crown, only with the black all glittery — a surreal vision put over with some panache. The singer is one of our best, too, who really could do those horribly difficult arias, while another of them took Tamino and also made a lovely job of the part. Nobody else was less than adequate and many were downright good. As the GLS commented, his own Stanford can do as well, but with a member of staff conducting, endless rehearsals, and a good deal more in the way of institutional backing. Considering that eight years ago we didn’t even have a Music Dept, we have come a long way.

We had a nice sunny afternoon here (as opposed to further south, where I gather there has been a deluge). I spent it filling a wheelbarrow with weeds– not that that’s the end of the story or anything like it, but at least, that’s a wheelbarrow full of buttercups, nettles and ground elder which isn’t in the flowerbeds any more. The ground elder is an absolute pest. I mind the buttercups least, on the whole, because you can at least dig them out. Ditto dandelions and docks, though we don’t have many of those at the moment. The nettles, though they fight back (my hands are covered in stings) do also on the whole behave — pull on one nettle low enough, and a whole tough stringy yellow root comes up with other nettles attached (and then nods over and stings the back of your hand but you can’t have everything). The ground elder on the other hand, breaks, and re-forms from tiny bits of brittle root, and with some things, like the mats of yellow iris, I can’t even work out where it’s coming up, let along get a trowel in to evict it. Still, if I keep at it, perhaps it will get discouraged.

We are trying to make some final decisions about my garden. Some have already been made: Barry the Great is lifting the old path, has made a plinth for Pegasus and is in the process of making a stepping stone path up the middle of the garden (the fact that it rained like Niagara through much of last week means that this is still in process). He has erected a gate, currently free standing, at the end. Unfortunately, what with weather, the fact that Tony got the same virus as Peter and disappeared for five weeks, and so on, the planting season pretty much shuffled past while we were unable to get anyone into the garden. So the beech hedge vs. treillage question is beginning to look somewhat taken out of our hands; it had better be treillage, though if it looks too flimsy we can always put beech hedge behind it another year. Today, after a good deal of deliberation, we started repainting the third remaining side which is in contention, viz. the revetting wall to the north, which has been pink-limewashed twice and is quite clearly, utterly unable to resist an Aberdeen winter. We bought one tin of a creamy white exterior paint (as opposed to limewash) to try, after a good deal of agonizing, and I’m pleased to report that it really looks all right: white but not glaring. There is probably a better and subtler colour out there somewhere, but it will DO. Of course, again, everything has grown up so painting the back wall is really quite difficult, especially since the remaining limewas has to be taken off with a wire brush. I got absolutely covered in fine splatters of exterior paint due to trying to work it into the highly irregular surface of the breezeblocks which make up the wall, and made the unwelcome discovery, trying to get the stuff out of my hair, that I have started to go grey over the ears. For a moment I hoped it was paint, but it wasn’t.

It has been pouring with rain. The Professor and I went into the university — there was a statue being unveiled, with suitable hoopla, in which he played a part, and I, meanwhile, needed to get to the library. The cobbled high street was streaming with water, and as I scuttled up towards the side road which leads to the history department, I was unsurprised to observe a gigantic puddle almost blocking the way, because as I know of old, it’s no ordinary puddle. It is, in fact, the Powis Burn, Old Aberdeen’s indigenous water supply. It was suppressed and caused to flow through a pipe about two hundred years ago, but really heavy rain always causes it to back-up and reappear on the surface. Inconvenient though it may be, I have a sneaking respect for it, for its quiet determination to go on being a burn whether we, the University, like it or not.

I think it’s a week since the last blog, but if I ask myself what’s been going on, the answer is, not a lot that’s bloggable. Miss Dog has refrained from crime, though she has managed to get surprisingly oderiferous considering she had a bath not long ago. The skunk cabbage by Twisby Island has produced a single very large and surprising yellow flower. Some late developing narcissus triandrus ‘Thalia’ have turned out to be double, which is very attractive — they are not the official double, which is called Calgary, but must have hybridised with some other variety. The shape is the shape of a single narcissus, but the trumpet is full of ruffled petals, giving very much the effect of a tutu. Otherwise, I am sitting at one computer working on the cultural history of Scotland, and the Professor is at another working on twilight and other topics, and Miss Dog, every now and then, wakes up and sighs at one or other of us for being boring. But it’s been pouring with rain off and on for days: we are going to have to do a fair amount of gardening in the near future, but meanwhile, since outside is so soggy, we are just writing. Not that Miss Dog will approve of gardening either. Cats are quite keen on supervising. Dogs think it’s dull.

