Battling for bike space

Once again the topic here returns to preparations for our grand cycling adventure planned for later this year, a planning process that we have been through before so one might think that there is little more to say. Booking early pays off, as we have discovered many times over the years, and by this time, barely two months before we depart, surely all our train and ferry bookings should be in place so we can focus on getting our bodies fit enough for the journey we have planned. (For those new to this blog this link will explain more.)

Looking back to our cycling tour around Holland in 2025, the journey with our bikes to the ferry port in North Shields (near the city of Newcastle) could not have been more complicated. Two ferries, an island crossing, two overnight stays, three different trains then finally a cycle ride along the banks of the River Tyne to the ferry port together made it by far the most complicated and stressful part of the whole holiday. Transport bookings we had made in advance all had to go smoothly as a single delay in just one leg of the journey might have put in jeopardy us making it to the ferry on time. So naturally with all this in mind we started this year's plans with the intention of making the home to port journey simpler and less liable to disruption. But our options are still limited. The location of our home on the west coast of Scotland where we have limited road choices, many of which are dangerously busy, will always make travelling with the bikes a challenge unless we just strap them onto a rack and drive somewhere with them. Rule out this option and we are back to relying on trains. Luckily these things run to timetables and so long as the changes between one train and the next leave sufficient time then any slight delay becomes insignificant. Sounds simple, eh? And so it is for humans but as soon as you include bikes then the problems start. They need to be booked on board as part of the ticketing process and this is where the whole system falls apart. 

Plan B which we are following and for which, as mentioned before, the ferry is now booked and paid for, needs a section which reads "Getting to Newcastle" by train, the first part of which is the sub-plot of getting us and our bikes to the nearest railway station, some sixty miles distant from home. What would be useful at this point is finding someone with a motor vehicle big enough to carry us, our bikes and our luggage who is also willing to drive us where we need to go. Here we are in luck! Visiting us from time to time is Gemma, a lovely lady friend who lives not far away, and after a little experimentation we are pleased to discover that our bikes will fit into her car. Better still she seems to relish the challenge of delivering us somewhere. All that remains is for us to book some train tickets. Simple, one might think.

Our route starts at our nearest train station then goes first to Glasgow, on to Edinburgh then finally down the East Coast Main Line to Newcastle. One would think that arranging this as a single booking would be simple and for humans, yes it is. For bikes, no chance. We know from our previous experience that trains on the final leg from Edinburgh have only limited bike spaces (and once on board they must be lifted and hung up in a small cupboard) so we book this section of the journey on its own and reserve two bike spaces. This just leaves us the other two legs - starting point station to Glasgow then Glasgow to Edinburgh - so these we try to book. We soon discover that between Glasgow and Edinburgh there is no need to reserve bike spaces at all. They can travel free so long as there is enough room. Our nearest station to home is 'Arrochar & Tarbet' so we try to book ourselves plus bikes on a train that will bring us into Glasgow with time to spare. To do this we can use the internet or else a phone app but whichever way we go we meet obstructions. The app says we need to reserve spaces for the bikes but it won't let us do it at the time of day we need to travel and the website tells us that all the bike spaces are fully booked on all the trains. We find this hard to believe so resort to calling a helpline and eventually discover that the internet is lying! Apparently booking bike spaces cannot be done until closer to the departure date, but nobody can tell us when this might be. Again, we can buy tickets for humans but not for bikes. Already these complexities are complicating our home to port journey, just as before.

Simply getting this far has involved us in hours of research and frustrating phone calls (most often speaking with someone whose accent is difficult for us to understand) with all the stress of wondering whether we should not simply revert to one of our earlier plans and drive ourselves all the way to Newcastle. Our van would then sit there happily waiting for us to return when our holiday was over. What could be simpler?

But then it happens. After multiple failed attempts at train booking, one day, quite by chance, we fire up the app again and suddenly it is allowing us to book spaces for our bikes on the train we want. Jumping past yet another stumble (the app won't accept our payment) we hit the website and make the booking. It is done!

Finally we can relax. There's just the small matter of getting the actual tickets and these must be obtained in advance from a ticket machine... which is when we discover that our starting point at Arrochar seems to be the one place in the entire country that does not have one of these. How wonderfully unhelpful is that! To remedy this we now have to plan another journey to a train station that has a ticket machine. The battle goes on...

