Carradale home

The news from Libya is troubling and is all over the television at the Lancaster Travelodge where we spent the night en route to Scotland. Nineteen pounds buys a bed here with clean sheets, a cup of tea or coffee and hot water in which to bathe, many thousands of miles away from the men with guns. But prior experience has taught us to avoid Travelodge breakfasts. These come in a tough plastic bag within which is a series of small hermetically sealed packs – cereal, milk, spoon, crunchy bar, fruit – the contents of which are digested with difficulty to leave behind a cloying aftertaste and a mountain of packaging waste. The best part by far is the tough plastic bag of which we already have several serving as handy receptacles for our muddy walking shoes. (This is called recycling, Travelodge please note.)

After stuffing ourselves full with a more sustaining breakfast we head northwards on the M6 towards the Lake District, Kate doing a sterling job piloting our heavy vehicle. At first low cloud blankets the road as we ascend steadily then suddenly we crest Shap Fell and the sky clears, the air sparkling and radiating sunshine.

Descending now towards Carlisle the only dull note is when we spot a Tunnocks lorry heading south, full to the brim, no doubt, with delicious caramel wafer chocolate bars destined for the undeserving English. This is Scotland’s least talked-about and most underrated export product, unrivalled and unchanged since my childhood it brings back a host of memories at each bite.

M6 becomes the M74 as we cross the border. Now only Glasgow stands between us and our new home. The motorway fills as we navigate around the metropolis, many lanes of traffic weaving about pointlessly but purposefully, then across the Erskine Bridge and suddenly it feels like we have dropped into another world. We glide along Loch Lomond’s shore, Loch Long, Loch Fyne and finally Loch Gilp where we turn south for the first time in two days of driving. There is a thin neck of land between the east and the west Lochs Tarbert but for which the Kintyre peninsula would be an island. It takes but a moment to drive across this, to transit from the cul de sac of the Clyde estuary to the Atlantic Ocean, and years ago sailors would drag their boats across this piece of land to avoid a long and dangerous sea passage around the Mull on their journey out to the Western Isles. Our road now follows the Atlantic shore where today the air is clear, just a faint salty mist drifting in where the swell pounds jagged boulders at the water’s edge. The Isle of Gigha lies closest but beyond this we can see Jura with its naked rounded paps peaking cheekily out of the sea. The road surface is still cratered from last winter’s frosts, holes cannot be avoided and our heavy van’s wheels crash noisily beneath us, distracting us from the horizon smudge that is Rathlin Island, another country just visible across the sea. We peer out to see if the surf at Westport has lured any wave riders before driving into Campbeltown where in an estate agents’ office there is a key waiting for us, the key to our new home.

I clutch this smoothly worn precious object tightly in my hand as I climb back into the van for the last leg of our journey. We head back north now along Kintyre’s east coast past Davaar Island which guards the entrance to Campbeltown Loch. Ailsa Craig squats in the sea away to the south east and the Isle of Arran shows off its massive summits just three miles away across Kilbrannan Sound. This is the road that takes our village’s inhabitants into Campbeltown but there are no concessions here to make a driver’s job easy. There are twists and turns, narrow bridges with tight corners and hard stone parapets, hairpin bends which enable the road to drop to sea level when it wants to show the traveller some feature, a quiet cove with a sandy beach or a rocky inlet. This lively piece of tarmac is now taking us to our new life.

It is very mild, with almost no wind so there is a tropical feel to the day. The vegetation is lush, daffodils in full bloom are scattered here and there making a startling contrast against the dark vegetation covered rocks. The moss under the rhododendrons is bright green too, springing back to life freshly emerged from winter. Our key turns in the lock and we enter. The empty house blinks back at us.

All we have to do is fill it with our belongings to make it ours so up goes the loading door, down comes the tail-lift and away we go. Despite all those potholes and the twists and turns of long road from Glasgow nothing has moved or come adrift inside the van, nothing is broken. Peter and Liz soon arrive to help out having made the long journey from their home in Leeds and by dusk we are all sweaty and exhausted. Our bed is reconstructed, our visitors retire to their B&B in the village, and we all sleep the sleep of the just.

The next day, our first full day in Carradale, and the van is empty. Peter and Liz have departed and we make time for a five minute stroll to the sandy beach of Carradale Bay. The rocky point lures us in and before we know it we are in full adventure mode, clambering over rocks, splashing through soggy tussocks and wading through last year’s bracken. We already know that this place is home to a herd of feral goats – perhaps we’ll be lucky.

