The Campaign starts here

Despite my incorrect form-filling (arguing with Electoral registration officers is the definition of 'futile') I am now registered as a Labour party candidate (ward 12 - Caol & Mallaig) for the Highland Council elections on 3rd May.  Basic difficulties range from: taking a photograph for the leaflet whilst 6 miles from the nearest house (I used the self-timer in the end rather than waiting for passing walkers like a cargo cult); preparing a leaflet on the fancy-dancy web-driven designer (slowed down by the fact that our broadband is steam-driven and it continually insists we're in Germany) and raw terror at the thought of promoting myself.

Tucked away here at Drumbuidhe at least I can disguise the chaos that my campaign is coming from.  I'm currently sitting here in my dressing gown having lit the fire, washed yesterday's dishes (the dishwasher is currently in bits although this is better than it was when I arrived and it was in bits all over the living room floor ... the mess is now confined to under the kitchen counter) made the coffee (I was hoping to find a moment to talk to C about how difficult his drinking is but since it took him less than two minutes to get his first drink of the day in - whisky in his coffee - I missed the elusive 'sober' moment) and put the bread onto bake.  Give me five minutes and I'll get round to some respectable clothes so I can tackle the Labour Party's 'print creator' again.

Today we have a handyman from Lochaline turning up with his wife and kids to help C on what will hopefully be a regular basis.  It's fair to say that C is struggling with everything.  He's making his way through at least a bottle of wine and a quarter bottle of whisky a day which doesn't help his memory, balance and temper.  The list of things that C can't do is extensive, for example he couldn't come up the dam when I cleared it out to get the water turbine working (it was a sunny day and it's a nice spot about 50m from the garden but C's too unsteady) he tried to defrost the freezer and broke it (since it's a large chest freezer this is a very big deal) by leaving a fan heater inside it and he's forgetting how to prepare food (when I'm not around he lives on booze and fray bentos).  What he does enjoy is getting involved in the solving of basic problems (once I'd cleared the dam the two of us worked our way along the garden water supply, unscrewing the junctions to clear them out).

Right, enough of the dressing gown and the blogging: it's time for proper clothes and a proper leaflet.

Spring sunshine

After months of dithering everything came together: the sun was out; the correct TEK screws were ready and I was actually up in Drumbuidhe. In a flurry of construction activity I got the fank chimney back up (a great view but metal roofs are killers on your knees) and the most crucial gable flashing back up. The sunshine makes even the grim tasks more pleasant and I wandered happily round the garden picking up all the prunings left from January which I'd been hoping the garden pixies would magic away.

Although the sun is out we're still in the broken down machinery phase of the year so the water turbine will have to get cleared out again (twigs, leaves and frogspawn) and the series 1 landrover LHS 94 is still fairly poorly. It was stuck about a mile away on the track since November: it has a recurring fault where it stops after 45 minutes and won't start again for an hour. The fitting of a fuel filter by an eager landrover enthusiast last year seems to have made it worse. Having fitted the filter the landrover enthusiast developed pneumonia and died unexpectedly so I can't really grumble about his intervention. Last week I jumpstarted LHS 94 on my way out of Drumbuidhe but it conked out again just when the track comes down to the shore, completely blocking the track. I didn't have an hour spare so I left it and ran away to Glasgow. Thankfully when I got back it started again (a wee bit of accelerator cable fondling was required) so I could get it off the track. I've still got to get it the 300m back here to the house but it will give C a project over Easter. He's coming back up to Drumbuidhe this week and my heart sinks a little at the "improvements" he'll start, especially since the gaps in his memory are now really obvious. Hopefully he will spend his time working out what all the bits of his wind turbine control system do: it took ages over winter but I finally managed to switch off all the gadgets which he has hard-wired into the battery system and electricity consumption fell dramatically as a result.

I'm really pleased with the etching I produced (my first!) over the New Year when the generator wasn't working and I was ekeing out every last drip of electricity and I'm now the proud owner of a faded sepia print of Balivanich's concrete water tower: definitely not the chocolate box market.

Turning the corner

Drumbuidhe does sometimes feel like a burden and this New Year has been quite bad: various bits of roof blown off; a neglected garden; my sister K stomping in with her size 7s to "sort things out"; mice everywhere; electrical system not working; the continual creep of broken electrical equipment across every space not to mention my lack of regular income. Now, as daylight gets to 10 hours a day. everything is starting to seem more manageable: I've tidied up the worst electrical equipment offenders and switched off the wind turbine controls; I've ordered next year's seeds and filled up the propagators; I've pruned the fruit trees and sorted out the compost heap. There's still a fallen tree on top of the garden shed but it's looking a bit more manageable.

