The Great Wigtown Adventure: August 2017

[Even though this won’t be seen for a number of weeks, I’m writing it and will post it as it was written – in the present, like a live-ish diary.]

The First Day

I bid my final farewell to Fullingdale Road at 7.40am. That was a little over 14 hours ago. The wife finally set off 45 minutes after I opened the front door of our new home.

My journey was one of the most uneventful long drives of my life – it should have been an omen – and the most memorable thing was having a group of bikers driving alongside casting admiring glances in Doug’s direction and then waving as they went past.

I took two stops; one at Tebay and another at Gatehouse of Fleet because the dogs were getting restless and picked the keys up at 2.50pm and opened the front door a little after 3pm. This, so far, has been the highlight of a day that has deteriorated into some hellish caveat to our escape route.

The wife isn’t here yet. She got caught in some excellent thunderstorms and eventually overheated – not related as far as I can ascertain – in the high fell about 60 miles south of Carlisle; still 130 miles from here and I’m hoping the AA has arrived. This is a woman on her own in the Lake District with a breakdown and they told her one hour and upgraded that to two within 20 minutes. If I told you I was pissed off, it would not be in the same galaxy as how the wife feels.

To add insult to injury, at a time when we’ve needed our mobiles more than ever before; mine is almost out of battery and I get a terrible signal. The wife sent me a series of texts – which all arrived at the same time – and rang me umpteen times before the signal hitched a ride with a house martin.

It is 10.30. I have done all I can; she has the food and other needed items. The dogs have been fed, so they’re reasonably happy – they miss their mum. Doug is also injured, almost the last thing he did yesterday before finishing his last walk at Bradlaugh Fields was the cut one of pads on his foot, so he’s limping around like a sorry thing.

The removal men are due around 10am in the morning; the rate things are going, they’ll beat the wife here.

This will have a conclusion, eventually…

The Second Day

The wife arrived at 7.05am. She was a mess. Over 24 hours without any sleep and bags of AA-related fuck-wittery (seriously poor service). But she got here and safely. The car appears to have a faulty fan, but knowing that piece-of-shit-pretend-Fiat, it’s probably far more serious.

I got about two hours sleep, which was two hours more than she did, but frankly I was all about to confirm that this is indeed hell and we’re just being allowed to move to a new hellish location until the wife finally got here. The removal men arrived at 9.30 and left shortly before 2pm – they won’t get back tonight because it’ll take 9 hours and they only have 8 left on their allotment of time allowed to drive.

Day two could probably have been written off. After losing my jacket at the beach – I was so knackered I took it off and forgot to pick it back up. It was shit, but it had an inhaler in the pocket. It was purely down to being utterly frazzled. If that’s the worst thing that happens from now on then I’ll be happy.

We have no TV as well as no internet. There appears to be no aerial and nothing to plug into my Freeview box. My TV – a pre-future-proof Sony Bravia – won’t work without a signal, so I can’t even watch stuff on catch up or off the flash drive. We’ll have to get a local aerial engineer out; Roger is doing some RnD for me in Shoesville and SMSing the results… it is modern technology at its best.

I expect we’ll both sleep tonight; but, you never know.

The Third Day

Not the North Atlantic Oscillation album, but they are (essentially) Scottish...

The rain started at 5am. It is 6.30pm and it stopped for about an hour. Rain bothers neither of us, but the reaction of the dogs would have had a casual bystander thinking they went for walkies inside shopping malls.

Today was about beginning to sort out the house coupled with making notes about what needs doing or what needs putting on a list for doing over the next five months. There are, as you would imagine, things that need doing, things we maybe should have looked at with bigger, more observant eyes, but I doubt they would have crossed our minds had we looked at the place five times before buying it. It is still a considerably bigger and spacious house as we discover that even all of our storage items no longer need storage...

I got up at 8.30. I had had about 9 hours sleep and that was all I needed. I got on with sorting my kitchen out, then rearranging the sun lounge so it resembled a room rather than a sunny storage warehouse. By the time 11.30 rolled around and the wife had been asleep for 13 hours, I had moved onto understanding the simple fact that in Fullingdale we lived in a slightly cramped house; but here was have bigger rooms and more of them, so I expect it’ll echo for a few months until we fill it up.

