Australia - the journey

Quite suddenly we find ourselves planning a journey to the other side of the world, to a land where spiders and snakes are best avoided. This (the journey, not the snakes) is because many years ago I married into a widely scattered family, one contingent of which had chosen to live in Australia, the consequence of which is that a family visit entails travelling to the other side of the world.

It turns out that if you live in Scotland you can't just get on a bus and ask the driver to drop you off in Brisbane. Instead it requires advance booking of a seat on an aeroplane which in turn needs to stop and refuel somewhere en route. To organise this you need a willingness to negotiate the many traps and pitfalls that lie in wait for the inexperienced traveller, including negotiating the complications of booking online through an unhelpful website, putting at risk a considerable quantity of money. But fortunately for us we have a son and daughter-in-law who both have considerable expertise in travelling to far away places and when we called them for advice they rather surprisingly said, 'Can we come too?' Before we could catch our breath they had flights booked for all four of us, visas secured and all the required inoculations, leaving us only to make decisions about how many pairs of shorts to take and whether to pack the sandals or wear them.

We were travelling in March, the back end of winter in Scotland, but late summer on the other side of the world, which meant we'd be faced with a temperature adjustment along with the time difference. I wondered whether if we were to seal ourselves away for a week in a heated box with lights programmed to come on to match Australian daylight time (10 hours ahead of GMT) then we'd be fully acclimatised by the time of our departure.  Strangely this idea didn't appeal to my fellow travellers although the most organised amongst us was seen wearing dark glasses at odd times of the day as part of her acclimatisation strategy.

The logistics of packing were riddled with complexity due to the need for us to plan for spending a few days in Bristol where our son Ben and daughter-in-law live, as they were to be driving us to the airport in London. My first packing list had the shorts, t-shirts and sandals we'd need in Australia and list number two had the warmer clothing one might expect to need in Bristol in early spring but each list also contained essentials like socks, underwear and shoes which either would or would not be flying with us. Everything on list one then had to be allocated as either hold or carry-on luggage and weighed carefully. Only when the lists were translated into reality could we leave.

Our drive south to Bristol was exhausting for us due to the rain-spray soaked motorways we had to negotiate plus our unfamiliarity with heavy, fast moving traffic flying down the outside lane. Driving within Bristol itself has many additional hazards for the inexperienced, which is what we are. These come in the form of electric scooters and cargo bikes. It is also a place where lane discipline comes with a set of rules that were completely alien to us, failure to comply with which invokes extreme road rage.

In Bristol we parked our campervan in the front garden where we slept for a few days before we all set off to spend our final night in a London hotel so as to catch the early flight the following day.

This is us arriving at Gatwick and from here on we were entirely at the mercy of our son and daughter-in-law, to whom all this is second nature.

The long journey to Australia involved a stopover in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where the airport terminal looked more like nature reserve.

We then climbed aboard an enormous plane in which we sat for many hours, being shaken about and fed from time to time, an experience to be endured then forgotten. Some twelve hours later we landed and were met at Brisbane airport by Kate's brother, Jim, who drove us for another three hours to his home in Cooloola Cove. By this stage our bodies were suffering from being cooped up for so long and my memories of the remainder of that day are non existent.

Shrimper corner

This entry is not fishing related in any way. Instead it concerns our small sailing boat which was designed and built in deepest Cornwall (she is a Cornish Shrimper; there's a clue there). She is called Eun na Mara which is Gaelic for 'bird of the sea'. Given her origin it is hardly surprising that there are very few sailing in Scottish waters. Tarbert marina had just the one, ours, until a few months ago when suddenly a second one appeared, as if by magic.

She is a little younger than ours, has a black hull, is moored close by and is called Loup.