Recent injuries

I still have a small scar on my leg from when our dishwasher bit me a week or so ago. To tell the truth I cannot blame the machine itself as the injury would not have happened had I not got a text message from a friend who lives locally telling me that the aurora borealis was visible in the sky to the north of us.

Up to that point we were having a quiet evening, dinner was over with and bedtime wasn't too far away but on receipt of the message I took immediate action so that we could watch the spectacle ourselves. (This is our friend's picture, not ours.)

To anyone who has never seen the aurora I should explain that the coloured light that appears in the sky is not dazzlingly bright. In fact to see it at all you will need to be away from other sources of light. Street lights and external house lights really need to be absent to see it properly and unless you live in a remote light-free area your chances of seeing anything at all are very slim. Then there are the eyes. We humans do not generally have good night vision so we tend to live in an environment that is artificially lit at night and if we move quickly from a brightly lit place to somewhere dark then our eyes need time to adjust, our pupils expanding so as to let in what little light there is. Until this has happened we are almost blind.

But the aurora is worth seeing, so my first reaction after receiving my friend's message was to turn off all the lights inside our house, a perfectly natural thing to do. The problem was that at that moment Kate was emptying the dishwasher and on being plunged into darkness she left the kitchen to find out what was going on. Having explained my reasoning we agreed that our garden would give us the best opportunity to see the aurora and it was then that, whilst walking through the kitchen towards the back door, my shin made contact with the open door of the dishwasher. Ouch! I didn't see it because my eyes were still adjusting. Even once I had hobbled outside into the garden my vision was still impaired but fortunately I missed falling into the pond although there were a couple of stumbles into our raised flower beds.

Injury number two, a small cut on my arm, was incurred some days later whilst folding up our wallpaper pasting table. We'd been helping some friends out by wallpapering a bedroom with lining paper so that it can then be painted in colours to suit their young daughter's taste. Our pasting table is a heavy plastic thing which folds in the middle and needs wire stiffeners to stop it collapsing in use. I have no idea of how the injury occurred but noticed the red stuff leaking down my arm as we were packing up. Suffice to say that a plaster soon stopped this and I didn't need surgery. The folded pasting table is both heavy and awkward to carry, which probably explains how I managed to strain a muscle in my back whilst carrying the thing downstairs after we had finished papering. In future I shall treat the thing with much more respect since clearly it has it in for me and has a taste for my flesh.

Sometimes it is better to focus upon the injuries we have avoided rather than those incurred. I am thinking now of my recent adventure up onto the roof of the house when the chimney cowl needed replacing. I chose a calm, rain-free day for the job, mainly because I knew it would involve my standing on the peak next to the chimney, the highest point of  the roof.

The old cowl had disintegrated and the remaining bits had been flapping about in the wind for several weeks making a clanking noise that could be heard inside the house. By the time I got up onto the roof using an extending ladder, most of the cowl had blown down but I still had to remove the remaining pieces and throw these down into the garden before fitting the new one. All in all I thought it went rather well and I am happy to report that despite the recent strong winds it is still sitting up there on top of our chimney. What this does prove is that, statistically, climbing up on the roof is safer from injury than wallpapering. Who'd have thought that!

The most annoying little injuries we seem to attract are those caused by one or other of the plants we have growing in or around our garden, most of which have spikes which are just waiting for human skin to come their way. Gorse is a top contender along with bramble and both of these will leave tiny pieces buried under the skin that are difficult to remove but irritate constantly.

Beyond our back garden fence the land is wild and uncared for, a jungle of gorse and rhododendron.

Some of the gorse has grown tall as it tries to reach the light and after a long period of dry weather this creates a fire risk close to our boundary. Clumps of gorse's spiky leaves are highly inflammable things, particularly when they are dry as they contain volatile oils and flammable resins. To reduce the risk I have been cutting out as much of the gorse as I can. Some of the trunks are six inches thick and will end up as firewood once they are dry but the smaller twigs and gorse leaves will be burnt in various stages in our garden incinerator. My thick leather gloves protect my fingers as best they can from the spikes and also from the heat of the fire. Injury avoidance again.

