Sir Benfro

Whindge

2012-01-29T12:41:00.000Z

One of the cornerstones of my plans for developing the farm has been the erection of two wind turbines on the ridge above the farm buildings. About thirty-one metres to tip, and generating a nominal 50kW each, these are not the enormous things you see sprawling across the skyline, but not insubstantial either. To put them up would have cost a lot of money.

I say 'would have cost' because it's not going to happen now. After a year of rather more hassle with the planning authorities than should have been the case, my proposal has been denied approval at appeal. No wind turbines for me.

The reason given by the DPEA, who deal with such things, boils down to visual intrusion on what is considered to be a special landscape. There is already one turbine on the ridge - my brother's erection mentioned in this blog before now. Two more reasonably close by, and slightly taller, are considered to be too much for the site to take.

Now I'll be the first to admit that the area around here is very pretty. Norman's Law is a prominent local feature, and the Tay Estuary* with its backdrop of mountains to the north and west is quite spectacular - particularly when you get a good sunset. But I can't agree with the worthy committees and hordes of unknown, unelected bureaucrats who have come up with the plan to designate the whole of North East Fife an Area of Special Landscape Value and slap even more onerous than usual planning restrictions on the area. In fact I can't really get behind such designations at all.

Far from being an unspoilt idyll, the south bank of the Tay is the way it is because of millennia of human interference. At the summit of Norman's Law there is an Iron Age hill fort; the fields immediately below it are defined by stone walls several hundred years old (and in need of repairs I can't afford); the woods surrounding the hill are blanket plantations of non-native species (Sitka spruce and Norwegian Fir mostly) dating back to the great Forestry Commission adventure after the second world war. Further down the hill towards the coast, once small fields separated by neat hedgerows have grown ever larger as arable farming has mechanised. The few small copses of native broadleaf trees are increasingly isolated; islands in a sea of uniform barley, oilseed rape and potatoes.

But people who live in towns and cities, who have well-developed public transport systems to take them from suburban house or urban apartment to office block, call centre or factory, who spend their lives in a melee of traffic noise, pollution and busyness, like to come out here where it's quiet to relax.

I really don't have a problem with that. Technically I own Norman's Law. It's a hill rather than a mountain, but rugged and weather-beaten. It's a Scheduled Ancient Monument, whatever that's meant to be, and a Site of Special Scientific Interest. I walk over it every day, I am in the process of restoring it to lowland heath rather than the blanket gorse it was in danger of becoming. It's my responsibility. But I don't feel like it really belongs to me. Why shouldn't everyone enjoy it, as long as they leave only footprints and take only photographs?

There's the trite old saying, trotted out by well-meaning landowners, that they are merely custodians. The hill was there before I was born and will be still there long after I am gone. Certainly the rules and regulations mean that I cannot exclude people from the land even if I wanted to. And I must ensure that it isn't degraded in any way, so the fact that I own it counts for very little, really. I could moan and say that in fact owning the land is more of a burden than a privilege, as the hefty bills for replacing fences, fixing drains and clearing gorse have so clearly shown me this last year. Not doing these things is not an option and yet the potential for earning any money from the hill is very small. Such is the lot of the modern landowner.

I am, nevertheless, delighted that people come and walk here. Even if I were able to restrict access I wouldn't. I'm even more tolerant of riders and mountain bikers than my father ever was.**

But I digress. This area is undeniably pretty, and it's popular with the general public as a recreation space. But, and this is an important but, it is also my workplace. I have to keep the land in good agricultural and environmental condition (GAEC, as the wonderful acronym goes). That's the law, and if I don't follow it I can be fined. I don't get any direct subsidies for the farm - the grants I do receive are specifically for the restoration and maintenance of Norman's Law as a lowland heath. They don't amount to much, and severely restrict the numbers of animals I can put there and when, thus limiting my income potential on that particular piece of land. If I don't follow the terms of my agreement with the Scottish Government to the letter, I can have my grant stopped, be fined the same amount as was going to be given, and be banned from participation in any future schemes.

The grants don't even cover the full cost of the work they are meant to subsidise, either. One was for 300 metres of fence and a new gate. The grant amounted to £1200, which seems very generous until you realise the actual cost of putting up the fence and gate was almost twice that. Likewise the gorse clearing I have been doing all year. I'll get around £6000 for that, but I've already spent £4000 hiring in a team of men to help me with just a quarter of the total area. Dividing that remaining £2000 by the hours I've put in doesn't really bear thinking about. It's certainly not a wage, nor is it meant to be.

In short, I am under a great deal of obligation for very little reward. I am not complaining about this - well not much. I knew this was the situation before I decided to take on the farm. It's the same for all farmers, although some get more in subsidy that I do. We are very tightly regulated and, particularly for livestock farmers, struggle to make a living in a world where people don't really care where their meat comes from as long as it's dirt cheap, but want everything to do with the industry regulated - at the industry's expense - until it squeaks.***

On top of this, some genius in Fife Council has decided that this part of Fife needs extra protection from us greedy land-raping farmer bastards, who can't be trusted with a field of grass. The Tay Coast Special Landscape Area cracks down even harder on rural development than the already insane planning regulations. Want to build a house in the country for a person working in a non-agricultural but rural-based business? Forget it. You can have a holiday cottage (WTF?) but it mustn't be occupied for more than 40 weeks in any one year. And if you just wanted to build a nice house on a bit of land you own, well, that's never going to happen. Unless you're extremely rich and have friends in government.

For years now, the news has carried stories of rural decline, closing schools and village shops. Our nearest post office is miles away, in a large town, as is the nearest shop. There's no bus service anywhere near here either. Pretty much the only service I get for my horrendously large council tax is emptying the bins. The countryside is being leached of young people and entrepreneurs.

The obvious finger to point, when looking for reasons for this, is the horrendous cost of housing out in the sticks. Funnily enough, the most vociferous opponents of my wind turbine plan are all people who have bought houses out here in the countryside but work in Dundee, Perth or Edinburgh, or have retired here from a hectic life in the city. They have paid a lot of money for these houses, and even in these troubled financial times the prices around here leap enormously once you've moved away from the nearest streetlights. People who want to work around here, where wages are low, simply cannot afford to buy a house.

You might think the influx of Polish builders and Czech plumbers was noticeable in the cities, but it's nothing compared to what's happened in the countryside. I let some of my fields for grazing to a neighbouring farmer. He has a huge business, spread over many farms, and employs a lot of farm workers. A couple of times a year they turn up here to sort out their cows, dose them or take them away. Almost all of the young men are Eastern European, and almost all of them live a dormitory existence - often in great camps of static caravans bought in specifically for the purpose. The scale of these operations can be astonishing, especially in the soft fruit industry across the Tay from here, with annual migrations of young workers camped out for the summer months.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing in and of itself. I don't think we should put up barriers to these people - quite the opposite. They are prepared to work hard, and I wish there was a way to pay them more than the minimum wage pittance they get. But it's not a great way to maintain a healthy rural economy. Those born and brought up on the land face the same problem. Many would love to work in agriculture, but simply can't afford to live in the countryside any more, and the wages on offer aren't enough to cover the cost of travelling from the towns every day.

Over-inflated house prices are not the real reason for this sad state of affairs, however. Or at least not the root cause. That can be laid squarely at the feet of our planning system and the chronic nimbyism that underpins it.

Do we want unchecked development rampaging across the countryside? Well, obviously not. It would be crazy to try and build a huge factory here - the road infrastructure isn't up to it. But as long as well-meaning but misguided bureaucrats insist on preserving the countryside in aspic; as long as the haves with their well-paid city jobs and nice country cottages shout loud about controlling what happens on land they don't own; then we will continue to see our rural economy stagnate, our farm jobs go to itinerant foreign workers who will quite understandably repatriate a large chunk of their earnings rather than spending them in the local community.

The government in its infinite, disjointed wisdom, has plundered the fund set up to facilitate the digital broadcasting switchover and is using that money - creamed off the top of the licence fee - to improve rural broadband coverage. its aim - to encourage business back into the countryside and reverse the decline of the rural economy. Brilliant, well done, more of it please. But here's a question: where are all these brave new entrepreneurs and teleworkers going to live?

My brother is one of these rural pioneers. His company employs nine people and is based in offices in the old stone steading buildings here on the farm. But all of those employees bar himself and his wife have to commute from nearby (and some not so nearby) towns. When he approached Fife Council planning department with a view to getting permission to build a house on a spare piece of land so that one of his employees could move closer, he was told no. He could build something for someone directly involved in agriculture, and it would have a restriction on it meaning it could only be occupied by or sold to a farm worker,**** or he could build a holiday cottage that could only be occupied for forty weeks in any one year. Someone simply employed in a business whose offices were in the countryside doesn't count. Likewise if I employ someone to drive tractors and feed cows, then I might get permission to build them a cottage to live in, but if I employ someone to run the wool processing plant I would like to establish here, then no, I can't. Because that's not agriculture.

My two wind turbines were intended to provide electricity for the farm and the wool processing plant, and generate a stable income to invest in the business. Without them, I am going to struggle, as so many livestock farmers do. The wool processing is on hold, and the prospect of employing anyone receding fast. Anywhere else - Aberdeenshire, Orkney, Shetland, the Western Isles, Moray, Sutherland, Caithness - I would have had my application for two relatively small turbines approved without fuss, but because North East Fife is special, apparently, I have to do without. The government says it wants to encourage new rural businesses, and it is doing some few things to that end. But without a complete overhaul of the planning system to allow development to take place, then it's all just pissing in the wind.

* It's the Firth of Forth, the Moray FIrth, the Cromarty Firth and the Dornoch Firth, so why is it the Tay Estuary? No one seems to know.
** There's a wonderful pamphlet, produced by our ever-so-wonderful government, detailing the various rights of access across private land in the UK. On the cover it shows a walker with a backpack, a mountain biker and a rider on a horse, all beside a traditional footpath sign. The clue to the right of access is in the name 'foot'path. Mountain bikers and horse riders do not, automatically, have any right to ride over footpaths. Most, however, only get as far as looking at the cover, and leapt to the obvious conclusion.
*** This is a rant for another day, but why, FFS, do we have to have vets, who are trained to keep animals alive, inspect carcasses in abattoirs? Why can't this job be given to someone who's had maybe six months training, rather than five expensive years?
**** And this restriction is also retroactively applied to any other dwellings on the farm, i.e. the farmhouse. So my brother would have to move out, since he isn't a farmer. Genius idea.

Happy Christmas

2011-12-24T17:28:00.000Z

click to embiggen

Red Fergus and the girls of the Fliskmillan Fold wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

Those were the days, my friend

2011-12-18T19:15:00.000Z

Earlier today I was looking for a file - a copy of a novel I wrote about eight years ago, if you're interested - when I stumbled upon a collection of my old blog posts from late 2006. Back in the day, when blogging was cool and trendy, I used to compile a year's worth of my rubbish and wittering, and dump it all into a word document. Then I'd post an end of year summary, telling you all how much time I'd wasted, how many words of drivel I'd produced and so on and so forth.

Times change. Blogging is still important, but the advent of twitter and facebook have changed their focus somewhat. My outpourings on this page are much fewer and farther between - the last dribbling nonsense was at the end of last month. I'd argue that I'm less erudite than I was back then, too. More wary of stating any great opinion, certainly less cutting and acerbic.

Annoyingly, the first couple of years of blog posts, lovingly archived along with all the images I'd posted, disappeared when the hard drive on my laptop gave up the ghost many years back. It's mostly all still here, of course, but blogger's not well suited for dumping a well-sorted archive to my hard drive. Or at least it wasn't the last time I looked. It's fascinating though to look back at this self-selective record of my life since December 2004 (yes, really it's been that long).

I never kept a diary as a child. Still don't as an adult. It's not something my parents ever encouraged me to do, and having an older brother whose sole purpose in life was to make me miserable (or so it seemed to me), meant that I learnt early on not to give any hostages to fortune. A diary, no matter how well hidden or coded, would have been found, read, used to wind me up or simply destroyed just because it was mine.* Having not written one, I can lament and imagine that it would have been full of the most wonderful memories, insightful comments and embarrassing little vignettes that I nonetheless could take a secret pride in having written. In truth, it would have been mostly rubbish like 'got up this morning, had breakfast, went out to play.' Ad infinitum.

This blog, then, is the next best thing, and it's fun, if rather time-consuming, to look back. Nostalgia, after all, isn't what it used to be.

So for SirBenfro's seventh birthday, here is a brief overview of the year's blogging. It's not quite as impressive as 2006's stats.

Over the year, the blog has managed a heady 5,927 page hits. Time was I used to get that in a month. I guess it's true what they say - the way to build a blog audience is to write something every day.

I've managed to post at least once a month, which is something. Although in August my sole post was a single line bemoaning my lack of input. In total, I've written just shy of 23,000 words, and a total of 30 posts. Photographs play a heavy part in padding out the dross.

For a year in which I've upped sticks and moved country, taken over the family farm and begun the long task of re-stocking and building up numbers, it's a bit pathetic really. Must try harder in future.

* we've long since made our peace, my older brother and I, but as children ours was a very stormy relationship.

That's not what I meant

2011-11-29T11:23:00.001Z

I can be a right idiot at times.

Those of you with long memories (and beards) may recall my embarrassment when, in the early, naive days of blogging, I mentioned the project I was working on in a blog post titled 'I hate my job.' A google search on that project name brought up my moaning as the first hit, which didn't go down too well with the project funders or my employer at the time. It didn't matter that I'd actually been quite positive about the project itself in my post - the problem was my inability to deliver the work - there was that title right up at number one on a search 'I hate my job.' Nothing else needed saying.

You won't find that original post in an archive search. I deleted it long ago, though I kept copies of it and the other ones that mentioned the project by name and so had to go. Since then I have been reasonably circumspect in my blogging and thought my lesson learned.

So I was a little surprised, and mortified, to find a message waiting for me on my facebook account from the son of one of my cousins. I check my facebook account so infrequently that I had missed this message for over two months, which probably means he thinks I am even more of an insufferably rude fellow than he did before writing the message. It concerns various comments I made on Twitter following the death in July of my Uncle, his grandfather, and how attending the funeral meant that I would miss the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival.

Twitter being the wonderful thing it is, I couldn't immediately see the message, but the tone of what my first cousin once removed quoted at me seemed plausible, if a little insensitive even for me. So I wrote him an apology and explanation. I often joke about serious situations with my friends, as a way to assure them that I am OK. With hindsight, I can see how someone stumbling upon my Twitter stream might misinterpret my words.

Then I discovered how to look up older tweets in the Twitter archive, and re-read the actual conversation I'd had. What I actually said was:

'Alas I will no longer be attending #HarrogateCrime2011 this year. Instead I will be spending Saturday at the funeral of my uncle.'

Perhaps a bit formal? Maybes suggesting that really I'd rather be at Harrogate? You could read it that way, but it wasn't what I meant. In truth, I'd really rather my uncle wasn't dead, but there's not a lot I can do about that. Not unsurprisingly, the tweet had several responses from my friends expressing both sympathy for my loss and disappointment that we wouldn't get to meet up as planned. I responded to one of these with the following:

'@The_New_Mr_K Thanks Scott. It was on the cards, but it always comes as a shock. And what terrible timing. What was he thinking?'

Now I can see that sounds a little heartless and glib, especially to a young man who is following links in his search for information as he prepares to make a eulogy to his recently-dead and much-loved grandfather. It's only one half of the conversation, mind you. He's only read my tweets, not the messages sent to me. My uncle's death was not unexpected - he'd been fighting cancer for eight years and knew that the battle was lost. This much I have explained, and then I've added what to me is a jokey little aside to assure Scott that I'm fine. The very fact that I didn't attend the festival, instead drove all the way from Fife to Southampton and back to pay my respects to my uncle, should have been ample illustration of my sincerity. Unfortunately my first cousin once removed took it as moaning that I was being forced to attend the funeral against my will. To which I am tempted to ask 'by whom?'

Which brings me, haltingly, to the point of this post. I am at fault here, obviously. I've been glib and insensitive when discussing something with deep emotional resonance to some people, and I've done it in a place where they might conceivably come across my comments. I accepted this when challenged on it, put my hands up and apologised.

But is my first cousin once removed completely blameless in this? I've no doubt that his hurt was sincere, but I can't help thinking that it was also somewhat naive. As he admits at the beginning of his message, he doesn't know me. And yet he is swift to judge my words as he has interpreted them, without taking the time to try and clarify my meaning.

Words written on paper carry only half of the meaning of words spoken face to face, but they also carry twice as much. Letters, tweets, blog post and forum comments are all open to misinterpretation - a fact easily demonstrated by the trolling and flame wars that are all around the internet. Often these are born of a genuine difference of opinion, but probably more so it is simply down to one person taking someone else's written words the wrong way. I know this, and approach anything written down as potentially open to several different interpretations. I do not take offence easily as most often I do not think offence was intended. Of course, some people are offended by the very unintentionality of the offence*, but for them I fear there is little hope.

In this particular instance, my first cousin once removed hasn't stopped to think about context, or considered the difference in our ages and outlooks - he is in his early twenties and even if he had not wanted to attend the funeral would most likely have been forced to by his mother and grandmother. I am somewhat older and could very easily have made excuses for not attending that would have been acceptable to all concerned.

It is a truism that you should always stop and think before hitting 'send' on that irate email. Likewise you should consider that blog post or tweet - and the problem with twitter is it's all too easy to just blurt out any old rubbish and instantly forget it. Knowing that, however, I can't help thinking that anyone who reads anything on the internet should approach it with their eyes wide open, too. If people were less prone to jumping to conclusions, perhaps the world would be a better place.

* which is, of course, the very definition of bad manners. If you insult someone after careful deliberation, that is not bad manners. Insulting them without thought is. In this instance I have been guilty of a degree of thoughtlessness, which is very bad manners indeed.

Strange Dreams and Voices

2011-11-26T11:40:00.000Z

Time was I used to have vivid dreams. Sleep was a veritable adventure for me, which perhaps explains my love of it and my bed. I can't actually remember when the dreams stopped and sleep ended with just realising I was awake and still tired, but for the last three nights they've been back.

First off was an interesting ride through some post-apocalyptic zombie-strewn landscape. You'd think that would be a nightmare, but in truth it was more of an adventure. The over-riding concern was that I and my fellow survivors not get splashed by any blood or other fluids from the zombies as we fought them. We all helped each other, and I woke with a warm feeling of camaraderie. Still tired, though.

Yesterday's affair was somewhat more disjointed. It started with the Horse Doctor and me taking a small crab and starfish down to the beach to put them back in the sea. For some unspecified reason this was very important, but as I held the starfish, two teeth appeared in the end of one of its stars and it bit me. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

As we approached the water's edge, something orange and wolf-like appeared, washed up by the waves. It was genuinely scary at first, and probably dead, but then it morphed into a rather bedraggled orange fluffy cat, with a collar on that said it belonged to someone in Poole, Dorset. Strange how that one detail sticks. I couldn't make out anything else on the collar, so I took it off, at which point the cat escaped and I had to chase after it. There was a brief appearance by Mr Stuart's cat, Grendel, who strangely appeared to have had kittens, and then I finally managed to catch the orange cat in someone's overgrown garden. Alas, I woke, again tired, before I could return her to her owner in Poole, Dorset.

This morning's dream was not so vivid and I have forgotten the details. I did wake feeling happy though, which is a first for a long time.* Still tired, mind you. I never wake refreshed and it generally takes me until about lunchtime to get myself up to speed these days.

But I'm glad to be dreaming again. Or maybe I've always been dreaming but the alarm buggers up remembering them. The morning of the first dream, my alarm failed to go off and I overslept by an hour. Whatever the reason, though, I love the disjointed logic of dreams and the way the brain weaves together disparate thoughts and memories into something that makes absolutely no sense but is in every other way completely plausible.

And then there's the voices. The other night I was struggling to stay awake whilst reading just one more chapter of the latest work in progress before turning out the light. For some strange reason, the song Henrietta by the Fratellis was bouncing around inside my head - this happens sometimes, especially when I'm tired. Not necessarily Henrietta by the Fratellis, of course, any music will do. Life would be pretty dull if your brain only ever played you Henrietta by the Fratellis, after all. Sometimes it's got to give you Tori Amos singing Bliss, or maybe even the waltz from Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. My brain is a veritable ipod shuffle of half-songs and refrains, snatched bits of music on infinite loop, and has been since long before the ipod shuffle was invented. Occasionally it even invents its own tunes.

But I digress. It was the Fratellis singing Henrietta, from their debut album Costello Music. I suspect this was the last song I'd listened to whilst cutting and piling up gorse that afternoon - that's usually enough to birth the ear-worm and it can sit silent for hours, just waiting for the right moment to start burrowing through my brain.

I could tell I was getting tired and losing concentration on the reading because the music was getting more and more detailed. And because I'd had to read the same paragraph two or three times just to stop the words from moving around. Then, as if there were a volume control in my head, Henrietta faded softly down to nothing, and the clear voice of a young woman said:

'It's just so unfair.'

And then the music faded back up again.

It's not often that I hear voices, but I do from time to time. Now before you start thinking I'm some kind of raving lunatic here, this is not 'hearing voices' in any kind of psychotic manner. I am always aware that this is my own mind at work here, usually on the cusp of falling asleep - quite possibly actually asleep but not quite realising it yet. These are not voices urging me on to unspeakable acts of depravity, or persuading me that children are the source of all evil and need to be eliminated from the world. They are just simple snippets of everyday conversation - possibly even something I've heard during the day and forgotten about. Even the clarity of the voice, and the subtle turning down and back up again of the music, were nothing but a product of my tiredness. There is no message to be found in the voice of a young woman telling me of some unspecified injustice, unless you take from it a plea from my subconscious to stop reading, turn out the light and go to sleep. At least, I hope there isn't.

But it's weird all the same, and quite spooky when you're all alone and the wind is howling outside.

I heard the voice two nights ago, started remembering my dreams the morning before it happened. I have recently finished a major rewrite of my Debut Dagger shortlisted novel, Natural Causes, and have been giving it a final read-through before deciding what to do with it next. In many ways I'm starting to be more creative after way too long of doing nothing, either due to tiredness or apathy or even the creeping depression that's been my companion in one form or another probably since my parents died more than three years ago. I take from this not the thought that I might be descending into some new kind of madness, but that my creative juices are finally flowing again.**

Here's hoping the dreams persist and that the voices never get too insistent.

* Quite what happy was doing in bed with me, I've no idea.
** eww.

Goodbye, old friend

2011-10-18T22:08:00.001Z

This morning, doing some admin, I took my credit card out of my wallet to type in the number and pay for something. Transaction complete, I put the card back and threw my wallet down onto my desk. Nothing unusual there, it's a scene that's played itself out so many times as to be completely unmemorable.