We took the dogs to Garlieston – the closest useable beach – despite it chucking it down. We think they’re beginning to get the hang of this living here lark and while we didn’t have a long walk – I don’t think I’ve ever got so wet in such a short space of time – they were all bedraggled and knackered by the time we got home. This allowed us to pop into Newton Stewart to get a little bit of (microwavable) food and more fuel. We discovered Sainsbury’s has free wifi so spent half an hour desperately trying to understand the internet on my phone to find out where we can buy a cooker locally. That will be Stranraer, where we’re headed tomorrow. We’ve not been there for 19 years, it was of questionable social economic status last time round...

We also need to get an aerial installed – which I might have mentioned – and a plumber to tell us whether we’ve bought a house with naff bath taps.

The Fourth Day

“I understand the weather is going to be bad there tomorrow?” said Roger in a text message. This didn’t seem to correlate with what the forecast said, bearing in mind I’m using the BBC Weather app in a notoriously difficult spot to get it right [to be fair, that last sentence doesn’t really make a lot of sense; Roger saw the National forecast, I was using something tailored to my new post code, one would think the app would be more accurate...], I kind of reckoned we’d sit somewhere twixt the two.

The fact we did indeed sit somewhere between the two forecasts should make me happy, except the crazy juxtaposition between the rain and the sunshine was remarkable...

First off, I have never seen rain as wild and torrential for a long time. It was impressive and slightly scary at the same time. Secondly, when the sun came out, because it’s July, you could have been in the Med; but let me put some finer details to this because they could be important in the grand scheme of weather things to come.

We needed a cooker, something to stick in the ground, a bathroom cabinet and we ended up discovering something which, to be fair, is the only perplexing thing that has happened so far. The obvious destination was Stranraer, somewhere we haven’t been to in a long time (19 years). To cut a long story short, it’s changed and quite a bit. I enjoyed going there today and would have no problem going the 25 miles there at least once a month, to get stuff that our local supermarkets might not have – and there’s a spice shop and deli in the town which put to rest one of my culinary worries. Where we are isn’t and won’t ever be the arse end of nowhere.

We got a cooker from the shop we were told was the most expensive – it was the cheapest – and we got a better cooker, with free installation for £40 less than one inferior model and make from Argos. We kind of felt like we were on a roll and quickly got the rest of the shopping just as Stranraer Carnival started; it seems this weekend in particular is or has special relevance to Dumfries and Galloway’s more westerly regions.

This was all mission accomplished except something strange happened in McKenzie’s Electrical. We’d been served by a local chap, very helpful, quite dry and by now quite happy to discuss his life story with us, in a thoroughly entertaining way (even if he did have a strange comb-over-like haircut) and he was also someone who had been on holiday in Norfolk just the week before and feeling benevolent towards Sassenachs. While he was working out the delivery day of our new cooker, the wife says to me, “Right, that’s everything sorted; we’ve done the blah and we did the blah blah; I have to blah blah blah and we have the TV aerial man calling in on Monday.”
“Forgive me for asking, but who are you getting to do your aerial? I’m only being nosey because you are aware that Freeview is a little rubbish up here so you might not get much more than you’re already getting.”
“We have no aerial cable at all; just the remnants of a Sky box and we’re not having Sky.”
“Och, you’ll definitely need an aerial fitting. Tis a shame that Creeside Electrical, in Newton Stewart, shut down last year, the chap in the Isle of Whithorn is, if you’ll excuse me sounding rude, a complete bullshitter and he’s expensive..." [This was who we had coming]
“When you say a ‘complete bullshitter’” asks me, “What exactly does he bullshit about?”
“He’ll promise you 90 channels, you’ll get 20 – that’s all any of us get – he’ll charge you £150 for a £49 job and he’ll tell you that because of the high winds up here he can’t offer you a guarantee and that is also a load of rubbish.”
The wife looked at me and then said, “Do you know anyone else who can do it?”
“When do you need it for?”
“Whenever? The sooner the better, I suppose.” He mucked around on the keyboard/computer for a bit.
“I can have your cooker delivered on Thursday morning, he’ll make sure you’re the first call. He’ll also put you aerial in for you.” The wife looked at me slightly gone out.
“How much?”
“I told you, Forty-Nine poonds. I’ve also sent Carmichael at the Isle of Whithorn an email telling him you’ve cancelled his job with him; he’s used to me stealing his customers, he’s rubbish, he never complains and you get a five year guarantee with ours.” The wife got her debit card out again to pay the extra money, “Och, I’ll bill you, pay it in 14 days please.”

