Back end of the year

After weeks of dodging rain showers as we tried to focus on jobs around the garden, enduring the frustration of starting one job then rushing inside to avoid getting soaked, suddenly it has dried out. Cloud covers the sky and the wind blows as before but nothing falls on us. Bravely we venture outside, where we stay until late in the day, wearing ourselves out with all the vegetation wrestling. I acquire a battery powered hedge trimmer which I find makes cutting back the shrubs a lot easier and given the mountainous nature of our front garden I decide to call this my cliff edge trimmer. As a result of all our hard work some parts of the garden are even starting to acquire a 'cared for' look they haven't had for many years.

Then suddenly winter arrives. (Nobody saw that coming!) Something we know as the Jetstream decides to do an unusual wriggle, the result of which is to pour cold northerly winds over Britain. Then, since said Jetstream apparently finds this rather pleasant, it maintains this for weeks on end. It makes us reach for our warm underwear, put on thick socks, wrap scarves around our necks, and that  before we even think about going outside. Our garden has turned white with frost and walking about on what was previously sodden grass is suddenly like walking on concrete. Gardening in the conventional sense has become impossible but since there is now an enormous heap of plant matter which was dry enough to be processed in some way, turned into something usable perhaps, this calls for a new strategy.

The next phase of our existence makes use of the limited hours between the sun rising high enough over the hills opposite for its rays to make their way through our windows, giving us the motivation for venturing out, and the early afternoon when the same star disappears in the west for the day and the thermometer creeps below zero again. For me this involves dressing up in multiple layers, over which goes my boiler suit and then a fleecy work jacket, a close fitting hat and my Wellington boots, the latter not so much to keep out water but to keep in the warmth. Thick leather gloves complete this outfit, protection from both the cold and the thorns I am destined to do battle with. Dressed like this I go to war with the plant heap, the aim being to convert it into something of value, maybe something to keep us warm. Hidden in this heap are the branches of long lost trees which once grew in our garden which had previously been thrown over our rear boundary and piled up, threatening the stability of the fence itself. But this is wood, and once the smaller twigs are removed we are left with logs that when cut up and left to dry out, we can burn as fuel to heat the house. The trimmings from our various overgrown garden shrubs meet a different end. These are turned into 'shreddies' by passing them through a garden mincing machine (one of two we now possess) and then spread over our newly cleared areas as a top dressing. And the best part of all this activity is that it keeps me warm in the biting cold outside, a warmth that lasts all day.

The bitter cold does bring something with it, of course - sunshine. Solstice is only days away but just before 10am each day the sun pops up over the hill opposite and blasts down from a cloudless sky all day. It has little effect on the temperature outside but in our south facing conservatory, surrounded on all sides by glass, the temperature rises steadily until it becomes warmer in there than in the house itself. This is an unexpected bonus for us. We can only imagine how hot this is going to become in the summer months. Perhaps a small sauna is appropriate.

The winter solstice arrives. From now onwards the days get longer, starting with sunset happening later each day. At 47 minutes past 9 pm Greenwich Mean Time on 21st December 2022, at this precise moment in the day, the tilt in the earth's axis reverses so that the length of each day grows. Thank goodness for this wobble, without which life as we know it would not exist.

One person who must know all about this is Santa Claus but despite this he comes early, with flashing lights from the fire engine which accompanies him as he rides past our house and several blasts from the siren as we wave at him. We are honoured to be blessed with his visit and very excited to see him.

House plans

There are a couple of expressions people might use after moving home and looking around the house properly for the first time. We might say we want to 'make it ours' or alternatively we might want to 'put our mark on it'. Either of these expressions could mean almost anything from putting your own pictures up on the wall, new lamp shades, or entire decor changes in every room but in essence what we mean is that what was to the taste of previous owners is not to ours. Just putting in our own furniture, replacing what has been taken away, doesn't quite give us what we want so something more fundamental has to change to meet our desires... and this requires making plans.