Later on in the day I had to go up and help my neighbour with an internet problem. It wasn't going to take long, and the dogs were all asleep, so I let them lie. When I returned it was to find this.

I think we can save it.

OK, so that's it after I've picked everything up off the floor, sorted the loose papers, made sure the cards haven't been chewed. And of course thrown the puppy outside with much shouting and swearing. It used to be my wallet. Now it's some useless metalwork, chewed leather and damp cardboard. And I am surprisingly upset.

No ordinary wallet this, it was a mini Filofax with just enough space in the front cover flap for a meagre amount of cash, and room in the back cover for a few credit cards. I bought it sometime at the end of the 1980s in a little craft shop in Thistle Street, in Aberdeen. For the life of me I can't remember what it was called, but it was a great place for getting gifts. I didn't often buy stuff for myself there. Something about this diminutive Filofax appealed, though. Perhaps because it was so small, and possibly because Filofaxes were considered rather naff at the time. Then again, this was back in the days when my normal attire was stripy shirts and baggy corduroy trousers. Long before the beard arrived. So I might have been being post-ironic. Most likely it was just a serious bargain and I needed a notebook. That it was small enough to fit in my pocket and become a wallet didn't occur to me until much later.

I can't remember what I used for a wallet before the Filofax. Probably some cheap leather billfold given as a minimal-thought Christmas present. I found a pile of these when I was going through my old desk as we emptied my parents' house. They're still around somewhere, but I can't bring myself to go back to them. They don't have the weight, or the sheets of paper for my random notes. Nor do they have the history.

Not long after I first got my Filofaxlette, I went down to London to see the Jazz Butcher playing at the Venue. My little brother* was staying with a friend in Woolwich when he saw the concert advertised for the next evening, phoned me in Fife to tell me about it. This was back in the days when I did mad, impetuous things, so I jumped on a train and went to London just to see my favourite band.

It was a good concert, although unlike when I saw them in Edinburgh, I didn't get to speak to Mr Fish afterwards. I did buy T-shirts, which I still have, threadbare, misshapen and faded. On the way back from the gig, I realised that I'd lost my wallet. Pinched from a baggy corduroy trouser pocket in the crowd, no doubt. I was miffed, but not overly distraught. I'd not had more than a fiver left and this was long before I got my first credit card. I'd been proud of my little Filofax though, so I was sad that we'd had so short a time together.

Two weeks later, it arrived in the post. Someone had found it thrown into a front garden not far from the venue, dropped it in to the nearest branch of the bank whose cashline card was still in it. They had looked up my address and forwarded the whole thing on. We've been together now more than twenty years.

We've been around the world, my Filofax and me. Baked in the Australian Outback, soaked through in a Seattle downpour. Frozen on the ski slopes in a Glenshee blizzard, moulded and softened by the gentle heat of my body. It's helped me through good times and bad. Yes, the note pages had a tendency to tear at their ring-binder holes and fall out, but that was always part of the charm. And it never had a place for putting a pen, which I always thought was a bit of a design error. But we muddled through together.

For a while I used to write down the mileage and fuel costs every time I filled up the car, back in the days when a tankful was less than ten pounds. I've still got the sheets somewhere - they make for scary reading. Petrol used to cost less than fifty pence a litre, believe it or not.

Hidden in the ragged pages are notes for stories I've never quite got around to writing, illegible drunken squiggles that may well be the most brilliant ideas a person has ever had, but which I can't for the life of me read. I have grown so used to the weight of it in my pocket - be it jacket, coat, trouser - that I instinctively know when it's not there. I feel uneasy at its lack of presence.

And now it will never be there again.

I've had a look at the Filofax website, but they don't do anything remotely like that model anymore. Given that it was probably an end-of-line run-out reduction when I bought it in a previous century, this is hardly surprising, but it's annoying nonetheless. There is something that might, at a pinch, do, but I had a look at it in Tesco this evening, and despite claiming to be exactly the same size, it's much bigger. And stiff, and new.

Even going to the shops to look for something that might work as a replacement had me near paralysed with indecision. I needed to go out, but there was nothing to put my cash and credit cards in. Without a wallet, I couldn't go out, but I had to go out to get a new wallet. Just putting everything in my pocket was all kinds of wrong. The weight wasn't there and I couldn't shake that horrible sense of having forgotten something important. And there's something rather scandalous about carrying a credit card on its own. Naked. Like you've maybe just swiped it out of some poor bugger's pocket.

Even now my hand strays to the pile of rendered leather and card, leafing through the debris with a tremendous and unnatural sense of loss. So many memories attached to one small inanimate object.

And yet, it's been with me almost half of my life, so why shouldn't I mourn its passing?

So farewell, old friend. You were a good and constant companion, even when you were empty. And when you weren't, you always stood your round. I won't miss you as much as I miss my cat, nor as much as I miss my parents. But I'll miss you nonetheless.

* of whom it has been said before, he is bigger than me.

UPDATE - I've remembered the shop. It was called Nova, and it was in Chapel Street, not Thistle Street. It's still there, and even has a website. Nice to see that some things never change.

Enfys

2011-09-30T08:06:00.000Z

Rainbow over Tayside - Click to embiggen

Angry

2011-09-26T11:26:00.000Z

*** - blog warning - ***

This has turned into something of a therapy session. Read at your peril.

*** - end of blog warning - ***

Anger. It's such a useless emotion. It gets in the way of everything else, makes it difficult to think straight. It's a very bad idea to try and do anything important when you're angry, but then anger makes it nigh on impossible to recognize that what you're doing is important. Until it's too late.

I'm normally the most placid and laid back of people, but I've been feeling a lot of anger recently. Simmering rage that I find very hard to contain. I have to fight against the constant urge to lash out with my fists, to kick anything in sight, to shout until I'm hoarse, then jump on the horse and gallop away into the sunset. And then, when I finally think I've got a lid on the anger, it turns to despair like the trapdoor opening up under the condemned man on the gallows. For someone used to keeping a firm grip on his emotions, I find this roller-coaster somewhat disconcerting. I'm not used to having my mood swing quite so violently - not since I was a spotty teenager, at least - nor to finding myself swearing quite so freely, fuck it.

There are a number of reasons for this situation, but the most immediately obvious is small, black and currently fast asleep on the armchair with a 'goose wouldn't melt in my mouth' look on his sweet face.

Who? Me?

Yes, young Tegid, the Patterdale Terrier. Now, Tegid's not the first terrier I've owned, not even the first Patterdale, so I can't say I didn't know what I was signing up for. He is, however, quite the most infuriating creature to cross my path in recent years. The problem is one of obedience, obviously, and his propensity for wandering off. He disappeared yesterday twice, for three hours at a time. This morning he was happily playing with young Dogmael whilst I was hanging the washing out. Things went quiet for all of fifteen seconds, and when I looked up he was gone, full-tilt across the next field, gathering speed and completely beyond calling back. He finally returned two hours later with the leg of a deer in his mouth. Well, the bones and hoof, but it was still considerably bigger than him. I hope he found it, rather than catching it, killing it and eating more than his own body weight in raw venison before bringing home a trophy to show of with in front of the rest of the pack.

This afternoon I had to go and plumb in a new water trough on the back of the hill, and then walk the far march fence before letting my cows through - well, it would be embarrassing if they wandered off into the neighbouring farm. I took the dogs with me, being careful to tie Tegid to the truck whilst I was working, then keeping him on a lead whilst we all walked. That was until the gorse got so thick I had to let him off or risk both of us getting lacerated. He lulled me into a false sense of security by staying close for a few minutes, but it couldn't last. No sooner was my attention distracted by Haggis falling into a rabbit hole than he took off into the scrub, oblivious to my whistling and shouting. A few minutes later I could hear distant barks echoing from the woods as he gave chase to something undoubtedly much bigger than him.

Not much else I could do, I gathered the other two* and continued checking the fences. I half-heartedly whistled and called once I'd got back to the pick-up, and waited around for a few minutes just in case Tegid decided to re-join us, but to no avail. Fuming, I drove slowly home and started to hammer out this blog post, that being a safer way to vent than breaking something (most likely my hands and feet).

Halfway through the second paragraph, the prodigal terrier returned. He usually does this. In his own sweet time, but eventually. He knows perfectly well how to get back home, and only fails if some kind soul picks him up first, or there's someone up on the hill with a picnic. Since arriving here in February, I've had to pick Tegid up from the police, and from all of the neighbouring farms - some of them more than once. Is it surprising that he drives me to distraction?

But I've got a soft spot for animals, in case you hadn't noticed. I care about them and what happens to them. Probably more than I care about most people, if I'm being honest, but let's not go there just now. More importantly, I can't help imagining all the terrible fates that could await a missing dog. He could be stuck in a hole, caught by his collar snagged on a protruding root. He could be hit by a car, broken-backed and in agony by the side of the road. He could be trapped in a snare, chewing off his own leg in an attempt to get free. He could be taken in by strangers with small children who feed him endless cake and dress him up in dolls clothes. Oh the horror.

So I worry, perhaps needlessly - certainly needlessly to date, except that one time when Mortimer went missing. And I'm powerless to do anything about it. The dog is gone, the dog won't respond to being called, the dog escapes from the pen I've so carefully constructed and wanders off to whatever fate awaits him. And it happens over and over again.

It's frustrating, and eventually the frustration leads to anger. But worst of all is that I'm not really angry with Tegid. He's just a dog, after all. A Patterdale Terrier must do what a Patterdale Terrier must do. No, I'm not angry with him; I'm angry with myself for letting it happen.

And there's the nub of it. All anger, if you stop and think about it, is anger at yourself. For allowing something to happen or for not being able to stop something from happening. The first kind you can do something about. Learn from your mistake, make sure you don't do it again. The second kind you're powerless to do anything about - frustrating I know, and the easy way to deal with frustration is to get angry. But if you can accept that some things are beyond your control, then it's easy to let the anger go.

OK, that sounds a bit spineless, and maybe it is, but I'm not suggesting you should just accept defeat and slink away with your tail between your legs. Instead of getting angry and kicking out at the world for being unfair, it's a lot more productive to work around the problem. At least, that's how I've tried to approach life, and for years it's worked out pretty well.

But now, I feel the little demon of anger raging around in my head more and more often. Tegid's frequent disappearances are one flashpoint, but there's an underlying malaise there. I suspect among the reasons for it are the fact that I am living four hundred miles away from the Horse Doctor; that I am attempting to set up my own business; that I am so far out of my comfort zone I can't even see the dull glow of its streetlights on the horizon now. Many, many things conspire to enrage the demon, but the worst of them all is knowing that all this shit was my own choice, and that I could have had a much easier time if I'd stayed in Wales.

Then again, if I'd done that, I'd just be beating myself up about not taking the chance to farm and getting angry with the endless Welsh rain.

I guess it's just like Jesus said. There's no pleasing some people.

* the SausageDog, being of advanced years, declines the longer strolls these days. I was accompanied only by Haggis the Lucky Labrador and young Dogmael, who has yet to earn his name.

Sheeps!

2011-09-16T19:02:00.000Z

It was bound to happen, sooner or later. This is a livestock farm, after all, and you can't just have one kind of livestock. No, you need to have lots.

The Horse Doctor was up on her hols a couple of weeks ago, and we both went down to Galloway to look at some sheep. Not just any old sheep, mind you. These were Romney ewe lambs, born this April. We selected fifty nice looking ones* and bought them there and then. I would have liked to have bought more, but the price of sheep is at an all-time high right now - typical when I want to buy some. By the time I have any to sell, the market will no doubt have corrected itself, but that's life.

sheeps on the run - click to embiggen

It took a while for them to pack their bags and say their goodbyes, but earlier this week I had a call telling me the sheep had left their old home and were on their way. They had cleverly hitched a ride on the top deck of an articulated lorry bringing cattle from Ayr mart up to Fife, thus saving me considerably on the cost of transport. The downside of this was that they didn't actually arrive until near enough ten at night. It was also howling a gale, which meant that the poor wee things really didn't want to come out of their nice, warm and smelly lorry into dark, windy emptiness. We got them out eventually, the lorry driver and me, but I wasn't able to count them, or indeed see much of them as they disappeared into the night. I had checked the gate at the other end of the field earlier, but it's always a worry that someone might have gone through and helpfully left it open.

Come the next morning though, they were all there. But no, hang on, I can count sheep without falling asleep, and there were 52, not 50. Not a mistake, as it turns out. Marcus Maxwell, who breeds these hardy sheep down in Dumfries and Galloway, had added a couple to the flock for luck, nice fellow that he is. These are this year's crop of lambs, who won't get put to the tup until late next year, producing their own lambs in the spring of 2013.

should be enough grass for now

Romney sheep, for those who care about these things, originated in the Romney marshes in Kent. They were taken out to New Zealand and adapted well there, breeders selecting for good mothering skills and generally speaking a sheep that just gets on with things, without any intervention from the farmer. The modern system using them is known as Easycare over here, although some people get confused and think that's a breed of sheep (or cattle). In short, they will live outdoors all year round, lamb in the big field closest to the farm buildings, and hopefully require minimal attention. The New Zealand attitude is succinctly summed up by the farmer who, when asked what he does about lambing said: 'As soon as I hear the first lamb, I go on holiday.' I certainly will be happy if I never have to pull another lamb in my life. And if you don't know what 'pull a lamb' means, it's got nothing to do with chatting them up in the pub. More to do with having small hands and a robust constitution.

something to train the sheepdog

Romney wool is worth a good bit more than the bog-standard stuff most farmers produce, which ties in well with the Horse Doctor's fibre production plans. She already wants to have Alpacas here, and is looking at a flock of Bowmont sheep and a mini-mill to produce yarn for the knitting and craft markets. Well, you've got to have a ten year plan... Me I'm just happy to be kept in socks and jumpers.

With a bit of luck, I should be able to buy a few more ewe lambs next year, as well as a tup or two. The idea is to get a good Romney ram** and then follow him up with a Suffolk as a sweeper. Suffolks have black heads, and their lambs always have black heads whatever colour the ewe, so it will be easy enough to establish who's the daddy of whom. Most of the Romney ewe lambs will be kept (obviously requiring a second, unrelated Romney ram when it comes their turn to breed - no nasty incest on my farm!), building up to a flock of around 250-300 in the end. At which point I may even begin to consider myself a proper farmer.

I still need to get a tractor though.

settled now

* and no, I'm not going to tell you what makes for an attractive sheep. That way sniggering and smuttiness lie.
** in farming tup and ram are interchangeable. Much of the terminology is, in what I think is a deliberate attempt to confuse.

Time

2011-09-11T22:19:00.000Z

I was going to post today. Even managed to hammer out some words about me (isn't it always?), but then I ran out of time. So instead, here's a picture wot I took.

There is much to talk about

2011-08-02T12:43:00.000Z

I just can't for the life of me think what it is.

Dogmael

2011-07-05T14:02:00.000Z

I have only myself to blame.

This is a livestock farm. OK, so at the moment I've only got some Highland Cattle, but the plan is to have a flock of sheep soon. To be more specific, a flock of Romney ewes. Romneys are the main breed run in New Zealand for meat production and they are noted for their hardiness and easy lambing. The old saying goes that when the Kiwi farmer hears the first lamb, he goes on holiday, and to a certain extent you can see why. New Zealand sheep farms are large and the terrain difficult. Sheep roam over vast areas and one shepherd might have five or ten thousand ewes to look after. It would be simply impractical to try and bring them all in to sheds at lambing time, let alone wander among them pulling lambs, fostering twins onto mothers who have lost their own lambs and all the other extremely labour-intensive things sheep farmers do over here. The New Zealand system has been developed to be as hands off as possible. In the UK, this has been adapted into what is known as the easy-care system, and what's not to like about something called that?

The downside, of course, is that you'll never get the high lambing percentages that intensive farming systems in the UK can manage. Fewer lambs per ewe means fewer lambs going to market and a smaller pay cheque. On the other hand, not having to spend hours every day dealing with sheep means that time can be put to other more profitable ends. Also, when it comes down to it, I'm not as big a fan of sheep as is the Horse Doctor. And she only likes them for their wool. It's important to mix the species of animals grazing the grass though, so some sheep are unavoidable.

Which means some kind of sheepdog is, also, unavoidable.

I've been putting it off though. It's not as simple as just buying a ready-made sheepdog. You can do this - get one raised and trained by an expert - but it's very expensive (£2k+) and you end up with a dog whose personality has been already been formed. Bringing such an animal into an existing pack can also cause all manner of problems. Far better all round to get a pup and train it. Except of course that I've never done this before - hence the putting things off. And even an untrained pup, from good working stock, can cost both an arm and a leg.

So when the Horse Doctor texted me to ask if I wanted a Huntaway cross, I didn't immediately scoff at the idea. Huntaways are common in New Zealand, after all. They're bred for greater stamina than your average Border Collie, and work well as cattle dogs too. This particular Huntaway was crossed with a collie, came from a dairy farm in Pembrokeshire and was free to a good home.

As it happens, I was heading down to Wales anyway, for a friend's 50th birthday party. That was Friday, and on Saturday the Horse Doctor and I made the trip to Fishguard, just to look, of course.

And came home with this:

Much debate went into what to call this little fellow. He comes from the Preseli hills, so Elvis was one consideration. Benfro was another, but that's really a name for something a bit more laid back - a dachshund perhaps. It would have been shortened to Ben, too, which is just another sheepdog name. Just outside Fishguard, on the way to the farm where he was born, is the small hamlet of Trecwn - or dogtown. Ci is the Welsh for dog, the plural being cwn (pronounced coon). I did consider just calling him cwn, even if it might lead to odd looks when shouting for him in public places.

Much was the discussion in the car as we made our way home, unnamed small dog curled up and happily asleep on the Horse Doctor's lap. Then we rolled slowly down the hill towards Cardigan, neatly bypassing the tiny village of St Dogmaels.

Not much is known about St Dogmael. He was a prince of Ceredigion - Mael is Welsh for prince - son of Ithel ap Ceredig ap Cunedda Wledig. He preached in Wales for a while, then moved down to France. No-one seems to know quite what he did to be canonised other than sacrificing the good life to become a monk, but he's remembered in town names in Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. And he has the perfect name for a sheep dog. He can be dog if he's bad, and Mel if he's good. Dogmael it is.

The journey back to Fife yesterday should have been traumatic, with an eleven week old pup separated from his mum and siblings for the first time. I put him in a cage in the back of the car fully expecting seven and a half hours of pitiful whining punctuated with the occasional horrible whiff as nature took its course. As it happened, he curled up and went to sleep, did his business when I let everyone out for a leg stretch at Westmoreland, and then went back to sleep again. I foresee great things ahead if this can be maintained.

On the downside, he's not really house trained yet, and he seemed to think that four o'clock this morning was a perfectly acceptable time to be getting up. I am somewhat brain dead as a result.

Tomorrow morning he goes to the vet to have his jabs. Then all I have to do is train him. Should be a breeze.

In praise of Fife Constabulary

2011-06-29T12:59:00.000Z

It's been almost five months since I moved back to Fife (more or less) permanently. That time has mostly been filled up with cutting gorse and buying cows, but I also get to enjoy the delights of daily strolls around the farm. Fences need checking, livestock needs to be seen everyday to make sure it's all OK, and frankly I can't see the point of living and working here if I'm not going to enjoy it.

Usually I am accompanied on my rounds by some dogs. The number varies - the sausage dog is getting on in years, arthritic in the legs and sometimes elects to stay behind. I occasionally pick up my nephew's lurcher, Bran, on my way past the farmhouse, too. Haggis the Lucky Labrador and Tegid the Irritating Patterdale always come. But however many dogs I set out with, almost inevitably I come home one short. Can you guess which one?

Tegid is just over a year old now.* True to the breed, he has no concept of fear. Nothing worries him, be it a forty tonne articulated lorry laden with logs, or a herd of protective mother cows with their calves. Being lost is something that happens to others, not him. He is also a very amiable chap, happy to go and talk to anyone he meets, and doubly so if they have anything remotely resembling a picnic with them.

Lately he has decided that the best fun is chasing deer in the woods that surround the western end of the farm. This in itself isn't a problem - I doubt very much he'd ever catch one. But they do tend to lead him a merry dance, sometimes taking him miles away. Generally speaking, he comes back now - he's been here long enough to know where home is. But just occasionally he ends up going the wrong way. Such was the case yesterday.

I had gone up the hill in my new toy to fix some electric fencing. I've got a dozen Highland Cattle and a bull in one field, and the neighbouring field is let to another farmer. He has about fifty cows with calves at foot in there. I noticed on Sunday that my bull was wandering up and down the fence line, no doubt bored with his own small harem and looking for a few more cows to serve. A single strand of electrified wire attached to his side of the fence should be enough to cool the bull's ardour.

I took Tegid and Haggis with me as otherwise they would have been locked up in the caravan. Haggis being a Labrador, and thus one of life's natural supervisors, kept close by as I worked. Tegid less so. When I heard the manic barking echoing from the woods, I knew he'd found a deer, but I wasn't too worried about it as he knew the way home. I fully expected to find him waiting for me when I got back.

But he wasn't there.

Annoyed, I went back up the hill and walked around it, calling. No joy. Back home again, there was still no sign. Since he'd been gone around four hours, I figured there was nothing to do but call the police.

I've had to do this twice before. The first time Tegid had gone off with someone walking on Norman's Law,** and they had helpfully handed him in at Cupar police station. The second time he'd been found sniffing around the next farm East but one, and they'd let Fife Constabulary know they'd found him. This time he'd been found chasing deer in the woods to the south of the farm, and taken in by a kindly local. She'd contacted the police, so once more I had to jump in the car and drive around to a complete stranger to pick up The Horse Doctor's dog.

Tegid has been microchipped, but I don't like putting a collar on him when he's roaming over the farm. Terriers, as their name suggests, will tend to go to earth, and I don't like the idea of him getting snagged on an underground root. Chances are he'd lose his collar in the woods whilst in hot pursuit of venison, anyway. Most of the neighbouring farms have met him now, so they can just phone me when he appears. I can also hope that as he gets older, he learns not to go so far - well, I can hope.

But in all of this, Fife Constabulary deserve praise and thanks. I've usually phoned them well after office hours - you've got to give a dog time to retrace his route over several miles, then allow a couple of hours for the panic to build. Even so, they are always there, always friendly and never judgemental. I don't know much about their performance in other spheres of police work, but in this one they are top notch and have my undying gratitude.

I just hope that tracking the movements of my wayward terrier isn't distracting them too much from the job of catching criminals.

Who? Me?

* His official birthday is 12th July, since that's the Horse Doctor's birthday and he was her present. His actual birthday was about eight weeks before that, but his provenance was not so well documented that there is any great accuracy on the date.
** it's very popular with casual hikers, especially at the weekends.