We see their hoof prints in the mud and follow them but they could be behind any piece of rock, hiding in a crack where the strata have twisted in on themselves. Goats could even be laughing at us while hidden from view close by.

We turn a corner and suddenly we are confronted by them. They, of course, see us first but stand and stare, captured between curiosity and caution, jaws munching on regardless. The message is clear: approach thus far but no further. Such wild animals ought to be living free from any human interference but the ‘freshly-shorn’ appearance of these two suggests that they might have given up their coats to a higher cause.

Countdown to Kintyre

According to news reports we now follow, the Type 22 Frigate, HMS Campbeltown, made a farewell visit to the Wee Toon this week, her last before she is sent for decommissioning.

The event required firing of guns across the loch in salute, something we would have loved to have been there to see and hear. The moment of her departure might even have been captured on the Campbeltown webcam if it had been possible to swing it in the right direction, across the loch to the naval pier – bah!

Then over in Machrihanish on the west coast there is news that the windfarm proposal has now been dropped and also that the wind turbine tower manufacturing plant may have been saved from bankruptcy, both of these items being very good news for the local community.

As our focus turns ever more towards our new home the last week in Yeovil proved a tough one indeed. It seems as though our lives are on hold as we get everything ready then sit around waiting for the moment of departure. It is at times like this that I almost wish I was still amongst the ranks of the employed as this would at least provide a distraction until the day actually arrived. It occurs to me that in the past this is always the way things have in fact worked out, that over the years our numerous house moves around England have been initiated by the need to follow employment, usually mine I have to say, and not therefore really driven by free choice. This time, however, things are different. At last we are embarking on a venture to a place we ourselves have chosen, with no outside influences.

This is not to say we have made anything like a snap decision to live in a remote part of Scotland; far from it. From the moment we decided to live on board Cirrus Cat we knew we had started down a particular road - we had temporarily freed ourselves from the constraints of the house-on-land concept of living and thus has started a process which we both secretly knew would end at some point in us choosing another home location where we could settle. Although neither of us ever stated this as an objective, from the moment we retired from work and floated our boat-home downstream from London we were embarking on a search for that new life. The mental process was a fluid one which took place as we moved from place to place, following the coast of Britain in an anticlockwise direction, stopping here and there as the weather or our inclination dictated, but always there at the back of our minds was the question, ‘Could we live here?’

Scotland’s magnetism has taken us both a little by surprise, but in different ways. For Kate there is the blood, which comes to her from her Scottish father, the memories of childhood holidays spent in the Western Isles and the nationality she has always felt herself to be, Scottish. A little later in my life I discovered Scotland as a mountaineer and rock climber and returned time and again in winter and summer to clamber over many of its peaks and valleys. But new to us both was the opportunity to see the country from a different angle, the sea, and also new was the chance to spend more time there, beginning to integrate ourselves into the culture that makes the place so special. We began to feel we were no longer just visitors, despite our being yachties, normally a transitory group, and whilst travelling about the Western Isles and the Clyde we were getting glimpses of something else, a way of life that was enticing us, drawing us in. Trying to describe what was doing this is difficult. There is a sense of confident self-sufficiency plus a very trusting nature about the people who choose to live in remote places and these are traits we admire. We think we can expect those living in Carradale to be there because they want to. We need to be prepared for the fact that few drive along the road to Carradale to go anywhere else.

Counting down to our removal day, Kate’s brother Peter and his wife Liz have arrived to lend us a hand. They are planning to live here in Yeovil when we are gone so this is an opportunity for them to see and admire our freshly refurbished property. They seem impressed.

We rope them in for transportation duties so we can dump essential equipment on board Cirrus Cat in her boatyard across the border into Cornwall then finally our removal day arrives and they help with the loading. Here Peter stands back in a calculating sort of way finding it hard to believe that we have, finally, managed to get everything to fit in. Hiring the largest van that we can legally drive on British roads was always going to be a calculated gamble but so long as we can persuade it to go along ‘the long and winding road’ to Carradale then it will have paid off for us. Thank you Mr Hertz.

One way or another, the next blog entry will come from north of the border.

