Wonderful Wedding

Who can tell me the year of the last Typhoid epidemic in Aberdeen? I cannot recall exactly but it must have been fifty odd years ago that we young chaps were warned by our employers and church elders not to go near the Granite City in the hope of saving the rest of the nation from a horrible, painful end, to say nothing of ruining the surging post war economy depending as it did on a healthy though underpaid workforce. Needless to say we completely ignored the exhortations of the medicos and visited Aberdeen even more frequently for boisterous weekends of beer and rugby, although by then I was at the end of my career in both departments. I do not remember that any chums contracted unexpected deceases in Aberdeen however my easy going attitude to pestilence of fifty years ago does not extent to November, 2009. Now mothers in the Highlands and Islands are positively boasting about their snotty nosed offspring's particularly virulent viruses. They spread unimpeded throughout hundreds of thousands of the Hoi Poloi without a thought given to us Wealthy Well or whatever we are known as, mainly it seems because there is some dispute about what the GPs must be paid to administer a winter vaccine. Certainly many of the folk living in the harsh North Argyll Glens seem to have been struck down by almost every known curse, although I have to say that it seems to manifest itself in Glen Trollaigh as a great reluctance to surface much before mid morning and a dislike of cold, wet weather.

Dearest Dottie and I have been extraordinarily busy throughout the mixed October weather with several tasks ticked off the maintenance lists; Gutters have been replaced and serviced, leaking chimneys capped, patios and bridges washed down, burrams mounded up, water pipes buried, shrubs moved, winter fuel topped up, dung collected to compost piles, showers upgraded, gates widened and winter shutters put up. Although zillions more tasks remain it has been good to get on a bit and the pressure is off knowing that we do not take Autumn game shooting guests, so we only have to entertain rellies until New Year when we then charge a bob or two for an authentic Highland Hogmanay. We even managed to slip away to Edinburgh for a rather fab wedding and I have to admit that every time I visit, the whole appeal of Edinburgh and the East becomes greater. Could it be that I will be the first Trollaigh to forsake the Great Tower of Trollaigh for the East Coast in my old age? Any of my readers with outstanding apartments for sale, do please get in touch.

Another feature of October has been the substantial increase in air traffic using Glen Trollaigh. We have frequent fly passes from forestry and rescue helicopters and we are well used to the occasional Sunday microlight and even the seaplane slightly off course between Oban and Loch Lomond or the Clyde. However military low level jets are definitely on the increase with smokey Brits white knuckling it round the contours, perfectly correct Germans zooming by, now that the nod has been given to their re-militarization by NATO and of course the lovely ruggedness of the Yanks, who fly well below the height limit in jet black screamers, and whose pilots chomp on cigars, they are the only ones to give a tweed clad native a friendly wave, with one eye on the landscape rather than both on complicated avionics.God bless them all, Yours Aye, Archie, The Baron Trollaigh