I had a strange feeling run through my body that I should be utterly incandescent at this man being so presumptuous and yet I was almost gurning with delight. What a star he was.

Then, as we left, the heavens opened and when a local says she hasn’t seen rain like it for years you have to believe her, especially as she was talking not to me but to a fellow local in a shop doorway.

It rained for 24 miles; almost non-stop monsoon like rain. The wife was bemoaning the Wigtown Food Festival’s bad luck with the weather when it stopped raining; almost immediately and, we discovered, it had only rained for 20 minutes and we’d been there for 10 of those minutes before we went to Stranraer. It was almost unearthly.

We got the dogs sorted and got back with the intention of looking around the stalls of the festival; unfortunately it shut up shop at 3pm and we didn’t get there until gone 3.10; we’re hoping it goes into a second day.

There were about 1000 people at the festival and the other events taking place, and even though I live here now, I felt very much the stranger.

The Fifth Day – holiday day.

It’s 0:55am. I’m not overly tired, but I have just yawned for the first time tonight. I don’t want to wish my life away, but I’m looking forward to 2018, because given that there was still pretty visible light in the sky at 10.50 tonight – over a month after midsummer – I expect to be able to read the paper at 11pm in June.

Today we’re having ‘holiday day’ and hopefully wandering around Day 2 of the food festival in the morning; Back Bay beach in the afternoon with the dogs and a bit of a picnic, then we’re going to drop into the Steampacket in the Isle of Whithorn before heading home for some interesting looking microwavable things we picked up in Sainsbury’s... All of which could well happen just like I described or might be full of wild and reckless abandonment; we’ll find out later.

The reality was almost exactly that. Except we didn’t go to the pub in the Isle of Whithorn, we instead decided to try the Bladnoch Inn, which we were reliably informed at the food marquee, now sells real, locally-brewed, ale; except, we didn’t go there either; mainly because we had washing on the line and it looked like rain was imminent.

So, I opted to do something unusual. I thought I’d go and see what the local town bar was like. I had a pint of Belhaven Best – a keg beer with all the charm of a pint of frothy water – in a pub that went out of its way to make me feel decidedly unwelcome, but that might have had to do with the fact that I’m English and was the only person in the pub NOT drinking Tenants Extra.

The food festival marquee was pretty awesome for something so small and compact; we bought beer, cheese and fudge – all you’ll ever need and tried some excellent veggie treats and some lovely people – one from Bedford, another from Portsmouth and one from Ascoli, in Italy. Wigtown is pretty cosmopolitan outside of its bar.

There is a place called the Craft Hotel, which appears to have a bar and a restaurant, but I can never work out when it’s open. It sells, I’m reliably informed, proper beer and is a little more welcoming. The lady from Sulwath brewery, who I bought six bottles of ale from and drank a bottle of Chocolate Stout tonight (not impressed, but I did finish it), told me of numerous pubs locally that sell their beer. I think I forgot most of them the way you forget directions, but the point is more and more now offer proper beer, so that’s a bonus.

Our evenings have been taken up with watching stuff via the computer. Better Call Saul season 3 has been the programme of choice this week and I expect all three seasons of Fargo will follow.

I fell asleep listening to the golf, possibly for two hours, but I reckon both of our body clocks are shot to pieces from the jet lag of moving from one country to another...

We’re going to have a semi-holiday day tomorrow. We need to speak to people about address changes etc; we need to get the Sedici booked into a garage – fucking piece of shit car – and I need to try and work out three more days of dinners without a cooker. The weather forecast is superb and I haven’t got fed up yet.

The Sixth Day

I got up a little after 8.30am after a good 8 hours; all this sea air, yomping about and sorting the house out is exhausting but I noticed today, despite the 25 degrees of heat from about 10am, that my breathing is getting better already. It might be my imagination, but using my medication less without feeling bad for it has to be a positive sign and if I die from some kind of COPD related attack then I don’t give a fuck because the views are spectacular and I’ve had five unbelievably happy days so far.

My health, as you know, is now important to me and what I didn’t tell you about was ‘our’ first night here (I’d obviously been here almost 24 hours longer) and the asthma/panic/anxiety/COPD attack I had as I was going to bed; it was scary because it was the first bad one I’d had since the cold I had earlier in the year and it happened here. I’m now beginning to wonder if it was a reaction to the amount of air available to my lungs...