I had a terrific day out with the Formerly Tropical Godparents. Between 11 and 5.30 we had: brilliant sunshine, rain, snow, more brilliant sunshine, a blizzard, sun … the weather, in short, was cycling dementedly between all available possibilities short of whirling us off to the land of Oz. The trajectory of this expedition was up the Deveron, over the hills and far away to the Spey valley, up the Spey and over the high mountain pass which takes you down towards the coast and the valley of the Findhorn. With all the geans and the larches out, it was absolutely beautiful. The idea was to end up at Auldearn, where there is a splendid salvage/antique centre from which we have bought all kinds of good stuff over the years. We stopped for lunch at Grantown on Spey, which is quite one of the prettiest of Highland towns: looking for somewhere to have something modest but warming, the obvious spot seemed to be the Grant Arms … this came as a bit of a shock. Formerly Tropical Godpapa and I both have clear views about highland hotels. After all that fresh air and weather, they should be faintly and comfortingly reminiscent of a cave. There should be a huge fire, tartan carpet, antlers, and pseudo Landseers, or at the very least, hunting prints. This poor old thing, which had a very promising Victorian exterior, must have been bought by some kind of international chain because the bar was the blandest Style International mind could conceive, wrong for place and climate in all respects. Our soup and sandwich was perfectly nice, but perhaps the most subtle indication of the hotel’s lack of faith in itself was that the Light Bites menu, after Soup and a Sandwich and before Scone, was ‘warm toast with butter and jam’. Warm, that is to say, not hot, a detail which reminds one of Edith Sitwell’s ‘Scotch Hotel’ in Facade. Nothing absolutely wonderful turned up at Auldearn, perhaps fortunately, though Godpapa did find a nice brass letterbox,, and Godmama bought a length of houndstooth tweed: but as always, it is a lovely shop, and it was certainly a grand day out. One of Auldearn’s offerings was an aneroid barometer: this handsome item of Victorian hall furniture was set at ‘Changeable’, and how right it was. The really miraculous aspect of the day, though, was that our various prowlings contrived to take place in sunlight, and whenever it hailed or snowed on us, we were safely ensconced in a nice warm car.

Miss Dog has had a most exciting day. She was taken out to tea, no less: the Palaeontologist and the French Correspondent have acquired a fine baby, now about a month old. What with one thing and another, this was our first visit of inspection. The baby is a fine, solid little creature growing almost visibly, though he is displaying the first symptoms of a possible tendency towards World Domination: natural enough though perhaps when he is a little older some dialogue may be in order. Or an introduction towards Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, maybe. Anyway, Miss Dog thought he was lovely, as did we. Also, and rather importantly from a canine angle, there were cheese scones, yum, yum, and cake, triple yum. We (with the exception of the Infant Ozymandias, naturally) partook of all this bounty, and Miss Dog had some cheese scone in return for performing her party trick, viz., ‘being a bear’, which is to say, sitting up on her bottom and raising both front paws. We then proceeded to sit and talk for ever such a long time. In the view of Miss Dog, which is to say, just about at table level since she is quite a large Labrador, stuff left on the table when people have finished eating constitutes Leftovers, i.e. For the Dog. Three cheese scones, most of a Simnel cake, and most of an apple cake. After a while she became quite obstreperous. Dogs do not understand the concept of ‘putting it in the freezer’. After all, why should you, when you can put it in the Dog? Since the French Correspondent observed, quite justly, that Miss Dog is looking somewhat more rounded than when last seen, we hardened our hearts. And by the time we got home, our hearts were postively flintlike! The little animal has been in need of a bath for some time, and an episode, it would seem, of rolling in the sheep field sort of put a lid on what was already a pretty hummy cocktail of canine aroma. Formerly Tropical Godmama and the Professor rolled up their sleeves and prepared for pink sudsy funne. I was, meanwhile, making complicated curries in the kitchen, and the first thing I knew of this was the sudden arrival of a ballistic Labrador. Wildly excited, she ricocheted round the house like a pinball, and was eventually caught up with, put on a choke chain, and taken up for a date with destiny. Actually, she seems to have quite enjoyed it, but once released from her shampoo ordeal, there was another bout of wild capering about, after which, she subsided into her little dog house and is now sleeping the sleep of the truly exhausted.

