legacy

Hey hey hey! summer is here and it looks as if today (at least) will have some decent sunshine. Hopefully coupled with a decent breeze into the evening since summer also brings the curse of the twilight midge. It's midsummer's day today and I'm sitting at the desk in the newly-cleaned bothy hoping to get a decent chunk of thesis written before heading off to Drimnin for a pre-wedding chilli evening. I am temporarily without transport since the fat-wheel electric tricycle which was last year's grand birthday present to myself has suffered its second major breakdown in just 20 miles. This means I'll be walking out and, if I feel vigorous enough after the chilli, cycling back on one of my other bicycles, the canondale bad boy. For the past two weeks I've been indulging in all sorts of displacement activity to avoid the thesis writing some of this has been useful (clearing out the bothy) and some of it less so (baking extravagant quantities of cakes). So I'll be carrying out a quantity of cakes and flowers as my contribution to the wedding when I walk out this afternoon.

The bothy is a key bit of my parents legacy in Drumbuidhe. For years it was a storage shed and occasional rough-sleeping room whose corrugated metal roof would periodically blow off. About thirty years ago it was roofed and lined as an office for my dad. This was one of my mother's many schemes to live with my father but not have to actually, you know, live with him. After my mum's death we moved a single bed in here and, as my dad's turbine obsession moved into mania, it filled up with a quantity of stuff that took three wheelbarrows to remove. My dad also slept here for a year before he died which has meant a lingering hospital smell. My dad suffered from incontinence which he kept trying to disguise so not only is there a fair bit of urine seeped into the floorboards but his disposal of chamber pots out the door and window has led to the window-closing mechanism seizing shut.

It took a whole heap of displacement activity, the dismantling of the window frame and the judicious use of  small crowbar to get the window open but it means I now have a through draught to go with the fine views to distract me as I fret about not working.

At the end of May - while I was being all academic at an energy-policy conference in France - BB came up here with a group of friends to reassemble the wind turbine but this time as memorial art instead of electricity generation. Weather, time and logistics meant that they only got the pole erected. Their grand plans for bacchanalian barbeques came to naught as well so I was left with a whole heap of meat filling up my freezer. I had a paying guest arriving on Sunday which meant I had to clear out the fank freezer and - with no space left - I made a random stew that has sustained me for the past three days. The random stew doesn't really merit a recipe but suffice to say that it includes:

* one pack of cumberland sausages
* shoulder of mutton
* chilli-marinated chicken
* two tins of chopped tomatoes
* split green peas

The meat and peas were cooked beforehand and the whole lot is slow-cooked each morning for my lunch. Summer should be the time of salads and new potatoes but both of these are late this year after the loss of the lean-to greenhouse in the March storms. My other displacement activity has been flower-petal syrups with a very pretty rose and poppy.  wee bit of citric acid added to the rose syrup has enhanced the pink colour but the poppy remains an ominous dark purple. I was using  French recipe for vin de couliquot which is noted as having pharmacological benefits but I'm now displayingn my puritan streak and fretting that a drop of it will turn me into a dead-eyed junkie.

Sunshine on Snow

The weather is behaving as winter weather should with overnight snow and bright, sharp sunshine for my journey south.
Drumbuidhe, being right next to the shore, gets very little snow but the trip out can be a bit interesting once you get to higher ground and it's always wise to carry a shovel. The trip out is made more interesting because the track is going through a really, really bad patch.

A distillery has started up at the big house and the leftover mash is being fed to the cattle. This is excellent news for the cattle who are in fine fettle with glossy coats and good health. However it's rubbish news for the track. The tractor and trailer used to take the mash out to the cattle has a combined weight of 7 tonnes. This is too much for the track and sections of it keep collapsing. It happened last winter and it's happening again with two bad bits, just above Auliston and just before Port a'bhata. Once a patch of the track gets soft, that patch gets worse and worse.

Last year the track was patched in the spring and I assume that's going to happen this year as well. Obviously it doesn't fix the underlying problem which is that the track is not robust enough for the current agricultural use. If it's patched again (rather than the whole track being upgraded or lighter vehicles beinng used) then the same thing will happen next winter, albeit in different places.

The issue of the track is complicated because I don't own it and there is no formal agreement in place for its upkeep. The current owners of the estate would like me to move out and buy Drumbuidhe so the more difficulty I have getting to and from Drumbuidhe, the better for them. The current owners are also short of money so they would like me to contribute to the cost of track maintenance. Since the track problems are caused by their use, this is unlikely to happen. The current owner also has unsupported confidence in his ability to devise schemes for track maintenance which I am definitely not going to support. His cunning plan to dig out the hillside at Sornagan a couple of years back is causing regular problems as landslips keep blocking the drainage channels.

The rubbish track means that, if possible, I walk out. On Sunday there was a skiff outing which I walked out for and, for all the track problems, it's still a glorious route. Here's to a fine new year!