bashed about and a fair bit blooded

Crikey, that was a bit of a week.

Having registered for my PhD at Heriot Watt I took the scenic train & cycle route up to Drumbuidhe to continue the harvest (broccoli, rhubarb, cabbage, rowan) and to bring back my car. I headed back to Glasgow on the Monday to find that C had suffered internal bleeding on Saturday and had spent the weekend in a flat liberally covered in melena.

He was convinced that this was the end and, having refused the advice of our GP to go into hospital, had summoned my sister for a deathbed farewell. After cleaning him, his bed and the flat I realised quite how much blood he had lost, overruled his protests and called an ambulance. After a fair bit of unpleasantness (12 hours in A&E; a failed entroscopy; 2 blood transfusions and some spectacular sulking from my sister) the bleeding was identified and stopped and C was discharged last Saturday.

To complicate matters further, I then went back into the Southern General for a knee arthroscopy. I can now negotiate the fancy lifts in my sleep and yes, the views from the rooms are spectacular.

Subject to a bit of checking we're all back in our homes (my sister is back in Devon which also helps matters enormously). C has cut back on his drinking and, after trying Glasgow's homecare system, we've got an adhoc care system in place that shows promise.

Eating for the past week and a bit has been a mixed affair, including: vending machine chocolate (3am Southern General); tea and toast on a tray (from angelic nurses after I'd been awake for 36 hours); M&S ready meals (I got a bus rather than a taxi home after my knee operation and blew the savings on fancy food); Little Italy pizza (eaten through an ocean of tears after C's successful treatment and whilst watching the Great British Bake Off final); sliced bread donated by my corner shop (I think I looked particularly in need as I was buying toilet paper in a dwam) and macaroons (yes! macaroons!) from the (third) Heriot Watt PhD induction.

I'm still struggling to catch up with, well, everything at the minute but, the sun is shining and everyone is up and walking so the signs are good.

default

My dad is now very frail (shuffling along, easily tired, deaf and very forgetful) and now needs a fair bit of care which, since he's insisting on staying up at Drumbuidhe, means me. For the past two years I've recruited volunteers from the workaway site to keep C company. This year his memory and temper mean that he can't be left alone with them and even some of the tasks have proved tricky. C had a panic attack driving the Discovery across the track and G, an italian volunteer, had to run the two miles back to the house to get me. Scary stuff for all concerned. I'm trying hard to get C back to Glasgow (the land of shops! cleaners! doctors! friends!) when I'm not up at Drumbuidhe with limited success so far.

When I am up Drumbuidhe looking after C is pretty full on. This weekend I had a stack of stuff to do in the garden (fruit tree pruning, planting out cavolo nero, feeding, clearing a bed for cima di rapa, scything the meadow) as well as beds to change and bedrooms to clean for the arrival of friends next month. Oh and admin for the forthcoming village summer party. What I actually ended up doing was the standard cleaning and cooking (which is heavy enough) alongside walking my dad down to the boat & pontoon; moving said boat and said pontoon; replacing the kitchen sink drain (including hacking out the effing silicon some unknown helper had blocked the overflow with); cleaning up after the replacement; entertaining the Lewises and their new farm manager (I was out at the end of the point, replacing our mooring but C can't make tea).

It's at times like this that I fall back on my defaults. Much as it pains me, a proper Scottish woman, to admit: I am rubbish at scones. So, for proper emergency cooking, shortbread it is. There are all sorts of variations (rice flour, lemon peel, semolina) but he basic Glasgow Cookey Book option is:

4 units flour
2 units butter
1 unit sugar

Mix, flatten and bake 'til just browned. Helpful with all sorts of situations including unexpected guests and panic attacks.

another one bites the dust

Crikey it's cold up here.  And wet.  And windy.

Driving south through Glencoe on Tuesday (ie the second of June) there was enough snow on the slopes for skiing, albeit of the Scottish ice-and-heather variety.