As soon as we spotted her we were keen to make contact with the owners so we could exchange shrimpy tales, discover our boats' little differences and examine the modifications, these things all being important to a Shrimper owner. It turns out, however, that we share far more than an identical boat with Loup's owners as not only do they reside in our village but they have recently moved into a house on our street just a few doors away from us. Stranger still is the fact that their house is of the same size and construction as ours and their garden, well it makes ours look quite tame by comparison. They have a jungle to cope with and will be facing similar problems to those we had when we first moved in.

The Shrimper is a boat designed for two people to sail and even sleep in overnight but now that ours is so conveniently berthed within sight of our house I have been tempted to take her out on my own from time to time. I have taken for granted her various foibles and also the inevitable consequences of having a gaff rig - not able to compete with a more modern Bermudan rigged boat when sailing upwind. It was only after comparing notes with the owners of our companion boat, however, that I realised something more serious might be affecting Eun na Mara's sailing performance. Shrimpers have a heavy iron keel plate which, when lowered from within the boat, adds a stronger righting moment as well as resisting leeway when sailing to windward. [If this is starting to get too technical then please feel free to jump ahead or else take a short walk and come back later.] When raised the plate is contained within a watertight box inside the boat where it is supported by a pivot bolt so the rear part can be lowered on a wire. The problem with ours is that the plate gets stuck before it is fully lowered, something we only discovered from experiments on Loup, whose keel plate works as it should. 

It is a well known fact in sailing circles that observing what is actually happening beneath one's boat is not easy (it is a hidden world) so this rather uninteresting picture, taken with a waterproof camera fastened to the end of a selfie stick, is something to be treasured. What it shows in essence is that our boat has a problem as only a small fraction of the keel plate is showing beneath the hull.

This is what it should look like when fully lowered.

In order to try to fix the problem we thought it might be possible to dive beneath the boat, give keel plate a tug from underneath to encourage it to drop down, then bob back up to the surface before running out of air. This became Plan A. Wet-suited, I clamber over the side of the boat and slide underneath to grab hold of the small protruding piece of iron. Now upside down, my feet braced against the bottom of the hull, I heave away with all my strength but nothing moves. I soon realise that this is something that can only be fixed with the boat out of the water so I focus on the bobbing up bit but emerge from under the water looking like a zombie as I'm covered in blue antifouling paint, the self eroding hull coating having transferred itself to me as I slithered about down below.

Plan B. Arrangements are made with another local boatyard for our boat to be hoisted into the air (not her natural element) so the faulty keel can be extracted (it only comes out from beneath) and the problem fixed. The journey to the boatyard, however, is necessarily by road since the Crinan Canal which connects us with the other yard is closed for maintenance during the winter months. This means we must first get the boat back onto her trailer, the one that spent last summer languishing in our garage whilst new suspension units were fitted, so we take advantage of the crane organised as part of our marina's end of season boat liftout, which solved that problem. But once secured safely on her trailer it turns out things are a little more complicated because a massive rain storm passing over Scotland several weeks before had caused landslips in several places, the largest of which had completely blocked the road between our home and the boatyard we were planning to drive to. Alternative routes would all involve a lengthy detour along narrow single track roads, totally unsuitable when pulling a loaded trailer. So plan B is on hold.

Over the following weeks, road repair crews begin to remove thousands of tons of rock and rubble from the blocked road. Simultaneously an alternative route is constructed which bypasses the mountain from which the rockfall came by using an existing forest track, previously only used for extracting timber, and an additional piece of land bought from a local farmer. Remarkably, quicker than anyone had expected, the new road, which is far enough from the original rockfall to be safe from further unstable debris above the main road, was announced as being open to traffic, albeit with a one way traffic flow in place. But now something else intervened... Christmas. The boatyard workshop staff are given a two week break so our trip is on hold until the new year.

Finally the day arrives when we hitch up the trailer, slide under the height bar which protects the marina car park from vehicles only slightly higher than ours, and drive north.

Everything goes smoothly and on arrival at the boatyard Eun na Mara is lifted into the air so we can see what is going on with the keel. Once the inevitable layers of barnacles and worm casts are pressure-washed off the problem becomes apparent. From inside and from underneath the boat some distortion to the side of the keel box can be seen and it is this that is preventing the keel from dropping. Fixing this is not going to be an easy job and the busy boatyard cannot begin work for some months yet so once again we must wait.

