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.

Gardening

One of the things that journalists seem to enjoy these days is writing a headline for an extreme weather event. But they don't stop there. No matter whether it is a dry spell, heavy rain or a strong wind these things are invariably placed in the context of the way the world climate is changing from what we consider 'normal' to something else. A weather event that in the past we might have thought of simply as a rare phenomenon is then thrown back at us by the news media who will bombard us with images of floods in India, drought in Africa, melting glaciers in Greenland (easily done because of the way our world is forever connected through the internet) and all this happens so quickly that our own perception of the weather event changes.

As I write this, for the last week or so our country has been sitting under a static high pressure system which has brought us light winds, dull dreary days with little or no direct sunshine but no rain, none at all. This is unusual. In all the time we have been living in Scotland we cannot recall anything like this occurring. The 'normal' pattern where we live is for constant change, a few days of wind, rain coming and going, sunshine off and on, a world where the next day will always be different. What outdoor jobs you can't do today can be done the next or the one after. Multiple days of identical weather are rare but this particular high pressure system hovered over us all week, the barometer needle stuck in one position. The absence of wind meant that it felt quite warm outside and as a result we attacked the garden with everything we had, forks, spades, rakes and strimmers. Nothing was safe. The end result was a compost bonanza for each of our raised beds, the creation of a couple more, and most exciting of all, we built a toad house!

For anyone that might be confused by this you should note that the toad way of life involves waddling about on land just as much as splashing about in water. They like cool damp places with water somewhere within reach and in winter they will seek out such a dark place under a pile of stones, somewhere they know they will be safe from anything that might see them as a good meal. Generally they do not tend to waddle about in daylight so the fact that we have not seen any since we dug the pond in our garden does not necessarily mean they are not around. So just in case one should feel inclined to visit we have provided a home, free of charge. A pile of rocks covered by some turfs which will grow into a shapely roof. The only question is whether we need a sign over the entrance explaining what it is for.

Moving on and reading up on garden chores appropriate for autumn we learn that this is the right time to be turning over the compost that we have in our unsightly plastic bins. The process first involves digging out the material that is at the bottom since this is where the fully rotted stuff is normally found. The rest is 'partly cooked' and will need more time to decompose so this is transferred to an empty bin to start another season of rotting. One of my favourite tools is a compost stirrer, a device that spins on the end of a drill and bores into the compost, mixing the pile vertically and letting air into the lower layers. This is supposed to accelerate the decomposition process and as such I find it quite satisfying.

Which brings us very neatly to the 'Hugelkultur' experiment.

This is a mad idea that came to us via some random social media post. It is (allegedly) a way of creating a vegetable planting bed using layers of material all lying on top of some bits of old wood. The idea is that the roots from what is planted on top will dive down and feed on what is released from the wood underneath as it rots away. Our version still awaits some planting and we scattered sawdust on it to make it look like a Christmas cake, not part of the recommendations.

Elsewhere we decided that the garden needed some trees. I should perhaps explain that our garden slopes down quite steeply from the back fence towards the house and the presence of old tree stumps close to the back boundary tells us that some quite large trees once grew here, maybe before the house itself was built. There is also some exposed rock which, we have discovered, is solid bedrock that extends beneath the top third of our land as well as beneath the house. In the light of this you could say we are lucky to have anything in which to grow our own plants. But we have, and it turns out that the soil we have is dark and rich. It is also invariably moist as the underlying rock only allows rainwater to filter slowly away through its cracks and crevices. The patches of heather and the thick moss covering so much of the garden are other indicators that it was once a woodland so planting trees of our own seemed like a logical step. One side of the garden is particularly damp, runoff always ensuring our pond is never short of water and this overflows into an area where reeds and damp loving grasses thrive. Our choice of tree here is the alder, generally found growing with water close by. Elsewhere in the garden we dig holes for two aspen trees, hoping they will survive long enough to display their fluttering leaves for us. It was whilst digging the holes for these that we discovered the extent of the solid rock which lies less than a spade depth below ground level, prompting us to choose a spot just beyond the line of bedrock.

Our trees arrived by post having been ordered online (the modern way) and arrived in a slim cardboard box. Each one consisted of a single stalk rising from a tiny bundle of roots, hardly meeting the definition of 'tree'. The aspen stems each had just a single leaf right at the tip although the alder proudly displayed several healthy looking green ones along its thin stalk, the word 'trunk' hardly seeming appropriate, but we planted them in the ground then immediately wrapped the delicate things in insulating foam tubes to keep them safe. Given our climate here they are unlikely ever to need watering but they will need protection from the deer that wander into the garden from time to time. It will be several years before these tiny twigs have grown tall enough to be beyond their reach.