Whilst engaged on the gorse cutting I could not help but notice a thing of quite amazing beauty that the plant hides within its stems. The close up shown here of a freshly cut gorse trunk reveals a pattern within the tight grain that deserves better recognition. This hidden feature is right beside us inside every plant and by chain-sawing through the stem I have revealed its innermost secret.

Yet more cycle trip planning

One of the lessons we learnt last year when planning our cycle adventure is that it pays to book early. Train and ferry prices seem to have this habit of jumping up if one leaves it until close to departure. Lesson number two is that our cycling bodies, covered by clothing we wear whilst riding and supplemented by what we can carry with us on our bikes, require a minimum external air temperature of eight degrees centigrade. (Many might disagree with this but we have many years of experimentation to back this up.) So our optimum departure date will be governed by the temperature we can expect to meet at that time. We have learnt over time that this probably rules out any date before mid April but similarly we do not want it too hot nor too crowded which rules out the summer months when we'd be facing fleets of holiday makers. So eventually we settle for an early May departure which seems like a good compromise.

We begin watching videos on YouTube made by other cycle tourists and pick up various tips which are useful to know. One of these concerns the way trains in European countries accommodate passengers travelling with bicycles. Somewhere along the way this gives birth to a Plan C, one that involves travelling by train from Amsterdam to the end of the EV15 route in Switzerland and then cycling back down the Rhine river towards Holland. The attractiveness of this is obvious - rivers always run downhill making this an easy ride. The batteries on our electric bikes would hardly need charging at all! With this in mind we start researching train times with a view to making a booking before the price goes up but this soon presents us with a problem. On leaving Holland all the trains we would need pass through Germany and although they do have spaces for bikes we discover that these must be reserved in advance. Train tickets for passengers can easily be purchased online but reserving the necessary spaces for our bikes is not so simple. In fact we cannot discover how to do this at all! All the websites insist that this must be done but none explain how to do it. All very frustrating. Plan C goes on hold.

Whilst pondering this we digress into something equally important (to us) which is to  think up a name for our cycling tour. Our home is on Loch Fyne, the ferry leaves from the River Tyne and our planned route follows the River Rhine. So there we have it: The Fyne Tyne to Rhine tour. It makes perfect sense (to us).

The more we research 'bikes on trains' in Europe, the more confused we get. We really don't need the uncertainty of wondering whether our bikes can travel with us whilst we are on holiday. Then simply because we have tried to find out how to book such a train journey we find that the Internet is now bombarding us with organised cycle touring holiday offers. But we want to be able to ride where we want and at our own pace so the thought of dong this in company with a group of strangers does not appeal. This rules out us signing up for any of them. So no Plan D then and with Plan C fading into the background we are left with Plan B as our favourite. Nice and simple. Train to Newcastle, ferry to Ijmuiden, then start riding at our own pace going where we want to go, planning little more than a day ahead and pausing when we feel we need to.

We know that the whole holiday will be weather dependent so doing it this way means that we can easily stop and hide away if things get too bad. By way of example, the image here is produced by the UK Met Office and shows warnings covering many parts of the UK as another named storm passes over us. Our own plans must allow for something like this occurring, unlikely though this might be.

Next in the planning process comes the list, or should I say, multiple lists. Anybody going away on holiday must have a list, even if it only exists inside the brain. Our homes are equipped with things that satisfy our everyday needs and we rely upon local resources (shops) for other things. Once we are on our bikes cycling away from home then those everyday needs must be satisfied by what we carry with us. Shops can still fill in the gaps but when travelling there will always be uncertainty as to whether we can find what we need so our basics should always be riding with us, stuffed into panniers or other bags attached to our bikes. Things that can fulfil those basic needs cannot be forgotten, left behind at home, which is where the lists come in. But we are not novices. For our Holland Adventure last year we prepared lists and these come out again to use as our starting point. Items are broken down into categories - clothes, non-clothes, pre-departure tasks... to list them all here would be boring. Suffice to say that this is an essential, not to be missed, part of the planning process.

