Anniversary Waltz

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...