How did this damage happen? The answer to this question lies with the internal ballast used in the construction of these boats; small pieces of iron (shot) bonded into the floor on either side of the keel box. At some point long ago seawater has got into this on one side and caused the iron to rust. This in turn caused the ballast to swell which then put pressure on the side of the keel box, distorting it until the keel plate could no longer swing down. The solution now is to chip away the swollen internal ballast (not easy) so the keel box side can be forced back into shape and fixed in this position. I am able to do some of the work by chipping and grinding away from inside but the final repair will require access from underneath the boat, which is impossible whilst she sits on her trailer. Hence we still need the services of the boatyard and must be patient. We tow her back home and wait for the call from the yard.

A few weeks later we are watching enviously as the boats in our local marina are craned back into the water so they can go off sailing.

Music

I come from an era when many homes, including mine, had a piano. This wasn't necessarily because anyone who lived there had a particular musical talent; for many it was simply an item of furniture that was expected in your home and missed if it was not there. Its function was not really to entertain others. More likely it was seen as somewhere to sit and contemplate, to play a simple tune to delight the ears of one's children perhaps, to see if they might show an interest, or maybe playing carols at Christmas time. Interestingly, and unlike with some other instruments, a pianist can look directly at their hands on the keys whilst playing, keys which are laid out in such a logical fashion that even after moving on to a different instrument the piano keyboard will still serve as a mental reference.

I can recall going to piano lessons (which I hated) from an early age and despite having no interest in playing another instrument for many years afterwards, some of what I learnt must have stuck because today I can still read music. (This is the modern system of lines and dots first created by Christian monks to try to standardise their worship.) In later life various situations have prompted me to pick up and play different instruments, starting with a tin whistle and more recently playing a concertina. When I look back on how this has come about I find it quite hard to believe that those few short years as a child sitting once a week at a piano with my scary tutor beside me (slapping my knuckles with a ruler when I got it wrong) could have resulted in anything useful sticking with me. But it clearly did.

Learning to play the concertina on my own, with no tuition, has been something of a challenge but it has been one that I have been motivated to endure without really considering what it might lead to were I ever to become competent enough to share my playing with others. It is a strange instrument to master. Mine has thirty buttons, each of which produces two different notes, depending on whether I am squeezing or pulling. A choice of alternative fingerings are possible for many tunes and the position of each note, although it seems logical to me now, is completely different from the logic of the piano keyboard. Fortunately , unlike the piano, the concertina is conveniently portable, which I like, and the sound seems to fit in well when played alongside guitar and fiddle players. Playing music is a social thing but since moving to Scotland this is something I have missed... until we moved house and I teamed up with some like minded friends with whom I can share my mistakes.

This is what a bunch of musical unprofessionals look like in action. Next to me is young girl playing her clarsach, a small harp, and on the other side is a lad called Aidan playing an accordion almost as big as himself.

So this is the end result of all those childhood music lessons - me sitting in a cafe in Scotland squeezing a small box to make some squeaky noises. I really don't think this is what my piano teacher had in mind for me. She'd probably regard me as a failure but I think of it as a challenge which I enjoy ever more as my level of competency improves.

Out with the old

Our living room was always going to be a big decorating project for us. Every surface needed attention, changing from the before - patterned, papered walls which we hated, a faded painted ceiling and a hideous, ancient, patterned carpet on the floor - to the after, which is our own taste in plain coloured walls, a freshly painted ceiling, the mural across one wall and our own choice of floor, which is not carpet. Having finished work on our lovely new kitchen and with our energies recharged, we always knew that decorating the living room would follow.