The Professor is feeling a lot better and has gone to Edinburgh. I have remained here with a collection of insubordinate animals working on late medieval Scotland, about which I now know a lot more than I did. I’m sitting here with ramparts of books to either side — Fordun, Adomnan’s Life of Columba, bibliographies, dictionaries, and goodness knows all what. Miss Kit just tried to bull her way past the heaps to come and sabotage this blog but they were too much for her & she’s gone off to top up her calories instead. The only other thing which has happened today is that Tony turned up and cleaned out the gutters, which is a great relief to our tiny minds, especially mine, though Miss Dog is always delighted to see him. The weekend was dominated by the Professor’s decision to make hot cross buns. Not unreasonable at Easter weekend but the dough was not cooperative. It took three days in the course of which I kept lobbing more flour and years into the mix, and even at the end of the day, they still didn’t rise all that much. I really don’t know why they were so difficult but it was an absolute death struggle. Anyway, he went off this morning with a batch of nice fresh buns for His Gloomy Excellency with whom he is staying, so it has to be counted a victory of sorts.
.

The title of the post reflects a week with more below the surface than above it. I have decided to write another book, or rather, another book has declared its presence, a bit like getting pregnant. So research stepped up a bit, as it does when it’s got a direction. The snow melted. This is one year when we will not get sick of daffodils since most of them have been mashed flat, poor things, but most of the tulips weren’t far enough along to suffer notably. On the whole, spring is resuming its course. The level in the pond continues to fluctuate in a mysterious fashion, doubtless entirely unconnected with the fact that it must’ve occurred to many a farmer in Aberdeenshire that with water so scarce in the South, potatoes are going to be a high value crop this year …We had a diplomatic visit from Barnyards: the big trees on his side of the track have Dutch Elm Disease and will have to come down. We made a decent pretence of believing him: he’s been wanting those trees away for years. I will be sorry to see them go.

As a peculiarly fair-minded guest (an Englishman to boot) pointed out on Sunday, we have simply become ungrateful. Four days of temperature in the twenties and like certain labradors we know, we are whingeing, ‘but we always…’ Ay think not. Temperatures around five centigrade are perfectly legit for the time of year. But I was working with some concentration in mid afternoon when Miss Kit suddenly got up and said ‘Out Now’. I looked up, and the garden was full of whirling white flakes. Clever little creature that she is, she had picked this up and decided she needed to get into the garden before things got any worse. A wee was had, in double quick time. I must say, at this time of year, one does not love snow.

There was some stuff on the webnews today about the way that dogs lower stress. This, it has to be conceded, is not always the case. Miss Dog has I think felt a bit short changed because the Professor has not been very well. He was due to see the Chinese doctor today, and when I opened the boot to get out some screenwash, she leaped into it; later she bullied her way into the car and since there wasn’t time to evict her we took her along going ‘Woo woo woo’ and driving us potty. We didn’t take her for a lovely walk on the beach which would, we felt, have simply been to encourage her in general badness. But the story did prompt a genuine and moderately serious thought. We do tend to envisage a family as parents + children, or at best, three generations, grandparents + parents + children. The Roman definition of a familia was parents + children + slaves. But looking even further back than that, one of the peculiar characteristics of our particular branch of the primate lineage is that they were able to create a family, or mutual benefit association, which connected up people with grazing animals (sheep, goats, pigs, cattle), predators (dogs, cats), birds, and even insects (bees). This was first worked out by wiser heads than mine; I am not claiming responsibility for the idea. But it does strike me that a corollary of this is that the human being who exists only in an environment of other human beings is cut off from an interspecies association which is pretty hard-wired in us. And no wonder that various categories of vunerable people can commnicate with dogs.

Very odd. The front (south facing) wall of our bedroom. A patient scritch, scritch, scritch suggestive of a persistent attack on stone. Miss Kit staring hypnotised at the plaster, wondering what she can do about it. At one point more than 20 years ago, we had an old house in Crail with stone exterior walls and plaster of lime and horsehair stood out from the stone on studding. There was for a time a hole beside where we’d put in a fireplace, and my then cat, the unforgettable Nefret, used to climb about inside the walls on the studding as if it was was a system of ladders. You’d sometimes have an eerie realisation that she was passing by, inside the wall, her passage marked by a gentle rustle of falling fragments of lime plaster and ancient dirt. We put a stop to it after the day she fell through the bathroom ceiling & broke the Professor’s glasses. We are on the whole inclined to feel that encouraging Miss Kit, who is in any case, a lot less brave than Nefret, to get into the walls will only cause trouble. But I’m not at all sure what’s going on. Jackdaws and crows, who surround us, have a horrid habit of eating putty, and have a sort of grasp on the principles of masonry. The location of the noise matches up with a rather vulnerable looking bit of stonework outside which may have had its mortar removed. Or something could have got in already, which is more what it sounds like — but if so, why there? And what? It certainly sounds like excavation, as if something or other is trying to chip out lebensraum within the interwall space.