There was a brief sunny spell on Saturday when I walked out to Eilean nan Eildean with friends.  Back at Drumbuidhe we sat outside drinking beer and polishing our sword (not a euphemism).  After decades spent as a grimy prop, it's hilt and scabbard are now gleaming and it'd displayed proudly above the door next to the timber marked 'H Gordon Esq' which was removed when we renovated the kitchen and shows Drumbuidhe's build date to be about 1850.  The fine weather prompted C to try and set his turbine running but there wasn't enough wind to keep it moving (there's a starter motor to set it running).  C switched the electrical brake on when he went to bed but a variety of flaws (the electrical brake doesn't work; the starter motor may have been set to come on; the turbine is hideously unstable when moving; the bare minimum of guys were holding it down and one of the guys was fixed into a loose rock ...) meant that the turbine collapsed overnight.

C wasn't as upset as he has been in the past about turbine failures (this was number 19 so there have been a lot of turbine failures in the past) and I think there may be a wee bit of relief that he can finally stop all this striving for something that is never going to work.

I was down in London a couple of weeks ago (watching Krol Roger at Covent Garden, very fancy pants it was too) and while C was alone at Drumbuidhe he managed to break the phone, his car and the internet connection as well as assaulting one of the first workaway volunteers.  He cannot be left alone up there any longer.  Of course having stated this I've just left him alone up there ... I'm down in Glasgow for more supplies (and to see 'The Matrix' in Glasgow Uni quad) while he's awaiting the delivery of the fabled Greenhouse ... but I'm not sure he took it in the first time I told him anyway.

It's been more losses on the west coast as well with the news on Wednesday morning that our ex MP Charles Kennedy had died.  I felt the echo of another summer's day as I waited for the ferry on Muck three years ago in the morning sun and heard that the small isles GP had been found dead.  She'd been charged with drink driving the week before and, as it was described to me a couple of days before, "everyone but herself knows she's an alcoholic".  The loss of Charles is another sadness.

There's also the tang of local (very local) politics with the news that the estate shepherd is leaving on Monday.  We don't yet know why or where he's going but long, long experience says that Derek Lewis (the estate owner) will find it difficult to replace him.  As the NHS is finding with the small isles, what looks at first glance like an idyllic job can have too many strings involved.  That's one of the problems with idylls.

drowning democratic sorrows in dandelions

Turns out that making decent tasting wines is quite easy (although it does take a fair while).  Last May I made some dandelion wine and, after 6 months of steady bubbling in the south wood store, a very decent drink was produced.  It was rather like a vermouth and, with lemon juice and a dash of gin produced a very potent and sophisticated cocktail.  This autumn I had a go at beetroot and giner which was a fabulous colour and tasted not bad but showed up the first significant problem: all four of the bottles left in the wine rack popped their corks showering sticky flourescent pink stuff over C's Chardonnay stash.

This year I've got a bit more professional and I invested in 24 beer bottles for the nettle beer (which shattered a couple of ikea bottles last year).  I'm also leaving the winter's parsnip wine until it absolutely, completely, definitely stops bubbling.

I'll wait 'til this year's dandelion wine is ready to drink to publish the recipe (limited ingredients mean that I've taken some liberties and I won't know if they've worked for 6 months).  However the nettle beer is damn quick (4 days to bottling) and damn fine.  I've had the first pint served over ice and it's as good as last year's but without the smashed bottles.  The following recipe is adapted from Roger Phillips Wild Food.

nettle beer

* full carrier bag of nettles
* 1.5kg sugar
* 50g cream of tartar
* sachet of ale or wine yeast

Boil the nettles for 15 minutes with up to 12 litres of water.  Strain the liquid into a fermentation bucket, add the sugar and cream of tartar and sufficient boiled water to make the quantity up to 2 gallons.  Wait until the mixture is tepid then scatter on the yeast, cover and leave for 4 days.  Siphon off into beer bottles.  It does get very fizzy so take care when opening but it really is delicious served with ice as the summer sun goes down.

Probably just as well that I've got a stack of decent cheap booze given the election results in Scotland which, for a card-carrying member of the labour party, were really rubbish.  Hey ho.