Scheduling dilemmas

Reading just now about our friends Maryanne and Kyle on board SV Footprint who are preparing their boat for departure from the UK, we realise that we are just weeks away from our own removal to a new home in Scotland and we too are facing scheduling dilemmas. Surrounded as we are by our possessions, for each item a decision has to be made as to when it can be packed away, moved from view and therefore out of use. Since this involves quite a complex thought process, one that is repeated many times each day, exhaustion generally sets in from early afternoon and henceforth all higher brain function grinds to a halt.

Take a simple example like our wellingtons [this word probably ought to be capitalised - another decision]. Can we be absolutely certain that a need for rubber footwear will not arise before our departure for Scotland? And then again, when we eventually come to sail Cirrus north from Cornwall to Kintyre, surely we might have need of them with us on board? Maybe so, but they sound like useful things to have ready to wear in Carradale too so we can plod along the Kilbrannan shoreline with dry feet. Ah, but take them north now and we’ll have to bring them back south again, maybe on an plane, in order to have them on Cirrus and to wear them when stepping ashore from our dinghy in Ireland whilst on passage up the Irish Sea. Simple, you might say, buy another pair. Except that this type of decision applies to so many things and we simply cannot duplicate the lot.

Thankfully Kate quietly takes care of most of these decisions without reference to me and all I notice is that some item is not where it used to be, a shelf has become bare or a cupboard empty because things have been packed into a cardboard box. My primary role is to deal with the suppliers of everyday services, deciding when to terminate our supply of gas to the present house or how to ensure a telephone is connected to the new house when we need it. I also take care of the transport arrangements, both for us and for our belongings, and this can prove to be a considerable challenge too.

We have opted for the DIY approach to house removal since we are both confident of our capability as regards piloting the largest type of van the law allows us legally to drive on British roads. Unfortunately the question as to whether this size of vehicle will hold all our belongings, even with our well-practised packing skills, is one that will not be answered until just before the moment of our departure from Somerset and this adds an element of unpredictability and excitement to the whole affair which keeps our reactions sharp. The logistical challenge of putting each of our belongings and ourselves just where we need to be is a little bit like getting a man on the moon, but without the backup of NASA Mission Control Centre.

Our neighbour’s cat, Jelly, will surely miss us when we are gone. She sits beneath our ornamental willow in the front garden oblivious to the sparrows perching calmly in the branches overhead, or at least pretending to be so. She has the wisdom that comes with age (and perhaps some infirmity) that tells her how futile any efforts at catching the birds would be so she gives them a brief glance then focuses her attention on absorbing the rays from a weak March sun. She doesn’t notice my photographing her through the window and really doesn’t care who lives at No 20, just so long as she can rub her flanks along a friendly leg when she feels like it. We’ll miss her antics though.

Back to another scheduling decision, this time it is the freezer. We are struggling vainly to eat our way right to the bottom, down to the last frozen chip and pea as by moving day it must be empty so that it can be loaded into the van. The space inside can be used to pack some breakable items, how convenient.

We also keep a close watch on the weather we will soon be exposing ourselves to up in Scotland. This is done via the Internet and a couple of ‘gadgets’ that rest on my computer desktop. Earlier today there was a surprise in store as whilst both in Yeovil and Carradale the sun was shining, there was a twelve degree temperature difference, Carradale being the warmer. We are not fooled, of course. Spring has arrived here in Somerset – the daffodils are in bloom, tree buds are swelling, even the magnolia trees are about to burst into flower – but we know that at fifty-five and a half degrees north the seasons will lag far behind. The good news is that having enjoyed one Spring this year we have a second one in store waiting for us.

Arthurs

What are we doing wrong? Surely we should be climbing the walls with stress at this juncture. We are only a few weeks away from a house move from one end of the country to another (some might say from one country to another), into a house that is so far away and difficult to get to that we will not see the place now until we arrive at the door with our furniture and, we hope, our own front door key. But with no toilet or sink yet installed in our Yeovil bathroom, are we really ready to leave? Well no, but we have Andrew, one of the builders who worked on opening up our living room, on stand by to fit the toilet as soon as the floor is laid and now that the bath is fully tiled up, the vinyl floor tiles will go down in only a few hours. So there is a plan, it seems.

Packing began in earnest today after Kate arrived home with armfuls of flat-packed boxes and a big roll of bubble-wrap. Already now I personally have assembled, labelled and sealed some of the boxes, a very satisfying experience because it also involves sorting through the contents and throwing out things we no longer have any use for. Of course this is a two-edged sword for it is inevitable, sooner or later, that we turn up the old photo albums and we both just know that as soon as these are opened the day is lost, neither of us can pull ourselves away and we end up drowning in the memories as they flood past our eyes.