In the Grand Designs TV programme the format at this point is for the presenter to pour doubt upon the ideas some rather embarrassed family has for a barren plot of land they have acquired and to raise his eyebrows when told their proposed budget. 'How much! And how long do you expect this to take?' Of course on TV by the end of the show it is all smiles and happiness as we are shown around the colossus of a house with its custom built staircase and vast areas of glass looking out into a perfectly landscaped garden, evidence that the project has turned out well after all and is fully in keeping with the owners' original plans (although maybe somewhat over the original budget).

So now to reality. We are not building anything from scratch but there is, nevertheless, much that we would wish to change about the house we have just bought and moved into, probably going far beyond 'putting a mark on it' if the truth is to be told. Take the kitchen, for instance. It needs more worktop space and it would also be nice to have cupboards with shelves that are within arm's reach and not nudging the ceiling and needing steps to reach them. The gas cooker might look ok but it is far from perfect. The oven doesn't cook pizza properly, pies need defrosting first to have any chance of cooking and the grill is pretty hopeless. Then there's that tap over the sink that the kettle won't fit under - whatever were they thinking - and the kitchen power points all seem to be in the wrong place. The lack of an extractor fan also means that as soon as cooking starts the whole house knows what is coming by the smell.

Moving on to the bathroom, the tiny shower cubicle gave me claustrophobia as I bumped my elbows on the sides and it was squeezed into a small room which already has a bath with a shower attachment. The shower screen was the first thing to be ripped out (we have another en suite shower in the house that we can use). We have always found a spacious walk-in shower ticks most of our boxes and we have lived in a house without a bath for the last 10 years.

Fortunately since this is not the first time in our lives we have moved house and redesigned rooms to 'make them ours' I am equipped with the technology to produce scaled plans that I can view in 3D so we can visualise our ideas. Shown here is bathroom version 4, one that will involve a toilet relocation and a new shower tray and screen. The electric power-shower has gone, replaced by one fed with both hot and cold water, which seems to make more sense to us.

Whilst I can manage the destructive bits, stripping the walls and ceiling, for the plumbing side of this project and particularly in relation to the toilet, what we need now is a nice plumber to install and connect up all the difficult bits leaving me to redecorate afterwards. The polystyrene tiles have come off the ceiling (something that revealed a long crack in the plasterboard above) and we now have some nice shiny pvc panels up there. Our favourite plumber is lined up to do the rest.

These two rooms, kitchen and bathroom, are the priority for us although we are conscious of wanting to do so much more to the house to really make it ours, ultimately to change the decor in every room, a massive undertaking perhaps, but we're talking about longer term plans here, no rush. 

Meanwhile there are other things that will soon start going on outside the house, big changes that will keep us warm for years to come. Insulation all around, wrapping the house up in a blanket to keep us cosy.

Bramble extraction [✓]

The longest and most challenging of the tasks on our ToDo list is finally ticked. Job done! That is not to say that there is no single piece of bramble left on our land - far from it. But we have now clambered over every inch, gone into every corner, fought our way along each boundary fence and dived down beneath each clump of dense, overgrown plant life to find and cut off those stems as close to the ground as possible. Once having pulled those long strands out from their tangled home we have created a massive pile of vegetation in the rear garden which one day, perhaps, when it has dried out, we will set fire to. The brambles will regrow, we know this as the roots are still in the ground, but at least we'll be ready for them when they do. 

It has been hard work, very physical, and quite satisfying to get as far as we have. Sadly though such a thorough exploration of the garden has revealed something else, something we did not expect and which we find quite offensive. 

