So what are we doing with Stronvar? Are we conserving a building that’s performed many functions over the centuries? Are we restoring the original building or are we transforming it into a modern home, albeit one with a very obvious history?
History and Vision
Background
Stronvar Farm is the major part of a steading complex of the style typical of the great estates of the rural Highlands. Now B Listed, it was originally the service building for nearby Stronvar House, itself the centre of the old Carnegie estate. Stronvar Farm included hay lofts, a byre and stables, the dairy, coach house and coachman’s accommodation.
Much Dampness
It’s been a tad damp of late. That’s d-a-m-p, to the point of the loch rising a metre overnight, the field at the bridge vanishing completely and both our drive and the road to the village being overtopped by the flood waters. And this on the weekend that Gill’s nephew and wife are coming up from the deep South to visit. “No problem”, we’d said, “We’re just an hour-and-a-bit from Edinburgh, so take a wander into Wonderland”. Continue reading Much Dampness
YACCC: Yet Another Crap Courier Company
It’s happened again: once more a major courier company appears to unable to tell its arse from its elbow, with both hands, a map and a GPS system. This time it’s Business Post, who promote themselves as “the” alternative to Royal Mail. Well Business Post, I’ve got some news for you: at least the Royal Mail, whatever its faults, seems to know where our bloody house is.
So here’s a hint, for Business Post and other pillocks of that ilk (UPS, Parcelfarce etc etc…): we live a few hundred metres from a well-known Scottish tourist village, our house is named on the OS map (and has been since the OS was founded), is signposted from the main road and is on a postcode that only encompasses the half dozen houses on our side of the Loch. HOW DIFFICULT CAN IT BE?
BAA, Humbug…
A news item today concerned the forthcoming Climate Change protest camp being assembled at Heathrow airport:
“We will not tolerate protesters harassing our customers”, said a particularly assertive BAA spokesperson. Which is hardly surprising since, as any poor sod who’s travelled through any BAA-run airport will tell you, that’s their very own speciality.
The Infamous Incident of the Knife-Wielding Maniac
So I was in tropically soggy Festival Edinburgh this weekend for a bit of a schmooze, most particularly for our friend Martin’s stag weekend. As such weekends go, it was notably good-humoured and civilised, with the party ending up at the Pleasance for its late-night comedy show prior to the inevitable diaspora of cheerful drunks to their various borrowed flats, bought hotels and ad hoc burrows. So far, so good, and when the survivors reconvened on Sunday morning for a relaxed brunch and coat-of-the-canine in George Street’s Tiger Lily restaurant, all was relaxed and cheerful.
Continue reading The Infamous Incident of the Knife-Wielding Maniac
Smoke Without Mirrors
Funny how quickly perspectives change: I’m a mere three hours travel time from home, and it’s a different universe, made the stranger by being one entirely familiar to a past me.
Sky’s The Limit
Our recent move has brought me directly and painfully into contact with some of the less (and least) desireable aspects of living in the UK – despite my background in working with large companies on matters of organisation and intelligence (ie, trying to encourage them to develop some) I do try to retain – in the face of all evidence to the contrary – a cheerful and entirely naive optimism about stuff getting done when people say they’re going to do it. Silly me. This time the culprit is Sky. The Glen doesn’t have any form of terrestrial TV coverage, so satellite is in fact our only option. Continue reading Sky’s The Limit
Winter Festivals
As we approach our first seventeenth (argh!) Christmas in the Glen, here’s an update of a summary of the various year-end festivals that may be applicable to my friends of many religions and none and of cultures multitudinous in space and time. This is an update of a list I first cobbled together circa 1997, to accompany my first “Generic winter festival greeting of your choice” card…
Crowdie Cranachan
My homeland of Scotland has produced a fair number of indigenous dishes, many coming out of the mists of time and borne abroad by several centuries’ diaspora of woad-painted Picts – there can be few corners of the planet that don’t at least have a nodding acquaintance with the haggis and it’s accompaniment of neeps’n’tatties, with the attendant skirl of pipes and hopeless wails of its victims. Other recipes tend heavily towards high quality beef, lamb and game, rich in sauce and lipids, but generally a far more pleasant culinary experience than offered by many Northern European countries – cabbage is NOT a major feature. And let’s not mention deep-fried Mars Bars here, OK?
One such recipe is the famous Scots dessert of Cranachan. While other modern recipes make this from large quantities of double cream and little else, this is my own, slightly lower-fat, variant, which starts with the fancy that mediaeval Scots would have had more cheese than cream lying around, and so eschews the crudity of cream for the subtler taste of soft cheese. Here I’m using the traditional (Viking-era) Scots skimmed milk soft cheese, Crowdie (Gruth if you’re a Gaelic speaker), updated for modern tastes with a proportion of slightly sweeter Mascarpone. If you can’t get Crowdie, Ricotta makes a passable substitute.
Preparation time: 10 minutes;
Making time: 15 minutes;
Chilling time: overnight, by preference.