Finally I should confess that yesterday evening we booked the ferry! Two adults plus bikes. There's no turning back now. We just have to get our bodies fit enough to pedal our bikes on and off the ferry, the only problem at the moment being the weather we have had for the last month; endless cold easterly winds bringing clouds which hide the sun away completely. This is not normal for us. We live on the west coast of Scotland and our weather pattern normally brings us wind from the Atlantic lying to the west of us, generally wet but milder in winter than the country lying to the east. Somehow this has all gone wrong and there is no change in sight, according to the forecasters. Riding our bikes in these cold winds does not appeal.

Another mad idea!

It was a fine winter's day, one of the shortest of the year, which dawned frosty and cold. One of the features of living amongst the hills is that the sun takes longer to rise above them to begin warming things up. On this day it was nearly ten o'clock before the sun first hit our house and there was very little heat in it when it did. Despite this, I was tempted, by the clear blue sky and the almost total absence of any wind, to go for a walk on the hill opposite our home, the one that faces away from the sun and receives almost no direct sunlight at all at this time of year.

The ground was frozen solid, a thin layer of frost covering what little grass there was on the twisty path going up and then, on the descent, this frozen surface posed a real risk of slipping on the steeper parts. The cold air penetrated my lungs but the effort of walking up hill was more than enough to keep my body warm and encouraged me to keep going. Was it all worth it? Well yes, and this view is the reason...

At some point on my journey up or down I began reminiscing on our cycling tour of  Holland in 2025 and wondering what the coming year, 2026, might have in store. We love our electric bikes and the Dutch adventure had taught us that they are perfect for long distance touring. We have decided that 'bikepacking' as it is known (carrying camping gear along with everything else and staying at campsites) is a step too far for us but finding a place to stay overnight is what we did before and is not necessarily a problem. We learnt so much from last year's trip that by now even the thought of leaving Holland for somewhere a little hillier doesn't scare us at all. We rarely used the electric assistance on our bikes in Holland but we know that the boost it gives us going up hill means we can tackle almost anything.

For example, just supposing there was a cycle route that started in Holland at the mouth of a river where it flowed into the North Sea and then followed that river inland, eventually to its source. Well it just so happens that there is such a river, the Rhine, that begins its journey in the Swiss Alps, passes through Germany then into Holland passing through Rotterdam to reach the North Sea at the Hook of Holland and rather conveniently there is a marked cycle route that follows this river. It even has a name; EuroVelo 15.

But let us be realistic. The entire route is 1,450 kilometres long and the source of the Rhine is 2,345 metres above sea level so the chances of us riding the whole thing in one go are slim, to say the least. But who says we have to; there are no rules here. We could decide at any point that we have done enough then turn around to head down river for home (all downhill?) or else maybe jump on a train to travel back to our starting point. Hardly surprisingly, now that this crazy idea has entered our heads it will not go away and it has kick started the long process of planning: Where do we leave from? How do we get to the port of departure (something that was quite convoluted when we did it last year)? What time of year should we go? Do we need to learn to speak German?

Our tour of Holland last year began in Ijmuiden, the ferry port that serves Amsterdam, and our English port of departure was at North Shields, the mouth of the Tyne near Newcastle. Ferries for the Hook of Holland sail from Harwich in the south of England so Plan A involves us driving there carrying our bikes and making use of long term parking while we sail away on the ferry with just the bikes. Questions about how safe our van would be, left on its own whilst we are away, come to mind and the long drive to and from Harwich does not sound appealing but it could work nevertheless. Then suddenly another idea comes to mind. Why not start the 2026 tour as we did in 2025 by sailing to Ijmuiden from Newcastle then cycling down the Dutch coast from there to Rotterdam; Plan B. We talk this through with a dear friend who, amazingly, would be willing to transport us with our bikes from home to a train station so we can travel from there to Newcastle as we did before. This would relieve us of the burden of getting to our nearest station, some eighty miles away from home. In our minds we are transported back to the start of our 2025 tour, to the moment of our arrival in Holland, when within ten minutes of leaving the port we joined a beautiful fietspad (cycle path) that ran through wooded coastal sand dunes and we spent the whole day marvelling at the cycle friendly infrastructure that surrounded us. Plan B is beginning to look quite attractive. It is inevitable, of course, that there will be more versions to come and these will be documented fully, for those interested.

