Friday 11 August 2023
The water supply is currently good, very few midges around, extractor fan mouse hasn’t been eating through the fan and all seems kind of okay. Yesterday, it looked like autumn, grey, but it was 23°C and more humid than I’ve ever known it up here. It was the number one small-talk topic yesterday in shops and cafes.
Chris, Max and I ate/drank in Hawick and Selkirk, admired the Clydesdale horses and foals and walked across Ettrick Marshes. I know that in September, the Sitka spruce above the marshes will be felled, which I’m dreading, and one bridge across the river is already closed for repairs/alterations to ensure it’s robust enough for the timber trucks to cross it. I suspect the whole area will be closed off in September and I have no idea when it will open again. It is one of my favourite places to walk and sit, there are hardly ever any other people around and it’s full of interesting things growing.
We bought some Barnsley chops from a butcher in Hawick yesterday. The three of us stood in the shop chatting to the two butchers while one of them sawed our chops. People who eat meat use butchers considerably more in Scotland than anywhere else in the UK I have ever lived. Generally, the standard of meat and presentation here is considerably better. Max commented afterwards how good it was to see the butcher trimming, tidying and neatly, carefully presenting the chops after she’d cut them (and before they were weighed). Unsurprisingly, the meat, which I incorporated into a vegetable tagine, was delicious.
I am writing this from the slightly pretentiously-named Indian room. I love this little annex-like room. I painted two walls, we hung the few pictures we had that are Indian and then stopped. Looking now, I can see that the whole room should be painted the same teal colour and I really should get the right sized mounts for the pictures that were essentially shoved into frames on a make-do basis. If I also paint the ceiling, I have realised that I won’t need to spend so long trying to make straight lines with the paint. Chris is away from Sunday for over a week, I’m thinking that could be my house project in that week. I haven’t done anything to the house since the headboard and there are lots of things I’d like to get done.