Testing times

2011-06-27T16:06:00.000Z

Today I had to sit an exam.

Casting my mind back through the darkening fog of memories, I think the last time I sat any kind of exam was in 1991. By odd happenstance, this was also in June and could well be exactly twenty years ago. Fresh out of university and at a loose end, I had taken it into my head that a career in the European Union might be worthy of my intellect and social standing. My father was unusually supportive in this endeavour; unusual in that he was generally against anything to do with what he referred to as the 'common market.' I can only assume that he was hoping I would become disillusioned with the great grey bureaucratic edifice.* Either that or he was desperate for me to get a job.

Back in the day, you had to pass a couple of exams before you could even be considered for a position in any of the EU Departements. To do this, you needed an understanding of the history and workings of the institution, and you had to demonstrate at least a basic understanding of one of the official EU languages other than your native tongue. The exams took place at the Highland Showground in Ingliston, just outside Edinburgh and close to the airport. I turned up unprepared beyond having spoken to my uncle, who was a high up Eurocrat at the time. A couple of hundred other hopefuls who were there at the same time had probably tried a bit harder.

The first paper was multiple guess, and contained all manner of questions about the history of the EU that I'm sure are very important to know.** Each question had four possible answers, so I must have scored at least 25%. My dreams of joining the EU gravy train had pretty much evaporated before I arrived at the exam hall, and they died completely when I saw the earnest faces of my co-examinees, so I didn't exactly try very hard. Once I'd randomly selected answers for each question, I went back through the question paper making up fifth answers as humorously as I could, writing them down on the question paper. I thought I'd be able to bring this home as a keepsake and have a chuckle about it with my mates down the pub, but at the end of the exam all the question papers were collected in along with the answers. That was when I noticed that each question paper had the name and serial number of the person taking the exam on it. I like to think that my desecration raised a wry grin on the face of whoever had to mark the papers. More likely it was torn up and thrown away with an angry snarl. My experience of the kind of people working for the EU in the early nineties was that sense of humour was low down on the list of essential qualifications.

For some obscure reason I can't recall what my exact score was in the test. I think I did surprisingly well in the French - surprising because my French is universally recognised as being awful. I wanted to do the exam in Gaelic, but apparently that's not an official EU language, or at least it wasn't then. Today I'd possibly even scrape a pass if I did it in Welsh. At the time I was relieved to get a 'non, merci' letter, since it meant I could put off looking for gainful employment for another few months.

Fast forward twenty years, and in a suitably ironic twist today's exam was a direct result of EU intervention. In order to transport livestock more than 65km, you need to have passed a test quizzing you on animal welfare, what sort of vehicle is appropriate and other pertinent facts surrounding the legislation. In the UK, this is a City and Guilds certificate, and the test consists of twenty-seven multiple guess questions. You have an hour to complete this, on-line at a certified testing place.

Including the time wasted doing the tutorial that explained how to choose the answer you wanted (hint - radio buttons. You can only select one answer), I finished the test in a shade under seven minutes.*** There are nine sections to the test, and I aced seven of them. I only managed 80% in Causes and signs of stress in animals, and a distressing 60% in Checking animals and fitness to travel. It's still a pass, and that's all that matters. I can now transport animals for anything up to eight hours, should I wish.

Now all I need is a suitable trailer for my new toy, which by complete coincidence arrived today. Call it a prize for passing my test.

shiny!

It worries me that some people take the whole hour to complete the test though. And some don't manage to finish. Not a ringing endorsement for our education system, really.

* which worked, as it happens. I would rather boil my head in someone else's wee than work for the EU or support it in any way. This doesn't make me xenophobic; there are lots of things I like about the people and culture of all the diverse European nations, particularly their diversity. Trying to shoehorn them all into one Franco-German bureaucratic model is a recipe for disaster. Here endeth the eurorant.
** If you're the sort of person who worries about Norway, that is.
*** I'm a slow reader, OK?

Until the cows come home

2011-06-18T17:46:00.000Z

I'm not sure how long I've wanted Highland Cows, but it pre-dates the nasty little incident a few years back that left me with 350 acres of North East Fife to play with. From a money-making perspective they're not exactly going to make me rich, but there's something about the horned beasts that I find far more appealing than the run-of-the-mill commercial cattle breeds. Even Aberdeen Angus, renowned for their tasty beef and efficient marketing campaign, are dull in comparison. I couldn't possibly countenance having something English like a Hereford, or worse French like a Limousin or Charollais, and Belgian Blues are just ugly, ugly, ugly. So when it came to re-stocking the farm, there really was only one choice of breed. That, of course, was only the start of it though.

Fergus Ruadh, walking out with a cow of his choosing

Highland Cattle don't come in herds, but folds. I've no idea why, but that's the way it is. I started looking to build a fold by purchasing animals one by one from various Highland Cattle Society breeders around Scotland. Then I spotted an advertisement on the society website for an entire fold being sold as one, due to the owner wanting to downsize. The Horse Doctor (who happened to be in Scotland at the time) and I hurried on over to Eaglesham to have a look, and were reasonably impressed. The bull running with the ladies was especially impressive, and the whole fold were very placid - quite happy for me to wander amongst them even though some of the cows had new-born calves at foot.

Some smaller than others

When looking for a used car they say you should never buy the first one you see, and I guess this is good advice for any purchasing decision. I took advice from a local Highland Cattle Society herdsman, who went and cast an eye over the fold for me as well. Then I went to a Highland Cattle sale at Stirling Auction Mart, where cows with calves at foot and two year old heifers made very little money indeed. I read up some more about the breed, perused past sale reports and dithered. Dithering is perhaps my most honed skill, after all.

Settling in to their new home

Meanwhile the grass on the Norman's Law was growing longer. I have also signed up for a five year land management agreement with those nice people at the Scottish Government. This means that they give me a reasonably large sum of money to graze the land in a particular way,* which in short means I have to have nine cows wandering the hill from the first of April until the last of September. Another bizarre part of the great farm subsidies farrago** meant that I needed to have a certain number of my own cows on the farm to qualify for an additional payment that would, quite frankly, have been rude to turn down. So in short, I needed to get my shit together.

I made an offer for the whole fold, based on what seemed to be being paid for non-pedigree cattle at market. Since these animals had no breeding history and no health status it was a bit of a gamble taking them on. Getting my own fold established would have taken many years too, since the progeny of unregistered cows go on something called the B register, their offspring on the A register and finally their offspring can be fully registered as pedigree animals. At its quickest this would have taken five to six years.

Shorthorn X Highland calf. Mmmm, tasty.

Perhaps fortunately, my offer was considered derisory and rejected. I still needed to get some beasts though, so dug a little deeper in my long-suffering wallet and went to a registered pedigree breeder. Somewhat lighter of cash, I now have my own fold of pedigree cattle. Even now they are running with the bull, and all being well in the natural world, next spring they will give birth to calves that can be officially called whatever of Fliskmillan.***

They arrived yesterday, about lunchtime. Six two year old heifers, who will bull for the first time this summer. Six cows ranging from ten years old to four years old, each with a calf at foot at the moment. They will also bull this summer, as all of them are running with Fergus Ruadh, a two year old bull, who despite his youth seems to know what he's meant to be doing. Five of the calves are Highland cross Shorthorn, which will be raised for beef - possibly the tastiest beef there is. The sixth is a blonde heifer calf called Eleanor. Slightly disturbingly, I have a niece called Eleanor, and her younger brother is Fergus.

The whole fold, in the rain, all nineteen of them.

Can you count them all?

For some strange reason as the days drew closer to the actual arrival of my cows, I found myself getting very stressed. I don't think I've worried so much about something since I realised, six weeks before my final exams, that I'd not been to two thirds of the course lectures for the previous two years and really I ought to be doing something about that.**** It got so bad that on Thursday night I couldn't sleep at all. I tried to think only in images, but even then it was images of everything going horribly wrong.

The psychologist in me suspects that this is because the arrival of cows is a turning point. Up until now I might have owned a farm in Fife, but I wasn't a farmer. My nephew Fingal said as much a couple of months ago, in that charmingly disrespectful manner twelve year old boys have. Now that I have livestock of my own, it's all suddenly become real. I have a responsibility towards my animals, I am tied to the land and I have to work to make the business successful.

Ah well, if I cock it up completely, at least in a year or so's time I'll have some tasty beef.

Blondes have more fun.

* and also require me to remove by hand several acres of gorse, about which I think I have moaned enough already.
** which is perhaps a rant for another time. Whilst it's nice to get subsidies, I'm not sure that they're really the right way to go about ensuring food security.
*** although the Highland Cattle Society prefers Gaelic or Scottish names, which Whatever isn't.
**** Curiously, once I'd sat my final exams, all those many years ago, I was as relaxed as a warm kitten on mogadon. I knew that there was nothing I could do to influence my result once the papers had been handed in and could see no point in fretting about it. Jammy sod that I am, I got a 2:1.

The view from my office today

2011-06-14T13:34:00.000Z

It was the cat what got it.

2011-06-05T22:42:00.004Z

I find myself in Wales at the moment. That in itself isn't particularly strange. The Horse Doctor managed to get two tickets to see Paolo Nutini at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre, and since I hardly ever get to see live performances it seemed a good idea to come down for this one. OK, so the man himself is from Paisley and is likely to be playing a bit closer to home in due course, but you take these opportunities when they come your way. It's so unusual for anyone of any note to make the trek to Aberystwyth - the last concert I went to was Julian Cope about eight years ago - that when someone does actually make the effort, it's only fair to support them.

So, down in Wales to see a Scotsman sing. Nothing strange about that at all. Nothing all that strange about going to the supermarket on Sunday morning, either. We didn't need much, just a basket of bits and bobs and a chance to get rid of all the green waste I'd generated by digging over the garden. That's the problem with being four hundred miles away most of the time. When I do make it back here there's a list of little jobs to do that's a mile long.

Anyway, we needed cream. You can't eat rhubarb pie without cream, and there was a whole rhubarb pie just waiting to be eaten. So I picked up a small tub of cream and put it in the basket. I won't bore you with the rest of the shop; it involved bread, biscuits and deodorant amongst other things. It didn't take too long to get everything we needed, and the queues weren't too horrendous either. I piled everything onto the little conveyor-belt at the checkout and then started packing things into our reusable plastic bag as they came through.

Which was when I noticed that the cream was nowhere to be seen.

I checked the basket, sitting on the top of a pile of its brethren - no cream. I checked the edge of the conveyor belt where lost items accumulate - no cream. I checked the floor - no cream and no slippery white puddle. It had vanished entirely.

Much to the annoyance of the people waiting behind me, I hurried off and got another pot. There was a rhubarb pie with my name on it after all, and nothing was going to stop me from enjoying its tart rhubarby goodness. But I couldn't help wondering as I loaded everything into the car, what on earth had happened to it?

I will admit to being a little scatterbrained at times. There is also something in the design of supermarkets - all shops really, but supermarkets in particular - that robs my brain of the ability to function beyond the most basic level. I am quite capable of going shopping with a list and coming home with only half the things on it, regardless of whether the shop has them in stock or not. Mostly I just forget to take the list out of my pocket, my brain having regressed to toddlerhood as soon as I've crossed the threshold. Sometimes I can wander around ticking things off as I put them in the basket and still forget something important that's on the list, but mostly I manage to leave it on the kitchen table at home and just guess at what we needed.

All of which makes it quite remarkable that I even noticed we'd lost the cream on Sunday, except that I remember picking up the smaller of the two tub sizes available and showing it to the Horse Doctor, looking for approval or otherwise. I then distinctly recall placing the approved pot in the basket, alongside the bananas. So where had it got to?

There is a very slim possibility that I put it in somebody else's basket. Time was, for a laugh, I used to like slipping the odd, expensive item into someone's shopping, then watching them go through the checkout to see if they bought it in embarrassment, didn't notice at all, or sometimes discreetly placed it in someone else's shopping. I hadn't intended to do this on Sunday, and a small pot of cream isn't exactly high value. My brain might have been distracted by something shiny though, and another shopper with nothing but bananas in their basket might have been standing very close. I can't discount it as a possibility.

Another game I used to play, back in the days when mum used to drag us along to help with the weekly shop, was taking random items out of other people's trolleys. Oh the laughs! Perhaps someone, seeing me coveted cream and remembering that they had forgotten some for themselves, decided it was easy to filch mine than to go back to the dairy aisle. It would, I suppose, be poetic justice of a small kind, after all the supermarket shenanigans I've got up to in the past.

Perhaps a rip opened up in the space-time continuum, a wormhole the exact shape and size of a small tub of cream. If so, I hate to think where and when it will turn up. A few feet above my head at an awkward moment, I've no doubt.

Or maybe you found a pot of Morrison's own brand double cream in your fridge, and had no idea of how it came to be there. Well now you do.

Step 2: A Miracle Happens

2011-06-01T11:12:00.000Z

I type this blog post whilst sitting at my desk in the spare room of the caravan. Across the narrow passageway, there is a fully functioning flush toilet, plumbed into a state of the art sewage treatment system. Whirring around the air and through my head are millions and millions of tiny, invisible, magic WiFi pixies. They spew forth from a sleek black plastic box in the living room, carrying messages between my laptop and the internet via this magic thing called broadband. Yes, folks, despite all my worst fears and apprehensions, BT have actually pulled their socks up and connected me to the outside world.

Now before we get too excited and dance a merry jig, it should be added here that they were supposed to connect me on April 14, so they are a wee bitty late. Not eleven months late, though, which is why I am so excited about it. And unlike my run-ins with the Welsh and Indian branches of the great lack-of-communications company, I can honestly say that some employees of BT Openreach Scotland deserve a bit of praise.

Actually, if I'm being fair, and since I'm inordinately pleased at the moment I can be generous that way, the last engineer to come and make my final connection in Wales was worthy of praise, and I think I gave it at the time. (That sentence is far too long, by the way, but I can't bring myself to care.)

There is a cheerful fellow in Glasgow somewhere called Benny, who made the mistake of giving me his direct number, and then compounded that error by being helpful when I phoned him for updates. Admittedly the reason I had to phone him so often was because the company he works for had cocked up, but at least he was a friendly voice, and he genuinely tried to help. Then there was the nameless engineer who came out and connected 250 metres of cable from the caravan to the nearest pole. Apparently I was meant to have done this before he arrived (although quite why, I'm not sure, and anyway no-one had told me). He didn't complain, and didn't bugger off leaving me to do it. No, he rolled up his sleeves and did the job himself. Had there not been a fault on the line further up the road, he would probably have got me connected there and then.

I'll hold back on the praise for the two engineers who turned up on Monday, unannounced and unexpected. Yes, they cleared the fault on the line back to the exchange, but this was work that should have been done a fortnight earlier, or possibly a month before that. Or maybe even last year, since my brother reported a fault on the line ages ago. And since they didn't start on the job until three in the afternoon, by the time they'd cleared the fault it was too late to get the final connection done. So they were good, but not quite good enough.

Praise though goes to the engineer who turned up yesterday morning. I wasn't expecting anyone until today, but he came - doing a favour for one of the other engineers, he said. Whatever the reason, I don't much care. Alone, he strung a new line across the road - something I'd been told before required two men. I hope he doesn't get into trouble for that. An hour after he'd arrived, I had a functioning telephone and broadband. Easy as that.

One of the problems with the phone line around here is that it doesn't run from pole to pole coming down the hill to the farm. Instead an armoured cable has been laid down the drainage ditch at the roadside. There are only poles where they need to bring the line over the road into the farmyard. Over the years mud and silt have built up quite a good protective layer, but once in a blue moon* Fife Council roads department send a man out to clear the ditch. Invariably this results in the cable being severed.

Yesterday afternoon, as I headed up the hill to cut some celebratory gorse, I found myself stuck behind a tractor with a flail mower cutting the grass verges. Coming back down a few hours later, I was caught behind him going the other way. This is the side of the road where the cable lies, perhaps well buried, perhaps just snaking through the soon-to-be hacked grass. I had images of my nice new connection being severed before I'd even been able to write a blog post, but happily disaster was avoided.

So now I am connected. The world is at my fingertips once more.

Damn. No more excuses for not getting on with everything that needs doing.

* which is more often than you might thing. A blue moon is, technically, the second full moon in a calendar month.

Ring ring, ring ring

2011-05-27T16:31:00.000Z

I'm still here, honest. It's just that BT are playing their usual silly-buggers, which means no internet most of the time. At least I have a mobile signal, although it's not 3G or even Edge.

Those few, very few, of you who have hung around here hoping for the odd flash of genius may well recall the eleven month ordeal that was my last run-in with British Telecommunications. Then, the cable was already connected to the house, but somewhere between the nearest pole and the exchange there was a problem with the line.

BT isn't actually one company anymore, it's split up into several different divisions, each with different responsibilities. So the annoying people in the ads on telly are only concerned with routing your calls over their network and charging you money. There is another outfit, called Openreach, which deals with what they laughingly call 'the final mile.' These are the engineers who you occasionally see at the top of telephone poles or poking around in the spaghetti innards of a roadside exchange box. They'll also come and connect your new house to the network if you're lucky.

What they won't do is replace the heavy duty cable that runs between the exchange and your nearest pole. That's the responsibility of yet another division. Or more often than not an entirely different, subcontracted company.

Such was the case down in Wales, where the work of replacing the cable from the exchange to the village, including the replacement of several poles that had developed pronounced leans, was farmed out to some outfit that then employed a team from Glasgow and Liverpool to do the work. Monday morning and the Glasgow lad would get in his van, drive down to Liverpool and pick up his mate. They'd arrive to do the work around about knocking off time, so no work got done until Tuesday. Come Friday, of course, they had to leave first thing so they could get back to their respective homes. All this was eight months after they'd realised they couldn't connect my house, the intervening period having been completely taken up with inventing more and more fantastic lies to tell me about what was going on.

The oddest, and most annoying thing was that I was finally connected - eleven months after initially applying for the line - a couple of weeks before the new cable work had been completed. And BT didn't bother to tell me that someone was coming out to do the work, so when he turned up there was no-one in.

I type all this out again, shaking my head occasionally in disbelief at the story I couldn't make up, because I am now suffering from a horrible sense of Deja Vu. The missing cable for my new connection here in Fife finally turned up, and shortly afterwards an Openreach engineer came out to connect it between the caravan and the nearest pole. So far so good, and like most of the individuals working for BT he was a friendly enough chap. But there was a problem. Well, two problems if I'm being honest. The first one was that a line needed to be taken from the nearest pole across the road to the next one closer to the exchange. This pole has one of those bulbous black multiple-connection blocks on it, and my friendly engineer, working on his own, wasn't allowed to run the line. Health and Safety means that at least two engineers are needed where a road crossing is involved - which I guess is fair enough on a busy thoroughfare, but here, where about one lost tourist a day comes past at a pace that would make a snail yawn, it seems a bit much.

That was the first problem, which shouldn't have delayed matters too much. The other one was more horribly familiar. On testing the available lines coming into the locality, the friendly engineer found a fault. With further investigation, he came to the conclusion that the line would have to be replaced, if not right back to the exchange then at least a good deal of the way. I can't be connected until this work has been done. No phone, no broadband. Waily, waily, waily.

You can imagine I was a little upset at this news, and I was even moved to tweet some rude words about BT on that thar Twitter thing. Almost immediately I had a response from someone calling themselves @BTCare - offering to sort it all out.* Conversations with the cheerful engineer and his boss in Glasgow suggested that the line work would be carried out on Thursday 19th May - a week ago yesterday as it happens. I even had a text message telling me that an appointment was booked for me on that day, although I had no idea what that meant.

Come the appointed Thursday, there was a distinct absence of any line work. Then at lunchtime I had a call from an engineer - the appointment, as it turned out - asking me what he was supposed to be doing. I think I did very well not to lose my temper at that point. Maybe I should have done, but I am an unnaturally calm person, so instead of telling him that I was just the customer and it was his fucking job to know what he was supposed to be doing, I merely explained that the line was still faulty. We agreed that there wasn't much point in him coming out until it was fixed, and that was that.

A week on and I've had no further contact from the engineers or BT. I did have a useful land-line number for Openreach, but the helpful chap who used to answer has gone on holiday, so that line of communication has failed. I've asked @BTCare if they can shed some light on the situation, but so far it would appear they are as clueless as the rest of the organisation. As of now, your guess is as good as mine as to when the line will be repaired.

I am, you may have guessed by now, an unnaturally calm and patient fellow. I will wait for my line as if it were the good old days of the GPO. It could take years for you to reach the top of the queue to be connected, and even then you might only get a party line.** What bothers me most though, and gets me so riled I feel the need to blog about it at great length, is the total lack of communication from what is essentially the nation's communications monopoly. Between the divisions of this great behemoth of a company, and between it and the customer. @BTCare has twelve and a half thousand followers and is following thirteen and a half thousand. That's a lot of disgruntled people, and whilst I applaud the company for exploring new ways of getting in touch, couldn't it just every so often, you know, pick up the phone?

* I also had comment from someone called @BTDont_care, who has a rather amusing icon, but couldn't actually give me anything by way of help.
** can you imagine trying to use a party line nowadays? It just wouldn't work if you had a teenager in the village.

Graceless

2011-05-02T13:11:00.000Z

I trod on a woman's foot yesterday.

Not on purpose, you understand. She was in the queue at Focus DIY - the usual situation where they have five tills available but only one open. Lots of staff wandering around, keeping out of the way of the Sunday afternoon shoppers, but none prepared to do a stint at the sharp end. I know a couple of people who work there, and they both say that they spend most of their time trying to avoid the customers. Given my experience yesterday I can't say as how I blame them.

We were at the head of the queue, the Horse Doctor and I. We'd already had one argument with the assistant over a mispriced item, and now he was having difficulty finding out how much a roll of red electrical insulating tape should be. I probably should have noticed that its bar-code sticker had fallen off when I picked it off the shelf, but then they probably should have a better idea of their stock, and perhaps some basic staff training. Alas, Aberystwyth has only one temple to the religion of the amateur handyman, and Focus DIY is it. Otherwise I would go elsewhere. It's no great surprise I do most of my shopping online these days.

So the sales assistant trooped off to the electrical department to look for a price, even though the Horse Doctor could remember what it was, and told him, twice. This meant that there were now five tills, none of which were manned. The queue was growing longer, too, as it will tend to do at times like this. You could feel the tension rising. You couldn't? Oh. Well, I could.

Sadly, the sales assistant could only find multi-packs of electrical insulation tape in the electrical department. His immediate thought was that I had opened one up and taken the red out - not wanting to pay for black, blue and green and yellow tapes as well. Since the box with the single rolls of red tape was right next to the multi-packs, I thought this was a bit stupid of him. I'd also have expected him to have been able to look up the price on the computer screen on the till, or perhaps even just put it in as 'miscellaneous items - £2.85' and keep the customers moving along. But no, he had to find a barcode to scan. I guess a keen intellect is not high on the list of requirements for working the weekend shift in a DIY warehouse.