The good bit about the election was that C and I combined the voting with a lunch visit to the White House in Lochaline (mallard-cross with black mushrooms, wild garlic and walnuts followed by carrot cake with cream cheese and orange ice-cream ... really, really good).  This inspired me to grasp the bracken and finally have a go at eating the stuff (or fiddleheads as they're sometimes known).  My korean cookbook is down in Glasgow so I went for the simplest option I could find - bearing in mind that bracken is properly poisonous with variable amounts of carcinogenic ptaquiloside.

bracken
* pick bracken fronds before they've uncurled
* add to boiling water and boil for 15 minutes
* rinse in cold water
* dot with butter and grill 'til just browned

 Whilst I lived through the experience I failed to experience the delicious asparagus-like taste that is promised and I doubt I'll try it again,

In other news I've been offered a scholarship for a PhD studentship at Heriot Watt University.  It's four years looking in depth at the implications of current building performance models for low-carbon refurbishment schemes.  I'm very excited about it.  Here's hoping it'll allow me to keep the city/croft combination going.

snow, sunshine, springtime

We've had it all here in the past month: equinox! solar eclipse! midnight blizzards in Glencoe! and finally the sun has come out and Glasgow is frolicking in t-shirts.  I'm spending Easter in the big city having left Drumbuidhe to my sister and her family.  I had to drive down through the Glencoe blizzard late on Tuesday last week having fitted in a rather odd village hall AGM (there was a power cut so we all sat huddled in woolly jumpers, examining the financial statement by torchlight) and then a physio session in Glasgow.  I'm still suffering from the fall I had last summer and I'm aiming to strengthen my knee prior to examination and possible surgery for a torn cartilidge.

I'm also indulging in all the others joys of big city life including an excellent production of David Hare's The Absence of War at the Citizens.  I'm not sure what it says about me that I'm moved to tears by political drama.  I've also been catching up on my accidental vocation for looking after and/or listening to elderly chaps.  Just before Christmas I went through to Fife to try and track down my friend N whom I hadn't heard from in quite a while.  Turned out he'd had a slow breakdown and was stuck in his bed being very poorly.  The police broke his door down (nowhere near as dramatic as it sounds) and he was well enough to come back to Glasgow with me for Christmas and New Year.  Most of N's immediate crises have been avoided: he's solvent; he's stopped wheezing; the electricity isn't going to be cut off and his garden has been cleared to allow the post to be delivered but there's a way to go before he gets a lifestyle that will work long term.  However one of the great bits about having him up and functioning is that he was able to get a stack of tickets for the Edinburgh Festival when the box office opened last week.  The broadband at Drumbuidhe isn't up to high-level cultural organisation.  Now I have to get hold of N to check what is owed to whom and ensure he hasn't disappeared back to bed.

One of my other elderly gents is P who was a friend of my mother and is a retired lawyer with increasing mobility problems.  We went together to The Absence of War and over a picnic tea afterwards we talked about his possible move into sheltered accommodation.  He mentioned that a probable cause of his balance problems was his alcoholism.  When I looked surprised at this (P is currently teetotal) he told me that he'd been very miserable during the 1980s and had been drinking heavily at the time.  Although this happened thirty years ago, the neurological damage is permanent and is now manifesting itself in his problems with walking and balance.  We talked 'til late about, oh crikey, the alcoholics we knew: it was a key factor in my mother's death from breast cancer; destroyed any possibility of a relationship with D and is slowly rotting my father's mind up on the west coast.  I'm not sure how useful the talking was for P but I drove home (through a standard drink-sodden Saturday night in Glasgow) feeling lighter and calmer.

Nearly New

The grey clouds have settled in at the end of the year.  This year's Christmas miracle was present and correct but adjusted for reality: just over a week ago I travelled through to Fife to check on my friend N that I hadn't heard from for a while.  After a damp bit of dithering the police broke down his door and he was found alive but poorly.  N came back to Glasgow with me and we had a quiet Christmas followed by a (planned) quiet New Year up here in Drumbuidhe.  N has lost quite a bit of weight so there's been a lot of cooking, eating and gentle exercise.  He's also got a long list (and growing) of difficult stuff he has to sort out so there's been a fair bit of tears and trickiness.

Looking after N (and Christmas) has meant a pause in job-hunting but there were some decent interviews at the end of the year including an atmospheric trip to Dunoon and emergency trouser purchases for an interview in Glasgow's old BBC building.  Alas none of them resulted in the offer of a lucrative full-time position but I have strong hopes for a possible job in Fort William in the New Year.

In parallel with N's sorting out of stuff I also have my own issues of clearing (bank accounts, mooring permission, room rental, carer's benefit) that these last days of the year are made for.  First of all however there's still the track to be filled and a mark I landrover to get going.