Anyhow, today has been awesome. Almost wall-to-wall sunshine; temperatures in Wigtown as high as 25 and 21 on the coast – sea breezes you see. It has been brilliant. And we got so much done. We needed to tell people about the change of address, new circumstances etc and much of that had to be done today. While the wife sat in the car using Newton Stewart Sainsbury’s wifi, I found out where the vets was and registered the kids there; I popped into AB&A Mathews and finally put a face to the voice and name Jan, who had been the star for us by getting people to talk to each other, while we grew impatient and angry at the manãna attitude we saw, or thought we were seeing. Little did we know but that Spanish spirit of manãna still exists now we’re up here; there is almost a sense of ‘if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing some other time...’ as proven by the fact the garage has had my car since about 10am and I haven’t heard a dicky bird and it’s 7pm. They are less than 50 yards from my front door though, I can almost see my car if I crane my neck from the office window.

We went to the beach again, it’s becoming a habit.

A really great day proceeded to get better. We had dinner; another salad because we’ve run out of enough microwavable meals to feed us both intelligently (rhubarb with saag paneer doesn’t appeal to me), but it meant I only had to come up with one more makeshift meal before the cooker arrives because we had decided to go to a local Italian restaurant in Sorbie on Wednesday (the village where my great grandfather was born). However, that meal will wait because plans changed by the time 8pm rolled around...

I had been intending to try out the Bladnoch Inn for a couple of days, when I heard they now sold real ale that intention increased exponentially to urgency, because the Bladnoch is pretty much within walking distance. It is less than half the distance from my front door than it was to the Lamplighter in Northampton. While the wife was ironing a week’s worth of washing, I decided to go down the Bladnoch. However, before I did, we got our very first visitor! The police. They were looking for young Jack, the son of the former owner’s. More on this later.

One of my favourite bottled beers is called Bitter & Twisted, I discovered it, up here, many years ago and several of my Northampton chums will be familiar with it as it often appeared on supermarket shelves for a limited period. IT WAS ON DRAUGHT!!! How good was this day going to get?

Well... How about being served by said son of the former owners of our house?! Imagine his reaction when I discovered who he was and told him the Old Bill had just been round my house looking for him. Once he worked out what they might want he went about satiating my appetite for filling in blanks. He pretty much answered all of my queries and quibbles in a way that makes me feel optimistic about the future and he was a nice bloke.

Today has been a very good day J

And on the Seventh Day...

Nothing particularly exciting happened... I found out the car is going to cost in the region of £350 to fix – it’s the water pump and while that in itself is simple and relatively cheap, it’s the fact it’s hidden away from accessibility and half the fucking car needs removing to get at it has pushed the actual cost up because of the labour involved.

We discovered the Kilsture Forest, which is about three miles away and has nature trails and is extremely dog friendly; we also met two other couples, one from Derbyshire and the other from Berkshire; the irony wasn’t lost. I found my first mushrooms in Scotland, this season - nothing to get excited about.

The majority of the day has been working. The wife has been putting curtain poles up, while I decided that as the living room is so much bigger than we’ve ever been used to, I would utilise half of it to store all unnecessary boxes (ie: books, vinyl, CDs, boots, Christmas decos and all the other odds n sods), while freeing up the sun room (now a room not a warehouse) and clearing the rest of the unwanted boxes from our bedroom.

My next job is going to be starting to unravel my office. The problem I have is there isn’t much point until the Internet arrives and that isn’t for two more weeks; what I can do is set it up roughly how I want it, although, tbh, I haven’t got the inclination just yet, which is why I spent an hour today tidying up the top half of the garden – the gravelled and paved areas. I think it probably boils down to something odd given the current communications deficit – I’m enjoying not being on line (although I have managed to get my phone into Facebook for the occasional bon motte aimed at specific people) and it’s reawakened the urge in me to sort stuff out before I fart about with trivial bollocks.

A lot can’t be started because things like a cooker and TV aerials are due, so we need to know, specifically with the latter, how much cable we have to play with (woo... you can guess how exciting today has been compared to yesterday...) and where we’ll end up with the TV set up.

I did find my analogue radio so we’re now able to listen to something other than the BBC; radio reception is considerably better than O2 (apparently EE is the network to be on up here).