Stripping the wallpaper from the walls revealed a host of patchwork repairs that needed covering up but logic dictates that we start at the top, the ceiling, so white paint is rolled on, splashing everything beneath with fine droplets, which we knew would happen and was why we started at the top. Skirting boards around the room are given a fresh coat of paint after peeling back the carpet, the folded over edges of which have been nailed firmly down to the floor, a strange way to fasten a carpet. This reveals some gaps through which cold draughts come whistling up from under the house when it is blowing hard outside, not what we need, so thick beads of sealant are applied to seal the gaps and make the room more airtight. This will likely need more attention when our floor covering goes down, the finishing touch.

Walls are next, the mural (which has already been revealed here) is followed by fresh but plain coloured wallpaper around the rest of the room. There are, as ever, some awkward bits - around the edges of the windows where odd shapes require tricky trimming - but generally the work progresses smoothly over several days. Whilst working on the job the focus tends to be on the next piece, or the next cut, and it is only when the last piece goes up that we suddenly stand back and admire what we have created. So long as one's eyes are blind to the still carpeted floor we have a room that reflects our tastes, simple and bold.

Christmas intervenes with our son Ben and his wife Naomi coming to stay but without their cat, Toby, who is not a good traveller.

Although left home alone we can keep watch on him via a live video link and he seems perfectly relaxed as he wanders about the house and garden.

After Christmas we collect our laminate flooring from the shop then have to carry the ten heavy boxes up the steps to our front door, a task that leaves us gasping for breath and trembly at the knees, so we sit down and do some planning. The strategy for laying the floor involves shuffling large items of furniture across from one side of the room to the other then back again as we lay the flooring in rows across the room. The (horrible) carpet must first be lifted to reveal what we have never seen, the wooden floor boards below, but this can be done in sections with the furniture then being lifted back onto each completed section of the new floor. A small crane might help with this but in its absence muscle power will have to do. Just like with the kitchen rebuild once we start the job we must cope with disruption to our normal pattern of day to day behaviour so the sooner we can finish the better. 

The end of the second day of laying the new laminate flooring sees a sizeable chunk finished. We now have a sequence of moves worked out for each line of planks running across the room from end to end so in theory the rest of the job should go smoothly. As each section of carpet is sliced from end to end, rolled up and taken away it reveals a horrible mix of underlay, some of which has perished into black crumbs and then in another area there's a thick woolly material that looks older than the house itself. The only element that is consistent across the room is that each piece of underlay is nailed to the floor with long carpet tacks or staples all of which must be prized free before work can begin. As one might expect, laying a new floor is pretty tough on the knees too. Nothing is ever simple.

On the positive side the history of the house hidden under the old carpet that is revealed to us is like being on an archeological dig.

Strange scribblings on the floor boards like these must have had some meaning to someone years ago, just as a cave painting would have done to a neolithic hunter. We can only guess at what the writer was trying to tell us. But finally the last plank is laid, the rolled up slices of the hated carpet are carried off to the tip and the history beneath our feet is once again hidden from view. All that remains is to fix an edging trim around the room to cover the expansion gap needed on all laminate floors but visually the job is done. Every last piece of that hated carpet has become landfill.

Looking over the transformation we have brought about it suddenly hits us. Unexpectedly we now have an almost perfect carbon copy of the living room we created in our Carradale home. Some things in life are just not worth changing.

Seagulls & mice

We are well aware that we don't always follow convention when it comes to home decor. Nobody has actually told us this to our faces but we have noticed the expressions of horror, quickly hidden away, on the faces of those visiting.

When we started looking online for wallpaper to put up in our living room we were drawn to something we had tried in our previous house, a mural. For a time we considered painting the wall, something exciting, a work of art that might be visible from the street, but in the end we settled for this sunrise and its five seagulls, made to measure from strips of wallpaper. It is both unusual and quite dramatic, something more usually associated with a public space and therefore unexpected in a home setting. We do not follow convention. For the rest of the living room we have gone for plain colours and finally, at 1205 on Wednesday 13th December, we finished fixing the last strip of wallpaper. A big tick, job done.