Devices

A new meaning for an everyday word - device: a thing made or adapted for a a particular purpose. Today the word tends to be used to mean portable electronic computing devices such as smartphones and tablets. As these things become endlessly cleverer there has been a drift away from the things we used to call 'PCs', personal computers, that needed a desk to sit at and required wires which connected a screen (a 'monitor') to a large box often found resting on the floor underneath. The box would hum away as it stored emails, letters and other precious stuff whereas today these things are automatically 'uploaded' from a phone using something we call the 'internet' and end up in a place from where we can easily retrieve anything with one simple jab of the screen. The physical location of our 'data' is a mystery to most of us - we don't need to know - and why would I need a monitor today when I can easily send the image on my smartphone to the television screen across the room without getting out of my armchair.

Just recently, however, we have identified some flaws in the transition process described above. Over my many years of using computers I have replaced one with another several times as my needs have changed or the machine itself has ceased to function. Each time, in order to ensure my data is not lost, I have copied things to other storage media which have then been tucked away in a cupboard. Some of these are DVDs, which stands for Digital Versatile/Video Disk, a form of data storage invented nearly thirty years ago. Then there are SSDs (Solid State Drives) which go back even further. None of this would have mattered had we not decided to 'have a bit of a clear out'. This phrase describes the process of digging around in cupboards, climbing up into the attic to see what is there, going through boxes full of old papers and letters relating to long forgotten events and throwing out what is no longer relevant to our present day lives. It was whilst engaged in this tiresome task that we came across the historic data storage media, loads of them full of more bytes than we would ever try to count, and this presented us with a problem. We are, after all, talking about information, pictures and recordings of things that were once part of our lives so before throwing them away we naturally want to know what is there. The problem for us now is that to do this our present day devices, tablets and phones, must be able to connect to a device that can read a DVD and we must also find the right wires to attach our present devices to an SSD so it can be read.

At this point I am inclined to abort the mission and think of other uses for the pile of DVD disks that are now littering the dining room table. They are shiny attractive things that might be better used as ornaments or perhaps even reconfigured as a nice wall clock. So let us put them back in a box for the time being and focus on the SSD thingy.

The devices we use every day in our home are called tablets. They have a small socket at one end (or on the bottom depending on their orientation) which takes a particular type of plug, one that had not been invented when plug-in memory devices were first conceived so I am forced to dive into my box of old leads and connectors to see if I can botch up a solution. I have a single, slightly more modern SSD device, which I can connect to my tablet quite happily but at first they will not talk to each other. It takes much more experimentation with different leads before finally my tablet shows me the content on the device it is talking to, and I am presented at last with hundreds of files, pictures, emails, documents of all shapes and sizes. I find a comfortable chair to sit in and begin the long process of reviewing everything to decide what I want to keep and what I can delete. I am looking at history here, years of stuff filed away just in case it might be needed sometime in the future. It is as if the future has now arrived and I am trying to make the decisions I put off making all those years ago.

The whole process is tiresome and rather pointless as I shall probably never look again at what I am storing away. And if I did, the chances are that the technology will have changed again to create a new set of problems. Oh, then I get a message telling me that my online storage is nearly full and would I like to buy some more space. Once again I speculate on where in the world my data is being stored and how on earth we came to believe that every photograph taken by anyone with a mobile phone (used by 70.1% of the world's population) must be uploaded to a data centre when these things are in total consuming 1.5% of global electricity demand. We might try to limit our domestic energy consumption by switching off a light or turning the thermostat down a  degree or so but I cannot see anyone proposing a move towards moving and storing less personal data.

Having said all this I return to my box of old papers and wonder whether I should use the discarded stuff as a homemade firelighter or whether it might be better used as compost for the garden. Either solution will avoid simply throwing it away.

Boating adventure

Continued from Sailing yet again... Let me say up front here that anyone who says 'she's an old boat on an old trailer so what can you expect' is not aware that we have towed Eun na Mara many miles across the country so were not expecting anything to go wrong this time. But it did.

We were about fifty miles into the boat delivery journey, still en route to Glasgow, and driving up to the highest point of a mountain pass known as the 'Rest and be Thankful' when the unthinkable happened. The boat trailer shed one of its wheels.