Anyhow, the wife looks fit to drop and I think the last week is beginning to affect her a little; mix all that stress with sea air, with lots of exercise and excitement (because she has been excited, bless her) and you have a recipe for sleep and lots of it. I ache like a bastard and my lower back and upper thighs are continuously grumbling at me, but my sleep patterns have readjusted as quickly as I expected them to. I have been bitten three times; once was last Wednesday when I took the dogs for a quick forest walk 35 miles east of Wigtown; the other two times were this afternoon at the woods. It proves one thing to me – the parks are going to be a no go area between April and August because of the midges.

Tonight we just assembled a bathroom cabinet; ate the last of the microwavable food (we’re going to the Bladnoch for dinner tomorrow) and slumped around the house. We finished the third season of Better Call Saul, which had one of the most understated and quite poignant finales and that was about it.

I’m amazed that it’s midnight already; I don’t feel as though I’ve been as busy today, despite evidence to the contrary. Anyhow, apparently tomorrow’s weather will start crappy and finish very nice, so I’m going to try and make some sense of the wife’s Sewing and Craft room in the morning. We decided today that we need to have a guest bedroom, purely and simply because we do. We have a kind of utility cum scullery cum converted shed on the side of the house; I think it was originally probably a pantry or where the original kitchen might have been; it’s difficult to tell because of its slight oddness. Anyhow, it is currently storing a lot of things that are not important enough to warrant being unpacked; we are slightly lighter on cupboard space and need to get some new additions – wardrobes - before we’ll be able to cope completely. The gut feeling I’m getting is that I may end up having to work from there because most of the wife’s gear won’t fit down the narrow corridor, which, I will tell you about at a later date when we’ve finally worked out how and why they did this specific thing...

The Eighth Day

It is quite possible that we underestimated the debilitating effects of the last few months because while we achieved more today we’re both beginning to feel like we need a holiday and the dogs are looking like they need more food and less exercise.

The wife concentrated on properly sorting out our bedroom, while I focused on her sewing room and putting some semblance of order into it. For me this required more lifting and shifting of boxes, which, to be honest, is getting easier every day and part of my attempting to keep busy in the absence of massively long walks around Bradlaugh Fields or Brackmills. The problem with dog walks at the moment is low tide is exactly when we don’t want to walk the dogs and that would be the time when I would be looking at covering a lot of ground for the exercise value. I sound like a fitness freak, but the truth is I have to exercise, I enjoy it but it’s important I do it for my COPD and, for once, a ‘medicine’ I approve of.

We had a pub grub meal at the local tonight; nothing to get excited about, but it was cheap and filling. Timothy Taylor on draught and the chips were more than adequate.

I met one of our only neighbours today. I discovered the other day that no one has lived at #5 for over 15 years; it is kept up to standards and acts as someone’s pension, apparently. So, that leaves the people in the unusual bakery conversion on our left hand side. I met the lady half and very nice she seemed to. It seems she, like me, has spent time working with ‘excluded’ kids.

And this is where this ‘diary’ has to start taking on a less ‘daily’ feel and focus on events and interesting things; I can only talk about dull, everyday, shite for so long before I start wasting my own time, let alone anyone else’s. The rest of the week involves another trip to Stranraer; more shopping; an aerial and cooker being fitted and my menu planning. We might change the dog walk time after the weekend and we’re going to pick up the local papers (there’s two of them) to see what jobs are advertised locally. The thing is, I have to start thinking about this as normal life, as I did in Northampton. This might be a diary of a new adventure, someplace different, but I am 55, sometimes the highlight of my day is a decent beer or a satisfying shit.

I’m sure there will addendums to this until we finally get on line, but despite enjoying doing this, the daily dairy thing stops, as of now.

The Next Day...

We have TV and a cooker. We ate our first home-cooked curry tonight and we’re settling down to watch shit on TV. Life is returning to normal...

The Next Week

As we settle into life here a little more, we’ve attempted to assimilate ourselves while getting the house in order. The big thing is what we thought was a cluttered house in Shoesville is dwarfed by the amount of room we have here, yet there are some things we had more of, so it’s a weird juxtaposition for me to have all the cupboard space I need coupled with only two – not four – drawers for things like cutlery and packaging.