Winter is now upon us and a recent cold spell made us grateful for the extra insulation we have had placed around and beneath the house during the last year. This even includes the new central heating pipes running under the floor which have foam tubes around them to keep the heat in. But the question is, for how much longer? The first thing we noticed were the tiny granules of insulation material scattered about in the undercroft (or basement, as some would call it), a clear indication that we have some small visitors. Rodents like field mice will try to find somewhere warmer to hang out in winter, something we would not object to but for their nest building habits. Having gone to such lengths to insulate our rather leaky house it sort of rubs us up the wrong way to think that it is being chewed up to keep a few mice cosy, so eventually we decided to resort to setting traps for them. We chose a humane solution, one that merely captures the creatures inside a metal cage, but sadly the first tiny rodent we found had passed away by morning after eating all the bait inside the cage. (We like to think he was rather elderly and suffered a heart failure.) But on a positive note it did save us the job of carrying him somewhere far away to release him. He was not, however, the field mouse we had expected. This little fellow was a vole, a creature that does not normally make a habit of moving into a house, or so we are told.

The following morning vole No.2 was shuffling around inside one of the traps and this brought into play our release strategy. A ten minute walk away from us we have a wild area, a bit of rainforest woodland, where we like to think a vole will be able to live a long and fruitful life. Here, the cage door is opened and, after a few seconds deep thought, No.2 scuttled off into the wood, disappearing from sight as he dived under the fallen leaves.

The next day this little fellow was tempted into the trap, a field mouse. Again we took him for a walk and opened up the cage on the ground, the doorway to his new world.  Just how many of these tiny creatures will be lured into our baited traps only time will tell. It turns out that they don't like peanut butter - who'd have thought it! - but each one caught means that our underfloor pipe insulation survives a little longer. If we had a dog, which we don't, we'd be taking it for a walk every morning, like most owners do. Rehoming the rodents by walking them to somewhere wild is our own version of this. These tiny creatures may prefer to be inside someone's house in cold weather and the woodland may present something of a challenge to them. For this I apologise profusely but I'm sure they would do the same in my position.

Solar 'n chill

Winter is upon us, the first one with our present house heated by air source.

Not until next spring will we really be able to compare previous with present, gas boiler with electric condenser, but just what are the likely differences?

Well the first is the name. The term 'boiler' no longer applies since nothing is being 'boiled'. In fact nothing is even being heated so even the term 'Air Source Heating' is misleading. There are other modern gadgets which suffer a similar naming confusion (the air fryer being the most obvious since it is merely a small oven) but with 'air source' we seem to have totally lost the plot. We use the term 'refrigerator' to refer to a cabinet which is kept cool inside by removing heat from within. This heat is dissipated via an external heat exchanger, usually at the rear of the cabinet, but we don't acknowledge the fact that our fridge is merely a kitchen unit which moves heat from one place to another, no different, therefore, from the air source unit which now stands outside our back door. Both machines are doing the same thing, the only difference being one of scale. We are fortunate enough to have lived with domestic central heating most of our lives and have therefore become accustomed to heat being generated by combustion, be it oil, gas or coal, all very easy to understand. Then air source comes along to mess with our heads.

There is, of course, another source of heat which comes free and needs just one thing, a clear sky. We awoke one morning to a frosty landscape, a dusting of white covering everything outside while the 'air source heating' kept us warm inside. Soon the sun was beaming in through our windows and by late morning it was doing something else too. It was providing us with warmth. We live far enough north that at this time of year the sun is quite low in the sky so it is sort of unexpected when this happens. Yet it removes the frost from anything it shines on and, where the sun's heat is captured, it can raise the temperature even above that already inside the house. We call our heat capture unit the 'conservatory', a glass sided room attached to the south side of the house with a door leading into the kitchen. Conveniently we live north of the equator so our conservatory being where it is captures heat when the sun is at its height and therefore most powerful. The door into the kitchen can be opened to allow that heat to flow into the house.