Miss Kit and I came down this morning to find Barry the Great hard at work. He laid some shuttering down outside my door before he knocked off on Friday, so I was not at all surprised to find that my study door opened onto a grey pool of mirror-smooth concrete (which will have paving slabs laid on top of it). I accordingly took Miss Kit out via the back door. I do my best. But any reader who shares his or her life with a cat will be wholly unsurprised to hear that, nonetheless, Barry’s beautiful concrete is now decorated with dear little paw prints. The Cats and Concrete saga has been running since the invention of concrete.

We were in London for a few days last week, while the Godparents Formerly Known as Tropical minded the house and animals. I love London in spring: Ealing was awash in magnolias and flowering prunus, my Ma’s indulged fox was snoozing in the middle of the primroses on the lawn, and there was the misty, dusty, radiant light which seems to be a London spring specialty. Yesterday was coolish, but today we had a sudden outbreak of proper spring up here as well. At Fyvie, just down the road, the thermometer hit 22.8 degrees. My white narcissus triandrus are out, alongside the primroses and scillas, so the bank down by the lake is a pretty sight, and I have just seen the first bluebell. We spent the whole day outside — the Professor has a virus and is feeling rather shaky but he lay on a rug on the lawn soaking up some Vitamin D while I sat under the trees with a book (I don’t like sitting in direct sunshine), watching my little birds off and on — goldfinches, chaffinches, tits of various kinds, and greenfinches all came to the feeder. It seems extraordinary to get a day like that at this latitude, and we were duly grateful.

The Godfathers formerly known as Tropical are here. We went for a little expedition yesterday after they turned up to look at the various spring flowers around the place, of which there are now many. We were down by the lake when I saw something moving about and realised that it was a goldcrest. It seemed to be quite unafraid, creeping through the grass near our feet looking for insects. They are the smallest British bird, smaller even than a wren, and it really was ridiculously tiny. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before. You wonder how a little thing like that gets itself through the winter, but evidently they do. I saw a tree sparrow the other day - much rarer than a goldcrest, apparently, though equally new to me. Unfortunately, Miss Cat had done for it. The only bird she’s killed this year, and it would be a rare one.

We hatched some theories about sorting out my garden in the late winter; Barry the Great is now on the case, somewhat to our surprise. He is taking up the hideous hexagonal flagstones, laying some more land drains, removing the path and replacing it with stepping stones, cutting down the geans which never really worked, ditto the damson which has never flowered. He seems to be in his element. I need to move a whole lot of plants which are currently in the way of building work and am wondering where the heck to move them TO since half of what’s in the beds hasn’t put its nose up yet. Tricky. Meanwhile, today has seen the preview of a new vegetable in our life. Someone came up with the idea of crossing two of the least attractive members of the brassica family, kale and brussells sprouts, to create what are now apparently called ‘flower sprouts’. We bought a bag. Since kale cooks rather slowly and brussells sprouts cook rather fast it was anyone’s guess what to do with them. I opted for long and slow which pretty much caused them to melt but did not release the sulphurous gasses of your overcooked sprout, from which I deduce that the flower sprout is actually nicer than either of its parents. Since there was Malaysian curry laksa paste, coconut milk, leeks, celery, green beans, and sweetcorn in the mix I can’t report on what the flower sprout tasted like other than, so to say, ‘like a vegetable’, in a general sort of way.

The ex-ambassador turned up after we had sped the departing musicians on their way. Fortunately, he wasn’t minded to harangue us about Organic Bees or otherwise try and start anything, because we were frantically trying to catch up with ourselves. He and the Professor went off with the dog on Saturday to walk the Speyside Way — or quite a lot of it, at any rate, and came back tired and pleased with themselves. It wasn’t all exercise — it transpired, on their return with a happy but exhausted twit-hound that the ex-ambassador had bought a tweed jacket in Johnson’s sale as they passed through Elgin. Very pretty it was too, but when he embarked on the usual ritual of opening up the pockets, he began looking more and more puzzled: the inside pockets (various) were as usual secured with a few stitches to keep them in shape, easily tweaked out, but the side pocket seemed to be giving him a good deal of trouble … finally, investigation revealed that there weren’t pockets on the outside, just flaps. Which struck us as very odd indeed. To be sure, hardly anyone smokes. You no longer keep pipe & pouch, or cigarette case and matches, in your jacket pockets. The wallet goes on the inside. But people do carry mobile phones — indeed, hardly dare to be parted from them in many cases — and us oldies need our reading glasses. So surely the pockets are as much needed as ever?