I just caught a glimpse of it bouncing down the road in my rearview mirror and thankfully was only driving slowly at the time so was able to pull over to the side without any difficulty. A quick glance at the damage told me we were not going anywhere. All four of the studs fixing the wheel to the hub had sheared completely and the wheel itself had disappeared into a ditch at the side of the road. At the moment this happened there was one car behind us, waiting to overtake, and thankfully the wheel's flight path had missed it - a great relief - but the more important question was what to do next. We were completely stuck, on a main road, with cars and lorries rushing past at speed although fortune had smiled on us a little as it had happened on a fairly straight stretch of road. We immediately switched on our hazard lights then got on the phone to try to find a recovery firm who could pick us up. We knew immediately that this would not be a roadside repair as the wheel bolts had sheered and new ones would need to be sourced then replaced.

One important factor for us was to keep ourselves safe. We were now blocking one of the two lanes so when vehicles approached simultaneously from opposite directions one always had to pause until the way ahead was clear. Simple enough, one might think, but many drivers do not feel they should have to slow down and will try to sneak past by accelerating if they think they can get by despite this putting them head on to the oncoming traffic. Any misjudgement would result in a crash so sitting comfortably in our van was not the safest place for us to wait for the recovery truck to arrive. Instead we stood on the verge, a place from where we could always dive into the ditch if the need arose.

Then again, thinking safety, we also called the police to report what had happened and around thirty minutes later they turned up, blue lights and all. Once they had parked behind us we felt much safer and we shared a good jovial natter with them until the recovery truck arrived half an hour later. This came fully equipped for the job and in minutes they had our trailer loaded on their truck.

Their base was in Dumbarton on the outskirts of Glasgow but rather than follow them in our van we turned around and drove home as we knew the repair would take a while.

Which brings me to the next problem. The garage told us they could not source replacement wheel studs (like headless bolts) of the right size for our trailer. Only when these were fitted would we be able to resume our boat delivery journey. Fortunately from the comfort of our home we eventually managed to source these from a company many miles away in England but we then had to wait for them to be delivered by post. How long this might take on the run up to Christmas was anyone's guess.

Eventually we got an email message telling us the day and the time that our parcel would be delivered which meant we could plan our trip south again. But when the day arrived, nothing. All plans were on hold whilst we waited for the simplest of things, a small parcel containing a few bits of metal. Thankfully our boat buyer was a very understanding man and he was willing to let things stand until the boat arrived at his door and in any event we received seemingly endless weather warnings about rain and strong winds affecting our route so we began to think that perhaps the gods were actually working in our favour when they pulled the wheel off the trailer.

A second email arrived with an new delivery date and the online parcel tracker now showed the package as having arrived in our village, a cause for some optimism. But by mid afternoon this had faded. Fortunately, however, we have real human beings who run our local post office and by late afternoon I get a telephone call saying our package had been located. Having picked this up we drove off immediately so we could present the new wheel studs to the Dumbarton garage first thing the next day, which we did. Sadly however this soon brought us to problem No.2, the absence of wheel nuts, the originals having been lost when the wheel flew off, and strangely our garage couldn't source these either so we had to buy them ourselves from a nearby shop. They were not quite the right type but they would do.

Finally by ten o'clock in the morning we were on the road, a trailer full of boat following closely behind us. We now had some seven hours of motorway driving to negotiate and, our own speed being limited, this put us in the company of an endless line of heavy lorries belching fumes all over us, for hour after hour. It was after dark when we eventually arrived at the Derbyshire home of our new boat owner and carefully reversed the trailer into his drive. At this point we were totally exhausted, miles from home, and feeling unwell after hours of exposure to motorway madness. Living where we do we are immune from this. Our roads are bendy single carriageway things, the nearest motorway being around one hundred miles distant. We had agreed to do all this to make ourselves boat-free, which was always the plan, but do not ever again want to go through the process that got us here.

After staying the night near Leeds, my brother having offered to feed us and put us up for the night, the journey back home, minus boat and trailer, was uneventful although again tiring as we met strong winds, heavy rain showers and yet more lorries. But at least all our wheels stayed on!

Sailing yet again - or not

Our leisure activities change over time. Up to about a year ago I was looking forward to spending more time on the water, sailing on our brave little boat, but since then, after cycling around Holland (not to mention the preparation for the trip) taking up so much of our lives, sailing has been little more than an occasional temptation.

