Last weekend it was exactly one year to the moment we first
set foot in this house.
The fact we drove to this part of Scotland with six houses
to see at all, of which this one was firmly the least likely house to be
bought, is something I still find
weirdly surreal. A year ago, I doubt there were many people who thought we’d
ever move – I even suspected, for a while, that it was an unattainable desire,
mainly because my mantra for the later part of the 2010s has been: This is Hell
and We Can’t Leave.
Seven months after moving here, I do feel like a different
person. I get compliments from England about smiling – this can only be
positive.
The best person to ask if I’ve changed would be Luan – aka
Mammary Lass – who recently spent a week with us both up here and seemed to
genuinely enjoy herself, despite it being January and much of what I would have
liked her to see was obscured by clouds, lots of clouds… However, she’d never
admit to me improving at anything other than getting ugly, so maybe you don’t
ask her and just take my word for it.
A weird thing happened in the local pub recently; I had a
disagreement with someone over something – the EU – and instead of having that
prickly, uncomfortable feeling for most of the rest of the evening, I spent
five minutes realising and then wondering why I wasn’t feeling all prickly
towards the person I was having a disagreement with. I concluded it was a
combination of two things; it wasn’t really anything big enough to throw my
shit out of the pram and this place simply chills you out to the point where
being laid back is almost a gymnastic discipline, man.
Anyhow, one of the reasons I moved was to lower my blood
pressure and therefore prolong my life. This is achieved
by not allowing my old self to reappear and the only things in recent weeks
that have raised it have been ‘real world’ shit. We were without the internet
for a week and discovered that being isolated means diddly to major
corporations, even if you live within spitting distance of their exchange
building. Once, I would have sat here regaling you with tales of lazy
engineers, surreptitious drug-taking and the wanton waste of resources I have
witnessed since my office looked over the building, but, you know, I can’t be
arsed.
A ‘coincidental’ thing started happening shortly after
texting BT on their SMS service. I’ve been inundated with spam; text messages
and phone calls from people either wanting to sell me stuff or gamble my money
away. I had managed to pretty much avoid all unwanted mobile attention for a couple
of years, either by using a call blocker or by registering with the telephone
barring service thing and ... I don’t know... You send a text to BT, you get an
announcement up saying it will change the way your charging details are – or
something like that – and the next day and for the last seven, I’ve been
getting three calls and five texts a day from unwanted, bogus or simply dodgy
places. I wonder if other people have had anything like this happen to them or
if I just notice it more because I never got any before this.
On a more positive note: the wife has got herself a little
part time job, one she will be starting next week and working from home. It’ll
be good for her to do something new and different. The potential for me to be
forced into doing something practical will be there immediately, mainly because
she needs to buy herself a new computer – a laptop – and until we make the
decision on which one best suits what she’ll be doing, she’ll be taking over my
office for 15 hours a week.
Now, as I’ve alluded to elsewhere, the wife had a crappy
Christmas and I have spent most of 2018 hobbling about with another horrendously
bad back – caused, I’ve no doubt, by the fact I’ve become a fat bastard since I
moved here. I’m in one of those Catch-22 situations, by which I need to lose
weight and I also need to do more exercise, but all the associated aches and
pains that develop when you have a bad back have been in control, so doing the
latter to help the former hasn’t been as successful as I would have hoped. I
have made a start and begun to push myself again – but watching me wheeze and
struggle for breath after walking up a small hillock must be a mixture of
painful and hilarious for my new mate Ian, who I’ve started a weekly walk with.
I’ll feel better if (or maybe even, when) I can wear shorts
again.
One of my projects that I will, hopefully, begin while the
wife is using my newly redecorated office, is trying to solve the problem of
the severely flooding garden – I think this is a good way to get some exercise.
Based on photos from 2014 and from our visit here in 2017, I
think it would be fair to say that we’ve had a lot of rain down since August,
maybe much worse than other years – one dog-walking friend at Garlieston
suggested (maybe jokingly) that the weather has been awful since we moved
here... Locals claim it has never quite been as wet as it has for the last six
months and I’ve mentioned elsewhere how determined
the rain up here appears to be, this has been proved by the simple fact that
the new roof on the shed is leaking and it appears to be through sheer volume
rather than any fault in the re-felting. The wind doesn’t help – literally and
metaphorically.
Anyhow, we have this, possibly slightly forlorn, idea that
by digging a big fuck off hole in the middle of the lawn, about four or five
feet deep, filling it up with the gravel that currently passes as part of our patio
area and then filling the last part with massive great oyster shells which are
littered all over the beach (you mustn’t take the stones). The hole full of
gravel and shells will act as both a soak away and an ornamental pond that
rises and falls depending on the water table. I’m not convinced it will solve
the problem, but as it is the first and most logical course of action, I need
to be able to dig a small grave and therefore giving me a physical project
which, coupled with more walking, should help me get my weight down.
If that solves it (and as I said, I’m not overly confident),
I will then have the best part of early spring to get the neglected parts of
the garden sorted and the next stage of my project going. Using the soil from
the big hole, I intend to build up the two raised beds to a level where I feel
they can be used to grow salads and vegetables. At the rear of the garden,
where it doesn’t get quite as pond-like, I’m going to get my mate Frazer round
to cut down the leylandii and put a proper fence at the bottom of the garden.
In front of this fence will be a staging area with a 12’ x 6’ greenhouse –
which will give us a total of three areas down the garden for growing veg; all provided
the soak away does its job. This is MacMonty MacDon reporting from Gardening
Scotland... Film at 11.
The garden project is just the tip of the iceberg, so to
speak. I am as I said I’m getting back into some walking; I’m going to edit my
book – which isn’t physical, but will stimulate my befuddled brain – and I’m
going to take up Tai Chi and look for a genuine way of earning money while
keeping myself amused. The first part of the year has been a write off; I’m
facing the impending spring with a crazy little thing called optimism.
I'm sure there was something else...