Since we've now entered the post-it note phase of C's life I still have to work out ways of stopping him killing my carefully nurtured plants. C doesn't always do the killing personally, sometimes passing acolytes ask if they can do "something to help" and C will get them to pull up my salad (thinking they are weeds) or harvest my mooli (and then leave them to rot because he doesn't know what they are) or hoe the planted seed bed or harvest the onions a month too early or plant the carrots/onions/anything too close together or in the bed containing something else (this requires me to dig up and replant everything) or spray Pathclear (the clue is in the name) round the fruit trees... This is why I think my sister's idea of a live-in handyman to help C up here is a completely rubbish idea. Drumbuidhe is surrounded by evidence of what happens when my dad gets an acolyte with stars in their eyes (the bust grass cutter; rain that pours through the south gable; cables draped across courtyards and enough expensive gadgets to give a socialist luddite palpitations). Hey ho.

But enough of my whingeing. I've been writing this as displacement activity from today's task which is the editing of SAP calculations for my studio project and also for Uist. I'm trying to wrestle the complex calculations for energy use into a format which can be used to pragmatically assess the value of interventions for traditional housing on the islands. The algorithms aren't going to wrestle themselves so here goes.

New Year

Finally! we have daylight. It's universally acknowledged that the Christmas and New Year weather has been completely rubbish, this followed on from the early December rubbish weather to produce a series of perfect storms.

In parallel with the weather there has been a series of mechanical breakdowns so that my trusty fiat panda fell very poorly on the road down south for Christmas so after some seasonal wheel-removal I had to limp back to a Glasgow garage. I borrowed C's car to come up to Drumbuidhe for New Year but was hit by a lorry in Glencoe damaging most of the driver's side (terrifying at the time but my heart now sinks at the paperwork that will be involved). Now up here the storms have ripped off all attempts at protecting the generator which is sulking so I'm running on just PV and water power. Thankfully I've worked out how to turn off C's wind monitoring station (wired directly into the batteries, draining all those precious watts I've gathered) and, with a wee touch of sun today, I'm hopeful I'll get to watch the TV tonight. Hurrah!

wild winter

The day after the storm and there's a door and some flashing blown off up here in Drumbuidhe and the mystery of why the generator is still running (the temperature adjusted voltage is too high? the freezer compressor kept running? a n other device is draining the battery?). I've spent three days recovering from my part III exam in Benbecula and cowering indoors in my pyjamas as the winds (gusting to 145km/hr) howled outside.

The part III exam was even worse than I was expecting (and I was expecting it to be truly dreadful). On the weekend before the exam I posted a draft of my case study to my ex-colleagues for comments. Alas they took it personally and I was cold-shouldered for the duration of my exam. My ex-boss replied to the draft with a fair number of corrections (about half of them were relevant, but quite a few were editorial) and the comment that my case study would fail and that, if I submitted it as it was, she would write to the part III examiners noting that I was bringing the architecture profession into disrepute. I received her comments halfway through the exam and responded by drinking and smoking heavily. I was then dumped by A again (I know, I know, it's getting tedious how often this happens, but even I wasn't expecting him to do it immediately after taking off his clothes and getting into bed with me...).

The case-study situation did improve the next day as I talked through the study with D, a retired architect on S Uist and got hold of my academic mentor to check what the situation was with hostile bosses. I was at least reassured that the case study was interesting, accurate and well-written and one's boss has no business writing to the examiners.

The exam itself was just hard, hard slog and wasn't helped by interruptions while I was working out a fee offer using my spreadsheet - I was talking to S (who wasn't supposed to be invigilating but since M wasn't talking to me, he got the job by default) when my sister phoned me up and immediately put my 5yr old nephew on the 'phone so I couldn't say "I'm in the middle of the exam" and S now thinks I'm really rude. Hey Ho.

I slept for what seemed like 3 days when I finally got the whole damn thing into the post. A took me for a last beach walk and, alas, he missed the track back to the car so I ended up trying to follow him over rough machair. In the dark. In a hailstorm. This left me cold, wet and scared which did nothing to improve my temper. A's not that great at coping with guilt so, the next morning, my last hour on Benbecula was spent listening to him ranting at my rudeness - although I'd made tea, helped fix his bike and set up 'The Killing' for him to watch, my failure to say "goodnight" quickly enough had left him unable to sleep.

There are still so many things I wanted to do in the islands but words cannot describe how relieved I was to leave Benbecula.

I'm now starting to get back on track for Christmas (still not decided where to spend it of course) and I've got a parcel of Christmas Cake, sloe gin and Christmas tree biscuits packed and ready to send down to Devon. Since sister K has an aversion to nuts (no allergy, she's just picky) I've adapted the Glasgow Cookery Book recipe to incorporate chocolate chips as follows:

Chocolate Christmas Cake

250g plain flour plus pinch baking powder

1 tablespoonful cocoa

200g butter

200g sugar

4 eggs

25g ground almonds

1 tablespoonful treacle

600g mixture of chopped apricots, prunes and figs

100g chopped dark chocolate

The night before, soak the fruit in whatever spirit you have to hand (I used a mix of orange juice and whisky). Cream the butter and sugar then add the eggs alternately with the dry ingredients. Stir in the treacle and fruit and add to a 20cm cake tin. Bake at 170C (gas 3) for about 2.5 hours. I leave it to cool in the tin overnight to ensure the cake holds its shape and use just icing sugar for decoration.