Then, quite unexpectedly, a friend who lives locally asked if I would be prepared to help him with rigging a Mirror dinghy which he had recently acquired. Why me, I asked myself, when I have no experience at all with this particular craft. Well it seems that the many years spent on and around boats has given rise to a body of knowledge that I did not know I had and without me realising it I can apply this to water craft of all shapes and sizes.

The Mirror is a classic of the dinghy sailing world, a little under eleven feet feet long with red sails that distinguish it uniquely. The design goes back to 1962 and although it is still popular as a class racing boat it is stable and comfortable enough to make it a good choice for beginners and for those wanting a pleasurable day out on the water.

So this is how I ended up helping to rig a Mirror dinghy in our friend's garden, learning as I went along but at the same time dipping into my own accumulated knowhow. What came next was inevitable - an invitation to sail the boat to help an inexperienced sailor and friend.

Our village being a natural harbour we are blessed with a sailing club which has its own fleet of small dinghies ('Toppers', for those who know these things) and Friday afternoon is the time the local youngsters go out sailing. Rescue boats are on hand to support this so it seemed sensible for us to join them in the Mirror for our first sail. Having towed the boat there from the garden where she was stored we then spent some time getting her rigged, dealing with all the ropes and shackles that need to be attached, before rolling her down the slipway into the water. We had not, however, picked the ideal day for our first sail. The wind was quite fresh, gusty blasts coming in from the west straight onto the slip, which presented difficulties getting launched with both of us on board. But somehow we managed it and spent the next hour pottering about in the harbour entrance, tacking and gybing without totally capsizing. A Mirror dinghy is really a little too small for two adults to sail in and it can require quick reactions to keep the boat upright when a strong gust fills the sails and body weight has to be moved quickly to balance. But we were learning and did improve as time went on.

Once back on shore and packed away we both agreed that the wind had been too much for us and we really needed a light wind day if we were to make further progress. Two weeks later a seemingly perfect forecast tempted us out again but by the time we had everything rigged the wind had freshened so this second attempt was abandoned. Then finally we had a day when the wind was light and it came to us from the east, a much kinder direction for launching off the slip. It was also scorchingly hot so a few hours on the sea, where it was cooler, was quite welcome. This time we tacked about in the harbour mouth, each tack becoming smoother as we each learnt the movements needed when we moved our weight from one side of the boat to the other. Finally we ran back into the harbour with the warm wind at our backs.

By this time is had occurred to me that what my inexperienced friend needed most was to handle the boat on his own, without me cluttering up the Mirror's tiny cockpit. He still needed direction, however, so I worked out that if I moved forward and sat in front of the mast, facing towards the rear, my weight would be centralised and the cockpit would be free for him to use. This worked quite well and by the end of an hour or so on the water he was sailing quite confidently with only the occasional word of direction from me. We even managed between us to bring the craft back onto the sailing club slipway in such a way that we could both step off without tipping the boat over and getting totally soaked. Progress indeed.

Sailing opportunities like this might arise again but the bigger question facing us is how much use we are making of our own boat and whether this is the right time to sell up. Part of this conflict is due to the place we now live. Tarbert is on a sea loch, the longest in Scotland, and on each side the hills rise up steeply to create an easy route for the wind so that it generally flows lengthwise along the loch or comes in gusts over the hills. This can make for uncomfortable sailing in a small boat when you are just out for a short day sail. Or maybe this is simply justification for saying our lives have moved on. For both of us this is a massive life-changing decision as one boat or another has been a part of our lives for most of our time together.

Whatever the reason, after much consideration, we very bravely put Eun na Mara up for sale, although we soon discovered that the second hand boat market was almost dead. It was only after many months and several price reductions that we finally struck a deal and we are pleased to say she is going to someone who plans to use and care for her. All that remained was for her to be delivered to her new home, something we had agreed to take on as part of the deal.

She had been loitering on her trailer in a neighbour's garden since the summer so we we start planning for the journey by removing her cover and made sure everything is on board and lashed down. We attach the lighting bar and check the tyres are pumped up ready to set off the next day. Not for the first time the remoteness of our home comes at a cost as quotes for professional delivery run into thousands so the easiest option is for us to hitch up and do the drive ourselves, to Derbyshire in far away England. We made a plan which involved fitting the delivery into two days with an overnight stop en route but then, fifty miles into the journey things started to go wrong.... Continued.

