Thursday 8 December 2022
It’s 07:59 and apparently minus one outside. The latest fire in the multi-fuel burner is doing ok, though radiators are, at best, somewhere between tepid and warm. It was a full moon overnight and another clear night. I had my third consecutive outdoor shower, last night’s with perfectly hot water. I have no idea how or why but being cold, then warming up under a hot rainforest shower and then acclimatising to what was about minus one last night, somehow feels amazing and makes me stay kind of warm for ages afterwards.
I have never been as conscious of the moon and its light as I am here, somewhere remote and with no artificial light around. We still do not have curtains/blinds and the bedroom has two large Velux windows and a double window in a sort of short hallway connecting the main sleeping area to the door. Beams of light come through the windows and it is easy to see across the bedroom. The landscape is illuminated and so light you can easily see for quite a distance outside. Along with comments about how quiet it is, during the moon’s brightest phases we have constantly exclaimed at how bright the moon is, which I feel bad for thinking is an annoyance when it’s shining torch-like into your face when you’re trying to sleep.
Other surprises about life in rural Scotland compared to inner London include, unsurprisingly, the temperature, but we knew it’d be cold. It hadn’t, however, occurred to me that tea cosies and a means of heating dinner plates are not just affectations. Hot food and drink gets cold significantly faster when the ambient temperature is this much lower. Similarly, water seems to take longer to boil, I assume because the tap water, which in our kitchen is sourced directly from a spring, is a lot colder to start with. And butter. It’s such a labour of love to get the butter pliable enough to spread, even on toast straight out the toaster.
Similarly, I expected mud and mess but I have yet to find a technique for taking off one muddy boot and keeping that sock-clad foot clean and dry while taking off the other boot, and all without getting muddy feet on areas that are supposedly mud-free.
I would usually drink a few glasses of water at home in winter. Here, I am very reluctant to drink cold water. On the plus side, I have rediscovered hot Ribena (I had previously been of the belief that Ribena is only to be drunk hot and only when you’re poorly), which isn’t great for my sugar consumption. But saying that, I’m eating fewer chocolates and sweets as they are constantly hard and cold. I tried to eat Liquorice Allsorts yesterday but only managed about five as they were so hard. Liquorice Allsorts crisis; I hadn’t foreseen that.
One other difference is deliveries. Royal Mail, when not striking, seem to be our best postage option. DPD, who were clearly used by the previous owners, don’t usually come up to the door. They leave any packages in a designated parcel bin by the post box. Yesterday’s delivery of a large, boxed, upright vacuum cleaner was found standing a good third above the bin with the bin lid placed neatly on top of the box. I am fine with the leaving of parcels there, but I had thought something that big would warrant a knock at the door. The vacuum cleaner would most likely have been gone before we retrieved it had it been left outside a house in Lewisham.
We used the new microwave to heat up a stew last night. It took me ages (registration, getting the lengthy product code right, navigating past the sales pages) to find the “convenient” instruction manual via a barcode. All was fine with the microwave despite my conviction that it would explode (I have a vague recollection of a childhood story about something exploding in a microwave; I have never trusted microwaves).
I did more tidying and rearranging, made myself a kind of child’s lunch of leftover carrots and broccoli and covered them in cheese sauce (it was so, so good). Chris was out yesterday, sorting winter tyres and shopping. A “just popping out” shopping and errand trip out here takes significantly longer than we’re used to. He set off at eleven and returned home shortly after three.
I had a walk in the morning sun and frost, did some work, failed to progress the arrival of my desk, added more to Chris’s shopping list (but after he’d written it all out in a less haphazard fashion. He said he’d remember the extra things), none of which he returned home with.
Today, we are heading to the tip, to view lots at Peebles auction (online auction is tomorrow), for coffee out, to check out Chris’s new GP surgery and to inadvertently test my new winter tyres and the efficacy of Scottish Borders’ gritting programme.