Here are some examples, although I appreciate that these may be of limited interest to anyone who does not know these people. Pictured here are my brother, parents and grand-parents seated on a settee that I recognise and in a house that I remember well. I can even recall taking the picture and even the camera I used. Flash photography in the 1960s meant plugging a small blue bulb into the centre of a fan-like reflector. Triggered by current from a battery the bulb exploded, sometimes dangerously, in a single flare, after which the molten blob it had become was thrown away.

Just to put things in perspective, this second picture comes from Kate’s side of the family, her grandparents with their children. Kate’s mum is on the left with the bow in her hair and her age puts this shot around 1920. The difference in style is quite marked and as much as anything else this illustrates the development of the camera which brought about a change of role, from a professional’s tool to a piece of domestic equipment anyone could own. Each of us knows or remembers different things about our maternal grandfathers, just small fractions of the men that they were, and although they would never have known each other they did share a name, Arthur, which is sort of nice to think about.

Of course what is really dominating our thoughts from moment to moment is a Scottish landscape, soon to be on our doorstep. The Internet enables us to discover what hot issues are affecting the lives of our soon-to-be-neighbours living on the Kintyre peninsula. and top of the list seems to be the plan to use the sea close to Machrihanish for a set of generating towers, a wind farm. Its location lies on a track used by yachts sailing around the Mull and it is also not far away from the RAF base and airport, to say nothing of the golf course. (I didn’t realise this but apparently the game of golf is badly affected if the view is not just right.) All this is causing excitement and controversy locally. Bizarrely, until last year, the wind farm towers used to be manufactured locally, just outside Campbeltown and when Cirrus was berthed there in July we watched these vast tubes being loaded and shipped away. The factory has been a recent casualty of the recession, sad to say, but another hot news item. Will the plant be sold or broken up? Watch this space.

Clearing the dust

In a single moment and a yellow steel skip, five months worth of bits torn from our Yeovil house are carted away, captured (just) by Kate’s camera.

As each item was pulled from the rubbish pile in our back yard and placed delicately inside the skip there was a new memory triggered of where it came from, what it looked like before and what we had replaced it with. Each rusted nail had its own story, each broken tile held a dust-filled memory of how it had been chiselled free of the wall, every strip of flooring held the imprint of where it had fitted before my crowbar had pried it loose. The whole event is strangely therapeutic, a cleansing, a separation with the past. We feel we have achieved a lot in doing such a substantial house renovation and learnt a lot too, about houses, what they are made of and what goes on behind the skirting boards. There has also been much we have learnt about ourselves and what we are capable of taking on. So would we do it again? I think the answer is yes, we would, but maybe we’d go about things differently, putting ourselves under less pressure by setting a longer timescale.

One good thing is that I now have some amazing new tools to amuse myself with, very powerful and mostly red in colour, strangely. There is the random orbital sander (RAS to its friends) which vibrates at 13,000 cycles a minute whilst whining loud enough to wake the dead. Don’t think for a minute of using this little fellow to sand off an offending corn or bunion for it will have half your leg off before you can get to the power switch. I also persuaded Kate I needed a hefty circular saw for ‘cutting things’, preparing the ground for when we saw a nice orange and black one on offer in the store. This little babe will eat fingers, toes, arms, just about anything if you let it get away from you, all at great speed, projecting all the little pieces out through a nozzle in a glistening arc. I always do a detailed limb and digit count both before and after this one comes out of its case. Just because it hasn’t got me yet doesn’t mean I’m not on the menu.

One thing is for sure though. Taking on any house renovation work in the Highlands of Scotland will present a whole new set of logistical challenges. There will be no B&Q store close by and open seven days a week. I will not be able to stroll down the road and take my pick between five different plumbing suppliers nor will I have Screwfix at my beck and call. It is not an island we are relocating to but the location will present communication difficulties of similar complexity. We have already in the past come across the ‘Highlands surcharge’ on deliveries to this part of the world but we have now also witnessed an Argos van struggling around the hairpin bends just near Carradale’s long bay, which tells us that they do at least try.