The garden is ours

Some years ago, long before we bought our present house, the owners decided that it would be nice to create a level space at the rear of the house, an area of decking, where they could.... well we don't actually know what it was for. Perhaps they put chairs there so they could sit and enjoy the view of the hill rising up beyond the rear garden fence. Given that the sun only shines fully on that side of the house later in the day and that we have a healthy midge population who come out when the wind drops then perhaps this is wrong. Maybe it was somewhere to sit in the shade on hot days when the breeze was too much for the midges to cope with. We can only speculate. Whatever it was for, by the time we invested our money in acquiring the property the wooden decking was in poor shape. The surrounding guard rail was rotting and threatening to collapse and the decking itself was crumbling to bits in various places. So we removed it as described some months ago here and this is what happened next.

The world beneath the decking was exposed to daylight for many months. It consisted in the main of large pieces of concrete, some slabs which once formed the walls of a long ago dismantled concrete coal bunker together with broken pieces of rubble from some other long lost structure. Despite this it did not take long before weeds began to establish themselves on whatever soil was present and this gave the area a novel green and grey look. We stumbled across this uneven patch of ground on a regular basis as we moved around the back of the house until eventually we convinced ourselves that we should employ the services of a professional to create a decent surface for us to walk on, something to our own taste and not those of previous owners.

It was heavy physical work, not made easy because all the materials had to be carried up to the house from road level where they had been unloaded on delivery. The project took five days to complete and our professional landscape contractor was fortunate in that during this period not a single drop of rain fell from the sky. This would have delayed the work since apart from breaking up many of the concrete bits to create an even surface new concrete was needed to secure the new sandstone pavers as they were laid. It was important that these slabs were laid on a slight slope so that rainwater could not pool there and although the cutting to shape of each paver produced immense clouds of dust, once this dissipated it revealed the patterned finish we wanted.

The end result (we have gone nautical and named it the 'Poop Deck') is pleasing to the eye and solid to walk on, far better than the rotten decking that was there before. Our plans had also included removal of an awkward flight of steps, something we had never seen the point of, so the whole area appears somewhat less cluttered than before.

It was some days after the work was finished before we felt comfortable walking on it (the concrete and the grouting between the slabs needed time to 'go off') and in any case the week long dry spell was followed immediately by days of rain and wind which did little to tempt us outside. What did gradually begin to dawn on us, however, was that in the space of a week we had changed the view from the house. When the decking was there the wooden guard rail around it had partly obscured our view of the garden, something we took for granted until it was gone. Even then the mess exposed by removing the decking had still tainted our view of the garden, a place where we have planted things, like trees. We have built a few raised beds but we have deliberately left areas untouched to allow wild things like mosses and heather to proliferate. We have trodden pathways which criss-cross the garden so we can walk around without fighting the long grass and all this we have done ourselves, transforming the whole area into something we enjoy. Now suddenly we can see the whole thing at a glance simply by standing at a window inside our house.

Or alternatively we can view the garden from the top of our shed roof through the lens of a camera fixed up there. Despite all the wind and rain this thing keeps working and with its WiFi connection to the house we can see what it sees. It will start recording if it senses movement, which means that we will know if the odd deer wanders around but there are flaws to this feature. At night its infra-red night vision detects spiders who inhabit odd corners of the shed roof and seem to enjoy crawling across the camera lens.  This can give us rather scary close ups of their night time activity.

And then there is this chap. This is who the garden really belongs to, or so he thinks. He is attracted by the bird feeder placed just beneath him although he finds this something of a challenge due to the modifications we have made to discourage larger birds from feeding there. For a gull it is all a question of being able to balance whilst reaching down and grabbing morsels of bird food and he has to keep flapping his wings in order to do this. For this one particular bird, who we have named Jonathan, the effort seems to be worthwhile and in some ways we admire him for his persistence.

But he is not alone. This is a hooded crow, native to our part of Scotland and known here as a 'hoodie'. These are highly intelligent birds but he knows that trying to access the bird feeder is not safe for him; it could lead to injury as there are sticks and cords fixed above it designed so that only small birds can access it. But he also knows that beneath every feeder is spillage, seeds that are dropped onto the ground, and he will spend ages searching for these.