My standard technique for weight building is bread, sausages and lots of vegetables but I've thrown some cookies into the mix for this winter.

white chocolate & cardamon cookies

250g butter
340g sugar (white & brown)
1 egg
500g flour
16 cardamon pods (seeds removed and ground)
pinch salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
200g chopped white chocolate

cream the butter and sugar; add the egg, flour, cardamon, salt & baking powder (I put these all in at once but an electric beater definitely helps); mix white chocolate chunks in; divide dough into two, roll into log shapes, wrap in clingfilm and store in the fridge; to cook heat oven to gas 4, cut slices from the log and place on tray lined with parchment paper; bake for 15 minutes.

Here's to a good new year.

hardcore

Although we've had some bursts of sunshine, the damn rain just keeps falling.

I was off to Oban on Thursday for the Rural Parliament and was saved from enduring a damp wait at Craignure by a neighbour who provided a lift for me and my bicycle via the Corran ferry.  The day in Oban was unmitigated rain and, after a couple of strolls up and down the Esplanade I was soaked front and back which meant I was pretty grumpy for the fringe events that day.  Even without the grumpiness some of Thursday's events were a bit daft.  A discussion billed as "making uplands more productive" turned out to be about reforestation and the leaders were bemused when I asked if there were any other ways of making uplands productive.  Back at Drumbuidhe I'm even more grumpy about this presumption: we sit in the middle of a woodland regeneration area which was established 20 years ago and has surrounded us in trees but the land seems a lot less productive than the days when it was used for stock.  In the 1970s and 80s we used to have the whole shearing circus over here in the summer and no matter how nice the trees are it's now a lot less busy.

Friday saw some more pragmatic discussions and although the 'Open Space' session definitely verged into new age territory, Alasdair Boulton of Morvern Community Woodlands introduced a decent talk about fair use of rural land.  This was brought into sharp focus by a phonecall from our estate owner.  Although my family owns Drumbuidhe and the surrounding land, we sit in the middle of a larger estate and there are frequent tensions regarding our presence here and the fragility of the track we use to access our property.  The estate owner (the Mrs of the couple who own the estate) called, from Suffolk, to say that there had been a landslip on the track and it was impassable.  Well, actually, she didn't say that, she has a rather anxious air and she started by asking where I was ("Oban") and when I was going to Drumbuidhe ("tomorrow") and then saying I might want to rethink that.  This defined the conversation as her checking my movements and advising me rather than just passing on information.  I figured, rightly as it turned out, that she was exaggerating a third party report which had the effect of emphasising her control over me.

Since I am both independent and experienced when it comes to the track her warning had little effect although I did make sure I got over the track in daylight.  It turned out that there wasn't a landslip but that the gravel had been washed off about 100m of the track turning it into a mini boulder field that was kind of interesting to negotiate in a fiat panda.  I did make it over the track but, since I'll be going uphill on the way out, I'm a bit worried about getting both me and the fiat panda out in one piece tomorrow.  So today was spent with shovelling.  Lots of shovelling.  I shovelled a load of pebbles from the beach into the back of the mark 1 Landrover whilst watched by a diving boat anchored in the loch.  I then drove up to the washed-out section and shovelled all the pebbles out into the more serious holes.  I also did a bit of drain digging and levelled out the track where I could.  Crikey but shovelling is hard work.  The landrover fuel guage is showing as completely empty (I think the gauge might be bust ... the landrover is definitely a bit poorly at the minute) so I walked back for lunch which had to be quick, substantial and tasty.  Hurrah for pasta!

Herb and Roast Tomato Pasta

* three handfuls dry pasta
* three handfuls ripe cherry tomatoes
* parsley
* garlic
* olive oil
* soft cheese (1/4 pack of Boursin)
* salt & pepper

set the pasta onto cook; half the cherry tomatoes and place in a roasting tin, add salt, pepper & olive oil and set under a hot grill 'til they start to blacken; chop the parsley and garlic as fine as you can be bothered; when the pasta is cooked, drain and return to the pan; add roasted tomatoes, chopped parsley and garlic and soft cheese; stir and serve.

Fed and watered I trekked back up with a can of petrol and renewed vigour.  Mending the track is like painting the Forth Road Bridge but there is at least enough of a flat surface to be able to squeeze me and the panda out tomorrow.