What we can predict is that our car-free life is about to come to an end. Twice in our married life we have sold a car, our only car, without buying a replacement and we both have rather fond memories of the first time this happened and the car being driven away from our house in Faversham. No longer would it stand on the street soaking up our pennies and interfering with our green intentions. We both noted an immediate and distinct sense of relief and pleasure to give it away; the fact that someone was actually paying us money to take it off us even felt rather magical. Five years later and we had completely mastered the art of meticulous journey pre-planning which is the required skill for all those following this path. No journey is undertaken without studying bus and train timetables or fixing bike punctures and getting the family dressed up for the weather outside. No stepping from the house lightly clad and staggering into the shelter of the car for us. But we thought nothing of it, were proud of living this way – out of step with the rest of British life. When we needed a car again though, after our move to Devon in the late 1990s, we went straight out and bought one, only selling the thing after our move into London made ownership unnecessary again. Transport links in and around London are better than most places in the world and driving there today is one of the worst experiences you’ll get on four wheels. The decision was a no-brainer.

So here we are again, with yet another house move weeks away, reviewing our transport needs and saying yes, car it is again. How many other households today go through this process, I wonder.

Faces from the past

Just one trip to Scotland and back has turned into a life-changing experience for us both, far more than we expected when we set out.

Of course it is not every day that we end up buying a house on the west coast of Scotland – we need time for this to sink in, a little longer for the concept of living in Carradale to permeate our brains, time for our mental landscapes to adjust to accommodate the new place, the new land that awaits us. Chance was giving us no quarter, however, for no sooner had we left the Highlands when suddenly our path was swerving towards those of some friends whom I lost contact with over forty years ago.

A small collection of islands sat on the edge of the North Atlantic continental shelf they may be, but Britain is our home. Whilst being conscious of how it is home for our family and for those with whom we have daily contact, we forget how this place is also home to those whose lives have mixed with ours in the past, people we have known in a particular place or at a certain time and who have then passed out of our everyday lives. Each of us wanders along our own path through life, a meandering path that can often pass close to that of someone we know without ever crossing it. Two former friends might pass each other on different sides of the same street without ever re-uniting and of course as our faces change with age, recognition becomes less likely anyway.

It also seems very human to be intrigued by the past, especially by those we have known in our past. Wondering what happened to someone we once knew is so much a part of the human condition that it is hardly a surprise to find the Internet devoting such massive resources to bringing people together, enabling those separated by time and space to communicate freely. To pretend that this electronic medium is somehow less substantial and that the meeting, electronic or otherwise, is therefore less adequate than what went before is to deny the obvious. The great pleasure and satisfaction that can come from re-connecting with one’s past can be sensational, inspiring.

Having broken our journey south in Leeds to visit Kate’s brother Peter, and then in Sheffield to meet our son Ben and his band, Bang Bang Romeo, we begin to receive Facebook messages that for me in particular cast my mind back to 1967, to a time when my hair was long, my arms thin and my teeth all in place.

This was a time when the favoured mode of travel for me and a group of close but hairy friends was a succession of rather dubious motorcycles, probably considered old at the time but now looking like museum pieces. The Internet has enabled friends Geoff and Shelagh (Geoff far left, Shelagh the photographer?) to emerge from memory into present day, face-to-face reality. (I am centre picture, by the way, face partly hidden behind the windscreen of my pride and joy, a red/grey LE Velocette.)

We had diverted our journey home to visit my mother in the South-East and as a result, soon after the initial electronic contact we hastily arranged a meeting and over a pub lunch in Wadhurst there we were pouring over old photographs, hazy memories being resuscitated. In the faces around the table were the faces I once knew, subtly altered by time but easily recognisable - the human face is what we remember best of all when everything else is forgotten. Fortunately the Internet is no respecter of international boundaries so the fact that the life-paths of at least two of this group have taken them outside Britain has not prevented them now being part of a revitalised regrouping. And such was the warmth that flowed from those of us who were able to meet in person that it is hard to see how henceforth our lives will ever disconnect again. It really felt good to be part of this assembly. Thanks guys. Don’t disappear again!

Back in Yeovil we dropped down to earth with a dull thud as it dawned on us that we have but a few weeks to complete the house rejuvenation project that we started back in September last year, to pack our belongings away and transport the lot up to Scotland. It is one of the joys of the place that a house purchase there is a simple and rapid affair, although this now puts us under a lot of pressure. We have a deadline to aim for, achievable but buttock-clenchingly tight, one might say, so a plan of action is needed to guide us on our way. Fortunately this is just the sort of thing we do quite well. We have had plenty of practice.