Aware that the queue was starting to snake down the aisles, I decided to speed things up by showing the sales assistant where I'd found the electrical insulation tape. This meant threading a path through a growing knot of people, each and every one of whom was at best a bit tetchy, at worst actively planning their revenge on me for holding up the queue. It being my fault, of course, as I was the one who'd chosen to buy something without a barcode on it.

I'm a polite chap, normally, so I said 'excuse me' as I tried to negotiate a path through the throng. Most people shuffled a bit to let me through, but one woman - her mind no doubt fully occupied with thoughts of evil deeds involving the creative use of electrical insulation tape - did not move at all. By the time I'd registered this, it was too late. My boot came down on her trainer.

There was no crunching of bones - I'm not that heavy really, and I realised pretty quickly what I'd done, shifted my weight to the other foot and said sorry. Still she snapped out of her reverie and said, unnecessarily loudly: "Ow! You trod on my foot."

I once again apologised, but she was having none of it. "You could have said excuse me, rather than just barging through," she added. She had that pinched expression on her face that is just looking for a fight. I've seen it in drunken women outside pubs at chucking out time, but there's something scary about it on someone so obviously sober.

Now, as I've said, I'm normally a very polite person. But there's something about the whole Sunday afternoon trip to the DIY store that irritates me. To be fair, any trip to the shops irritates me, but the Sunday afternoon DIY thing is a special hell. I'd done my best, and everyone else in the queue had managed to find enough room to let me past. All I'd done was very lightly tread on this woman's foot, and immediately apologised once I realised what I'd done. That should have been the end of it, but she would not let it go. Well, two can play at that game. I fixed her with my best steely glare - no lack of eye contact here.

"I did say 'excuse me'," I said. "And everyone else moved out of the way. I didn't mean to tread on your foot. I'm sorry. But if you'd just got out of the way like I asked instead of standing around like a great lemon, it wouldn't have happened."

That was the end of it, really. Her other half was too busy studying the floor and his fingernails to even think about intervening, and anyway I was both taller than him and sporting a fabulous bushy beard. The multi-tartan trousers might have given them pause for thought as well; you don't mess with a man wearing trousers like that. I walked away, pointed out the correct electrical tape to the slightly bemused sales assistant, paid for my purchases and left.

But it stuck with me, all the way home, how graceless she had been about the whole episode, and how that in turn had made me lose my temper. And yes, I consider that retort to be losing my temper. I don't do violent rage, hardly ever get angry. Mostly I become a bit tetchy and withdraw into myself when irked, although I will shout at the telly when I'm alone. Sometimes even when it's switched on. For me to deploy sarcasm and cheap insults in a public place means I have seriously lost control.

Something about this woman's refusal to accept my apology became itself an insult. I was angry at myself, too, for letting such a little thing get to me. The whole incident left me oddly shaken and it took a long time to stop playing it over and over in my mind. That I've been moved to bore you all about it just goes to show how much I was affected.

The obvious retort is, I suppose, that I should get out more.

So that didn't happen

2011-04-21T15:53:00.000Z

One week on from when it was supposed to be fitted, and still I have no phone line. I am not surprised, but still annoyed.

To be fair to BT (not something that comes easily, trust me), they have been very good at keeping me informed of what's going on (and what's not). They even delivered several lengths of grey pipe, otherwise known as ducting, which I'm meant to dig into trenches where the cable will go under driveways. There's about 40 metres of this, which seems a bit of overkill given that the route the cable will take doesn't actually cross any driveways at all. I'm not complaining about that, mind you. It will come in handy I'm sure. No, what's most irritating is the non-arrival of the 200 metres of phone cable needed.

You would think that a company like BT, whose main job is the delivery of communications services over cable, would have access to almost unlimited quantities of the stuff. This, however, appears not to be the case. I had a very polite phone call from an engineer in Glasgow called Benny, who asked if I could let him know when the cable was delivered. The implication of this is that the engineers don't have access to cable, nor do they know where it is at any given time. An order has been placed, but they seem to have no way of tracking it beyond asking the customer to get in touch when it arrives. As a way to run a company this ranks fairly high up the useless scale.

Presumably when (if) the cable does ever get here, and I let Benny know, there will then be a further delay whilst they find a time slot for an engineer to come out and connect me. How much easier it would be if they could just come with the cable in the back of their van. 200 metres might sound like a lot, but phone cable is thin stuff and that much should fit on a reel two men could handle with ease.

The wifi router and various other electronic gubbins for my broadband connection arrived in good time. I suspect that it will have been superseded by a newer model by the time I can actually use it.

I'm Still Here

2011-04-08T11:56:00.000Z

Just a bit short of internets.

BT have promised to fit a phone and broadband to the caravan in a week's time. Cue the sound of hollow laughter. At least they've sent out an engineer to survey the job first. I will be pleasantly surprised if it all goes to plan. Actually, no. My gob will be well and truly smacked. Watch this space for updates.

More in keeping with my usual frustration, I still don't have any sewerage at the caravan. Although Fife Council were prepared, after much delay and prevarication, to let me have planning permission, that's not the end of it. I know have to pay them even more money for a building warrant, and I also have to pay SEPA - the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency - yet more of my hard-earned for permission to discharge treated effluent into a burn that runs through the farm. Both of these permissions could take anything up to six weeks to get, despite them being fairly simple and non-contentious. For the building warrant I had to provide three copies of plans* - yet another cost as you're not allowed to just photocopy the OS maps, oh no. You have to pay through the nose, and make damned sure you get the scale right, or it's back to the start, and yet more expense.

The field I want to build my house in, and which lies between the caravan and the burn, is not suitable for a traditional soakaway. I didn't want to build a septic tank and soakaway system - I mean, 'septic'. It just sounds horrible anyway. And the idea of leaching the effluent slowly into the field where I'm going to have my garden doesn't really appeal either. As it happens, the soil is too slow-draining, so a soakaway would very quickly turn into a smelly bog.

So I've applied for permission to install a domestic scale sewage treatment plant. The outflow for this is almost clean enough to drink - although I'm not sure I'd want to try. And yet still SEPA are reluctant to let me add it to the water already flowing through the farm. Fife Council Building Control can't seem to get the word 'septic' out of their brains either, as every time I call them to discuss my sewage treatment system they insist on referring to it as a septic tank. And these guys are meant to be checking that what I do is done properly?

I had a similar problem with the mindlessness of the bureaucracy when I put in the planning application. Despite my repeated corrections, and even sending them a letter fully outlining the situation, they never quite got hold of the idea that my application was different from and in no way related to an application that my brother had put in around the same time. I can only assume that the powers that be demand all the information we supply them out of a sense of spite, or perhaps because it's the only power they wield. They certainly never read the stuff we send them.

I wonder how much trouble they'll have getting their heads around the house build, if and when it ever happens. I don't suppose there's been a barn raising in these parts for a while.

*this isn't quite as bad as one other council that I won't name here to save their embarrassment. Their planning application system is online, and maps are submitted as pdf or jpg files, and yet they still insist on three copies of everything. I kid you not.

A brief hiatus

2011-03-23T18:56:00.000Z

OK, I know. I promised you a chainsaw frenzy. So sue me.

Today finds me back in Wales, albeit briefly, to visit the hospital for the results of my MRI scan. Predictably enough, there is apparently nothing wrong with me. It would seem the incessant whining in my right ear is something I've just got to learn to live with. So much for the wonders of modern medicine.

The doctor did reassure me that there wasn't a tumour growing in my brain, so I suppose that's something. Since he hadn't even raised the possibility beforehand (and quite correctly so, I guess), that's scant consolation for being made to wait an hour and a quarter for what turned out to be a less then five minute consultation. It seems churlish complaining about the NHS, but I can't help thinking they ought to be able to do a better job with the money they get.

Perhaps I'll try acupuncture next.

The trial separation begins

2011-03-10T18:52:00.000Z

So called because we're separated, and it's a trial.

It's a curious situation, and not one I hope will last for too long. The Horse Doctor is down in Wales where her job is and our house for sale. I am up here in Scotland, where my farm is and my no-longer-leaking Caravan. Soon I should have some livestock to tend, but for now my days are mostly about clearing gorse and mending fences (that's not a euphemism, by the way).

This sorry state of affairs actually started almost two weeks ago, when I ventured north with dogs and a trailer load of rubbish. I was determined to take up residence in the caravan, rather than relying on the spare bed and goodwill of my brother and his family. That first night, without water, gas for heating or any other kind of convenience, was mostly cold and very uncomfortable.

The following day, I connected up the water supply. I wasn't too certain this would actually work, but even I was surprised by the sheer number of burst pipes that spewed forth underneath. The problem was that, when I bought the caravan from Pettycur Bay Caravan Park in Kinghorn, Fife, the site owners moved it off its pitch and wheeled it to the front gates for the hauliers to bring to me, they didn't bother to first drain it down.

Putting to one side for now the fact that this is perhaps the most idiotic thing I've ever encountered, and not something you'd expect from people who deal with caravans for a living, it wouldn't much have mattered had the caravan actually been delivered back in November when it was supposed to be. Unfortunately, delivery day coincided with the start of what was to become the coldest winter on record, with blizzards sweeping across the country and general misery all round. The caravan couldn't be delivered, and so sat in the haulier's yard until the end of January, when it finally arrived.

Of course, temperatures dropped as low as minus eighteen this winter, so any water in any pipes (and cisterns) was bound to freeze. Had the caravan park done their job properly, there wouldn't have been any water in either pipes or cisterns. Since they didn't, there was. Both toilet cisterns have cracked, and I spent three days last week just cutting out split copper pipe and replacing it with plastic (handily left over from the renovation work on the house). I stopped counting after the fifteenth burst pipe.

But it's fixed now. The gas is connected, the heating and hot water running as well as can be expected given the poor pressure. It's a private supply and very much end of the line. As yet, I have no sewage system - that's a subject for another post entirely. But the waste from sinks and the shower drain to a handy soakaway nearby, so at least I can keep clean.

The beginning of this week saw me on a train all the way down to Cardiff to pick up a car. Next week I'll be doing that all over again (I have too many cars). The following week I have to go to the hospital in Aberystwyth to be told that my MRI scan has shown up nothing serious and I will just have to learn to live with the constant ringing in my right ear. Sometime in between all this travel, I may yet start farming.

Next time: Chainsaw frenzy.

Remembrances of Times Past

2011-02-24T09:45:00.000Z

Take a look to the left. Up a bit. There. No there. See that little book cover thumbnail and the recommendation that you buy some books? Well, that there's Head, a fun little urban fantasy thriller thing I wrote about a bazillion years ago. Mr Stuart said some nice things about it a while back, and he did that natty little bit of cover art for me, but I've never really done anything with it as a manuscript. Very few people in the world have actually read the bloody thing, which kind of begs the question why did I write it?

The answer to that is probably a post in itself. Or perhaps an amusing author introduction to an anniversary edition. It's not giving too much of the book away to say that it features a talking, severed head. Decapitation has been a potent image of horror for me since before I can remember. Perhaps I was a French nobleman* in a former life and lost my head on the guillotine. Whatever the reason, I am very sensitive around the neck area, and particularly disliked that bit in The Omen where David Warner lost his head to a sheet of plate glass.

But I digress. Head, the book, stemmed out of that primal fear, but it's not really horror. I remember at the time desperately trying to come up with a label for what it was. I settled on magical realism, unaware perhaps of what I was really talking about. Urban fantasy as a genre hadn't reared its vampiric head by then, and as for the New Weird, well China Mieville hadn't even dreamed of Perdido Street Station when I finished the first draft of Head. I think I finished the second draft around about the same time that King Rat came out.**

So I had this book, slim but strange, and no idea really what it was. Then it got put to one side as I moved down to Wales at the start of the millennium. I toyed with the idea of sending it out to some agents and publishers, but then got distracted by newer, shinier things. I wrote some unmemorable SF, and then followed it up with the first three books in the Ballad of Sir Benfro trilogy.*** A few short stories along the way, a couple of award-shortlisted crime novels with a supernatural twist, a straight as they come thriller of epic brevity. If I try hard enough I can even pretend I've been busy this past decade. Not much actually published, mind you, but it kept me off the streets.

And always at the back of my mind were those nice things that Mr Stuart said about Head, a vague feeling that, of my body of work, it was the one that had the most worth and the least exposure. Soon, I told myself about once every couple of months, I'll dust down the old manuscript and see if I can't do something with it.

Well, finally I did. Printed up a copy and took it with me on a long train journey last weekend. And you know what? It wasn't that bad.

Not good enough to be published, of course. It's full of the schoolboy writing errors I was prone to a dozen or more years ago. I've probably written a million words since then, so I ought to be putting them in better order now. What fascinates me and annoys in equal measure, however, is how much needs to be changed simply because the world has moved on since the late 90's.

The main protagonist (I won't call him a hero, as he's not terrible heroic) smokes. I've never been a smoker, so I don't really know why I decided that Charlie should be, except that I set out to make him as objectionable a character as possible, and to me someone who lights up wherever and whenever he pleases, without a thought for those around him, is about as objectionable as they come. Unlike some writers out there, I didn't become a smoker just so that I could better write the experience - see earlier blogs about my love of research. The fact of his smoking is not really a problem, though. What doesn't work any more is where he smokes. In the pub, in restaurants, in his hotel room, in a taxi. It's been years now since the Scottish Government banned smoking in all these places. He's not allowed to be an arsehole in this way - lighting up wheresoever he pleases just makes him seem an idiot, so I can't do that. Instead of being a prick, he has become the victim of the nanny state, forced out onto cold pavements to feed his addiction. I still can't drum up any sympathy for him, but that character trait doesn't work as well as once it did.

Nobody in the book has a mobile phone, either. Sure, they were around when I started writing it. I'm old enough to remember the yuppy bricks of the mid-eighties, but I didn't get my own first mobile until after Head was finished.**** This is less of a problem than the smoking, as the world the book inhabits harks back to an earlier, more magical time. It still jars as I'm reading it though. Mobiles aren't a luxury item anymore; they've become an essential part of the fabric of society. The book needs to acknowledge that at least.

There are other little things that niggle. The book's set in Edinburgh, but obviously there's no mention of the traffic buggery that's gone on in Princes Street and George Street as the new tram lines are being installed. A chunk of the action centres around Roslin Chapel, which at the time of writing had just been closed over with a steel scaffold and roof as part of a restoration project. This has now been removed, and of course Dan Brown's unmentionable book means that a few more people know about the place than did back then.

These problems are not insurmountable, of course. Head needs a thorough rewrite anyway if it is to stand any chance of being taken seriously, so I can make changes where necessary. It's been a fascinating trip down memory lane though, and yet another reminder of why I really prefer writing pure fantasy. In twelve years time, the world of Sir Benfro will only have changed in ways I want it to.

* I hope not. I mean, French?
** not, I would hasten to add, that I think Head is anywhere near as good, or frustrating, as Mieville's work. His stories are breathtaking, but his love of complex language and obscure sentence structure does tend toward the obfuscatory.
*** There are four. It's hard to explain so I won't bother. If you're really interested, read the entire archive of posts to this blog. The reason's in there somewhere.
**** twelve years on, I'm on my third. Not a classic early adopter, me.

Let sleeping dogs lie

2011-02-14T15:14:00.000Z

There is such a thing as too comfortable.

Credit where credit is due

2011-01-27T21:11:00.000Z

A couple of things have happened to me recently that have restored, to a certain extent, my faith in human nature. I'm not completely cured of the yapping dog syndrome that makes me cheery on the outside but expecting the worst in all situations. I still subscribe to the mantra that a pessimist is never disappointed.

But there have been two incidences recently where even the pessimist in me was pleasantly surprised. The first was when a Christmas card from my uncle arrived a few days ago. Granted, it had been posted on December 8th, but the address had been slightly mangled by whatever contacts database my uncle is using these days. It had my name, the name of the house, and then the name of the county misspelled as 'Ceredigeon', which makes it sound like some kind of lewd act to me. 'M'lud, the plaintiff was caught in a state of high ceredigeon, such that two officers of the law were required to calm him down. We arrested him on the spot, and sent the parrot to a zoo for safekeeping.' To cap it all, my uncle had managed to get the postcode wrong as well, changing the initial SY to SE. Then, despite living in deepest Englandshire, he had written the country as Cymru - perfectly correct if you know Welsh, but unlikely to mean anything to your average Hampshire postie.

Despite all this, the letter arrived, a little over a month after it was posted. Scribbled on the bottom of the envelope were a few cryptic clues in several different shades of post office biro. 'Wales?', 'SA? SO? SY?' I am impressed with this level of service. Several people have sat down with this envelope and puzzled out where it was meant to go. Some old-timer, with thirty years or more of dodging rabid dogs under his belt has stroked his long, white beard and said 'Kimroo? Kimroo? That's what those strange Welshland buggers call Wales now, isn't it?' Country established, a younger member of the lost letter squad has set to working out all the possible variations of S+ another letter, until they've realised that both SA and SY are in Wales, unlike SE which is in London. Then the young lad, still wet behind the ears and never been been invited in by a bored housewife, has sat down at one of them newfangled computer things and cross-referenced the house name against all the possible postcodes. And lo, the full address has been extracted from the garbled mess on the envelope. Neither wind nor rain shall stay and all that. Good job lads. Thankyou.

And the second event? Well that happened today. My elderly Range Rover, not content with losing its air suspension on the journey up from Wales to Fife earlier this week, leaving me driving on very hard rubber bump stops for the last eighty miles, decided that it wasn't going to start. It didn't do this at the farm. No, that would have been too easy. I could have cursed it, borrowed the pick-up from my brother and just got on with what I needed to do. Instead, it took me to Dundee, and then to Cupar. Only then did it say 'enough is enough. I shall start no more.'

I had parked at Meldrums Chainsaws and Garden Machinery in the Eden Valley Business Park, as I had business to conduct with them. Quite what a chainsaw is if it's not a piece of garden machinery, I'm not sure, but it's probably best not to go into that. Despite not having been able to conduct any business - the second hand UTV I wanted to buy from them was out on trial with a prospective customer - the nice people at Meldrums lent me their battery booster, since I thought at first the problem was simple like that. Then when that didn't work, one of the engineers came out to have a look. Admittedly he was more used to dealing with vehicles running on a single cylinder, rather than eight, but he came to the same conclusion as me, to whit: the starter motor's buggered.

There was nothing for it but to call the AA.* Fortunately I'm not only a member, but had my card with me. Now normally, if you're not a pregnant woman in the dark on the edge of a war zone, you can expect to wait at least an hour for a patrol van to come to your aid. I was resigned to this in the way a rabbit, staring at the oncoming headlights, is resigned to becoming a crunchy smear on the tarmac. But I had my iphone, and a 3g signal, so I could at least while away the time until the battery ran flat.

To my surprise and delight, the patrol van arrived in twenty minutes. I hadn't even finished the first level of Angry Birds. He poked and prodded the beast, hit it with a hammer a couple of times and the said: 'your starter motor's buggered.'

As luck would cheekily have it, next door to Meldrums, there is a Land Rover dealership. Just out of curiosity, and fairly sure I knew the general direction of the answer, I had already asked them how much a new starter motor would be. From a Land Rover dealer, the answer was an eye-popping £350. Plus whatever they thought they could get away with for fitting the thing. Bear in mind the beast only cost me a grand in the first place. I wasn't about to part with almost half as much again for a starter motor. Not when ebay would sell me one for fifty quid.

All of which I told the nice AA man when he offered to tow me round the corner to the Land Rover dealership. Technically this was all he had to do, but he took my point, and instead said he'd call up a truck, the Range Rover being too heavy for his van to pull more than a few hundred yards. Word came back from head office that this was OK, but it would probably have to come from Edinburgh, or even Glasgow, and would almost certainly take a couple of hours to arrive.

Resigned to a lost afternoon, I retreated to a nearby cafe and stared out the window as the light began to fail, nursing a cup of fruit tea and a slice of ginger cake. I was, indeed, so lost in my pessimistic musings that I didn't at first notice the large tow-truck pulling into the car park of Meldrums Chainsaws and Garden Machinery. How could this be? The clock on my phone said it was only half an hour since the call had been made. Not a lot more than an hour since the problem had first manifested itself. And yet here was the man come to the rescue.

Loading up the Range Rover was a matter of minutes; the drive from Cupar to the farm just under half an hour. And so I arrived home ignominiously but nothing like as late as I had anticipated. So thank you, nice people at the AA, and also at your subcontractors, ACE Vehicle Recovery (not of Edinburgh or Glasgow, but Methil, in Fife - made famous by the Reid Brothers). Although if I was being picky, I could complain about having to see the recovery truck driver's bum-crack peeping from the top of his low-slung jeans as he tied down the beast. Please, people, learn to dress properly. There's a lot to be said for overalls, you know.

The Range Rover has had the last laugh though. Had it refused to start an hour earlier, I would have been able to order a new starter motor in time to be delivered tomorrow. As it is, the part won't get here until Monday. So I'm stuck in Fife for the weekend. At least that'll give me time to get the caravan in order.

Maybe paying a grand for something that cost £50k new wasn't such a good idea.

* no, not them. Don't be silly. The Automobile Association.

Trailer Trash

2011-01-26T21:42:00.000Z

It's taken a long time, and many aborted attempts, but yesterday, finally, my home for the next (insert best guess here) years arrived at the farm.

Why a caravan, I hear you ask? Well, my little brother inherited the farmhouse, so whilst I have 350 acres of useful grazing land, I have nowhere to lay my head at night. The plan is to build a house down by the old cow shed, but these things take time.

The caravan should have arrived last November, and I came north for a long weekend to see it in. Unfortunately, that was the Thursday that the big freeze hit. Stuck down in Hull (where most of the big static caravans are built these days), the hauliers couldn't make their delivery time on Friday. Then on Saturday the snow arrived, decided it liked the place and was going to stay.

Three weeks ago, with the snow mostly gone, the hauliers tried again. This time they got as far as the farm entrance, but where thwarted by sheet ice, compacted by the coming and going of tractors. I wasn't here to see that, but apparently there was a great deal of swearing and ill temper involved.

And so to yesterday, with the ice all melted and the snow only still clinging to the tops of distant mountains, the caravan finally arrived here. And it was huge.

You'd think I might have been expecting this. I knew that it was 35 feet long and 12 feet wide, after all. And I'd seen photographs of it, with people standing inside to give me an idea of scale. But nothing quite prepares you for the reality of something that wide and that long. Also the friends who went to view it for me, since it was in Fife and I was in Wales and unable to make the trip up, are both quite short. This buying from a distance had worried me a bit - these things aren't cheap, after all.