Whoever had responsibility for this garden in the past seemed to think it appropriate to throw things away, to dump stuff there, mostly amongst the denser growths of vegetation so that it would be hidden in the shrubbery or the long grass. The bramble invasion ensured that once lost from sight these items stayed that way and would still be hidden today had we not bought the house. The latest discovery, buried beneath the grass, is another Jewson's bag, a bulky sack used to deliver sand or gravel to your home. These things are made to last, a tough nylon mesh with four handles for lifting the immense weight as it is craned off the lorry. They are indestructible by any normal standard and will certainly not biodegrade by being buried in the soil. However this is the third bag we have pulled from the ground since we moved in a month ago, along with plastic bags, glass bottles, lumps of iron fencing, plasterboard, some sheets of corrugated asbestos, broken flower pots and a host of other things. One of the Jewson's bags was full of tiny pieces of broken glass, too heavy to move until some of it was shoveled out. This goes way beyond a lack of care for the garden. It is as if someone has deliberately thrown these items away, guiltily hiding them perhaps, instead of disposing of them properly.

On the positive side, during all our outdoor work, carried out in between the rain showers, we have had a small companion.

He will fly down almost as soon as we start work somewhere and stare at us from almost beneath our feet, hopping about looking for any insects or worms to feed on. He is a robin, but one with almost no fear of humans. We call him Rob and rather obligingly he has let me take his picture. He's a real charmer.

Mahonia

Mahonia is a large genus of woody evergreen shrubs named by British botanist Thomas Nuttall to honour Bernard McMahon, a colonial nurseryman from Philadelphia who was Thomas Jefferson's gardening mentor. It is also one of the many gifts left to us by the previous owners of our new house.

Like others in the Berberidaceae order this plant has shiny leaves which are spiky, rather like holly, and we have several massive bushes in our garden which have not been pruned or cut back for many years. Pruning them, however, means braving not just the spikyness of their leaves but also another invader which hides itself in an impossible-to-reach spot amongst the cluster of stems at ground level. The green stems from this plant rise up within the bush until they reach the daylight nearly three metres above then continue growing to drape themselves downwards around those spiky leaves until eventually they reach the ground again. Here they grow into the long uncut grass surrounding the tree where sooner or later they will decide it is time to send out new roots into the soil. By this time their spiky stems have grown to some six or seven metres. No amount of pulling on the exposed stems will break them; they are strong. Only by cutting off the stems from within the bush can they be removed, torn away with with every ounce of strength as each spike tries to hold on for its life. But to do this you must get inside the bush, braving those spiky mahonia leaves again. I am, of course, referring to bramble, often named after its fruit, the blackberry.

Suitably protected by my boiler suit, with thick leather gloves tightly fastened on each hand and armed with some long handled loppers I attack the shrub from the outside first, nipping off each cluster of leaves until I can see deeper in to where the bramble is hiding. I am ruthless, this is not an exercise in prettiness. The aim here is to reduce the whole thing to a size which enables us to walk around this part of the garden.

I soon notice, however, something quite surprising. The flesh inside a mahonia branch is bright yellow, thicker stems also having an internal ring of white with more yellow inside that. This takes me by surprise as I apologise to the plant for any harm I might be causing. Then eventually I can see the bramble stems deep inside rising from the ground and I push the loppers in to cut them off as close as possible to the ground.

I have nothing personal against the bramble (I would be the first to eat jam made from its fruit) but we have just bought a house with a garden completely overrun by this plant, to such an extent that normal gardening cannot even begin until the long trailing stems are cut out. By their nature the strength of those stems and the roots that feed them is quite remarkable, impressively so. Human strength alone will not break them. Instead each stem must be traced across the ground or through whatever plant it has invaded until it disappears into the soil where it can be cut so that the whole stem can then be ripped free. Inevitably during the process of doing this the spikes will find your flesh, usually the wrists, but eyes and ears are equally vulnerable unless great care is taken. So far we have filled our trailer three times with bramble stems, each time jumping on the load to squash it flat before taking it to the local tip. Then, realising the futility of wasting fuel by driving, we began to pile the material up in the garden, awaiting the next dry spell when we will have a massive bonfire.

