Thursday 10 August 2023
Yesterday morning at 05:40, I left London for Scottish Borders, stopping once for a stretch and coffee near Retford and two wandering-about stop-offs, Barnard Castle and Kirkby Stephen, arriving back at our house in Scotland at around 14:45. I am still tired and not acclimatised to the significant drop in temperature, more indoors than outdoors.
I am sitting at the kitchen table to write this, looking out a window at our bird feeder. There are also some pheasants sheltering from the rain under some shrubs at the edge of the lawn. But, oh dear, the pheasants. Chris has been back since Monday. There has been no sign of Mr Pheasant, though that is not particularly unusual. He seems to take a casual approach to parenting and husbanding. Chris saw the neighbour who filled us in on the reason for the loss of three more pheasant chicks (fourteen, down to seven, now four). Apparently, there are weasels on the rampage. The neighbour thinks they’re also to blame for some headless finches. He did set one of his German Shepherd dogs on the trail of a weasel but the dog lost the scent after a while, so there is still at least one pheasant-killing weasel at large. All of this reconfirms why I don’t like watching nature programmes. It is such a brutal world out there. The young pheasants are now at their transition phase, going from cute, fluffy chicks to patchy-feathered teens. That’s probably my problem with animals, anthropomorphising them. I do feel sad for the pheasants though. I realise that they are constantly nervy and alert for danger and danger comes from just about every direction for pheasants.
Other than the devastation to the birds, it’s lovely to be back here. This morning, despite a reasonable weather forecast, it’s grey, damp and low cloud. Within the final ten miles of getting back, I saw a field of hay bales and I’ve noticed quite a few flowers have started fading; it is starting to look like it’s the end of summer, which, in meteorological terms, it is as June, July and August are meteorological summer. I’ve only been away for eleven days, but I definitely noticed it was darker later this morning and earlier last night.
Chris’s son Max arrived last night so we’re going out today. He and his girlfriend often go wild camping and I know he loves Scotland anyway so he already seems happy about being somewhere so remote and quiet.
For my last couple of days in London, I had a long walk with Duncan around Blackheath and Greenwich, went to the cinema to see Barbie (took me a while to get absorbed into it but I enjoyed it, despite it not being quite what I expected even though I had read and heard quite a lot about it) and spent Tuesday in Hastings, including sitting on the beach in the rain, which my friend said was surely a reflection of my being far more used to rain having lived in Scotland for the past nine months. Fortuitously, I had bought a small, old, £20 doormat-sized rug in Hastings old town, which was perfect for sitting on to avoid getting wet and uncomfortable on the pebbles. I felt quite the eccentric, sitting on the beach in rain, wearing a long black dress (I was in Hastings for a funeral), including a black rain jacket with the hood up, sitting on a thick woollen rug, eating a potato salad. As you do.
