Indoors

August has come and gone with not much to recommend it, a cool, cloudy but mostly dry month without sufficient sunny warmth to ripen our domestic crops; so we are searching for a good receipt for green tomato chutney and wondering if some things will over-winter which has never worked before; fruit trees are on the whole bare as strong gales in May stripped their flowers before the good bees could get their job done. The only thing which has kept growing is grass, the cutting of which is a weekly chore difficult to avoid; at least midges have more or less disappeared depleted by chilly nights. Unfortunately this absent food source has also encouraged some of our garden birds to set off on their migration a week or two early and we miss their constant chatter. A few days forced indoors has left my paperwork in good order, even my tax return has been submitted in good time, so brownie points all round.

Being forced indoors from time to time has also allowed some idle reading and I dipped into Philomena Cook's weekly Herald article which recounts the life and times of a jilted Scottish lady enjoying the warmth of Provence. One would get pretty fed up if forced to read it everyday, however the piece I picked up amusingly bemoaned the destruction left by affluent Brits in self catering freshly fettled and furnished Chateau. Many chums let their lodges nowadays to pay the grocer so it was an easy matter to carry out a straw poll of these land managers as I met up with them. In Scotland we seem to do much better than the fair francophile Philomena with hardly any reported problems be the guests Tattoos and Trackies or Range Rover and Rohan; however one Sutherland Chatelaine has removed risk from her ten bedroom holiday hide away by asking on her booking form "Do you have a maid or other domestic servant?"; if the answer is yes, then the booking is refused as the dear lady claims that such visitors are genetically incapable of clearing up after themselves or their boisterous family! Beware the trick question chaps; yours aye, Archie, The Baron Trollaigh.