Changing the subject a little...I believe I may have mentioned before the 'stuff' we have been (un)fortunate enough to have purchased along with our new house. The quantity of garden tools alone, particularly small trowels and forks stashed in both sheds, in the greenhouse, or just lying about in the garden, is hard to comprehend. Someone who once lived here clearly had a fetish about nails and screws too. These come in all sizes and are invariably in little packets, carefully wrapped then placed in larger bags or boxes or rusted tins. The space beneath the house (we call this the understory although this normally refers to the area beneath a woodland tree canopy) is the best place to find screws although on each visit down there something else is discovered. There was a considerable collection of long playing records, most of which date back to the 1960s and were welcomed in our local charity shop, an elderly knitting machine, a wooden table and two benches lay dismantled alongside a box of hinges and a bagged up gazebo. It is clear from the layer of dust that none of these items have been touched for years; they were forgotten long before the last owner chose to forget to take them away when she moved out.

A tasteful cluster of tiny drawers was fixed to the wall high up in a kitchen cupboard, not the sort of place where one might expect to keep a ragged assortment of screws, small electrical bits, hooks, tiny nuts and bolts, a random collection of washers, assorted nails, plastic wall plugs and 11p in coin (that is if you ignore the Belgian francs). The sheer randomness of each little drawer's contents speaks volumes about the mind of the person who put together this collection, a level of disorderliness to which I can only aspire. Indeed it has made me recognise one aspect of my own make up which results in my recoiling in horror when faced with having to deal with something like this, casting over 90% of what is before me into the rubbish bin. Each item was clearly manufactured with a particular purpose in mind, a destination which it should have shared with others of its kind or indeed a role which it might have uniquely held for many years. All that is now lost.

But I have gone on long enough here about the discoveries in and around our new home and since for some days rain has discouraged further play out in the wilder areas of our garden we now indulge in some indoor relaxation by planning how we might change the inside spaces to suit our tastes. Lots of thinking and months of decorating lie ahead.

Moving in and on

We turn the key and the door to our new home opens smoothly. Some might be tempted to go for the over-the-threshold carry but we have already agreed to go for a threshold rollover instead, purely for health and safety reasons. Finally we are inside and look around. It is all ours, warts and all.

It is, in fact, only the second time we have stepped inside the property, this despite various requests for another viewing and a lengthening list of things to check or measure. Can we look inside the shed(s)? What are the house carpets like? (Who thinks to stare at your feet when you are being shown around by the charming resident owner, a lady who offers us coffee and a plate of biscuits.) Is there a space in the kitchen for our dishwasher? Can we take a peek in the attic? Will our Martin fit in the garage? (Actually we discovered the answer to this one by a sneaky drive past and rapid deployment of a tape measure. The answer is... not without some modifications to the garage roof.)

When it came to collecting the keys to our new home, and given that the estate agent's office is twenty miles further on down the road, we asked if the keys could be left somewhere nearer, with a neighbour perhaps. We'd almost lost hope of avoiding the forty mile round trip when word finally reached us that the keys would be left for us to collect, in the village post office.

Then another call came in, this time from our removers, saying that they were at that moment emptying the house we are buying of its contents and, because no packing had been done in advance, this was taking far longer than planned. Would we mind some stuff being left behind in one room until our moving in, four days later? This we agreed to, for the sake of the sanity of the removers, but little doubts were beginning to sink in.

We were, therefore, beginning to feel a little more apprehensive than we might have been. For the last seven weeks we had been asking ourselves whether we had missed anything, whether our memories of that all too brief viewing were accurate and more particularly, should we have lifted at least a few carpets or peered into a cupboard or two before we made our offer. Looking back it seems like a mad gamble - not the sort of behaviour we undertake routinely - and our sensible selves are shouting back at us, telling us off. Then, added to this, we would be moving into a house which still has property of the previous owner inside, something any solicitor will tell you is a no-no. It can lead to chaos. It relies on trust, which the solicitor never recognises as existing. In the real world, however, trust does exist, hence our acquiescence to this arrangement. But is it misplaced?

