Tuesday 3 October 2023
A large formation of birds have just flown past, probably water foul heading south for warmer weather. Some time between my leaving Scotland on 12 September and Chris arriving back on 24 September, the last of the swallows left for Africa. I don’t blame them, it really has got chillier here, but I do feel strangely abandoned and like we’ve been left to fend for ourselves until they return in March. The sky is much quieter and there are significantly fewer birds around. I know that’s all obvious but it’s been a very long time since I’ve lived somewhere rural enough that you can notice bird migrations.
The telecoms engineers arrived yesterday, surprising us by arriving bang on time at 11am. We now have a restored WiFi service from our outdoor router and are slightly more ready for the fibre/OpenReach contractors next Tuesday, though we don’t think we’ll have fibre broadband from Tuesday as they will need to dig quite a long trench. It turns out that our very long cable from the outdoor router up the hill into our house has three weak areas, one where the cable was broken and fixed, another a junction box just outside the house and the other at the actual router. The broken area and the junction box were likely both a problem but the casing around the fixed area was full of water, which it shouldn’t have been. We now have a new box around there and the WiFi is buzzing along fine. It also transpires that our long white cable is an indoor cable. It didn’t let us down last winter and I don’t know how long the previous owners had been using it (I think only a few months before we moved in) but it’s been fine. However, we should really have a black, outdoor cable that is pretty much weather and rodent resistant. But hopefully none of that matters as we should soon have fibre broadband.
While one of the engineers was working on the box up the garden, he sat on a bench next to it. I was upstairs already so had the job of relaying calls (ie shouting from the hill) from the engineer to his colleague downstairs. I was looking out a Velux window in the bathroom. On seeing how dirty the window was (as per the photo below), I decided to clean it while waiting for the next message. While cleaning the inside, so with the window closed, I wondered why the engineer kept giving me a cheery wave. I eventually realised he’d been seeing me ‘waving’ while cleaning the window!
I can tell the house is consistently colder, I have a lip balm that is kept on my desk. It is now always solid/hard.
Two friends are staying with a friend of theirs in Melrose from today and I’m picking them up from Selkirk tomorrow afternoon to bring them to our house for lunch. I see there is now a yellow weather warning for rain tomorrow, which might mean the road to Selkirk will be closed/impassable in my car. It has just started raining now, which is also annoying because I have hung my washing out.
Outside the window, I can see Mr Pheasant either instructing one of his young sons how to fight or he’s squaring off for a fight. Sadly, while Mr Pheasant and his four sons are still alive, Mrs Pheasant seems to have vanished. I heard some pheasant screams, which I hoped were just warnings, on Sunday, but then I saw a mysterious animal in the same kind of direction. It looked like a short, pale fox. It really is a brutal world out there for the pheasants.