Now that I've seen it in the flesh so to speak, I'm in the main relieved and actually quite happy with my purchase. It's not perfect - seven years in a park on the south coast of Fife was always going to have some effect - but it's got double glazing, central heating and extra insulation. The main living area is large enough to swing a cat, which soon I hope to be able to do. I've sited it in a Dutch Barn, under cover and protected from the prevailing wind and rain by a slatted wall. I think I'll be OK. Once I've got the slabs and blockwork installed properly so it's sitting level and safely supported.

Then all I have to do is get the electricity supply connected; tap into the water pipe going to a nearby animal water trough; find somewhere I can buy bottled gas for less than the GDP of a small South-American republic; and organise for a man to come and dig me a pit for a septic tank or similar sewage treatment system. This last will also serve the house I intend to build, so whilst it's a considerable expense, I can compartmentalise it in the 'house building' fund and not feel so bad about spending the money.

Still, if you'd told me twenty years ago I'd end up living in a caravan, I'd have probably called you something rude. That or punched you on the nose. I mean, me? Slumming it in a Pikey caravan? Never.

Just goes to show something. Not sure what.

Next up, cows. And maybe even some sheep. Yes, we're going farming. Ooh arr.

cough gag

2011-01-19T19:11:00.000Z

Ah, the joy of hospitals. I should perhaps be a bit more sympathetic, but there's few things I like less than sitting in a waiting room full of sick people. I know, I know. Technically I'm sick too, or I wouldn't be there. And there may be a time when I really need the help of those hard working and uncomplaining doctors and nurses. But waiting rooms, full of sick people...

So today I had to go to Bronglais to see the Ear, Nose and Throat specialist. It's taken a while to get the appointment, as is always the way. Normally the symptoms of whatever undiagnosable ailment I have start to disappear as the approach of the appointment day looms, but not so this time. If anything the irritating whine in my ear has grown louder recently. Giving up milk seems to have made bugger all difference to it, although it did help me lose a lot of weight. If I'm being completely honest, I have to admit to the odd lapse. Life's too short to live without cheese, and just occasionally I long for a decent latte. By and large, though, I've been milk very much reduced for getting on four months now. Cheese notwithstanding (and reduced amounts means I can afford to splash out occasionally on something really smelly), it's a diet I will probably stick with if only because I like being a stone and a half lighter than I was.

But I digress. Bronglais. I handed over my appointment letter and was told to go and sit with the sick people. Fortunately I only had to wait about fifteen minutes past my allotted time, after which I was ushered into a sound-proof room with heavy, padded double doors. Here they tested my hearing and declared it 'very good'. That's nice to know, but what about this annoying ringing sound? Oh, that's just tinnitus. You'll have to get used to that.

The doctor also peered into my ears with an otoscope, and pronounced himself satisfied as to their cleanliness and lack of wax, which was nice to know. But what about cures? What about treatment?

Before I could say anything I was ushered out the door. I thought that was it, but apparently no. A nurse pointed me in the direction of another group of sick people, told me to go sit and wait. It's at times like these that an iphone or similar device comes in handy. I was able to read the first three chapters of Wilkie Collins' classic novel The Moonstone (available for free on Kindle for iphone) whilst I waited to be called again. Eventually I was shown into a different room where a different doctor stuck a different otoscope in my ears and declared them not only wax free but excellent, and also commented on the clarity of my hearing. Then he wrote out some details on an official-looking piece of paper and told me to go back to the sick waiting room again.

This time I only had to wait a chapter before being bundled into yet another room. The same doctor as before (though still different from the first time) then asked me, somewhat bewilderingly, which side I favoured breathing on. Now I've heard of handedness - I favour the right as it happens, although can manage a surprising amount with the left. I've heard of favouring a particular eye when looking at things, and a particular leg when walking. I've never been asked about breathing before. I assumed the doctor meant which nostril I tended to use, but generally I use both at the same time. Well, except in the summer, hayfever months when I tend to use neither. I have no control over them at all, wayward things that they are.

Before I could ponder this curious question further, the doctor had already made up his mind, opting for the right nostril up which he proceeded to shove a very long, very thin endoscope.

It didn't hurt. I can't quite say it was an enjoyable sensation - particularly not when it slid down the back of my throat. But there was no pain involved. I had to say 'Eeee' a lot and then with a slithery pop, the endoscope was removed. Almost instantly the nurse was at my side with a long paper bag, of the sort you might use to hold baguettes in the bakery. She took the endoscope, now slimed with my nasal and throaty mucuses, and, handling it like a particularly belligerent snake, slid it into the bag. Then she scuttled off, no doubt to the autoclaves.

The smiling doctor told me there was nothing wrong with my nasal passages, throat or other internal spaces, but thought an MRI scan was in order. Sadly this means another wait, as there is always a long queue for the expensive machines that go ping. I also have to make an appointment to see the doctor again, but not until two weeks after my MRI scan, so he can have time to look at the results and think of a suitable non-excuse for my ailment. Or more likely do nothing until the day I arrive, the frown a lot and make tutting noises as he tries to read them quickly.

The whole sorry exercise took about an hour and a half of my time, fully ten minutes of which was spent being tested in one way or another. I guess that's not too bad in the context of the four months it took to get the appointment in the first place. It will be interesting to see how long it takes to get my go on the MRI. I don't think I've got any metal plates in me anywhere, but I must remember to take my glasses off beforehand.

And now it's time to drink beer until I can get the taste of endoscope out of the back of my throat. Ack.

Reviewing

2011-01-11T14:48:00.000Z

My normal procedure at the start of a new year is to launch unprepared into a new book. Often I have a plan, or at least a vague idea of what it's going to be about. Sometimes I even start by plotting some scenes out and trying to create some kind of shape for the whole thing. Once I even wrote 'The illusion of free will' in pretentious black marker on a strip of paper which I then taped to the top of my monitor. But mostly I start with the first sentence that comes into my head and go from there.

This, my friends, is not a recipe for swift authorial success and great literary acclaim. It can be a good short story writing exercise, such as with my much-ignored masterpiece, Martin Scorcese's Underpants,* but generally doesn't work at novel length.

So this year I thought I'd do things a bit differently. To be fair, last year's novel isn't actually finished yet, so I need to get on with that and then decide whether it's a pile of steaming ordure or not. But I've also been revisiting past works with a view to actually trying to get myself an agent, if not an actual publisher, in 2011. Mostly this has meant reading stuff and wincing in embarrassment. Not all of it is execrable rubbish though, and some of it's really quite good, which pains me when I think of some of the terrible dross I waded through last year that had somehow made it past editors and buying committees and out into the real world.**

Sadly it appears that mainstream publishing is not ready for the brilliance that is The Ballad of Sir Benfro, and may not be for some time. I can see their reasoning - it's a dragon fantasy series, after all. So one of my tasks in 2011 will be to put the first book out as an ebook - possibly free or very cheap indeed - and see if I can make this whole social networking thing drum up a bit of interest. I need to sort out some kind of cover that looks good in postage stamp thumbnail size, but that shouldn't be too hard.

SF remains a very hard field to break into, and if I'm being honest my most recent attempt at an SF novel falls somewhere between the execrable rubbish and embarrassing tags. My first ever attempt at SF (and writing a novel, for that matter) remains a great story in need of rewriting so it doesn't read like a first attempt at writing a novel. I started the process some years ago, but had to put it aside when Benfro started to attract some (small as it turned out) attention. Something to go back to just as soon as I've found out how to be organised, methinks.

And then there's Head,*** a funny little thing I wrote in a previous century and which nobody but Mr Stuart has ever read. Nowadays it would be called urban fantasy, but I don't think that name had been invented back then. Everyone's mad for vampires and zombies these days, so maybe my little dig at conspiracy theories deserves another spin on the rejection letter cycle.

Head also features the first prose appearance of my reluctant psychic and detective, Tony McLean, although only in a supporting role. He first appeared in a comic script I wrote for 2000AD, probably before some of you were born. Then I dredged him up again for this little story, which was meant to set the world alight, but didn't. He finally got his starring role in Natural Causes, followed up by The Book of Souls, both short-listed for the Debut Dagger, as I keep having to remind myself on dark days. Those books deserve another crack of the whip, and will form the vanguard in my renewed assault on the literary establishment.

At least that's what I'm telling myself at the moment. It could be that I'm just pissing about re-reading old stuff rather than getting on with the new. Your guess is as good as mine. But it begs the question: when should you stop ~~flogging a dead horse~~ sending out the same old manuscript? How many hints does it take before you realise your writing stinks?

Then again, there's all that published excrement out there, so maybe it really is just a case of banging your head against the wall until something breaks.

Or I could just give up and go be a farmer. Beef anyone?

* and yes, I didn't know how to spell his name when the phrase popped into my head. It should, of course, be Scorsese.
** not that I dwell on such things at too much length. It's too easy to become bitter and resentful, neither of which emotions are conducive to creativity.
*** the pretentiously labelled one.

Grubby

2011-01-02T18:43:00.000Z

On New Year's Eve, about five o'clock in the afternoon, I had a bath. Well, 2010 was almost over, so I thought it was probably about time. Water pressure was a bit sluggish, but that often happens around here when the weather's cold, so I wasn't concerned. When I went to run a tap (faucet for you overponders) a while later however, scarcely a dribble came out. By seven in the evening we were completely waterless.

At first this was just a minor inconvenience. We've had the water go off for an hour or two before. I had been planning to cook some rice for supper, but we made do with baked potatoes instead - no big deal. The toilet got a bit stinky until the Horse Doctor remembered the two large water butts attached to the downpipes from the gutters, collecting our lovely Welsh rain. Between them they probably hold about 500 litres, so we've a few flushes there. Boiled, it's OK for washing the dishes too, but I wouldn't want to drink it. The dogs don't seem to mind, but I'm a bit wary of unidentifiable floating objects in my tea.

So I took my whisky neat to welcome in the new year. Some would bluster and say you should always take your whisky neat, but I have to disagree. OK, so most of the commercial single malts have already been watered down and chill-filtered, but the cask strength Bruichladdich that was all we had in the house really needed something to stop it from stripping the skin off my tongue, and a drop of water helps to bring out the more subtle flavours.

New Year's Day and we still had nothing coming from the taps. I phoned Dwr Cymru to ask them what was going on, and was unsurprised but somewhat alarmed when the helpline operative seemed to know nothing about it. The whole village was without water, and there's no way my neighbour wouldn't have been complaining loudly from the first moment the supply disappeared. Still, whilst not as bad as Northern Ireland, Wales has had a fair few burst pipes since the recent thaw, and the authorities have been very busy. I was prepared to give them a little time to fix the problem.

Of course, we had no drinking water, and it being New Year's Day, all the shops were shut so we couldn't go and buy any. We consoled ourselves by drinking beer instead and waited for the water man to come. The day passed without a sign.

This morning I tried the bathroom tap with hope in my heart, but still it was dry (the tap, that is - I imagine my heart is quite damp). I was contemplating how muesli might taste moistened with wine when the phone rang. The water man was going to be in the village at eleven, handing out bottled water to all and sundry. Had they got any further with the problem? Of course not.

To be fair to them, the water man and his chum turned up pretty much on time. There are numerous mains valves, stopcocks and other water paraphernalia along the road that runs in front of the house, and as they stopped at each one to do whatever it was they needed to do, the locals appeared like wasps at a picnic, swooping in with the obvious questions. Is it fixed? Do you know how long it'll take? Have you found the problem yet? Apparently there was good pressure at the top of the hill, but nothing down the bottom, which meant there was a serious leak somewhere letting all the water out. They just needed to find the leak and stop it. How long that might take was anyone's guess.

When I asked the water man about bowsers and temporary supplies, he opened up the back of his van and hauled out a six pack of two litre Brecon Carreg spring water bottles and handed them to me. Twelve litres will dilute a lot of whisky, and is probably more than the average African villager gets in a week, so I wasn't going to complain too much. We still went to town and bought another six bottles, just in case.

Later on, walking the dogs up the top of the hill, we saw a man in a mini-digger excavating around a stop-cock or valve or something. By the time we came back, he had finished and disappeared. Hooray, I thought (or Hwre, since we're in Wales), it's fixed. We can go back to our profligate ways.

But no. The taps gave a light gurgle, spat out a very small mugful and then dried up again.

That was about three hours ago. The water men have gone home for the night and we still have no supply. That's forty-eight hours since it went off, three days since the drop in pressure started to play havoc with the higher houses in the village.

Now I wouldn't want you to think I was complaining. I've mentioned those African villages, and there isn't a week goes past that some charity doesn't ask me for a donation to sink a well somewhere or other. Water is a scarce resource in large parts of the world, predicted to be the next major reason for countries going to war, once the oil has run out or we've worked out how to live without it. We've got it pretty damned good here, all things considered. But that easy access to fresh, clean water on demand inveigles itself into every aspect of life, and when it's gone you don't half miss it.

Take cooking, for instance. Pasta and rice are my main staples. That might not say much for the healthiness of my diet, but having to come up with recipes that can be cooked with no water has stretched my imagination. Last night we had mutton pies, chips and beans - a great Scottish tradition.

Before Earl Grey invented tea, people drank beer because it was safer than water. My old school had its own brewery to supply the pupils and masters.* Having tried it for a couple of days, however, I can honestly say that beer is no substitute for a nice cuppa, and it feels just wrong drinking it at breakfast. Fortunately we have bottled water now, so I can finally fill the kettle.

But I still can't wash properly. The occasional rinse of the hands and face in boiled butt-water, yes**, but no showers, no baths. I know it's only been forty-eight hours, but I already feel grubby. My hair looks like I've just come out of an audition for the remake of Worzel Gummidge, and my scalp is crawling and itchy. I've gone much longer in the past without washing, but for some reason this time it feels worse. Maybe because I'm at home rather than out on the open road living out of a bicycle pannier and turning my underpants inside out to make them last longer until I can get to a laundrette.***

As of half past six this evening, we still have no running water. I can cook rice for supper, and have tea at breakfast tomorrow. I can fill a basin with boiled water to wash, and the water butts should keep the toilets flushed for a good few days yet, particularly if I keep on peeing in the hedge outside.**** But somehow life without the luxury of a bath is increasingly intolerable. And I only had one two nights ago.

We are grown soft in the decadent west, so we are.

* alas, long since converted into a library.
** kyak, kyak.
*** you can get an extra couple of days putting them on back to front, too. Then inside out and back to front.
**** if it's OK for the dogs... Mind you, I draw the line at shitting on the lawn.

And A Happy New Year To You All

2010-12-31T22:51:00.000Z

Two thousand and what? Eleven already? What about 2010? It was just starting a moment ago. Where did the year go? What happened to all that time?

I could moan on about 2010 for hours - it's not been the best of years, though hardly the worst. But that would be a waste of time, really, since it's over now. Better I think to look ahead to 2011 and what should be coming up.

2011 will be the year of the great move north. OK, so 2012 might also be the year of the great move north, and 2013 too. Who knows, maybe 2014 as well, although I sincerely hope not. A lot depends on how long it takes to sell the house here in Wales, but I will be more often in Fife come the spring, when I aim to resume farming on what was my father's farm but is now (mostly) mine. I say mostly, because my brother inherited the farmhouse, and we sold a bit of the arable land to raise funds to buy out my other brother and sister, so the farm's not quite what it was. It's still substantial enough though, and getting my own livestock on the land will be a big psychological moment.

Of course, my brother inherited the farmhouse, so for the timebeing I shall be living in a static caravan. It's been a struggle, but I have finally received planning permission for this. One big task for 2011 is to design and get planning permission for a more permanent dwelling. Those of you who've followed these witterings from the start will recall my lack of progress the last time I tried to build a house. This time I own the plot already, which should help. I won't be able to afford much in the way of building until the house in Wales is sold, though, so I might be stuck in my caravan for a while. Trailer trash, that's me.

2011 will also be the year of windmills. At least I hope it will. My brother already has his erection at the farm, and my plan is to have two of my own, bigger and better.* There's that small matter of planning permission again, of course, and Fife Council could scupper everything if the ~~nutters~~ bat lovers come out and complain. I hope not, as the energy farming is a key part of my plans for the place, hopefully providing the funds needed to set up the Horse Doctor's wool enterprise and many other interesting things.

2011 will also be the year of clearing gorse. Since my father reduced his farming operations about ten years ago, the gorse has rather got out of control in some parts of the farm. Fortunately those nice people at the Scottish Government Rural Department sometimes award grants for environmental improvements, and I've secured one for part of the farm that is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). It's a tidy sum that will help bridge the gap before the business starts to earn any real income, but it does mean that I have to cut and clear almost one and half hectares of mature gorse by hand. That's a lot of work.

Hopefully 2011 will be a year of greater writing productivity, too. In 2010 I managed to write the first draft of a short thriller - a total word count that in 2006 I'd have dashed off in about two weeks. It's going to need a some serious rewriting before I dare show it to anyone, but I should be able to get it done in between bouts of gorse clearing, house designing, arguing with the planning department and trying to remember all the stuff I've forgotten about animal husbandry.

And of course I'll be up and down the M6 like something that goes up and down a lot.

Did I mention that I was going to be very busy?

So goodbye 2010, and don't let the door hit you on the way out. Welcome 2011, and a Happy New Year to you all.

*fnarr fnarr

Happy Christmas to you both

2010-12-25T00:49:00.000Z

I know I've not been around much lately. Currently I'm in Canada, enjoying a very snowy Christmas on the slopes. Probably the last foreign holiday in a very long time, so I'm making the most of it.

2010 has been a strange year, and quite stressful. Here's hoping 2011 has more going for it. In the meantime, have a great holiday, and here's a picture from a few days ago.

If it makes you feel any better, the weather's turned a bit shite since then. Heavy snow all day for the last three days. Great for skiing, except that you can't see where you're going.

In other news, Sir Benfro turned six the other day. Maybe when I'm back home I'll post some stats to show just how little attention I've been paying to the interweb these past couple of years.

The eyes have it

2010-11-29T16:38:00.000Z

Warning - unsettling photograph below. Do not scroll down if you are squeamish. Or eating your breakfast whilst surfing the net, which is pretty damned decadent if you ask me. I mean, there you are, laptop or ipad propped up against the cornflakes box, dribbling milk from your spoon onto your tie, or that blouse you picked out special for work, checking on your emails, twitting or just generally immersing yourself in the whole out there, when you should be talking to your children about school, discussing with your significant other what you might do in the evening, taking the dogs for a walk or giving the cat a cuddle. What's so important on the interweb it has to be looked at now? Go on, switch off your computer and get a life.

All of which rather strays from the topic, and is perhaps not the best way to start a blog post. But if you're still here, then you've only yourself to blame.

I've written in the past about the problems I've had with my eyes. I think it all stems from when I was a spotty teenager,* and our local optician prescribed me some contact lenses you could apparently wear for a month without taking out, cleaning, or doing anything with at all. These were great, as I was obviously far too busy being an angst-ridden adolescent to bother with any of that malarky. In on the first of the month, out at the end. Give them a quick clean and straight back in again. It's possible I was meant to have a couple of days off, and I may even have remembered to do that from time to time, but generally I was a teenage boy, so I did what I thought was right, not what I'd been told.

I can't remember how long I had those lenses, or the monthly disposable ones that followed. All in all though, I'd been wearing contacts of one sort or another for probably ten years when I got my first stye. Such was the horror of the removal procedure, I gave up wearing lenses for another ten years, possibly longer. Nowadays I wear them only for sport where glasses are simply impractical, otherwise I'm done with shoving plastic in my eye.

But the damage was done, all those years ago. My eyelids in particular are very prone to inflammation. My tear ducts don't work as well as they could.** I've noticed over the years that as my stress levels rise, so my eyes become drier and more irritable. And every so often, this happens.

stretch marks due to pulling eye upwards

to reveal nastiness, not ageing.

Well, don't say you weren't warned. And I hope I've put enough text above the picture that you don't see it without scrolling down the page. If you're one of those flash bastards (like me) who has an enormous monitor (and no, that's not a euphemism - although it could be), you may have seen the photo before reading the warning at the top of this post, but that's what you get for showing off.

This is swelling of the upper eyelid due to a blocked pore - another common problem when your tear ducts have been removed by life's harsh cruelty. It's essentially a zit on the eyelid, an ocular plook. Doctors are generally unhelpful when you take such squeam-inducing symptoms to them, but I have over the years gleaned enough information to self-treat. Essentially this involves the regular application of heat to the eyelid. You can use the back of a teaspoon dipped into boiled water that's been allowed to cool a little. Alternatively, if your hot water tap is scalding, then a clean flannel soaked in very hot water can then be pressed against the affected area. The idea is to apply as much heat as you can stand without actually damaging yourself, stimulating blood-flow and opening up the various pores and capillaries to clear the blockage. With the teaspoon method, you can also gently rub the area to try and get things moving.

You'll know when you've succeeded because, like a plook anywhere else on your visage, it will burst, loosing out copious amounts of unpleasant yellow fluid into your eye. Once the blockage had been cleared, it's essential to continue with the treatment until the eyelid has healed up properly, or it will just block up again. Failure to clear it completely will lead eventually to the formation of a hard lump in the eyelid that can only be removed by surgery. Some of you will have read already my thoughts about this, but it's not something I'd recommend.

In two weeks time, I will be skiing. This is one of the few sporting activities I do that I can't do without wearing contact lenses. Yes, you can get ski goggles that have prescription lenses fitted, but I haven't, and it's too late to get them made up now. This particular eyelid unpleasantness only showed up recently, so I need to get it sorted soon. I only hope I don't end up like last year, having to have surgery to remove the last stubborn vestiges.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to burst a zit.

* actually, as a teenager I was relatively acne-free. That didn't stop me agonising about every zit, spot and pimple, and spending a fortune of my parents' money on skin treatments. Something called Moncla Derma (although that may not be the right spelling - it was a very long time ago) was my preferred choice, and it's a testament to the vanity of the average teenage boy that I was prepared to go through the three-stage washing and primping ritual twice a day. I had great skin as a boy, though. Shame about it now, and of course I really should have been putting all that effort into keeping my eyes clean.
** cold, heartless, unemotional bastard that I am.

Offline

2010-11-10T18:46:00.000Z

I could claim that I've been busy. I could say that I've switched off the internet to concentrate on Nanowhatnot. I could pretend that my computer ate itself, or that all the phone lines in Wales suddenly stopped working. None of these would be true. Well, perhaps apart from the busy thing, but that doesn't really count.

The truth is I, like a lot of bloggers of yore, have run out of things to say. Or at least run out of the enthusiasm to share the minutiae of my life that once I had. A few people have found solace on facebook and twitter, and I do actually have accounts on both of these services. I've even tried using both, and facebook just doesn't do anything for me. That plus a few scary stories about what they do with your profile information, and I'm just about ready to shut it down. I might keep it up there and put a whole load of incorrect details about me, just for the fun of it.

