Wednesday 12 April 2023
I’m kind of between holidays. Our friend Duncan is staying, and today we’re all heading to Edinburgh for a few nights. As with most visitors, something fairly dramatic happened. We picked Duncan up from Tweedbank station on Saturday afternoon, had a seeing-and-eating-and-walking afternoon, came back to the house, dinner, chat; normal stuff. All was in order with the house until Easter Sunday morning when the water from the cold tap in the kitchen trickled then stopped.
The last few days have consisted of an array of water-related chats, Do we need to fill the bucket to flush the loo again?, Any cold water upstairs?, How many bottles of water do we have left? Three days later, we seem to have reached the as-good-as-it-gets-without-professional-intervention stage where there is water from all downstairs taps, hot and cold. Upstairs, there is hot water from the taps and shower but no cold water. A bucket does almost two flushes (up and down the stairs to collect water from either the sink or from the hot tub that is still full of water from our failed attempt to get it serviced and working) so is fairly easily remediable, but the shower has been the unexpected problem. It is always cold for the first couple of minutes, but now it progresses from cold to scalding when the water tank has first been heated. The pleasant hot stage is missing. Now we’re trying to work out how long to leave the water heater on to get the water hot but not scalding. All three of us have had at least one scalding shower, at least one cold or chilly shower and only two of us have had a good, hot shower. I suggested Duncan might enjoy an outdoor shower, where probably the hot and cold taps would work (on the basis that there is cold water from the ground floor taps). I told him how much Carla had enjoyed the outdoor shower. Duncan, however, displayed zero interest in that option. Ditto Chris. And in fairness, I didn’t have an outdoor shower either.
Not that we would ever do this, but I am glad we don’t have paying guests who could write reviews. I think “no water”, “no heating” and “bitterly cold” would not get us repeat business. The heating situation is improved, though so is the weather – it’s snowing as I type, but hey ho, just a glitch. I thought it took a lot for me to get cold – well, it does, but the house has been extremely cold at times – but I have still been wearing quite a few layers around the house. Duncan, however, to Chris and my amazement has a few times looked comfortably warm wearing shorts and t-shirt. Nicky, who was here just a few days previously, had to resort to most of her available layers and my Oodie to keep warm.
As for the rest of Duncan’s visit, we visited some of the Scottish Borders towns that he visited as a child (Kelso, Jedburgh and Hawick) to see what, if anything, he could remember of them. The short answer would be not much, other than the odd small detail. I have found it fascinating wondering how it is that certain details or features of a place are all you can recall. In Jedburgh, Duncan looked up a hill towards the castle and said he recognised the hill and certain details about his dad’s concerns about parking on a fairly steep hill outside their accommodation. He recalled a house that he thinks used to be a café and thinks he recognised the building where they stayed … about forty years ago. It all made me appreciate that these towns and villages, while with a lot of new buildings and housing estates growing up around them, seem more unchanged than a lot of the small towns I would have visited as a child in Kent and Sussex.
Duncan and I spent an afternoon walking through forest and marshes nearby, seeing only a Ranger at the beginning of our walk, a man walking a dog at the point we turned back and another man and dog back near the end of the walk. That was it. No other people. We had a coffee and cake in one spot (nobody passed by) and lunch in another (nobody around).
Yesterday, Chris, Duncan and I visited Wigtown and Isle of Whithorn, meeting up with a friend of Duncan’s who partly lives on Isle of Whithorn. It was a good day out, interesting places, amazing scenery through (a traffic-influenced detour) Galloway National Park and great to go somewhere new, despite the heavy rain by mid-afternoon. The photo of the harbour on the Isle of Whithorn is the sheltered area. Believe it or not, the rain was very heavy. But away from the sheltered harbour, wow, torrential rain, crazy strong wind and huge waves; we could barely breathe in against the force of the wind and rain.
Right, we now need to see if it’s rained enough for the road to have flooded – I don’t think it has – where we need to pass to get to the station to go to Edinburgh …