Then it got worse. Midway through the very day we are supposed to be collecting those keys and getting access to our new home, crossing the threshold, we hear the owner has not moved out and has yet to sign the necessary papers transferring ownership. We are now getting frantic. Calls to the estate agent and to our solicitor take place with little joy. It is a Friday and nobody works at weekends, of course. We have packed almost everything, disconnected our appliances and our removers are booked for the following Monday. Do we have to cancel this? We pace around our box-filled house like people possessed.

The weekend passes with no communications from anyone, our blood pressures are rising steadily as we know that at 9am on Monday a team of removers will start loading our belongings into vans but we have nowhere for them to go, no house to move into. By 11am the first van is loaded. Then, finally, at 11.30 the call comes. We have a house (something that should have happened three days earlier) and we can now collect the keys. We all hit the road early afternoon then climb the steps to our new front door an hour or so later.

Our vendor has indeed left belongings in one bedroom - it was full to the ceiling - but she had neglected to mention that neither of the sheds had been emptied, nor the space beneath the house. Odd items of her property are scattered everywhere indoors, left behind as she moved on.

Oh, and this is what we missed underfoot.

Our team of removers did their best, emptying the bedroom and then taking away two lawnmowers, but this left a long list of items (nothing of particular value) for us to deal with. When you buy a house, unless agreed otherwise everything within it becomes yours, which means you can dispose of it as you choose. But why should we have to?

All this additional hassle and stress we could have done without; any sympathy we had for the previous owner evaporated from the moment she began to mess us around by delaying the sale. But we now put behind us the distain with which we have been treated by the seller and we move on. The new house is just what we need and we love the location. There is much about the house we want to change (starting with those carpets) to make it ours but we shall enjoy the big project that lies ahead.

Packing and moving house

There must be a simple mathematical formula associated with living in a house for any length of time, expressed as a relationship between the number of years occupancy relative to the amount of accumulated 'stuff' stored therein. No amount of careful hoarding-avoidance changes this. It is an inescapable fact of life itself, part of the human condition that remains hidden from view until moving day arrives when everything you own has to be packed into boxes.

Boxes, boxes and more boxes. We have more on order and cannot wait for them to arrive so we can start filling them.

The whole process of moving house, selling one place and buying another, has its own timetable, one that runs at different speeds from one end to the other. Here in Scotland an up front Home Report is the seller's responsibility so the sale starts slowly, visits by the estate agent then a surveyor. These are busy people, so they always insist. After they have seen all they need to see, asked those important questions and taken those carefully stage-managed photos time slows down as you wait for their efforts to manifest themselves; your approval of their expert preparatory work is needed before the process can continue. Finally our house is out there, pictured in glorious colour, online for all to see - the modern way - and displayed in a high street window - the old fashioned way. The next day we get a call for our first viewing, as if someone was just sitting there waiting. This is soon followed by another. I check to see if there is a queue outside.

House purchase is somewhat different. Estate agents are tripping over themselves to get you a viewing of your chosen house then can't wait for your views. Once an offer is made and accepted though, time grinds to a halt and no amount of nudging makes any difference. The legal process has its own pace and we just have to live with it. We wait and wait for something called a 'date of entry', something that must coincide with the seller leaving the property, leaving behind an empty house.

These changes of pace are hard to understand and put pressure on us as participants in what is already one of the most stressful of life's events. We need a distraction, hence the boxes and the packing, which we continue with on the assumption that the two separate processes, the sale and the purchase, will deliver at roughly the same time. Our spare bedroom gradually fills with boxes until we can hardly close the door but it all seems strangely unreal. Our attic is now an empty space, its contents divided between the spare bedroom, the Wheely bin, the charity shop and the local tip in roughly equal proportions. We try to think positively by reminding ourselves of the effort our family will avoid by us doing this now instead of leaving the sorting and the boxing to them at some future date when we pass on. I'm sure their gratitude will be unmeasurable.