But in winter this doesn't last long. By four in the afternoon the sun has dipped below the hills and the temperature in the conservatory will start to plummet, by ten degrees or more, the warmth slipping away through the glass windows and leaking outside. Ah, but some of that warmth will be captured by our 'air source heater' and pumped back inside the house so all is not lost. Ideally there should be some mechanism that detects when heat is captured by our conservatory so that on a cold day it can be moved  into the house - but we haven't invented this yet.

All this heat being moved about from place to place might sound confusing but the real head scratcher is how the air source unit can move heat from outside the house when the temperature outside is barely above freezing. To answer this one must return to the refrigerator and turn up the dial inside. The effect of this will be to make the already cool inside space even colder and at the same time the fridge will dissipate more heat around the kitchen. What we learn from this is that cold is merely an absence of heat and we can move heat, even from somewhere that is already cold, to make it colder. Our air source unit is taking heat from outside and moving it inside. One effect of this is to make Scotland colder, although this is only temporary as no matter how well insulated our house is, the heat inside will always leak out eventually. But contrast this with oil or gas heating where heat is actually being generated, making Scotland, and the world, warmer.

Right, well that's cleared all that up.

From kitchen to pond

Describing the steady progress made with tiling our kitchen walls is of no real interest to anyone not directly involved so we will not dwell on it any more here. Hanging over us throughout the whole process is the 'Have we ordered enough tiles?' question, something which any kitchen fitter regularly faces. As it turns out we find ourselves with a whole box left unused, which naturally begs the question, 'Where else can we put them?'

Anyway, that's both sides of the kitchen completed decoratively and on the end walls, where we decided we needed to add some colour to the otherwise grey/white palate, we are very pleased with the effect we have achieved. A recent visitor remarked that we were steadily bringing our home decor into the twenty first century, a comment that we were delighted to hear.

This could be the last kitchen picture ever to appear here. The inset shows where we started just over twelve months ago. Job done!

So moving on...

It has been some months since our garden pond featured in this blog so perhaps it is time for an update. No? Well here it is anyway.

Our rear garden is on a slope, from the back fence down to the house, so any pond was always going to have to be a hole in the ground with a dam below it, a soil bank, to contain the water. As it turned out our wet climate ensured that the hole filled with water from the moment it was dug and originally we thought it might retain a certain level of water without the need for a liner. But when a dry spell last spring reduced it to a muddy puddle we decided a plastic liner would be needed after all. Then, in order to keep the pond water level constant, we fitted an overflow pipe which took away the surplus, all of which seemed to work well until the real rains started in September.

Suddenly, almost overnight, the pond liner started rising, forced upwards by the pressure of the ground water from beneath. How this could be happening in a sloping garden seems to defy logic but the effect of this was that as the plastic liner rose higher the water inside the pond was forced out through the overflow until almost nothing was left. The pond life which had spent the summer months galavanting about above and below the surface were now living in a shallow puddle, if they survived at all. Even large rocks placed into the pond (rocks being heavier than water) failed to counter the pressure from beneath - they too were being lifted up! All this goes to show is how little we know about what is happening beneath our feet. There are forces at work that we could never imagine.

Initial attempts to try to relieve the pressure from below by poking a long metal spike horizontally into the ground below the dam in an effort to create a passage for the ground water to escape had no effect at all. More rain arrived and despite it falling into the pond itself, this was always countered by more pressure from below so nothing changed. 

After much contemplation we realised that it is merely a matter of balance between two opposing forces. The pond overflow is constantly draining away the excess water and this means that as the pressure from below increases, it lifts the liner and more pond water flows out of the overflow.  It follows that as this happens the weight of water in the pond decreases so it is unable to resist the force from below. It took a while but once the simple logic of this was recognised the solution became clear. The pond overflow pipe had to go.

