There is much to be said for the Deep North in a whole variety of respects, but not the least of them is its antique shops. The Professor was in Edinburgh a while back, where one of his hosts was bemoaning the fact that he could not get a finial for a recently acquired grandfather […]
We had a very fine evening yesterday up Glenbuchat — which is a curly and exasperating Jacobite glen in the general environs of Glenlivet, i.e. seriously up country and a dashed long way from anywhere. There was a Village Hall thing about the Glenbuchat ballads — there has been a recently published edition of probably […]
The Lady Novelist has been South again — to Cambridge mostly, which is looking very May-Week-ish and nostalgic. My days of floating about in a long white dress clutching a bottle of of dubious sparkling wine are long past, thank God: I was banged up in Mill Lane with a roomful of academics at […]
One of our regular summer visitors, The Greatest Living Shakespearean, has been here this week — which has meant a great deal of gastronomy (and no time for the blog). Even as I write, there is a venison pasty in the oven fit to gladden the heart of Henry VIII — or indeed, St Thomas […]
It poured with rain all of yesterday, steady, drenching rain, which we were quite pleased to see after what has been a rather long dry spell for hereabouts. I nonetheless strolled out into the garden to look at the lake, see if any if the ducklings have survived the trout, that sort of thing. […]
I have just spent the last four hours with the BBC filming what I believe will be 3 minutes of some kind of show on Scottish music. I was discoursing on the topic of the Aberdeen Breviary, which led to some less than thrilling mobius conversations last week. ‘Does it have music in it?’ ‘No, […]