We’ve also become acutely aware of what a bunch of lazy and bohemian people the previous owners were. Yes, some of the things in this house are quirks of its 1860s build date, other things like floors like bouncy castles and all but one of the doors not fitting or looking like they have been cut using a spoon and some dynamite are hilariously frustrating; we knew we had stuff to do, it’s just we didn’t expect things like a toilet door made out of bits of Balsa wood and hope, with no lock and a teenage girl having lived here prior to us or the small (3.5 feet) corridor between the kitchen and utility room which is about 2½ feet wide as you leave the kitchen and is 4¼ inches narrower at the utility room end... I call it the drunken corridor, as in someone came home drunk and figured they could do it themselves and wouldn’t need an expert. Again, it is humorous rather than annoying and fat people would struggle to get access.

Some of the painting looks like it was done by Stevie Wonder on drugs and leaves me shaking my head in bewilderment how people can live in a house with woodchip wallpaper on the ceilings and patching up rendered by Godzilla. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a massive problem, every house you move into has to eventually take on your own mark, it’s just the people we’ve bought this house from might have got the word ‘mark’ confused with ‘skidmark’. It’s the ill-fitting doors and unattached skirting boards that have made my mind boggle...

We’ve discovered that the place is running alive with adders (that’s a viper for all you snake-o-philes), or so we’re told. Apparently they hang out in the long grass between the fields and the beaches; this has made me a little paranoid. Doug found two fallow deer and two ticks. The deer got away (somehow), the ticks didn’t.

There appears to be an odd trait among the older locals; they seem to be more doom-laden than my late mother-in-law. They open their mouths and its all cancer this, funeral that, heart attack here, burned down house there. I know most old people are as miserable as fuck and can’t see it, but you’d think they’d have something to be cheerful about living in such a picturesque and accessible place?

If you were told that the wife and I would go out on a Saturday night to listen to a ska-influenced covers duo in the pub just round the corner, a lot of you would probably guffaw, snort some form of liquid down their noses and suggest madness. Well, that’s exactly what we did on Saturday night; we stood (for most of the evening) in the Craft Bar (which is 140 paces from my front door) drinking heavily hopped beer and cloudy cider while simultaneously adding to the local economy because they were getting a tenner more than they would have got a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t really our thing, but it will probably become something we’ll enjoy because the people were welcoming, even if one of the staff seemed to understand I’d be empathic to her long working day – which I was.

We also met Ian and Cheryl, originally from Bedford, who moved up here 16 months ago and have no doubt that was the best decision they have ever made and we probably agree with them. There are going to be niggles wherever you move or whatever you do, the fact that ours are fairly trivial only add to the general agreement that this is the best thing we’ve ever done together.

The Wigtown Show and Beyond...

We had our first bad moment. It was partly our fault, but equally it was really down to piss poor communication. We attended our first and Wigtown’s 207^th town show. It was an enjoyable experience full of things I’ve never really had any interest or understanding of – livestock and farming. It also had local food companies, arts and craft businesses and locals doing stuff to make a shilling or two. It cost a fair bit to get in and we spent far too much money (we’ve spent far too much money all week) on mainly frivolous stuff, but you have to add to the local economy, if you can.

The weather had been threatening all morning; we took the free bus down to the showground and from 10.00 to well after midday there was barely a speck of rain, the sun tried to come out and the forecast, yet again, looked more like guess work than reality. However, a little after 12.30pm, the rain came; for ten minutes and it stopped. There were slightly optimistic looks to the sky and for twenty minutes I think we all thought the weathermen had got it wrong again. Then, just as we bought coffees and donuts, it started again. Not a lot, but the sky had gone from reasonably benign to something a lot angrier than you wanted to see.

I managed to break the umbrella – it was cheap shite – just as it started to go from bitty to consistent. We made it back to the art and craft marquee just as the heavens unleashed watery hell. We were informed by a steward that the free bus would be at the gate for 1.30, so at 1.10 we made our way, through the rain, to the exit. 1.30 came and we’d been standing in torrential rain for ten minutes, more and more people arrived and 15 minutes later the bus still hadn’t arrived and most of us were on our way to be drenched. The wife and I decided when the man at the gate said the bus wouldn’t be there until about 2.05 that we’d walk the 1 mile to our house. It was 1.47pm.

The local garden centre was next door to the showground when the bus passed us. I attempted to flag it down – because you can do that here – but we were ignored. We got home a little after 2.00pm, both of us utterly drenched; so wet you would have thought we’d swam home. I wasn’t happy, but shitting and stamping in it was a Northampton thing, so I peeled my wet clothes off, dried myself down and changed into warm dry ones and had a chuckle about the inconvenience and the utter cunt driving the bus.