Twitter is a bit more fun, but basically too distracting. I also hate not knowing what's going on in a conversation, and since I can't possibly follow more than a couple of dozen people at a time without my brain exploding in a sticky mess, I find myself more often frustrated by it than not. I've not tweeted in several weeks now, although I still seem to attract about one new follower a week, which is weird. They're not all nipple bots, either.

I downloaded Tweetdeck to help manage both my twitter and facebook accounts, but I've noticed my productivity spikes on those days I forget to turn it on. That seems to be happening a lot lately, which is probably how I've managed to finally finish the first draft of my current WIP. Depressingly it's taken me all year to write, and is only sixty thousand words long. It will grow a bit once I've added a couple of necessary scenes, but then shrink again in the redraft. So it will be comfortably my shortest book since the first one. It's sobering to think that when I was writing the third Benfro book, 60k would have taken me less than a fortnight.

The clue, I suppose, is in the title. Not of the WIP - that's called One Good Deed and will be brilliant, I'm sure. No, I've reverted to the original topic now, my lack of interaction with all things web. They call it Social Networking. I've never been the former, and I'm dreadful at the latter. So it's hardly surprising if I lapse back into type when the going's tough. Maybe one of these days I'll get the hang of it, but it's a new trick, and I'm an increasingly old dog. Perhaps I should stop worrying and just be content in myself.

At least I've posted more often than Mr Stuart.

Moo

2010-10-19T09:10:00.001Z

So, three weeks without milk. Has it been that long already?

Actually, to be fair it hasn't been completely without milk or dairy products. Yes, I've lapsed a couple of times and allowed a little sour cream into a dish I was cooking, or perhaps a small grating of cheese. But I've not had any liquid milk in twenty-one days, nor have I had so much as a bite of cheese sandwich. Breakfast's muesli is moistened with fruit juice, and my coffee comes black. I've had to give up tea, as I just can't stomach its bitterness without milk's softening embrace. Instead I drink rooibos sweetened with a little honey. My twin indulgences are Morrison's Finest dark chocolate with Italian orange peel and Morrison's Finest ginger and dark chocolate cookies. Neither of these fine comestibles list milk or its derivatives anywhere in their ingredients, although the cookies alarmingly then claim that they 'contain milk.' I am choosing to ignore that, along with the warning on the chocolate that says it's made in a factory where nuts and milk have been known to lurk. They print these things just to stop themselves from being sued. And anyway, I'm not lactose intolerant or allergic, just following the dictates of my rather strange doctor.

How, then, do I feel for my dairy holiday?

To be honest, no different. If anything, perhaps a little worse. My right ear still rings and feels slightly bunged up compared to the left. That's hardly surprising as it can take months for such congestion to ease, and even then the tinnitus may persist. I feel very tired most of the time, but that might have something to do with the running schedule, combined with a reduction in my calorific intake. I've also managed to do something to my back that is painfully working its way down my left arm, making sleep very difficult, but if I'm being ruthlessly honest I'd have to say that's not got anything to do with my diet. I might blame lifting heavy objects the last time I was north, or it could be my brother's incredibly uncomfortable spare bed. Whatever, it hasn't helped my general demeanour.

On the plus side, I've lost more than half a stone. At this rate I may have faded away entirely by Christmas.

So will I persist with this milky aversion? Well, I've got a follow-up appointment with the doctor at the beginning of next week, so I'll keep at it as best I can until then. I may well stick with the fruit juice on the muesli, since I actually quite enjoy that. A healthy salad laced with not-so-healthy bacon and egg for lunch is probably just as good as a cheese sandwich, so I'll keep that up until the soup season starts. But I do miss cheese, more than anything else. Except perhaps butter on home made sourdough bread.

The evening meal presents difficulties too, especially given the Horse Doctor's legendary fussiness when it comes to food. Milk and its associated products get into everything - we're drowning in the stuff. White sauces, butter (even most margarines have some butter fat in them these days), cream and sour cream and ice cream, chocolate, cheese. These are just the obvious things. Esoteric milk derivatives are everywhere. My doctor suggested Sudafed decongestant to help clear out my glue ear.

Its main non-active ingredient? Lactose.

What do they hope to achieve?

2010-10-12T10:26:00.000Z

I've been trying hard not to write a rant about the Linda Norgrove tragedy. I only posted yesterday, after all, and I wouldn't want to start building a reputation as someone who blogged regularly or anything. But today I have seen the opening lines of two newspaper reports about the matter, one in the Scotsman, which uses the verb 'bungled' and one in the Telegraph which adopts 'botched', both in describing the failed rescue attempt.

See what I did there? I described it as failed. Given that Miss Norgrove died, I think it's fair to say that. None of the Special Forces troops taking part in the rescue attempt were injured, as far as I am aware, and a cell of Taleban kidnappers were killed, so I'd call that a small silver lining. That's not the point of this rant, however.

Botched. Bungled. I'm sure I don't need to look too far to find other words that are at best arrogantly dismissive, at worst deeply harmful. Having endured the BBC's reporting on the matter yesterday though, I have no great desire to trawl the online papers just to stoke my ire some more.

It will no doubt change in the coming days, but at the moment we don't know what actually happened during that fateful rescue attempt. We do know that the part of the country where it took place is best described as inhospitable; that the soldiers who risked their lives trying to save Miss Norgrove were very highly trained experts; that the operation was as meticulously planned as is possible given the circumstances. We can also be fairly sure that the Taleban kidnappers had no intention of letting their captive live. At best they would have spirited her away across the border to Pakistan, there to become a propaganda plaything for Osama Bin Laden, until such time as her public death was deemed a better way of sapping Western morale than her public humiliation. At worst they would simply have executed her and left her body for a patrol to find.

The military strategists expert in the region would have thought long and hard before proposing the rescue attempt, and by all accounts both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary agonised over giving the go-ahead. This wasn't some gung-ho seat-of-the-pants military joy-ride, not Sylvester Stallone and his OAP chums roaring into town to rescue the damsel in distress. And yet reading the newspapers, hearing the reporters on the radio and telly, you could be forgiven for thinking their only knowledge of military matters was gleaned from watching The Expendables and re-runs of MacGyver. This operation wasn't bungled or botched, and it is deeply, deeply unfair to the soldiers and military planners involved to suggest that it was.

Linda Norgrove died, and that is tragic. She was a bright, thirty-six year old woman with her life ahead of her. She had dedicated herself to helping others and certainly didn't deserve to be blown up either by an American grenade or a Taleban explosive vest. But she went to work in a war zone. She knew that there was always a risk she might be captured or killed. I applaud her for taking that risk, but I also applaud the men who tried to save her, even though they failed. They didn't kill her - not even the man who pulled the pin out of the grenade and lobbed it into a room, if that's how it happened. The Taleban killed her the moment they took her hostage.

My rant is reserved for the press back home, who at the slightest whiff of honest mistake in the running of what is a very complicated war, immediately leap on the idea that our armed forces are incompetent fools, being lead by politicians who care more for their image back home than the safety of their soldiers. The Foreign Secretary gave out incorrect information, then admitted he was wrong and corrected the error - what an idiot! The Americans changed their account of what happened once they'd had time to review the operation (and less than twenty-four hours) - how dare they tell the truth! Are we not being lead by bunglers and fools who couldn't organise their way out of a paper bag? We must get rid of these morons and elect, what? A new set?

The Taleban almost certainly intended to use Linda Norgrove as a propaganda tool - either releasing regular videos of her being forced to beg for her life, or worse just one video of her execution. Their intention, as ever, would have been to weaken Western resolve. Body bags coming home never play well to the masses, and a young woman, a volunteer charity worker, is a potent symbol indeed. But the Taleban have no need to chip away at our morale as long as the media frenzy continues to do it for them.

Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you

2010-10-11T17:23:00.000Z

I've been trying to sell my house for the last six months. I knew when we put it on the market it would be a difficult and protracted affair. We live in the middle of nowhere by choice, but not everyone likes to be so isolated. And the housing market in the UK isn't exactly effervescing at the moment. More a pool of rancid dog-sick, if you're looking for a simile. But even I hadn't anticipated the level of house-buying apathy out there; in those last six months we've had just three people come to have a look around.

That's not what I want to moan about though. I read the papers and watch the news; I know we're in a bad place financially as a country right now. The public sector is overwhelmingly the largest employer in this region, too, so talk of cuts makes people understandably nervous. Such things conspire to make it all too believable when people tell me the average length of time it takes to sell a house in Ceredigion is two years. I'm OK with that. It's not brilliant, but we're not desperate to get the place shifted at all costs. We can afford to wait out the lull.

No, what irritates me intensely, and plays to my inner conspiracy-theorist is the situation I've been through in the last week. It was Tuesday when I answered a phone call from the estate agents,* telling me that someone wanted to come and see the place. That was the first time I'd heard from them in well over a month, and to be honest my attempts at keeping the house clean have somewhat lapsed - well, there's only so much hoovering and floor washing you can do for no audience but muddy-footed dogs. So it was that I spent Wednesday morning deep cleaning from top to bottom. And then, in the afternoon, the lady in question arrived.

She was obviously excited about the place, so much so that she made me swear I wouldn't sell the place to anyone else before she'd had time to bring her husband round to see the place too. This she did, on Friday evening, bringing him straight from the station where he'd just returned from a trip to London. No time to go home and freshen up, or have a stiff drink to alleviate the stress of both rail travel and time spent in the capital, no, he had to come straight here and see the place.

And he liked it too. Perhaps in a 'yes dear, whatever you say,' manner, but enough to arrange to come back on Sunday to talk about offers.

This couple were the perfect buyers, as far as I was concerned. They had already sold their smallholding just a few miles away, and were looking for somewhere with a bit less land where they could grow old happily. They had the cash waiting, and weren't stuck in some endless chain of the type that so bogs down the English and Welsh property market.** What's more, they were being pressured by the people who had bought their property to move as soon as possible.

As it happens, and purely by coincidence, the house we used to rent, a mile up the road from here, is currently empty. It's part of the research farm I still technically work for, and we would have been able to move in there at very short notice. Had this nice couple made us a reasonable offer, the sale could have been concluded in a month - an almost unheard of speed for conveyancing in the UK. The only thing slowing down the transaction would have been the lawyers who are a tiresome necessity in such things.

But, and there's always a but, on Sunday morning, as we were out strolling the beasts,*** a message was left on our telephone answering machine. The nice couple had seen another house, a bit further away, and were equally excited about that one. They needed some time to consider options, but would let me know as soon as possible.

Today, I received a call from the estate agents, telling me that the couple had decided to make an offer on the other house. Apparently they had reservations about the bungalow next door - reading the subtext, the current inhabitants of the bungalow next door - and that our house was perhaps just a bit too far out from town for them as they approach their twilight years. Given the property they've made an offer on, this last excuse rings a little hollow, but I'm not bitter or angry at them. They found a house they liked more than mine. Fair enough.

But I can't help thinking that my luck really stinks. It's not that I didn't get the sale, so much as they were in so many ways the perfect buyers - and then I didn't get the sale. Absolutely everything was right for a swift, simple and stress-free transaction, and then it all just crumbled to dust in front of my eyes. The pattern recognition part of my brain sees parallels with my situation in the middle of 2008, when I came tantalisingly close to getting a deal with a major publishing house, finding a new agent and generally succeeding where I'd failed for the previous ten years. And then, of course, it all fell to pieces.

I don't mind rejection. Well, yes, I do mind rejection but I understand it's part and parcel of life in general and being a writer in particular. What I really object to though is the exquisite pain of getting to within a whisker of your goal, only to find yourself on the long snake back to the beginning. Once is bad enough, but over and over again? Come on life, give me a break won't you.

* Realtors, for you lot over there.
** But not in Scotland, where they're much more sensible about these things.
*** This is not a euphemism. Shame on you for thinking so.

Milky Milky

2010-09-27T11:49:00.000Z

Driving back from FantasyCon the weekend before last, my right ear popped and began to ring slightly - a high pitched mixture between a hiss and a screech that doesn't seem to affect my hearing, but is just loud enough to be annoying. I thought nothing of it at the time; these things happen to me occasionally, and the ringing usually goes away after half an hour or so.

It was still there when I went to bed that night, but I was dog-tired after no sleep in Nottingham, so it didn't really bother me.

It was still there the next morning, and that was a worry. Many, many years ago, back when I was in short trousers, the Horse Doctor and I* went to visit a friend who was working in Amersfort in Holland. On the ferry over from Hull to Rotterdam, my right ear popped and went profoundly deaf. For the duration of the visit I had no hearing on that side at all. A friendly Dutch doctor, with perfect English that rather put my non-existent Dutch to shame, shone a torch in my ear and declared that a wax plug had formed and would need to be syringed out. This was finally done when I got home to Aberdeen, and for a few hours I had hearing in my right ear to rival that of Matt Murdock.**

This time, however, my hearing seemed unaffected, there was just this annoying ringing. But reasoning that it might be a small wax build-up, I spent the next week putting warm olive oil in my ear before bedtime each night. This sounds rather strange, but is a recommended procedure. Just don't use the oil for cooking afterwards. Or salad dressing. Unless you like really bitter salad dressing.

But a week on and my ear was still singing, so I finally gave up and took it to see the doctor. She confirmed that there was no wax build-up, but suggested there might be a bit of a fluid build up in the inner ear. These things can take a while to clear, and according to her one common antagonist is milk.*** Milk, she told me, is also implicated in testicular cancer, is full of growth hormones and oestrogen and ought to come with a health warning on it. It's fine for children, up to a point, but adults really have no need of it. From an intellectual point of view, this argument has a certain merit. Milk is, after all, designed for infants. And cow's milk is designed for infant cows. It really is very strange the way us adults continue to lap it up when we wouldn't dream of demanding it from our own mothers. Nor, I suspect, would many of us try to suckle a cow.

So for the next fortnight I am to forswear all milk and see if it improves things. It didn't occur to me to ask at the time of my consultation, but I now assume by 'milk' my doctor actually meant 'all products deriving from the exudations of the udder of a cow.' So butter and cheese are probably best avoided too. And milk chocolate. And, it appears, digestive biscuits. I can have no lattes and my tea will have to be flavoured with lemon, or taken black. I am even now wading my way through a coffee as dark and sticky as treacle which, though made from decaffeinated beans will probably have me climbing the walls soon.

Breakfast will be interesting, since my preferred muesli-lubricant is a half pint of full-fat. My mum used to use Innocent Smoothies as an alternative, but until I can get to the shops I may have to try fruit juice. Porridge is out of the question, as making it without milk and serving it without cream are two unforgivable crimes against humanity. Lunchtime's cheese sandwich will have to give way to perhaps a boiled egg and some salad. Supper's creamy pasta dishes and white-sauce laden lasagnes will have to go. If nothing else I should lose a bit of weight.

I recall from my travels in the Far East, even longer ago than my ill-heard visit to Holland, that a common complaint amongst the natives of that region is that us Westerners smell strangely sour to their senses, tainted as we are by our infatuation with milk. As I embark upon this self-imposed diet, it will be interesting to see if my friends start sitting a little closer.

I'm going to miss my cheese, though. Life's hardly worth living without it.

* Except that at the time she wasn't even the Horse Student.
** AKA Daredevil, the man without fear. I suggest you read the comic book, currently being written by Andy Diggle, rather than watching the terrible film with Ben Affleck and Jennifer 'Electric Nachos' Garner.
*** yes, we got there eventually.

Tegid Take Two

2010-09-24T13:44:00.000Z

Since Laura asked for it:

He's going to be quite a big terrier, but Labrador puppy he ain't.

Tegid

2010-09-23T10:00:00.000Z

Well, it's been a couple of months since young Tegid arrived on the scene, so I thought I'd give you an update on the new DevilDog.

The small bundle of cute naughtiness has grown into a much larger bundle of boundless energy and teeth. Most dogs investigate the world by smelling it, from a quick casual sniff to long minutes of intense aroma-snorting. Tegid investigates the world by biting it. Size is unimportant. Even if he can only fit a small piece of, say, my knee into his mouth, he'll try it, just to see what it's made of. The Labrador's jowls are a particular favourite, and now sport a crust of painful-looking scabs. Boots and shoes have to be raised beyond terrier reach, a surprising height, or risk being lost. Tegid hasn't so far destroyed anything, in the way that the SausageDog will slowly, methodically, render eighty quid's worth of boot down to tuppence-sized chunks of leather and plastic - he lacks the attention span and determination - but he will take things from one place and leave them somewhere else entirely.

Early on, he had a problem with stairs. Going up was fine, but coming back down again, not so much. You'd think that an animal with half a brain would learn not to go upstairs then, but no. The lure of forbidden realms was ever too much. Now he's got the hang of it, I don't have to worry if I've not seen him for a few minutes. Before that, a slip of attention risked soiling the new carpet. I do have to remember to close the bedroom door, however, since he's big enough now to jump up onto the bed and thinks that King Size is just about right for a terrier.

Now he's undergoing intensive cat-flap training.* It's taken a while, but he seems to be getting the idea. The real leap in education will be when he puts two and two together and works out that he doesn't need to crap at the closed front door because no-one noticed his silent vigil, but can instead take himself down the back stairs to the basement and then out the cat-flap to do his business. He's already worked out that he can do that to go and catch beetles, so I'm hopeful it won't take much longer. He's fascinated with creepy-crawlies in a very cat-like way, but then he's a terrier so I should expect inquisitiveness.

Tegid's a good eater, too, despite being as skinny as a rake. All that exercise he gets from beating up Haggis and biting the world, I guess. Either that or the worming tablets aren't working. We've started weaning him onto grown-up food mostly for economic reasons, although he seems to prefer it to the puppy stuff anyway. It's what the big dogs eat, after all, and he's determined to be a big dog.

The worst problem is an old terrier trick, perfected by Mortimer and obviously handed down as a race memory. Tegid learnt early on that peeing outside on the lawn got a reward, so now of an evening, when we're sitting down and trying to enjoy something on the telly, he leaps up and scratches at the door to be let out. Into the darkness, back again an instant later and then a perfect sit, head cocked slightly to one side in query: where's my treat? Once, he might get away with. Twice is pushing it. Every three minutes starts to get annoying, so you ignore him. Which, of course, is when he pees on the floor.

None of this should surprise me. I've over twenty years experience of terriers, after all. But it's been a long time since we had a puppy in the house, and you forget just how much hard work it can be.

It's fun though, and he's a cracking wee dog.

* well, technically it's a dog-flap, but for some inexplicable reason that sounds rather rude

Stoke up the bonfire

2010-09-09T17:48:00.000Z

This is one of those awkward posts. You see, I think the best way to deal with the whole Koran burning story is to starve it of publicity. So blogging about it here, even though this place has few visitors, is a little on the hypocritical side. The best outcome would be for Terry Jones and his fifty followers to have a nice little barbecue on Saturday, and for no-one else to notice at all.

Of course, the world media being what it is, that's not going to happen. The story will be spread around the world, most likely with live cameras showing the flames. There will be no context as these images are broadcast in Muslim countries, except that this is a deliberate insult to their religion and it's happening in America. It will inevitably become another rallying cry to those who think the best way to deal with people you don't agree with is to kill them, and that a good way to do that is to persuade some poor footsoldier to strap a bomb round their middle and walk into a crowded marketplace.

I think Mr Jones is probably one of the most stupid and bigoted men I've ever had the misfortune to learn about. I certainly would never want to meet him, and his creed certainly weakens any desire I had to visit America soon. His act of defiance is an idiotic stunt, the pathetic tantrum of a child. I wish he wouldn't do it as much as I wish the world would ignore him until he goes away.

But.

If I was in Gainesville on Saturday, I wouldn't try to stop him. I'm glad to see that President Obama isn't going to try anything other than persuasion to make him change his mind, either. However crass his actions are, Mr Jones has every right to burn a copy of a book that he has purchased, as long as he isn't in contravention of any zoning laws or other statutes that prevent the lighting of fires in public places. Just as I have every right to criticise him for his actions. That's how we do things in the western world.

Perhaps predictably, the cry has gone up around the world to stop him. Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Pakistan have all waded in with demands. I've no doubt that a similar stunt, if it were attempted in any of those countries, would end up with the perpetrator being hauled off to a cell before he could even get his matches out. I can see how it might be difficult for them to understand what is stopping the authorities in America from doing the same, and that, unfortunately, is the fundamental problem underlying the conflict between Islamic thought and that of secular or Christian societies.

That's a gross exaggeration, of course. There are plenty of moderate Muslims who are rather embarrassed about this latest furore, and who condemn without reservation the actions of the jihadis and militants, if anyone is prepared to listen to them. And of course there are the Christian fundamentalists, like Mr Jones, who would no doubt like to see the whole world ruled by their peculiar interpretation of the Bible, and burn anyone who disagrees. All religions seek to control, some in a relatively benign way others by killing those who refuse to conform. And states don't even need the prop of doing God's will as an excuse to enforce conformity, either; using a strong military and police to terrorise a population seems almost to be the norm rather than the exception.

So perhaps it's no surprise that there will be rioting in Indonesia on Saturday, American flags burned in Pakistan. I expect Iran will have a field day, Ahmedinejad spouting forth about how this proves that the west is a force for evil, bent on destroying his people - by which he means, of course, every single Muslim in the entire world and not just those few who voted for him. I doubt very much that any of them will say anything at all the next time a suicide bomber blows up in a Baghdad market.

It may just be the way these things are reported, but it seems to me that there are very few spokesmen for Islam who will unequivocally condemn the actions of the extremists who claim to be of their religion. I can't remember the last time an Imam appeared on the news expressing his horror at the carnage wrought by Muslims on Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, let alone condemning the actions directed against western forces in those countries. Yet there are plenty of loud voices when a Dutch newspaper prints a few crap cartoons, or a well-meaning but naive teacher names a teddy bear Mohamed, or a man with fifty followers out of a population of more than three hundred million decides he's going to burn a copy of a book.

However much it has become a cliché, Voltaire's mis-attributed quotation* is very apt in this case. 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.' To which I would add that I would also defend to the death my right to disagree with you, as well.' It is the strength of the western world that we can allow the likes of Terry Jones the freedom to spout their drivel. Obama's condemnation of the man should be enough to satisfy anyone with an ounce of sense that this is not the view of America as a nation.

If Islamic leaders insist on treating the actions of a few individuals as indicative of the entire race of non-Muslims, and stirring up righteous indignation at the most minor of slights to their way of life, then is it any surprise that many in the west come to believe that all Muslims are suicide bombers, and want to burn the book they believe calls them to arms?