Language

First of all, a bit of translation. The language I grew up with, English, uses the noun 'job' to describe two different things. One is an occupation or career, the sort of thing one would do routinely by working for an employer in exchange for a reward, usually in the form of money. The word has another meaning when used to describe a task or a single piece of work such as repairing a tap, digging a hole in the garden or wallpapering the bedroom. I now realise, however, that if the language I had grown up with had been American English then I might use another word in place of my second meaning. That word is 'project'. The first time I heard the word used in this way I was confused, largely because to me a project was something rather different, something bigger, something planned and considered in advance which might take days or weeks to complete. Designing and building a house would be considered a 'project' and this would involve a series of smaller 'jobs' using a variety of different skills.

Why is this important? To begin with it illustrates the way that our spoken language can become adapted in different ways without necessarily becoming totally misunderstood. But take the word 'cool'. Again I have been brought up to understand that this describes the temperature of an environment or an object. It is a relative term with no precise value attached to it, but it is a word that my parents would only ever have used in this context. Today, however, this same word has another meaning altogether, one that is again relative and rather imprecise but at the same time it has acquired a positive aspect. It can describe people, an experience, even a job or a project and it has nothing to do with the temperature at all. Some people might even describe a visit to the sauna as 'cool'.

In the absence of a relevant photo to accompany this blog I give you a random picture with no relevance to the topic.

Since we decided to make Scotland our home (a life changing event that took place more than fifteen years ago) we have adapted our own spoken language based upon the way the English language is spoken by those around us. [In some ways it feels wrong to call it the 'English' language but I shall stick with this name for the moment.] There are two main ways in which we have changed our own speech. Firstly there are words used everyday that can only be described as 'Scots'; words like dreich, blether, brae and canny that possibly have their origins in Gaelic or Norse. More subtle, however, is the way the language is spoken, the emphasis placed upon particular syllables in a way that is different to that of the English I grew up with. Many place names in Scotland have been 'anglicised' or roughly translated from the original Gaelic so that the road signs can be pronounced by visitors from south of the border. When one needs to ask a local for directions to these places one must be able to pronounce them properly to be understood and in many instances this is simply a matter of placing the emphasis on the right syllable. One example of this is a village not far from us called 'Kilberry'. Most English speakers would emphasise the first syllable, making it sound like a type of fruit. In fact it is the anglicised spelling of the Gaelic name Cill Bheiridh, the meaning of the first part of this name means 'chapel' or 'church'. Like many other Scottish place names, the emphasis comes on the penultimate syllable. Another example is the village of Ardrishaig where the first syllable, 'Ard' refers to a headland or promontory and the rest is a bramble bush. The emphasis on the 'drish' syllable is rarely heard when the name is spoken by visitors from England.

The longer we are here and exposed to the language spoken by those born and raised here the more our own speech is influenced by the local dialect. Most people tend to retain the accents we grew up with, usually acquired whilst at school, but different words do slip into our speech, particularly when we are in conversation with someone local, and we do not resist this when it happens. In fact we think it is pretty cool! For example when speaking to a Scot we will say "We stay in Tarbert", meaning that this is the village where we live. What we don't hear spoken much, however, is the Gaelic language. Fluent speakers are rare in our locality, an outcome of the history of the Kintyre peninsular going back to a time when speaking the language was actually banned. This is gradually changing as today there is a strong movement seeking to bring it back and the BBC Alba channel is broadcast entirely in Gaelic.

We met a couple recently whose command of spoken English was very poor as they had recently arrived from Odessa, escapees from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Without the benefit of Google's translation app our conversation with them would have been something of a challenge but we each had phones held ready and by speaking a phrase into this we could stimulate the phone to make the translation so we could understand each other. This, combined with nods and smiles, gestures common to us all, meant we could communicate quite easily, although perhaps a little slower than usual.

A recent visit to the city of Glasgow, a three hour bus ride away from home, highlighted another feature associated with the way we communicate. In our home village and indeed across most of rural Scotland, when approaching someone on the street it is normal practice to make eye contact just before passing by. This will normally trigger a greeting of some sort, a quick 'Hi' perhaps or even 'How are you doing', a short greeting being the minimum one might expect from a stranger. If it is someone we know then a pause for a conversation (a 'blether' to the Scots) is likely. When the initial eye contact does not happen it usually means you have just passed a tourist. In Glasgow, however, eye contact is avoided by most passers by, perhaps for good reasons although for us visitors this is strange and unwelcoming behaviour that makes us feel uncomfortable, unsafe even. The rush and bustle of city life is something we happily avoid as much as we can anyway but there are occasions when we just cannot avoid travelling there. Our bus passes might give us free travel and the journey around mountains and through glens might be something most would happily pay for but it is not something we undertake gladly. Nothing would persuade us today to live in a city environment.

One final thought on the language issue. We both recently called in at the local village hall to have our flu 'jags' and these seem to have caused some unpleasant side effects - sneezing, runny noses, aches in unexpected places. All part of modern life, of course.