We are on the last stage of the Old Aberdeen book. Meaning, we had bloody well better be, because at sparrowfart on Tuesday morning we are heading off on the first leg of going to Florence by train. That is, Aberdeen to London, London to Paris, Paris (overnight) to Florence and La Spezia. But […]
The last thirty-six hours have been dominated by weather. The wind has been screaming round the house like something possessed. Miss Kit refused to leave the house, and I had personally to conduct her out for her ablutions yesterday morning — on really bad mornings she will consent to go if I go with her, […]
It has been a somewhat strange day: we have a very grand, and very old, French poet coming to dinner, throwing me into a bit of a tizz as when I do Grand Dinner it is on the whole Italian Grand Dinner and not French Grand Dinner which is something else again. The car is […]
Since the last blog, life has pursued a sufficiently even tenor not to provoke much in the way of comment. Despite the recommendations of the Barbadian Latinist, we have not embarked on glue-traps, since old fashioned breakbacks combined with Miss Kit seem to be working wonders. We are trying to finish a book; any excitement […]
The Apparitional Gamekeeper is offroad, having knackered the clutch of his absurd 4×4 boy-mobile. While he waited for another clutch to turn up in the post, he was looking for work, and suggested that he demolish the carport created by Kev the Evil Geordie. It was something we had had in mind, so we said […]
For the third time, we have mice in the flour cupboard, which is sited catercorner above the cooker. This is quite maddening: they squeeze through a ventilation brick from outside, come up the inside of the wall, and gnaw holes in the ducting for the cooker’s ventilation fan. They are therefore entirely outwith our control […]
We found ourselves the lucky recipients of one of those mysterious outbreaks of Corporate Culture that the extremely wealthy somehow consider necessary. Various individuals connnected with the wonderful world of oil decided to have an elegant evening of hits from grand opera at a local castle, and proceeded to invite a pretty motley selection of […]
We have had an extremely jolly time in the Eden valley, despite slightly more weather than seemed strictly necessary at the time. There was a very fine howling gale which left us trying to remember precisely which point on the Beaufort Scale (which we both dimly remember from school geography) is represented by ‘flying twigs […]