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.