There are many checklists associated with moving house and many different outside parties to be notified. But no matter how much time and effort we put into researching the contract or arrangement with each one we keep coming across surprises. It seems there are unforeseen consequences to moving house. A year ago we signed up for a fixed price deal with our electric supplier. It still has 18 months to run but it appears we cannot carry this with us to a new house. Any new contract will be at a higher price....of course.

Then there's the broadband, another fixed term contract. This time there's either a cancellation or a moving charge even if we want to install the same equipment in the new place...which we don't.

Conclusion - you cannot win!

Moving house is not, of course, something you do alone. Normally you become part of a chain of house moves all of which have to synchronise at more or less the same time or else nobody gets to move. It's rather like a line of swimmers along the edge of a pool, all holding hands and leaping into the water together. It doesn't work unless you all jump simultaneously. If just one holds back then it breaks the chain and when it comes to houses, if the chain breaks then someone is left homeless. For both swimmers and houses there is, of course, always a beginning and an end to the chain, a first time buyer at one end and an already empty house at the other perhaps, but generally the longer the chain, the longer it takes and the greater the pain. Thankfully our chain is short but we do have other delays, not least of which is what happens when one of the solicitors involved catches Covid and drops out of action for a week or so.

Then finally we have a date, at last. Six or eight weeks was what the estate agent predicted but he was wrong. It was seven. This is what it has taken, from end to end. Actually we have two dates, one to move in and then seven days later, one to move out. This gives us the chance to clean and polish our old house leaving it ready for those moving in then bid farewell to the neighbours and to the village that has been our home for the last eleven years. Removers are arranged, now it is simply a matter of going through the multiple checklists we have prepared to make sure nothing is forgotten. Oh, and more packing. Boxes, boxes, boxes.

Lindisfarne

We don't often have it, but when something called 'spare time' comes along then one of the things that often emerges is an old photograph, maybe discovered in an album previously hidden beneath a pile of papers or perhaps slipped between the pages of a long forgotten book. This is because 'spare time' is often used to move our 'stuff' about, to shift it from one place to another within the house. We might call this 'tidying up'. It achieves two things; firstly it can dramatically change the appearance of one corner of the house by moving the 'things' somewhere else (or better still out of sight into a cupboard) and secondly it makes those 'things' impossible to find should you later want them. Which is what happened once before to that old photograph.

But all that was before photos changed from ink on paper to bytes, a name for a system of electronic codes first coined in 1956 to describe an ordered collection of bits, which were the smallest amounts of data that a computer could process. I am guessing that we are unusual amongst our generation for storing all our old family pictures as electronic codes, inaccessible without artificial intelligence in the form of a computer, but this is in fact what we do. And there are many advantages flowing from doing so. For example it requires far less 'spare time' to find them, they can no longer be moved into cupboards and they can't be folded up or spoilt with tea stains. It is even possible to reverse the process that got them into this form originally, to change them back to paper and ink. It's called printing. But why on earth would you want to do this!

All this brings us to a picture of our son Ben taken over 30 years ago, one which has lost none of its charm since. We were visiting Lindisfarne at the time, an island off the north east coast of England often referred to as Holy Island due to the priory which existed there thousands of years ago and was an attractive target for invading Vikings. Our memories of why we were visiting this place or even how we got there on that particular occasion are lost to us but the image of our young, red-haired son is not, thanks to this photograph.

Just recently an opportunity came to meet with Ben in Berwick, a town not far from Lindisfarne, this being a place to which we could all travel without too much inconvenience or long distance motoring. Being less enthusiastic drivers we stopped overnight en route, parked up beside Traprain Law, the remains of a long extinct volcano which we then had to climb to the top of... because it's there, then booked into a proper campsite in Berwick for day two. Ben being tired from his own long drive we fed and watered him first before waving the photo about and telling him of our plan. Could we somehow create an equally charming adult version of this photo?