For myself, I wish all religion would go away. It's not going to happen, but I can dream. Many years ago, my niece asked me why I didn't believe in God, and I explained to her that it wasn't so much that I didn't believe in God as that I didn't believe in belief. She didn't get it then, and I'm guessing most people won't get it now, but if we weren't all so certain that we were right, and they were wrong, then I think the world would be a much better place.

* read this explanation. He never said it at all.

New Girlfriend

2010-09-01T12:04:00.000Z

I seem to be getting a lot of attention from someone called Julia at the moment. I've lost count of the number of times she's emailed me, but every message is exactly the same:

Hello, im Julia.

I found you in my friends list.

I'm guess I added you at the one of social networks.

I live in New York, USA.

Search for new friends. like to travel and like visit new places.

I wanna visit UK again.

email: info@julianewyork76.com

I hope to hear from you and see more pictures soon.

Kisses. Have a nice day and take care.

Julia

My email reader won't download images unless I tell it to, which I haven't in this instance, but I'm sure there's a very nice picture of a pretty young blonde thing to go with this rather illiterate message. I know this is spam, even if my spam filter is having a hard time learning to recognise it. What I can't quite understand is what its purpose is, other than to irritate the hell out of me. There's no link to click; the email address isn't even embedded as a mailto: command. It doesn't seem to be trying to sell me anything, and any possibility that I might have fallen for the 'friends list' angle fell apart as soon as I received the second identical message, quite apart from the fact that the email headers have been doctored to make it look like it's come from me anyway.

I guess whoever sent it could be fishing for email addresses to sell on to other spammers, but they've got my address already. And if you're buying mailing lists at the dodgy end of the market, you're hardly going to complain if most of them turn out to be false.

The penis-enhancement emails that are as much a part of daily life as bread and cheese I can understand. Send a million, and even if only .001% respond, you've still got a thousand hits to your website. There are plenty of people out there stupid enough to believe that a pill will make their willy as big as a stallion's. It's a numbers game that makes perfect sense if you're trying to sell something or trick people into giving away their life secrets. But this, I just don't get. I'm almost tempted to send Julia a message, perhaps accompanied by a photo of George Clooney or Brad Pitt to let her know what I really look like.

Almost, but not quite.

Damn you, Network Rail!

2010-08-11T09:19:00.000Z

There's a point in my current WIP where the rather useless protagonist finally manages to escape the clutches of the evil baddies. He can't turn to the cops, so he goes on the run - as you do. I came up with a great idea as to how he throws everyone off the scent. At the railway station he buys a ticket for one destination using his credit card, then gets on the train going in the other direction and buys a new ticket using cash. Brilliant.

Except I then went and looked up a map of the UK rail network. For all the destinations I might possibly have him go from the station he was closest to when he escaped, you can only go north, to Leicester. Then you change to go east to Cambridge or west to Birmingham. Bah!

The question is, does it matter? In the wildly unlikely situation that this book might get itself published one day, only readers in Kettering and Leicester will spot the mistake. Them and the die-hard anorak and notebook brigade. And it's the idea that's important - understanding that credit card transactions will be monitored and tracked and using that to your advantage. The specific details of station and line are incidental.

I should probably be more worried that our coalition government is disbanding SOCA, the Serious Organised Crime Agency - Britain's answer to the FBI. I started this book before the general election back in May, and two of the main supporting characters are SOCA detectives. How much sense will it make in a year to eighteen months time if DS Campbell and DI Jonas are working for an organisation that no longer exists?

Which dovetails neatly into a rumination on the nature of research in novels. I've gone on record before as saying that I'm not good at it. I find it very hard to approach a complete stranger and ask them for help. The thought of phoning up the police and wasting their time with my inane questions leaves me quite literally in a cold sweat. I gave up going to comics conventions because I physically couldn't approach editors with my manuscripts. It's not something as complicated as a fear of rejection, simply an unbearable terror of the unknown that severely limits my ability to push out of my comfort zone. I'm hopeless at social interaction of any kind, which is probably why I live in the middle of nowhere.

All of which also explains why I like writing fantasy so much. There you can make up your own rules and all you have to worry about is being consistent.

My novels set in the 'real' world are meticulously researched as far as I can from Wikepedia and reading other people's books. I don't obsessively pore over details of handguns or go and hang out with homeless people in my quest for verisimilitude. I don't agonise over whether it would actually be possible to get the ingredients for a proper Gung Dong from a corner store in Aberystwyth. I do look at maps to see what's physically possible, but I'll happily invent pubs, shops and other meeting places if they're useful to the narrative. In my last book I created an entire village.

Should it matter? Ian Rankin apparently got into trouble when Edinburgh CID moved from St Leonard's to Gayfield Square and Rebus took a book to catch up with them. As far as I'm concerned, it would have made no difference to the entire series if, in Rebus' world, the move had never happened. It's not particularly important, although it can be used to explore the characters further through their individual reactions to the change.

And that, to me, is what the research should be about. It should be about exploring possibilities, coming up with new ideas. It shouldn't be about slavishly detailing every inch of the cells at Bishop's Stortford Police Station, or making sure you've got the right manufacturer's name on the coffee machine in the cafe your hero stops at before heading off to fight more evil. Personally I don't even care that much whether or not it's possible to slide off the safety on a Glock 9mm (if such a thing in fact exists). That level of detail - even being able to name the gun, which 99.99% of your readers won't be able to do - is not important. The intent of the action - removing the safety, being prepared to unleash lethal force - is what is key here. All else is window dressing.

So my protagonist will still get the Birmingham train from Kettering, having paid for a ticket to Cambridge. And he'll be spotted going to the wrong platform, too, so his cunning plan will fail. That it's not physically possible for him to do these things in the real world does not bother me at all, the intention is made clear. It's enough that, after a hundred odd pages of being beaten up, chased, tortured and generally mistreated, he's finally starting to show a bit of backbone. That's what the scene is about, and hang the pesky details.

I'm still going to have to do something about SOCA though.

Worms!

2010-08-03T18:31:00.000Z

It occurs to me that I haven't posted any disturbing images lately. For this I apologise and seek to make amends with my latest dispatch.

Young Tegid the puppy seems to have settled in well. It took him a while to learn that the SausageDog doesn't like to share his bed, but Haggis has no such homophobic hang-ups.

cuteness buffer ™ Jen Jordan

Haggis has come into his own, really, taking on uncle duties without so much as a squeak of complaint, even though a lot of the time this involves whirling around in dangerous circles trying to dislodge two kilos of sharp-fanged black naughtiness from his tail. Or having his ears chewed.

There is, however, more to the life of a puppy than chasing other dogs' tails. More indeed than eating and sleeping. There are visits to the vet for vaccines, and of course there are worming tablets.

The experts say you should worm puppies once every fortnight from age two weeks to twelve. My vet isn't quite so thorough - he reckoned once a month. The people I bought Tegid from swore blind he'd been wormed, but we wrapped a tablet in a small piece of cheese and fed it to him on Saturday anyway. Most un-terrierlike, he gobbled it down rather than licking the cheese off and spitting the pill out.*

Next day I was wandering around the garden with my trusty shovel, doing pooh patrol, when I came across this.

you were warned

Toxocara Canis, or the canine roundworm. Quite a large one as it happens. Given that Tegid is only ten weeks old, that's some size. Particularly given that over the course of the next few days he produced two more, of similar magnitude. He'll get another dose when he reaches twelve weeks, and then slot into the three-monthly worming regime that the other dogs follow.

No wonder he always seemed so hungry, poor thing.

* something that Chiswick mastered at a very early age, and even Mortimer occasionally did.

Odd

2010-07-29T08:41:00.000Z

A funny thing happened to me at this year's Harrogate Crime Writing Festival.*

It was a good weekend, and I managed to catch up with a lot of people, but If I had to pick one word for this year's event as I experienced it, that word would be subdued. The festival itself wasn't subdued, far from it. This year will probably have broken all records at the box office - tickets for the Ian Rankin vs. Val McDermid bare knuckle fight were sold out before the event even started. But in amongst all this bustle and busyness, I was a small centre of tranquillity and calm.

Or at least it felt that way to me.

But that's not the funny thing, or perhaps that's not the funny thing that I intended to write about when I started this post.

I didn't get to see much of Stuart, as he was busy being festival chair and whipping up the panel audiences into a frenzy before the main act came on. He did have time to introduce me to one of the editors at HarperCollins though, and then promptly left us to go and organise something else. This wasn't too much of a problem since the editor - let's call him Emad, since that's his name - turned out to be a really nice bloke. As is the way of such things, particularly at the bar as Friday turns into Saturday, the conversation went this way and that, covering politics (yawn), the drinking habits of crime writers, Ukrainian sand art and how best to avoid getting dragged along when a group of people decide they want to go clubbing.

Conversations can only go so far, though, and eventually the tiresome topic of writing came up. I have a policy of trying not to bore people I've only just met, but sometimes they ask what I'm doing at a crime writing festival. I guess it's a fair enough question. Emad, it turned out, had assumed I was a published author well on my way to fame and fortune (you can see why I thought he was a nice bloke). When I disabused him of this notion, and explained that I didn't even have an agent, he immediately offered to introduce me to a friend he knew who was at the festival on the hunt for new talent (ahem). Formerly another HC editor, she had recently jumped ship to a prestigious literary agency I'm not going to name here.

The only problem was that it was very early on Saturday, and Emad had to leave just a little later in the morning. The chances of being able to arrange a meeting were slim to negligible before he had to sprint for the station to catch his train. Still, he took my email address and promised he'd do his best.

Later that morning, my having hung about the lobby for as long as I could, I went into a panel entitled 'Putting The Boot In', where Ray Banks, Charlie Williams, Stella Duffy and Craig Russell waxed lyrical about violence in fiction and other good stuff, under the skilful guidance of Martyn Waites (who wasn't wearing a dress for this one). I was a little disappointed at not having seen Emad again, but resigned to that sort of thing happening to me. My life is a series of such small disappointments. Chalk another one up to experience.

Just as I was about to switch it off before the panel started, my phone rang. It was the Horse Doctor, but before she could say anything, my ear was blasted with a terrible wailing screech. It appeared that Tegid the Patterdale Terrier had made the fatal error of assuming the rawhide chewstick that Haggis was chewing was, in fact, his. A few rude words had been exchanged, and being a bit of a drama queen, Tegid had decided to howl like, well, a puppy. So I had to vacate my seat, go to the back of the hall and wait for the Horse Doctor to calm everything down before I could actually speak to her.

By the time the call was over - and I won't bore you with what it was about, as that's unimportant - someone had pinched my seat and I was forced to take another, further back. Soon afterwards, Russell appeared, in that way that he has, and perched himself in the row behind me. The panel still hadn't started, so I proceeded to tell him about Emad's friend and how sad it was that I'd missed him that morning. No doubt I'd get his friend's name and email address in the fullness of time, but it's always nicer to meet someone face to face.

At which point a nice lady sitting directly behind me coughed lightly and said: 'Excuse me, but are you James Oswald?'

It turns out that Emad had spoken to his agent friend, waxing lyrical about how brilliant a writer I was, for all that we'd met each other for perhaps a couple of hours and he'd never actually read anything I'd written.** Then by some strange twist of fate, I'd actually sat down right next to her in a seat that wasn't my original choice - if Tegid hadn't howled the moment I answered the phone, I'd never had moved. And by some even stranger twist of fate I'd had someone to talk to about the situation so she could overhear me and introduce herself. In a crime novel such coincidences might well be described as laziness on the part of the author. Or maybe the influence of supernatural forces.***

We had a good chat about my writing - it turns out that she's looking for both crime and YA fantasy, which is great since I write both - and then she gave me her card. As soon as I got home I emailed off a copy of one of my manuscripts. I'm not so naive as to think everything's going to be beer and skittles from now on - chances are the next email will be an embarrassed and apologetic 'it's not really for us' kind of thing. I've had a few before, so I know what to expect.

But for a while I can bask in the odd feeling that the fates are somehow directing me. My destiny awaits.

* or the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival Harrogate, to give it it's full and rather unwieldy title.
** I had saved him from being dragged off to the notorious Harrogate night club, Rehab, so perhaps he felt he owed me a favour.
*** a point that was touched upon during the panel, and of interest to me since I use supernatural forces in my crime books. Sort of. The consensus seemed to be that having a ghost turn up at the end of your book as the resolution of the plot was pretty lame, but perhaps weaving the supernatural delicately through the whole narrative was acceptable. Which is a relief.

The DevilDog Lives!

2010-07-11T09:51:00.000Z

Not Mortimer come back from the grave. Alas that would be impossible, and slightly creepy. No this is a new DevilDog, the DevilDog mark 2, aka Tegid.

Tegid is the Horse Doctor's birthday present, even though her birthday's not until Monday. He came from Burnley in Lancashire and is from good working stock. His mum is quite hairy, his dad quite smooth, so it will be interesting to see how his coat develops as he grows. He is, of course, a Patterdale Terrier. And Haggis is quite astonished.

Mort, the original DevilDog, came into our lives fifteen years ago, when the Horse Doctor was still the Horse Student and just embarking on her PhD. He, too, was a birthday present, and one which lasted quite well. Hopefully Tegid will have a long and happy life ahead of him, and won't succumb to the ravages of arthritis that so crippled his famous predecessor. At the moment he is mostly an eating machine, capable of consuming his own bodyweight in food in one sitting. Little more than a stomach on legs, really, but at least he's got a healthy appetite.

Well, that was bound to happen

2010-06-28T18:39:00.001Z

Nothing I find on the internet surprises me anymore, but just every now and then something twitches a wry grin onto my lips and makes me breathe out through my nose. Not a belly-laugh roll on the floor and poke my eyes out (or whatever the acronym is) moment of hilarity, but a lift to an otherwise humdrum day nevertheless.

And so it was this morning when I went to check my web stats. They're nothing earth-shattering, I have to admit. Time was I got somewhere between fifty and a hundred hits a day on this site, but that was when blogging was the thing, and people weren't turning their brains to mush on Twitty and Faecebook. Nowadays I'm lucky to get that many waifs and strays wandering here by mistake every couple of weeks. And when they do come here, this is what they're looking for:

It amazes me that people are still desperate to make plum brandy, but that's the power of booze for you. I've hardly touched the stuff I made, so if you come here looking for yet another recipe, here's my advice: make a pie instead.

Searching for information about Perth Royal Infirmary outpatients is a sensible enough use of the world's favourite internet search engine, but I'm not quite sure that picking a blog called Sir Benfro out of the ensuing results shows much in the way of intelligence. Perhaps better to start with nhs.gov.uk or something.

windmill erection+sweden sounds like the work of an engineer. Someone with a tidy mind who knows what they're looking for and just needs a little help. I'm not sure what momentary aberration caused them to come here; it's not really important. They would have found some pretty pictures, I'm sure. And if they come back, well - this is where you were trying to get to.

And then there's 'lil bro got an erection'. I don't really want to know what persuaded someone to type this into google, and yet somehow I can't help myself speculating. Was this the first time lil bro got overexcited? What was it that gave him his trouser bulge? What was he doing running around showing it to all the family? And is it big bro who's run to the interweb for help or big sis? For that matter, what help did they expect to find from google? Or is this some weird new sexual fetish that I'm not aware of? Not that I'm aware of many weird sexual fetishes, you understand, but you can't wander these electronic halls without stumbling upon the occasional example of mankind's perverse inventiveness.

It quite baffles me.

Six hundred and eighty-nine words

2010-06-17T13:28:00.000Z

I wrote a scene this morning.

There shouldn't be anything special about that sentence. It shouldn't be a whoot whoot moment or cause for dancing a merry jig. I'm not a professional writer, but I am an aspiring author. Writing is what I tell myself I do with my time when I'm not trying to earn a crust. But lately writing has not been as smooth a process as once it was.

I could blame the many distractions in my life; there's plenty of those. But I think that's a lame excuse. However much else I have to do, however busy my life becomes, I can always find time to do something I really love doing. Time was that was writing, but lately I can't seem to find that old enthusiasm.

A few years back, everything seemed to be coming together nicely. I had an agent trying to flog my dragon books, I'd been nominated for the debut dagger twice, and publishers were actually asking to see my most recent manuscript. I was on the cusp of fulfilling the dream I've had for too many years to mention without embarrassment - getting something I'd written published. Then it all seemed to fall apart. My agent decided she didn't want to carry on, then the publisher's buying committee decided against my book. Another agent, who had shown great interest up until that point, backed off sharpish. I was so close, and then right back to square on as if I'd landed on the big snake just before the finish line.

Now, I'm used to rejections. God knows I've had plenty down the years. I started off this writing gig sending comic scripts to 2000AD magazine, and used to get a standard letter twice a month: "Thanks for your script, but we're not buying anything at the moment. Do try again." I never did work out whether that was a polite way of saying 'you're shite, go away.' It doesn't make it any easier when the rejections keep coming in. Each one is yet another chip away at the self-confidence, until after a while you begin to wonder why you bothered in the first place.

And so it has been with me. I have something out with an agency at the moment, but I've heard nothing and will have to send them a gentle reminder soon. Usually that means the rejection will come a few days later. Other than that, there's nothing in the pipeline, no deal being considered, no hope of publication to keep me plugging away at the keys. I know that you should write for the pleasure of it, not the hope of fame and riches, but what if it stops being pleasurable?

Then something like this morning happens. I hadn't intended writing this short scene. I hadn't intended writing anything fiction this morning - there's paying work that needs to be done first. And yet as soon as I sat down at my computer I felt compelled to write. This isn't a pivotal scene, and it might not even make the final cut. But I like it, I enjoyed writing it, and it reminded me - at least a little - why I started doing this, all those years ago. So here, for your entertainment, are six hundred and eighty-nine words where we learn why one of the two hitmen is called Mr Crisp.

Fine, yellow, oily crumbs tumbled from greasy fingers onto the lapels of Mr Crisp’s crumpled black suit as he worked his way slowly and methodically through the packet. Jonno watched from the corner of his eye, listening to the crunch, crunch, crunch of his colleague’s jaw as it turned deep fried potato into starchy goo. Each swallow was a bobbing of that prominent Adam’s Apple, threatening to burst through the paper-thin skin of his neck.
            Surveillance was the worst. Waiting in a car or a van, parked up across a deserted street, not knowing if your intel was good enough, if the target was ever going to show. Scanning the neighbouring windows for lace-curtain twitches; you never knew when some nosey old biddy was going to phone the police and complain about the car that hadn’t moved all day. Even if none of the other cars had moved all day either.
            Packet finished, the ritual began. Mr Crisp brushed the crumbs from his lapels and into his lap. Then he took the empty bag and began to fold. His long, thin fingers took on a life of their own, so dextrous it made Jonno feel ashamed of his stubby Rugby-player hands. In a seamless flow of movements, what was once a packet of crisps became something else entirely. A neatly tied bow, a small boat, a passable impression of a swan. This time it looked like a hawk, preparing to stoop on its prey. Mr Crisp reached forward and placed it delicately on top of the dashboard. Five other foil-packet origami shapes already sat there; it had been a long day.
            Mr Crisp wasn’t his real name, of course. That was, well, that was lost in the mists of time. It was the old man who’d first called him crisp as a joke. Then the copper had got the wrong end of the stick, thought it was his real name and called him Mister Crisp. Somehow the name had stuck. It was ironic, really. When you looked at the clothes he wore, the way he could turn a neatly pressed, brand new jacket into something that looked like it had been stolen off a dead tramp, just by putting it on. But then that was probably what the old man had meant when he’d called him crisp. Nothing to do with the man’s eating habits at all, or his strange passion for origami. Irony. The old man did that a lot.
            Jonno shifted in his uncomfortable seat. That was another thing about these German cars. Bloody seats were as hard as rock. The old Range Rover was much better for a long surveillance job, but they’d had to get rid of that last month. Shipped off to Africa with a load of stolen Mercs and a couple of Tonkas. A shame that dealer had bled all over the back seat like that. Still, forensics would have a hard time finding it in Addis Ababa or Timbuktu or wherever the fuck it had ended up. Perhaps when this job was over he’d get himself another one though. He liked the Range Rover, even if it was as conspicuous as fuck.
            ‘Shouldn’t be long now.’ Mr Crisp tapped the glowing clock on the dashboard and turned towards him. Jonno caught that unmistakeable whiff, saw the brown and black stained teeth for a moment. That was the downside of a starch-based diet. Far worse than eating sweets all the time. He’d read that somewhere. Sugars got dissolved in your saliva and swallowed away, but the starchy stuff stuck to your teeth, in the cracks and gaps between them. Perfect breeding conditions for the bad breath bugs and the stuff that dissolved your enamel away.
            ‘If he shows at all,’ Jonno said.
            ‘Oh, he’ll show.’ Mr Crisp reached around behind his seat, fished another packet of crisps from the bag. He pulled it open with a swift, practiced move, dipped two fingers in and drew out a single, pale disc of fried potato, paused a moment before putting it in his mouth.
‘And if he doesn’t, then his sister will be home soon.’

Don't say I'm not good to you.

Helping my little brother with his erection

2010-06-05T17:43:00.000Z

Fnarr, fnarr.

I have been mostly away for the past week, and mostly in North East Fife. There was inheritance stuff that needed to be done and a few other things besides, so I loaded up the Range Rover with a couple of dogs and as many boxes of comics as it would take*, hitched a trailer-full of random belongings to the back and took the whole lot to the farm.

I won't bore you with details of the long and uneventful journey, nor of the business that needed my personal attention once I was there. No, I promised you erections, and that is what you will get.

My little brother** set up his own environmental consultancy about fifteen years ago, and to everyone's surprise, least of all his own, it's still going. Lately a lot of work has been in the area of wind turbines. The UK government in its unfathomable wisdom has come up with a system called the Feed In Tariff, or FIT, which guarantees a minimum price paid for renewable energy generation - photovoltaics, wind power and hydro. This means that if you've got a bit of land in a windy spot and not too far from a power line, it would be madness not to put a windmill on it. Payback can be as little as three years, and the returns after that are far better than anything you can make with animals.

None of which is the reason my little brother decided to put one up. He just likes the whole renewable energy thing. And if you're selling windmills to landowners, it helps to be able to say you've got one of your own. So, much of this last week was spent on the process of erection.

It came largely in kit form, from Sweden. Sad but true, the British are a long way behind in wind turbine manufacture and design. The hard part was building the tower - eighteen metres high, and coming in three sections that had to be individually constructed and then bolted together like some giant meccano set. I spent a lot of Tuesday driving back and forth to Dundee in search of tools. Then on Wednesday morning a man arrived with a great big crane.