Scottish adventure

Our train ground to a halt for the fourth time and we sat gazing out of the window as two men in bright orange vests strolled by on the track. Each had a large, long handled hammer slung over his shoulder, not a sight likely to inspire confidence in the rail network and as we waited, and waited, it gradually began to dawn on us that we might still be here when our flight from Bristol took off and flew over us. At last an announcement came, but this filled us with even more gloom as its tone was depressive, predicting as it did no end to the holdups on the line ahead. There were signalling problems on the network, delays on the ‘trunk line’ ahead and no sooner had the words come out when rumours about fallen trees blocking the line began to spread amongst our fellow travellers, which just goes to show how we hear either what we want or what we expect to hear, never what is actually said. So far as we were concerned missing our flight to Glasgow would scythe through our carefully planned timetable, the booked rental car and accommodation, the visits to friends and family on our return journey, as well as being a very costly experience. Our stress levels began bubbling nicely in the quiet of the railway carriage.

Fortunately the train eventually re-started and we did arrive at the airport in time so that little more than an hour later we were driving along the shores of Loch Lomond just as the dying light of the day was lighting up the freshly snow-covered mountain tops. We had been transported from the relative warmth of Somerset into the heart of a Scottish winter with ice crunching beneath the wheels of our hire car the moment the road climbed above sea level. Soon enough though we arrived at our B&B in Inverary and tucked into the tea and biscuits that was laid out for us, putting our travel worries behind us.

By morning there was a crust of ice on the car and the steps from the house we trod carefully, keeping our wits about us ready for the day for we were in Scotland to look at houses, to find a new home for ourselves. Our planned property viewings were lined up, all pre-arranged with the estate agents, so that we would see a different place at roughly hourly intervals throughout the day. This was the start of a new venture, our Scottish adventure into the Highlands of Argyll. Something is pulling us northwards like a magnet, drawing us in to a new life in this beautiful land, an area we have got to know very well over the two years since ceasing full-time employment and a place that is going to suck us in to its welcoming embrace.

When the Scottish winter can produce views like this, how can you resist?

We tramped first around Lochgilphead, a town which nestles snug at the northern end of a long sea loch, before moving along the shore to Ardrishaig where the Crinan Canal emerges from its journey across the land from the west. Here it is possible to live with salt water at the front door and fresh water at the rear as the canal runs close to the sea before it escapes. There were a few neat little properties here that interested us but winking away further south was a fishing village on the eastern shore of Kintyre and we had a rendezvous there at three o’ clock. We drove off south down the peninsula past East Loch Tarbert then turned onto a narrow road, wide enough for a single car with posts marking places where two approaching vehicles could pass. With nothing but a passing tractor to worry us, soon we were dropping down towards the sea, Kilbrannan Sound, and in the near distance the mountains of Arran rose large and dark.

The road wound its way on, the surface broken by winter frosts so our tyres crashed and splashed into large black, water-filled holes. Slowly, up and down the hills beside the sea, in and out of gullies and rills, we closed on Carradale where the river Carra drains the Kintyre and where a settlement of some five hundred souls have made their home. Here we found a small house that will soon be our home, for a day later the deal was done, our offer accepted; we are now Scottish property owners. This is not some vast country mansion but nor is it a holiday home to be used just in the summer months. No, this place will soon become a permanent home for us both, within a small, remote village on the edge of the Kintyre peninsula, the sea just five minutes from our door and in every direction, more wilderness than you can throw a stick at.

Perhaps it is Kate’s Scottish ancestry that has brought us here or maybe it is our joint insanity that has pulled us in. Whatever it is we are totally comfortable with the idea of joining the small community of Carradale to begin a new life here. This is not some sudden whim, much though it may seem so through the pages of this blog, but instead it is something we have talked about long and hard between ourselves, sometimes deep into the night. Probably from the moment we sailed out of the Caledonian Canal into Loch Linnhe back in 2009 we began to have the inkling of an idea to get our lives to the point where we could re-locate permanently into the Highlands and we feel that the moment and the opportunity has now arrived. So rather than sit around doing nothing about it we have plunged headlong into action, researching the Internet to come up with a shortlist of affordable houses and taking our very limited funds north to make our choice. We have settled on the village of Carradale not specifically for its remoteness (this is a subjective term anyway) but more for the chance to live in a lively community where a spirit of self-sufficiency is the norm, and surrounded by the most beautiful scenery that this country can offer.