The first things to be considered are the props, which in this case consist of a big lolly (preferably one with 'Holy Island' written on it) and a van, for the background, both of which must be red. Then of course we had to be on the island itself, a place that is accessible via a causeway which is only revealed at certain states of the tide. But a quick check of the tide tables revealed a low tide, an opportunity, the following afternoon. So it was mission on.

As luck would have it the scorching hot weather tempted us to the Berwick seafront in the morning and from there into the sea for a revitalising early morning swim. Then after sustaining ourselves with some exotic paninis we spotted a giant red lolly for sale, exactly what we needed. So the mission is underway and we head off to the island...but then we met the crowds. It is a fine day in summer and a convenient afternoon low tide encourages every man, plus his two dogs, to drive over the causeway to the island, park in the enormous allocated car parking space then walk the half mile or so to the castle, this being the most visible attraction for miles around. The place is absolutely heaving, dogs running everywhere, hot sweaty children who would rather be anywhere else, elderly grandparents who can barely walk the short distance through the village having reluctantly agreed to go but who are now regretting every step, they are all here. This is not ideal when you need a quiet place to try to try to recreate one very specific set of criteria. It is nigh on impossible.

Then, as we briefly escape the crowds into the maze of back streets which house the guardians of the castle, we spot it - a small red car. It is not a perfect match but red is not a popular colour, it seems, amongst the inhabitants of Lindisfarne so we must grab the shot while we can. Ben takes a stance, we snap off a few trial shots... Yes, with a little editing this could be it.

So, did we nail it?

Over thirty years separates the two pictures.

Has he really changed?

Can this really be the same person?

Was it worth the effort? Most definitely yes. The modern day Ben may not remember his first visit but he will most certainly remember this one.

Another retirement

Both our lives are due to change this year. We are retiring!

But wait a second, didn't this happen once before, somewhere around the time this blog started, a good few years ago? Ah yes, but back then we retired from paid work. This time we are retiring from unpaid work, volunteers as it were, fulfilling roles in running our local community through a sense of commitment and having responsibilities without expecting or receiving reward. But make no mistake this is still work. It has many of the features of work that tend to make it so unpopular - the way it takes over your life if you let it, the pressure to get things done on time, the boss...well no, perhaps not this one. Kate and I have both been linchpins in different community organisations for a good few years, longer than most others would wish, and we have gradually become aware of the impact this has had on our lives. The many hours we spend emailing, telephoning, organising, these are hours that are no longer ours to do with as we want.

This is not to say we regret having taken on these jobs - there are rewards to playing an active role in a small local community, a feeling of satisfaction that such involvement inevitably brings - but we both feel that it is time for us to step aside and for others to step up and fill our shoes. This is not a sudden decision and we know we may experience a certain emptiness once we have taken this step but this will be as nothing, we hope, to the pleasure we shall feel from regaining control of lives.

It is, however, easier said than done, to resign from an organisation when so much of the working knowledge of that organisation is stashed away inside your head. Things you have done at certain times, procedures you have followed as a matter of course without thinking, little bits of knowledge that reside in your head without you realising, this must now be documented so others know what needs to be done and when. For example my position as treasurer of the local community trust has put me in possession of a plethora of passwords which I use to access a range of different online services. Many of these are hidden away, saved by my computer, but I must now remember them all so I can pass them on. And what of all those emails now stored on a server somewhere, addressed not to me but to the organisation I have been representing. Will they ever be read again? Does this matter?

Then there is the physical stuff, papers going back years. Should stuff like this be stored away for future reference? If so, where? Or is this a good moment for a big bonfire? All in all the handing over process seems like it is going to need more thought and consideration than the actual job.

Meanwhile...

A quick march around Carradale bay is always a good boost for the brain cells. So when coming across the only mermaid on the beach we are naturally inclined to stay a while and admire her many attributes. She's a stunner!