The longest, nastiest, and most complicated exam season on record has it seems drivelled to an end. We are tentatively sniffing the air of freedom, more or less; i.e. though ‘and another thing’ is inescapable, we aren’t taking classes. But one thing is a huge plus. Turriff has developed a real fish shop! We bought […]
Failure to update the blog has been to do with Not Much Going On. In some respects, at least. The Northern Professor has touched in white areas of his studiolo with the beautiful, luminous Cornforth Gray we put in his study. The dog has been moderately good. We have done University business of various kinds […]
Our on the whole good little dog must have got out of bed the wrong side this morning, because when I took her out, there was a series of Incidents. We have a rather odd family just up the road, who I think espouse some exotic religion, at any rate, for whatever reason, they […]
There has been quite a lot of Met Office gloom and doom about snow this weekend. We woke, not very early, to bright blue skies, and I am delighted to say that we got the dog to and around Delgaty Woods before anything turned nasty. It was actually quite beautiful; there’s a sort of edgy, […]
We ended up having a night out. The Professor is multifariously involved with music at Aberdeen: while keeping an appointment in the Music Dept he bumped into a youthful tenor who has sung several of his songs, and who said, ‘We’re doing Iolanthe! You will come, won’t you?’ Well, you can’t say no. Actually, they […]
We celebrated Valentine’s Day, after a fashion, by going to the dentist, which is the sort of thing us over fifties end up doing. I am happy to say that the result of this excursion was that the bloke counted our teeth, made quite sure no new ones had grown, tapped them a bit to […]
The Two Nice Girls came today, and hey! we had another potato mountain, and a bag of kale! Also, a bag of what they call ‘braising greens’, a nice mix of small cabbage leaves, pak choi and radicchio. I dealt with a kilo of surplus onions the other day by stewing them down to an […]
There is a limited amount of Barry the Great which we can afford, and we’re getting near the bottom of the piggy bank. We’re therefore sorting out jobs requiring 1) skill, 2) resolution, 3) ladders, from jobs which require none of the above. In accordance with which, having identified a group of Jobs for the […]
One of the minor problems of Layfe at the moment is the collision between two important factors: the Two Nice Girls’ vegetable collection, cheap, nourishing, local, fresh, etc., and on the other hand, the general boost to one’s spirits, morale and so forth induced by the Asian Home Gourmet and sundry suchlike packages from […]
We went the other day to pay the plumber: his office is at his residence, built over what must have been designed as a double garage, which he uses as a storage area for all manner of plumbers’ supplies. The Professor, who had been there before, had mentioned the presence of two charming cats. He […]