140. Is the Grass Greener? Summery Scotland

Monday 12 June 2023

It’s going to have to be a water or midges kind of post as both are far too key a feature to ignore.

My mum has been staying since Friday and all has been fine, albeit in a water-and-midge-aware sense. Oh dear, I think it’s going to be water and midges, not “or”.

Water. Our tank is going down at an expected rate for the very limited water we are using. The leak seems to have stopped. I have a theory about the leak but as nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems, I doubt that’s correct. The overriding issue now is that I think it’s pretty much definite that our spring is barely producing any water. All promises of rain, including the storms that were forecast yesterday, have come to nothing. We had a light cover of rain in the early hours of Sunday, which seemed only enough to give plants a bit of moisture. I have emailed our neighbour to ask if we can have some more water from his borehole but I know he’s out all day today and has things of his own to deal with. Once our tank gets almost down to the outlet pipe (probably tomorrow), we will have to turn off our taps again and just use bottled water and the water still in our hot tub. Water has become the talk of the area. Chris was away until last night and stopped to chat to our friends as he drove past them. Their water supply is also solely from a spring and is shared with a farm. They said it is apparent that their water supply is dwindling. We at least have the neighbour’s borehole to access. As well as the hot tub. So, in short, it would appear that we are awaiting rain. The forecast is not promising thunderstorms here today, though. And every day for the next week has a cheery sunshine in the forecast.

As for the midges, at least with the sunshine, they are less of an issue during the day and in the shade, but they are very much around. We haven’t had clouds of them. Yet. We have an issue with them in the bedroom. I shudder to say this but they must be breeding there. And they reproduce in seconds. I have no idea where they come from, the room is sealed, even the Velux air vents are closed. They are tiny, seemingly impossibly small to cause such intrusive and irritating bites. You get rid of, say, twenty, turn around to search the rest of the ceiling and by the time you’re back to where they were reproducing, more have arrived. It’s like those really annoying celebration candles that you blow out but then, hahahahaha, they relight – how was that ever a good idea, to have candles you couldn’t blow out the first time? Anyway, annoying. And all the more so for not being able to open the windows to let the lovely cool evening air into the bedroom. So I couldn’t sleep because I was too hot (even with the fan on, the breeze also being a midge deterrent) and now I’m a bit tired and grumpy.

My mum and I went for a long walk in the Ettrick Marshes yesterday, getting as far as a waterfall. The sunny areas weren’t too bad for midges, but in the shade and around the waterfall, unsurprisingly there were quite a few, but I think they were too hot to bother us too much.

Without doubt, there is a lot to think about, living in a fairly remote part of Scotland. We knew about midges, but I hadn’t thought about the multiplication rate of midges which seem to be resident inside the bedroom, I hadn’t thought about the heat from not being able to open the windows and you can never quite remember how annoying they are. And we know that it will be worse and that there will be a few days when we will go outside and be covered in them. My mum is outside now, which is brave as they are all around. I’m about to go out, to measure the water level in our tank and hope to see a trickle of water miraculously going into the tank.

All that said, it’s a lovely place to be and the downstairs of the house remains cool, which we can finally enjoy and appreciate. And, yes, I am contemplating moving elements of the bedroom downstairs for summer.