I needed to cadge a lift into town this morning with the taxi which brings us Honey the Hamster Loving Hippie. I therefore ended up pottering about in the garden, listening for the sound of wheels on the track. The pure and mysterious leafless flowers of the autumn crocus are coming up all over the […]
We progress towards finishing the kitchen. There is now an island of granite to the left of the sink, which should solve the old problem of the wood rotting where it kept getting wet (plus I can put hot pans on it), and Barry has managed to fix the steel splashback so that it actually […]
We are still pretty much kitchenless, though things have moved on to a point where we could make a dish of pasta after Barry’s departure, since the sinks are restored. Considerable progress, readymeals have been getting us down. The most interesting thing which happened today was a visit from a clock-whisperer, looking into the Professor’s […]
Barry is still at war with the kitchen, which is out of bounds. It now has floors, skirting, beading, and the tiling is under way, so there are some grounds for optimism, but for the time being we are still having to live rather randomly. Even the sink is off limits at the moment because […]
We’ve had a lovely ten days away. The forecast was not good, so we prudently took rain gear, but the sun shone on us almost continuously — we never got wet once. We were staying at Felbrigg Hall, an eccentric composite building not unlike St Custards, but idyllically quiet in the middle of a park […]
We are going on holiday — a week in Norfolk, and seeing some friends. Not exactly exciting, but it should recharge the batteries. Barry has taken the kitchen apart already — by the time we came down this morning, he’d ripped the floor up. Miss Kit has had to go to a cattery. I […]
I’ve been aware for some time that the Professor had a certain hankering for a long-case clock. He was highly pissed off some years ago when Northfield rang from an Edinburgh auction to say there was a Turriff clock going for tuppence, and alas, the phone was switched off. But recently, the sharp-eyed Northern Gentleman […]
If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. We’ve had ever so many guests, and as a result, the fridge has gradually filled up with little bowls. The end of some lamb, and its bone. The end of some chicken. A tablespoon or so of lasagne. Some rather aged ham. Surplus lamb shanks which […]
The Tropical Godparents’ Visit wasn’t all cashmere, corduroy and intaglios. No. After a day of shopping, they rolled up their sleeves and set about the Sisyphean task of organising us. Those Constant Readers who are visitors will know the front spare room with the fourposter. It’s been styled, lah (as they say in Malaysia). The […]
We have the Tropical Godparents — now relocated to become Edinburgh Godparents — with us. Yesterday, we went shopping. Godpapa, having lived in Kuala Lumpur for about a decade and a half, possesses an extensive and becoming wardrobe but it doesn’t include winter-weight trousers — so we tootled off to Elgin to see if the […]
One of the various guests of the last ten days was an academic based in Oxford. We went into Turriff together — I was doing a bit of boring shopping at the supermarket, and she went in search of a pair of tights (the weather having been rather colder than she anticipated for the time […]