First the tower had to be raised slightly, then settled on a precarious tatty box so that there was room to fit the turbine head. This was winched into position, followed by the three blades, and then the nose cone. Finally, on Thursday morning, the whole thing was lofted into the air and dropped carefully into position on a concrete foundation. Against all predictions and expectations, the whole thing went with barely a hitch, and the tower that had been bolted together by four people with no engineering background between them fitted almost perfectly onto its base. It was actually surprisingly easy to manhandle four and a half tonnes of steel and fibreglass as it dangled from a pair of frayed straps high above.

I had to leave and drive back down to Wales before the turbine finally started to turn, but I am reliably informed that it did, and that it even produced a measurable amount of electricity. It was, however, slightly more noisy than it should have been, so someone has to go up the tower and sand down the blades, or something. Fortunately the Swedish technicians were on hand, this being the first of their products to be installed in the UK, and they seemed to know what they were doing.

So now there is a wind turbine at the farm. I have put in a planning application for three more, slightly bigger ones for myself.*** If all goes well they should add a useful income to the place and provide a handy cushion when we have the next food scare and the livestock market collapses. Even better, I know how to get an erection sorted now, and I have all the right tools.

* which is quite a few, as it turns out, but still less than half the collection. I guess I've been reading comics for a long time.
** who, I think it has been said before, is bigger than me.
*** I just hope that Mr Stuart will still talk to me if I get them erected. He's had three of the things dumped in front of his house to spoil his view.

Have we gone mad?

2010-05-27T18:41:00.000Z

I saw an ad on the telly last night (or an advertisement on the television, as my mother would correct me), extolling the virtues of a new, battery powered, automatic soap dispenser. I can't for the life of me remember the brand, which just goes to show the power of advertising. But here's a similar one I found using google, and which uses the same argument to justify its existence.

And that argument is this: soap, and the increasingly popular liquid soap pump dispensers, harbours millions of tiny, nasty, evil germs. You touch the top of the pump with your e-coli infested finger, and then the next person to use it gets a dose too. Raw chicken juices (yum!) might easily transfer from cook to small child. Dog widdle recently sponged from the floor could be shared with the whole family. Something brown, furry and almost sentient from the back of the fridge might leap from soap dish to hand, and thence to your brain, where it will take over your body like some alien creature from Doctor Who. In no time at all we'll be pod people, all traces of our individuality wiped. Or we might simply die of listeriosis.

But hang on a moment. Soap dispensers, by their very nature, dispense soap. The only reason for touching the top of one is to squirt something cleansing and antibacterial into your palm. And once you've done that, you're most likely to spread it around both hands, with the aid of some nice hot water, in the act of washing. You're hardly likely to then touch the soap dispenser again. Far more likely you're going to reach for the tap (faucet for you other-siders), or a nearby towel. Both of those are far worse horrors when it comes to lurking nastiness.*

I'm not suggesting that we all swap bacillus thuringiensis without a care in the world, but a little bit of exposure to germs is a good thing, surely. Nowadays almost every second advertisement** is for some product or another guaranteed to make the floor or even the toilet seat clean enough to eat off. Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought it was best to eat off a plate, with a knife and fork, sitting at a table and making polite conversation about the events of the day. Or at the very least slobbing on the sofa in front of the telly.

There's a body of thought that suggests our obsession with hygiene is responsible for the massive increase in allergies and asthma in the so-called civilised west.*** Babies' immune systems are missing out on crucial early exposure to the sort of everyday bugs and beasties they are going to have to cope with in later life, and so we descend into a kind of sickly malaise, ready for the next pandemic to come and wipe us out. On the plus side, that would be a quick way to cut our carbon footprint.

But even if that's all just a load of hogwash made up by reactionary dirt-lovers keen to embrace their inner pathogen, insisting that an automatic, no-touch soap dispenser is essential to health and well-being is just plain mad. You don't need to worry about the bugs you might touch just before you wash your hands.

* the average dish cloth, the most commonly used item in the kitchen for drying hands, has more nasty bugs on it than a house fly, apparently.
** the others are all trying to sell cars.
*** although that doesn't explain my hayfever, since I grew up mostly in and around muddy puddles and fields full of animals.

To blog or not to blog

2010-05-25T16:01:00.000Z

That, obviously, is the question.

I find, astonishingly, that it's almost a month since last I bothered you both with my inane self-absorbed witterings. Is this because I don't love you any more? Or maybe that I've run out of things to say? Perhaps my life is so unutterably dull that even I can't bring myself to bore you with it. Or perhaps I've just been too busy.

Most likely it's a combination of all of the above (apart from the not loving you any more bit). And a great deal of not being able to settle my mind on any one thing. At the moment I'm trying to sell the house I'm living in, which most psychologists will tell you is the second most stressful thing you can do in your life after getting married. I'm also trying to organise moving back to Fife and starting farming, which means sorting out a lot of paperwork at the moment, but will mean sourcing livestock and other farming essentials soon. And there's the small matter of building a house once we're up there (since my little brother inherited the farmhouse - it's a complicated story), which means plans and planning applications. And as if that wasn't enough, we're still arguing with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs about the exact amount of inheritance tax still to be paid. I warn you now - don't die, it's incredibly expensive.

On top of that little lot, I'm trying to write a book. I say trying to write, because 'writing' would imply that some words were being typed on a regular basis. When I do write, I can bang them out as quick as the best, but lately that's not been happening more than once or twice a week.

Oh, and there's paid work too, which is nice, but which also gets in the way of all the other things that need doing.

Time was I could multi-task without a second thought. I'd happily juggle a dozen different jobs and think nothing of taking on a dozen more. But lately I've found it very difficult to concentrate on anything for very long. This post, for instance, was started many hours ago, and in between paragraphs, sentences and sometimes even words, I've flitted onto other things as my mind wanders. My mental discipline is a total mess, and my productivity has vanished as a result.

I'm not sure what caused this descent into chaos. The house move and rebuilding work probably didn't help, and neither did my parents' untimely death. This is a period of great change in my life, and I could just blame that.

So maybe that's what I'll do.

That twitter thing

2010-05-02T17:12:00.000Z

I've never really got the hang of it. Facebook as well. You can find me in both places, masquerading under the pseudonym Sir Benfro (or @sirbenfro if you must), but to be honest I don't do a lot of twittering or facing the book. My last tweet was almost a month ago, the one before that a month earlier. I had a brief flurry of blip.fm tunes as tweets, but got bored of that. Facebook simply parrots my twitter page these days (or should that be 'squawks'?), which is why it took me two weeks to realise I'd been sent a concerned message by one of my friends wondering where I was.

None of this should come as any great surprise to those who have met me socially. I'll admit it - I'm very shy. I also find it almost impossible to hear anything in a crowd, so I tend to sit on the edge, smiling and nodding at what I hope are the right parts of the conversation, and ever so often adding my own comment when I know there's absolutely no chance of embarrassment whatsoever.

Then there's the problem of recognising people. I'm brilliant at it - if we've met once at a busy event twenty years ago, and since then you've dyed your hair, grown a beard and are sporting an eye-patch, I'll still recognise you. But there isn't a hope in hell that I'll remember your name. I need to be reminded at least a dozen times before that crucial piece of information sticks. I can be introduced to someone and have forgotten their name by the time they've finished their first sentence. You know, the one that goes 'Hi, I'm Jonathan.' As soon as they say something else, that name is gone. It's not that Jonathan is boring, or not worthy of my attention. It's just the way my brain doesn't work.

Oddly enough I can easily recall the names of people's dogs and cats, but not what they call themselves.

So, unsure exactly what the names are of the people engaged in conversation, and unwilling to make a complete tit of myself by getting something so obvious wrong, I tend not to participate all that much.

And the same is true of Twitter and Facebook. It doesn't help that I'm not at my computer twelve hours a day like I used to be, either. But when all's said and done, the biggest reason for my failure to engage fully with the social networking generation is that, quite frankly, I can't think of anything to say.

Except this, of course.

Stream of Consciousness

2010-04-21T09:00:00.001Z

As a nipper, I was forced to read James Joyce's epic meandering tale Ulysses. It made little sense to me at the time, and I suspect would make even less now. Perhaps its most lasting effect was to make me very wary of anything sporting the tag 'literature'. To my mind, if something is so obscure and difficult to read as to make my brain hurt, then I really can't see the point in persevering with it. Twisty, convoluted plots, yes. Tricky characters who defy your expectations, fine. I'll even go for elegance of prose over ease of understanding some days, and I expect good writers to understand the importance of rhythm even when they're not poets. But the really difficult stuff, the references to obscure texts that are as much the writer saying 'look at me how clever and well read I am' as adding anything cogent to the story, the weird desire to ignore the rules of grammar and punctuation as if to do so is somehow edgy and dangerous.* These things I just don't get. That might make me seem thick in the eyes of some, but quite frankly I'm stupid enough not to care.

But why, I hear you ask, am I spouting forth about the difficulties of literary fiction? Well, I'm glad you asked. You see, lately I've been spending a lot of time looking at advertisments on ebay. In particular, I need to get myself a relatively cheap towing vehicle that will run for a year and can then be traded in against something for the farm. I've been looking at Land Rover Discoveries, Range Rovers, Mitsubishi Shoguns and Isuzu Troopers mostly, anything that strikes me as most suitable to the task. I don't really want to spend more than a grand if I can get away with it, which means that I'm fishing at the bottom of a very murky pond.

If you've ever looked at an ebay advertisement for a car, you'll know the format. There's a form at the top of the page, where you fill in the relevant details like manufacturer, model, engine size and so on, and then beneath that, the plucky seller is given as much space as he or she wants to wax lyrical about their no-longer favourite vehicle. The first part of the page is frustrating enough, as people are remarkably bad at filling in things correctly. Thus in a search for Range Rovers you can easily end up looking at half a dozen Vauxhall Astras or a BMW 3 Series convertible.

In some ways this lack of understanding can be a good thing - track down the Range Rover that's been listed as something completely different and chances are you'll have less competition when it comes to bidding. On the other hand, apart from some dodgy, unfocussed photographs and the seller's pitch, you've no way of knowing whether you're buying a good'un or a dog. And if the seller doesn't even know what kind of car he's selling, then chances are the pitch is going to be at best incomplete. Worse, he probably doesn't even know an engine needs oil, let alone where to put it.

And these pitches are illiterate. Sometimes astonishingly so. There are spelling mistakes aplenty - the sad result of years of poor education in this country. There is bizarre grammar - a scattergun approach to commas and the inevitable roaming apostrophes. But what I like most is the terrified stream of consciousness that grips the person faced with filling that blank form so that he can get as much money as possible for his dodgy motor. This, for example, is an advertisement for a Land Rover Discovery:

hi selling my disco due to moveing to ireland in the next few weeks only had full service january at cost of £573.01 even got receipt drives very well and never lets you down photos will follow next few days no buy it now full payment on collection within 5 days or prior arrangment can be delivered for a price

You can almost taste the breathless terror as the poor soul racks his brain trying to come up with a description that will sell his car. In the end, after screwing up his courage just about as far as it will go, he lets forth in a flood of jumbled words, hoping against hope that they will somehow rearrange themselves into a semblance of sense. I particularly like the precision of the one detail he has been able to focus on - the cost of its last service down to a penny. And there, lurking in the price, is the only punctuation mark in the whole description. Nothing else can be allowed to come between the reader and the words.

On the plus side, there's only two spelling mistakes. I don't count the failure to capitalise Ireland, since there are no other capitals in the whole thing.

Other descriptions are much worse; I've picked this one out mainly because it's mercifully brief. But what worries me, what bothers me to the point I feel moved to blog about it, is the sheer weight of poor communication out there. In this country we've had compulsory universal education for a hundred and forty years. The minimum school leaving age has been 16 for almost forty years, and yet a quite astonishing number of people are unable to write properly. True, these people function well enough in society - they can afford to buy Range Rovers after all - but it does ask the question just what is it that schools do?

I don't know. And I don't pretend to have an answer to how to improve literacy except to spend more on education and spend it more wisely - easy words, very difficult job. And when all's said and done, people do seem to cope surprisingly well not knowing what a gerund is, or where to put an apostrophe, so maybe I should stop worrying. In the meantime I'll leave you with another gem from my fishing trip, and you can all ponder yourselves how best to educate a nation that stubbornly refuses to learn.

V8 DISCO LOOKS GRATE RUNS FINE HIGH MILES BUT EGNINE SWET U R BIDING TO BY NOT TO LOOK NO TIME WASTERS.

Yeah, I'd pay a grand for that.

* like Cormac McCarthy, for instance. Brilliant writer, great stories, but why oh why oh why won't he use bloody inverted commas to delineate speech? Everyone else does. It's a well understood convention that works. Not doing it just makes the writing that much more difficult to read.

Grrrrr.... Again

2010-04-14T08:14:00.000Z

Dear reader, you will recall, a few weeks ago, how life kicked me in the goolies when a cheque I had been waiting ages for finally arrived, neatly ripped in two by those nice people at the post office.

Well life came back for a second go recently, and in a remarkably similar manner. Perhaps I should get me some kind of protective.

This time it was two cheques, not one, and their combined value equates to about half my annual income. I guess I should have treated them with a bit more care, but because I bank with an entirely online outfit, there's little option but to entrust cheques to the postal system. I prefer, of course, to be paid by electronic transfer of funds, but some of the people I do work for are a little old-fashioned in that respect.

So I filled in a paying in slip, put my account details on the back of each cheque, and took the whole lot to the main post office in Aberystwyth, just to be sure that everything would be OK. This was Easter Saturday, and as I arrived at the post office, a postman was emptying the contents of the letterbox into a big grey sack. So I put the stamped and clearly addressed standard size envelope into the sack and walked away, relieved that I'd actually earned some money for a change.

On Tuesday evening, I posted a cheque to a consultant who'd done some work for me (someone else who needs to be dragged into the twenty-first century). On Thursday that money had been debited against my account, but of the two very large cheques there was no sign. I phoned the bank, only to be told that they couldn't tell me whether they'd received them or not (eh?) and that anyway cheques can take up to seven days to clear. So what about the one I wrote, that they cleared in a day?

Yesterday, eleven days after posting the envelope, I finally managed to persuade someone at my bank to look into the situation. Surprise, surprise they had no record of ever receiving anything. So somehow, between Aberystwyth main post office and an office block in Manchester my envelope has gone missing. A first class, DL size envelope designed specifically to work with their automated systems. Of a kind they handle millions of each day. Useless idiots the lot of them.

I screamed a very rude word when I got the news. It quite upset the dachshund - he's very sensitive you know.

So now I've got to go back to the people who wrote me the cheques, get them stopped and ask them to issue me with new ones. If I'm lucky, that means I'll only be six weeks late in getting paid. I'm going to try very hard to persuade everyone of the merits of electronic funds transfer at the same time. I'm also seriously considering moving my bank account to somewhere that has actual branches so I can, you know, pay money in and stuff.

Grrrr.

Ow

2010-04-12T17:44:00.000Z

Today was the day. A little over six weeks since it was requested, and two since I moaned about how useless the NHS was, I finally had my appointment at the eye clinic this morning.

Aberystwyth was unusually sunny, and since I knew I wasn't going to be able to drive myself home after the operation, I hitched a ride into town with the Horse Doctor, which meant I had an hour or two to kill before heading up North Road. Of course, there's bugger all to do in Aberystwyth on a sunny Monday, so I ended up getting there early. I'd have loitered around in the car park, getting a bit of sun, but since the North Road Clinic also houses the sexual health unit, I thought it best for my reputation if I wasn't seen hovering uncertainly at the door.

So I went in, sat down and waited. And waited, and waited. There didn't seem to be a lot of activity, either in the eye clinic or the sexual health clinic, which speaks rather well for the good citizens of Ceredigion, I suppose. Only a slightly out of tune Radio One and a month old copy of Grazia magazine for company, I endured an hour of sitting with as much stoicism as I could muster.

Finally, when I was just about to get up, find a receptionist and ask if they'd forgotten all about me, I was called in to see Doctor Kontes. He was a nice enough man, though convinced I was somehow related to Lee Harvey Oswald.* He looked at my eye, declared that it was a cyst needing to be removed (which I already knew, of course) and then made me sign a waiver form so that I wouldn't sue the NHS Trust if accidentally poked out my eyeball or something. Not a problem as far as I was concerned.

All signed and ready to go, I was just about to follow the good doctor out of the consulting room and into the operating theatre,** when a very bossy nurse bustled in, telling us that we had to observe two minutes silence for the Polish tragedy.

Now, I'm very sorry that the Polish president, his wife and various hangers-on died in a plane crash at the weekend. I'm probably even more sincere in my condolences than most of our elected or want-to-be elected representatives, but do I really need to observe a two minute silence? In Aberystwyth? I mean, it's not even as if any of the nurses or doctors were Polish. They haven't even sent that many of their builders this far west yet.

But we couldn't not be silent, not after being told off by the nurse. So I sat in a rather embarrassed non-talking way for a couple of minutes. Then Doctor Kontes got up, and told me to follow him through to the operating theatre.

Or at least he would have done if the bossy nurse hadn't rushed in at the first sound of a voice and hissed 'It hasn't started yet!'

Finally, after what felt more like ten minutes than two, she let us proceed. I won't go into the details of the operation; suffice it to say it involved eyes and pain. I now have a patch taped to my head, and have taken to saying 'Arhh, Jim Lad' a lot. Tomorrow I can take the patch off, and then maybe I'll stop.

The Horse Doctor drove me home - you kind of take binocular vision for granted until you don't have it any more. Then we took Haggis and Mac for a walk. Most days, I can count the number of people I meet whilst strolling the dogs on the fingers of the hand of a very clumsy heavy machinery operator, but today the whole bloody village was out. And every single one of them took one look at my eye patch, across at the Horse Doctor, and then said 'What has she done to you?'

I begin to understand why they pay the good comedians.

* which I may well be, but I've never tried looking into the family history on the American side.
** or another room the same size, but with a reclining chair in it.

Oops

2010-03-28T16:59:00.000Z

The morning after my last diatribe, a letter arrived in the post from Mid and South Wales NHS Trust, inviting me to attend the minor operations clinic a fortnight tomorrow at ten past ten in the morning. I shall be seeing Doctor Kontes, apparently. That will be approximately six weeks after my GP made the initial request, and none of that 'I have to get in touch with them to make an appointment' nonsense I was told over the phone.

Alarmingly the letter advises that I arrange for someone else to take me home after the appointment, so I guess I'll be sporting a proper shiner for a while. If I'm feeling kind, I'll post some before and after photies.

So my apologies to those hard working individuals in the NHS, 10% of whom are likely to lose their jobs in the next year or so, if our papers are to be believed. Yours is still an overweight organisation massively bloated by needless bureaucracy and desperately in need of a major overhaul, but you can book me an eye appointment in six weeks, so I'll forgive you just this once.

Poke me in the eye and call me Susan

2010-03-26T16:25:00.001Z

Keen readers of this random collection of moans and musings will recall that I had an eye infection at Christmas. I was in Canada at the time, skiing at Whistler and determined not to let something so mundane spoil what was in all other respects the best holiday I've ever had. A local pharmacist gave me some eye drops that took away the worst of the symptoms, so all was fine.

Once I got home, though, I thought it only prudent to visit the doctor. The infection had abated, but had left a nasty lump of a stye on my upper eyelid that was both disfiguring and discomfiting. As is his way, the doctor stated the bleeding obvious - 'You've got a stye on your eyelid', and gave me some ointment, admitting as he did so that it might not actually help the problem.

It didn't. All it did was make my eye all gummy, and left a horrible taste in the back of my throat about half an hour after I'd put it in. So two weeks later I went back to ask the doctor if he could refer me to the specialist at the hospital in Aberystwyth. It seems a bit of a faff, but that's the way things work around these parts.

Or don't work. I got a letter from the grandly titled Outpatient Appointment Centre about a week later informing me that the doctor had asked them to arrange an appointment to see the Consultant Opthalmologist. This letter didn't actually offer me an appointment. Instead it informed me that they would write to me again 'in due course' to give me details of my appointment.

I've been here before. It's one of those wonderful unintended consequences of our government's fondness for targets. All requests for an appointment must be responded to in a set time - I think it's five days or a week, but it could be a blue moon for all the good it does. You see, the target only stipulates that the request for an appointment be responded to within that time, not that an actual appointment be made. So instead of the Outpatient Appointment Centre sending me one letter after perhaps two weeks telling me to come see them in another month, I instead get a letter that is to all intents and purposes a waste of paper, stamps, time and money within a few days of the initial request going in and then... nothing.

It's been over a month since the letter, so today I phoned the Outpatients Appointment Centre to ask if there were any updates. This time a helpful fellow told me that the waiting time was currently running at around twelve weeks.

Cue intake of breath. The lump on my eyelid isn't getting any bigger, but neither is it getting any smaller. It blurs the vision in that eye, and feels like there's something stuck in there the whole time. I spend most of my time looking at computer screens these days, and it's beginning to give me headaches not being able to focus properly. I can't watch the telly for very long (not a big problem, except that the Sky+ box is rapidly filling up with unwatched episodes of True Blood) and even reading books is tiresome. I am a visual person, so this handicap is making me very grumpy indeed. Having to put up with this for another two months is not the kind of news I need right now.

But it gets worse. Helpful helpline operator (remember him?) then informed me that after twelve weeks I will be sent a letter asking me to get in touch with them to arrange an appointment.

What? The? Fuck?

I am perhaps a little spoiled. Many years ago, I had a similar problem with my eyelid and took it to my doctor in Fife. He looked at it for a while, said it was a stye that needed to be removed asap, picked up the phone and placed a call to Perth Royal Infirmary. They said they could see me straight away. I went in, the opthalmologist gave me a once over and then said he was going to carry out the procedure there and then. It's not pleasant, involving as it does the attachment of shiny stainless steel implements of torture that hold your eye open and stretch the eyelid. You get a local anaesthetic, but you can still see the scalpel approaching, and feel the tugging sensation as things are cut away. I had a shiner to be proud of, but I was walking out of the hospital less than six hours after first going to see my GP. Now it would appear that I have to wait twelve weeks before I can even make an appointment. That's what I call progress.

But what I can't understand, in my tiny little logical brain, is this. Why can't they book me an appointment now, even if it is for three months hence? My (NHS) dentist can book me a check-up appointment for August - he did when I went in for a filling about a month ago. Why do I have to wait twelve weeks for permission to approach the Outpatient Appointment Centre when they are far more likely to know when the doctor's going to be able to see me than I am?

I understand that NHS resources are finite, that I can't expect to be seen straight away every time. But what monstrous bureaucracy thinks it's more efficient to do things this way?*

*I suspect it's the same monstrous bureaucracy that requires five different people from two different departments to sign off the paperwork before a £25 grant payment can be made. That was the point where I had to wash my hands of working for the civil service. The sooner someone gets in there with a broom to sweep away decades of the worst business practice imaginable, the better. But that's a rant for another day.