The Saga of the Leak – part the second

Now the men of Wessex Water they make their own laws regarding when, where and how to dig to find a leak, when it is proper for sod to be turned, how deep to dig and when they should extract payment for doing so. And if their own people do not follow those laws and rules then the noble men who manage Wessex Water can exact penalties against wrongdoers or indeed may also award gifts to those who have been wronged. Such a gift has now been bestowed upon the bearded Malcolm and his good lady and this saga has already passed into the folklore of the men of water with their listening sticks and their spades. It pays to complain.

But such men do not take kindly to water hissing from their pipes and they do not like to be beaten. So they have paused for thought, weighed up the balance of skills and technologies available to them, planned a new campaign of assault and consulted the oracles regarding the most favourable day of the week on which to begin. Meanwhile the hissing of the leak continues unabated although the water still flows in the pipes and tubes so life continues with little change – until the Day of the Dig. This is the day the whole of Somerset will not forget, the day when the soil was peeled back so that the pipes beneath were revealed to all, a day when every substance which lies hidden below was exposed to human eyes, a day when the long-lost knowledge of pipes would be re-discovered, finally, once and for all time, never to be forgotten again.

On the morning of the chosen day the sun rose above the horizon but it hid its face from the men of Wessex and the wind it blew cold.

Those men they had arisen early, champing at the bit like stallions in protective clothing, their large boots thudding to the ground as they emerged from their coloured vehicles. They had brought with them their listening sticks, they had brought their spades but most of all they had brought their favourite machine, a rather nice grey and red one with a long arm for digging deeper and further. ”Let digging commence”, they cried with one voice as they laid into the ground. Rapidly the first hole appeared, swiftly followed by a second and a third. The men of Wessex fell over themselves to dig deeper and further, the competition amongst them was intense.

By noon and soon after their fifth cup of tea they had traced a pipe as far as the house of Malcolm and Catriona, the black plastic seeing the light of day for the first time for many years. There it was at last, the knowledge guarded by the men who built was at last revealed to the men who dig, the lost pipes had been found.

But what of the leak? What of the hissing beneath and the water that escaped to run away into the ground? Tracing the pipe is only part of this saga as despite eight holes having now been dug, we still have water seeping away into the night. No wonder there are floods around the other side of the world in Australia!

The men of Wessex departed to their homes and families no doubt to sing songs of pipes lost and found, to brag of the holes they had dug that day, to tell tales to those who would listen of great deeds and how many sugars they took in their tea. For the bearded Malcolm and his lady however the story had yet to end. The saga of the leak must have yet another chapter, the one in which the leak is finally quenched so the water flows no more. Make yourself comfortable where you sit and read on to the end of this tale.

Now the thing about pipes that lie hidden beneath the ground outside houses is that they work best when they are connected to pipes within houses or, as they say locally, “That’s what he do round here”. This final chapter in this saga is about connecting the without to the within and the men who do these things, not Wessex men but men from Sherborne, that is across the border in Dorset. So it was that a Dorset man, this one calling himself Sid, came to the house of Malcolm and his good lady to make a connection that would stop the leaking water from leaking and hissing away. There was much discussion as to the best way this could be done, whether if the water ran backwards in the pipes within the house it would still flow from the taps in the same way, so that the lady Catriona could bathe herself and make free with the oils and essences to purify her skin as she was wont to do. And at last ‘The Day of Connecting’ dawned, another day when the wind it blew hard and cold but nothing could prevent the connection being made for the lost pipes had been found by the men of Wessex and the Dorset man called Sid wielded his spanner for all to see. The pipes bent beneath his will and became one with the water inside and all was well at last. The deed had been done and the leak was no more.

So it is that the saga ends.

We now have a quiet house, one that hisses no more. Sleep is difficult, of course, as the noise of silence is deafening but it is pleasant to know that all is well with our pipes once more. This whole process has been a learning experience for us both although not a particularly enjoyable one. While waiting for this or that to happen we have felt trapped, unable to leave the house for any length of time in case someone turned up to dig another hole. We both feel like a break, perhaps even a holiday is called for, a term not generally applicable to retired persons, so where better than a few days in Scotland in mid-winter. Flight and accommodation booked, transport arranged, off we go!