The result was almost instantaneous. Several days of heavy rainfall and the pond had water in it again, the liner having being squashed down under the weight. We now have a pond, deeper than planned, but one with water in it. When it fills now (which doesn't take long given the rainforest climate here) the weight of water in the pond increases to counter those hidden and mysterious underground forces. Eventually the pond water will overflow the edge of liner and the excess will run down into the boggy area further down the garden. This is now a small wetland that we will keep suitably unkempt in the hope that this might be attractive to some other wild creatures.

As autumn moves on and winter sets in there is little to see from our observation perch beside the pond. The pond skaters have all gone although there is still the odd beetle scuttling about beneath the surface. The wild plants (commonly described as weeds) surrounding the pond have extended across the water (as intended) in the space of less than a year but we must wait until next year for what we'd really like to see... frogspawn. Should there happen to be a lady frog passing nearby we can just hope she might be attracted to our fledgling wildlife haven. Would a 'Frogs Are Welcome Here' sign help?

Kitchen distractions

One day there's a knock at the front door... it's a delivery, something we are expecting. A pallet is shuffled off the back of a lorry and lowered onto the road. On it there are seven heavy boxes tightly wrapped in plastic, each one needing to be carried up our many steps and into the house. They are all marked with the words Revestimiento Ceramico and each one contains 44 smooth white tiles which, with an additional bundle of 10 more, adds up to 318. Each of these now has to be fastened to one or other of the walls in our kitchen.

The first question might be as to whether to call this a 'project' or a 'job' but the answer comes easily when we decide where to fasten the first tile and immediately realise that it will need a piece cut out of it so it will go around the first of the many wall mounted power sockets. This definitely makes it a project, one that will take many days and a considerable amount of time and patience. At the end of the third day we still have 281.5 tiles left in their boxes but at least one of the most difficult sections of wall, the one with most wall sockets, is covered. Sticking whole tiles to a wall is considerably quicker than fiddling an odd shaped piece around a power socket but even so the numbers are still pretty daunting.

We are, of course, under no pressure to complete the project at this point as we have a fully functioning kitchen. Life can continue as normal, one would think, although there is always something nagging when it comes to an unfinished project. Nevertheless when our charity coast walking friends need help for their progress around the coast of Wester Ross (one of the most remote areas on the west coast of Scotland) we decide this should take precedence over tiling and we set off north in Martin. Two days later we find ourselves in a blast of bitterly cold air from the east which takes our breath away and makes us question the decision but after wrapping up in enough layers to insulate a frog we realise that this is an opportunity to explore the wild terrain we have driven into. 

So off we go, and without meeting a living soul we climb up into a gorge then, pausing for breath beside a crystal clear torrent, it becomes clear why we set off. The wildness of the place just blows us away.

The waterfall is an added bonus.

Thankfully the bitter cold moderated after a few days and we were able to recover. In all we spend more than a week lending a hand by driving two campervans, Martin and Nancy, from place to place along the wildest coastline in Britain. This involves negotiating tiny single track roads where a single wheel off the tarmac could spell disaster but the views around each corner take our breath away and the sunsets each night are simply stunning.

Our keen walker friends set off early each day and once we had moved their campervan, Nancy, to their expected finish point we have plenty of time to set off exploring on our own.

This is a place of big skies and big mountains, the terrain being rocky and difficult to traverse on foot but it has never failed to take our breath away each time we have visited. There are glimpses of deer, who tend to keep their distance, unlike the sheep who will wander about on the road or lie beside the footpaths which wander off into the hills. The history of this landscape is full of sadness, crofters driven from their homes by greedy landowners, but there are still plenty who choose to live here, making their living in other ways.

We took our leave from Nancy and her owners beside the lighthouse at Stoer in Sutherland, a halfway point in their round the coast walk. It could be argued that a campervan of this size is totally unsuitable for the narrow single track roads of the north west Highlands and after having for the last week driven around many tight corners on roads with rocks bulging out on either side I would be the first to agree. At least we had a specific reason for doing it and there were similar vehicles of this size so clearly there are others who feel it is quite acceptable.