It is an invariant law of the universe that books expand to fill the space allocated to them, plus ten percent. I call this The Bookshelf Constant. You can’t outwit this any more than you can gravity and it is entirely independent of how many books and bookshelves you buy.
Highland Life
Random maunderings from life off the beaten track. Includes the joys and trials of living in the Highlands, its scenery, humans, animals and environment. Contains traces of environmental and climate pleading, plus some enthusiastically experimental cooking.
Tweedageddon
The Royal Highland Show is the third largest ticketed event in Scotland, after the Edinburgh Festivals and T in the Park. It has been an annual event for nearly two hundred years and now exists as a four-day celebration of the cultural collision between acres of tweed, forests of wellington boots and great steaming piles of manure, all worn or produced by attendees from a wide range of species. It is, definitively and definingly, Country.
Streetfighting Cheese
We’re all familiar with willingly suspending our critical faculties whilst on holiday. At such times we’ll cheerfully throw the sort of liquid down our throats that we’d normally reserve for drain cleaning, consume ‘delicacies’ that probably contravene several Geneva conventions and dance badly to music that would otherwise have us harumphing into our gin & tonics at the bar.
The Great Frozen Pollock Scam
A parable for our times.
I have been rumbled: as of yesterday, the Great Waitrose Frozen Pollock Scam is, officially, over.
It all started out – as such things often do – with the opportunity to get something for nothing, or at least for very little.
Back in the day, life was simple: in our rural economy, the cats would occasionally get a treat, a pack of frozen pollock fillets from Waitrose, at £2.99 a pack. And, whilst that remained a luxury, all was well.
Spice Miscalculation
It’s the Fourth of July so, to celebrate our independence from those turbulent colonials, I’m making that staple of Imperial India – a Kedgeree – for supper this evening.
The Coming of the Beavers
Whilst English Nature and Scottish Natural Heritage spend large amounts of time and money swithering over the reintroduction of Eurasian Beavers (Castor fiber) to the UK, no-one seems to have bothered to tell the animals themselves that they’re supposed to be a tightly controlled experiment that can be eradicated at any time.
A Camping Ban, Hoorah!
Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park is extending the Loch Lomond lochside wild camping ban to the rest of the lochs in the Park. This is, unequivocally, A Good Thing.
Unfortunately, there’s been rather a disappointing and unconsidered ‘rent-a-quote’ level response from, amongst others, Andrea Partridge of The Mountaineering Council of Scotland, something that definitely called for a response…
Beset by Fools…
So, this evening we were heading home – conditions moderately crappy, but all was well, until we reached the Pass of Leny, where we joined the back of a long and unhappy queue. After half an hour of thumb-twiddling, a stroll to the front revealed that: one articulated lorry had got stuck on the rise to the blind ridge; the following lorry driver (see photo for registration number), rather than thinking, “He’s stuck, I’m driving a similar vehicle, so I’ll wait and see what happens”, thought, “it can’t happen to me” and went to overtake, on the rise to said blind brow. Of course, he a) slid into the vehicle he was overtaking b) got wedged between that and the roadside barrier and c) blocked the road completely. It was just luck that no-one went head-on into him.
There. Or thereabouts.
Summary
It’s taken us six years, but we’re there. Actually I’d say we’re three months from finishing and probably will be for several years, but all the basics are in place, remaining work being the painting of woodwork and one bedroom, the tiling of one of the bathrooms and the rectification of various minor-but-annoying balls-ups by the main contractor.
Recycled Warmth
The last piece of the insulation jigsaw went in today: 27 bags of Warmcel recycled newspaper-based insulation, blown into the floor of the new master bedroom. This room sits above the unheated stable and tack room, now our garage and plant room, so when we used this room as our living room, it was perennially freezing unless we had storage heater, radiator and the log burner on, full blast. With the heat pump now in the plant room, we also needed better sound insulation between the floors – the pump isn’t particularly noisy but the buzzing of the compressor would definitely not aid a good night’s sleep.