I’ve probably mentioned this elsewhere but we’re both exhausted by the sea air and the fact that we’re probably doing more than we did in Northampton. I don’t think I’ve been walking as much, mainly because the woods and beaches allow the dogs to take off and have a laugh while we take it easier than usual… Well, I do. The wife really needs to get herself a little more fit; she’s acknowledged she’s getting more exercise than she probably has had, apart from Scottish holidays, in 32 years. As a result she’s discovering bits of her that have never ached before and other bits that aren’t agreeing with her in any way and steadfastly refusing to do as she thinks. I have to say that having now got the house to about 75% a home, the strain is beginning to show and so are the slightly toned muscles. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again – I have an incurable disease and I feel better than I have in 10 years (not being around friends with drugs also helps, if I want to be brutally honest, even if I miss them and maybe even the people... bwah-ha-ha)

One of the things that takes the edge off the tiredness are the birds. We live near natural wetlands, but the garden has everything from, what seems like a million sparrows, to yer average starlings, massive great thrushes, at least one woodpecker, fit-looking pigeons that fly proper, like, and house martins – hundreds of them, squeaking, chirping, squeeing and sounding like Paul Oakenfield on masses of hallucinogenic drugs through a synthesiser – it’s a mad sound amplified because it’s coming from the BT building over the road (the BT building that will eventually tie us into the internet, but not just yet, eh?) and also our own eaves.

The harriers are in abundance up here as are gulls, because of our proximity to the sea, but there are also the occasional skewers and something large that the gulls didn’t like that I’m trying to identify.

We have also discovered that the previous owners were unbelievably lazy; so lazy I’m amazed they lived to be in their 40s with four children. Some of the decoration in this house is the work of Ray Charles’ Painters & Decimators and some of the building work, while not likely to cost us a lot, has ‘drunken Saturday night fucking about’ writ large. I’m amazed these people – the former owners - are real... [And I know I've talked about this already, but it's worth repeating, differently]

We also discovered Rigg Bay today. It had been recommended by sis-in-law Jenny six years ago, but for some reason we never went there in all our visits here because we didn’t know how to find it. We found it. We’ll never forget how to get there; it will become our new Bradlaugh Fields even if it’s 8 miles away rather than 1. Some of the original Mulberry Harbour, erected for the D-Day landing practice, is still there and you should Google it and look at the images; it’s pretty stupendous and is just another reason why this is a great life decision.

The First Bad Day

It's funny, but the last three weeks have been an almost perfect period of time - no stress, no anger, none of the things that threatened to drive us to an early grave in Shoesville...

Today, modern technology re-arrived in our lives and with it came headaches, frustration, anger, and tension. We finally had the phone and broadband switched on at 11.20pm. The box that does all the stuff is plugged into a phone socket by the fridge, the other one - socket - is in our bedroom - neither socket is anywhere near my office, so we have an engineer coming tomorrow to put a socket in my office under the pretense that none of our existing sockets are working or are broken.

To add to the headache, my PC is having driver problems and keeps crashing because of some video fault, so even if I could use it to connect to the internet to retrieve things I can't access on my laptop or phone, it would crash before I could see it; so we need an engineer to come and look at my PC to fix that (or condemn it). I've never used my laptop to access my Yahoo email account, I can't remember my password and because I can't access my PC I can't send an email to my recovery account because that is on my old Virgin Media account and that has probably been shut down. The secondary recovery account is an old Borderline email, so after 20 odd years I may have lost my Yahoo account and every single bit of important or unimportant email sent since 1996.

BT is also claiming they have sent further details to the wife's email account... Two points: 1) she didn't give them an email address when she signed up. 2) How were we supposed to get the email when we don't know where to find it or access it, especially if they've randomly assigned us one.

And to add insult – my phone has been acting like a sulky teenager all day – to injury – I feel like shit; I have a headache and for the first time since we got here I’ve felt like I was back in Northampton and raging at the futility of raging at anything. That's what modern technology does to you.

Today, while best part of England waded through water and wondered where summer had gone, we had another sunny and warm day. People will start to hate me, even more...

The Great Wigtown Adventure

Monday 14 August 2017

The Wigtown Diaries Part 2 - the Drawbacks

Wednesday 9 August 2017

The Wigtown Diaries Part One

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