Westering Home

My time in Benbecula is drawing to a close with a flurry of activity (a trip to St Kilda, a wee course in collograph printing, the start of construction on the Harris House care home); a new lodger in my Glasgow flat and a confused series of trips between Glasgow, Morvern and Benbecula (with an extra trip to London when it looks like it wasn't complicated enough). I've still got some furniture, a fair amount of books and a heap of clothes stored in A's cottage on Benbecula. I moved out of my rented cottage at Aird at the beginning of September so I've been squatting at A's since then. I'm grateful for the storage of stuff but staying there gets a bit depressing with missing light fittings (I think he's been using a camping light in the bathroom for a couple of years); a pervading smell of mildew and a mattress on the floor to sleep on. I replaced the broken lights in the bathroom and kitchen (and replaced the wire at the fuse box which meant I also fixed the sitting-room light); nagged continuously about buying some more fuel oil and took a stack of rubbish to the local dump but it was my clearing of the guest room and the introduction of a proper bed (Ikea's finest at £44) that was the final straw and A announced that my presence was causing him too much stress. I upped sticks back to Glasgow (many thanks to Calmac for squeezing in a wee fiat panda at the last minute) leaving A to his mess and mildew but at least I know I actually have a bed to sleep on when I head back to the islands for my part III architecture exam at the end of November.

Down in Glasgow there 's been a fair bit of sorting as I've started moving my things back in again (this implies that the Glasgow flat has been a barren shell while I've been up in the islands but it turns out that I own a ridiculous amount of stuff) and clearing the spare room now that Marc's heading to India. I had one false start with a new lodger when a dramatic Italian-Brazilian chef got sacked just before he was due to move in but I now have a decent and quiet chap who works in Hamilton and supports Partick Thistle. He was a bit surprised that I welcomed him in to the flat and immediately left for a trip up north.

Up here in Morvern I've got seriously behind on garden tidying but I'm trying to persuade myself that this is what winter is for. I had been hoping to start refurbishing the fank this winter but I'm still struggling with the dismantling of C's home improvements. Although the wind turbine is nowhere near producing net energy C has installed a series of energy storage devices which include: a hot water tank on the bookcase in the fank (caused chronic condensation across the whole building) that has been disconnected but never removed; wiring the immersion heater in the fank to the turbine (leaving a bare-wire junction box in the bathroom, just below the towel shelf ... ie just where one would be likely to place a damp hand ...); placing electric radiators in any available areas of floor space (they're newly purchased but have all had their wiring cannabalised in what can only be described as a 'haphazard' fashion) and looping networking cable over the courtyard. Hey ho.

After a couple of truly glorious days of bright autumn sun it has settled back into greyness reminding me that the time of soup has arrived. Here's a great quick soup that uses the cavolo nero we've got growing in the potato bed:

Bacon and Kale soup

200g smoked bacon

4 to 6 chopped potatoes

200g cooked beans

as much cavolo nero as you can gather

water

parmesan to serve

I had some fine bacon from Puddledub in Ayrshire and I used soaked and cooked butter beans but a can of cooked cannelini beans is particularly fine ....

chop the bacon and fry in a touch of oil

remove the largest ribs from the cavolo nero and slice finely

once the bacon's browned add the chopped potatoes, cooked beans and cavolo nero

stir a couple of times then add water to cover with either salt or vegetable stock to season

simmer for about 30 minutes or 'til the potato is cooked

serve with grated parmesan

sunshine on a rainy day

It was yet another spectacular Easter: sunshine, good food and a smattering of broken-down vehicles.

The long drive to Drumbuidhe (minus the Corran ferry so about 10 hours door to door) helped with the perspective and the arrival of the Wintles and Pulhams in sunny Morvern provided plenty to do. The holiday was filled with beachcombing, bottles of wine and banter - very jolly. After the family hordes had left there was a lovely final Sunday lunch (slow-braised pork belly with soy sauce and rowan jelly) with Hugh and Miranda Morris. After the slightly frenetic pace of a full house in Morvern, the wedding weekend in Glasgow was very quiet: a long lunch with Sonya Hancox, cupcakes with Peter Hamilton and blissful shopping in Waitrose.

The flight back to Benbecula was delayed (broken plane) but beautiful and I made it to the last film of the rather worthy Ecofilm festival, Wasteland. I arrived back to grim discussions about the Comhairle's architecture department, missing my mum and sad. I found myself very tearful during Monday's gaelic class and I'm still feeling rather fragile. Thankfully all the physical stuff's in place so I still managed a clamber up Ben Kenneth (280m) on Saturday and Ben More (620m) on Sunday followed by a rather extreme bit of paddling on Culla Bay. I'm off to Drumbuidhe again tomorrow with fresh-baked chocolate brownies and four gaelic CDs. I can't provide gaelic recipes yet but the classic brownie recipe is:

125g butter

125g chocolate

2 eggs

250g sugar

150g self-raising flour

Melt the butter and chocolate together. Whisk the eggs and sugar then fold in the flour and melted chocolate mixture. Bake at 180C for roughly 30 minutes and revel in the squidgy yumminess.