March News

Melodramatic. That's the word I've been looking for. That book I mentioned in January (I was still reading it early in March, and finding it hard going) strikes me as melodramatic. I wonder if that's why I wasn't really enjoying it. There are occasional nice bits, usually about people outside the author's immediate circle. Perhaps there is less scope for melodrama and pretentious attention-seeking when it's about someone else. Trouble is, I was just nearing the end of April in this author's year of do-goodery and I wasn't sure I wanted to be bothered with the remaining two thirds. Sorry, Judith. You said my first criticism was strong. I expect this is even worse.

So then I pulled out Four Seasons North by Billie Wright, and I started enjoying that straight away. There's a simplicity about it and about the descriptions she gives. And what she and Sam do in their daily lives in the Arctic is interesting in its own right without any need for pretentiousness or melodrama – such as the account of how they mark out a landing strip on the frozen lake by chipping small holes into the ice, inserting branches of spruce into each one, and watching the water freeze again within minutes to hold the fronds upright. "To arctic pilots it can only mean a safe landing strip, and that, in all these endless miles of isolated wilds, someone lives here at Koviashuvik."

This kind of calm description of hard work in a place where only human ingenuity stands between dying and living for another day (and I haven't even mentioned the grizzlies yet), puts into a ridiculous perspective flapping about whether ordinary everyday being decent to other human beings 'counts' as good or not. The stripping away of fuss when dealing with problems that most of us will never encounter is, to me, impressive, and it makes for good reading.

A week after the arrowless Glenlivet Escapade, we had our own frostbite shoot in the garden. In temperatures close to freezing and with snow flurries carried on an easterly wind, we practised at twenty-five metres for an indoor tournament, a FITA 25, the following weekend. Being the only Lady Barebow, I won the gold medal! I did have a higher score than the other two barebow archers, who happened to be male.

Mr Toad has got himself a new bike, by accident. The Toadlet has grown out of the bike she had but is not yet quite tall enough for an adult-sized frame. So I suppose the online seller of the new bike must have got his size chart wrong. Hey ho! Mr Toad always hated his current bike anyhow. The new one is a touring/off road hybrid (No! No! interposes Mr Toad: a hybrid is different; this is a cyclo-cross. Righto, says I) as there are some nice off road tracks near us. So the Toadlet needs to be taken to a bike shop to 'try a bike on' in the... er... usual way to get one to fit ;-)

The first half of March was remarkably dry for western Scotland. Spring often is the driest time of year. The pond level fell substantially and is still low at the end of the month as I write. My top count of frogs was twenty-four and the piles of frogspawn grew larger by the day. Then I saw a heron in the pond. The spawn is still there but I didn't seen any frogs for a few days, so assumed that they'd either skidaddled or got recycled into heron. Then I counted twelve frogs and the heron carried on visiting;  sometimes I saw it jabbing away at the bank of the pond. It could have been eating frogspawn, but the jabbing wasn't really where the spawn was, so I wondered if it was trying to dig frogs out of the mud, or other delicious morsels. Comments from heron experts welcome!

We are growing mushrooms in a cardboard box in the living room. Apparently they were supposed to be in an environment whose temperature didn't vary out of the range 17–25º C. We're not sure we achieved that. Sometimes the room may well have been below 17º, especially at night. Never above 25º – no danger of that! Then Mr Toad moved the box, still unopened, to the wash-house, where it definitely goes below 17º, probably every single day. The baby mushrooms were not to be given too much of a shock. Now it is back in the sitting-room, opened, and  some white mouldy-looking stuff is visible. I'm always coming across fungi in the garden but the only time I've seen similar mouldy-looking stuff is in my wormery. The worms died.

My food experiments this month have included an apricot and poppy seed wreath (and ground walnuts, but don't tell Mr T; he doesn't like walnuts 'as walnuts' but he liked the bread) to be eaten with baked Camembert cheese. Utterly scrumptious! Great party food as a change from standard fondue.

The next experiment was chucking an apple into some lentil soup I was making. Each batch is different because, other than using the same basic stock – made from boiling some water in the Le Creuset casserole dish in which I oven-cook sausages, initially done to get the sticky meat juices off the pan, but then I thought "why waste it?" – and some lentils and onions, what else goes in depends on what is kicking around in the fridge that needs using up. I found three-quarters of a peeled apple wrapped in cling film, so I chopped it up and chucked it in the soup along with some carrots, some celery, and some mushrooms. Good soup, and you wouldn't know there was apple in it unless I told you.

Howie's quilt. Took a lot longer than anticipated because I got carried away with the quilting on the turquoise, which I drew on freehand. 

Now working on a seaside quilt for Manny and a scrap-patchwork Thing for a friend. She can use it as a table runner or a wall-hanging. Picture when finished!

Hope this idea to clean plastic off the oceans works:

http://www.psfk.com/2013/03/ocean-clean-up-plastic.html

PGL Dalguise

Little She Bear and I took eighteen Cubs and Scouts (8-12 year olds) to PGL Dalguise for an adventure weekend. We did the same thing last year at the same time, the third weekend in March. Last year we had beautiful, warm, spring weather. This year we had beautiful, cold, spring weather, with snow and biting winds. So what's new? British weather as usual. We were glad of the underfloor heating in the lodgings though!

The first evening, after supper, we played ambush in the forest. Some kids are not good at keeping still and quiet. ;-)

Next day, Saturday, we all went on a forest hike with stories. It was great. The PGL leaders used local myths and stories and told them with wonderful relish and encouraged the kids to act out some of the drama. I loved the story about Timotei – a love story between Tim and Otei. She fell into a stream of freezing water. This is not what Wiki will tell you!
       Unfortunately I had to take a scout – Toadlet as it happens – back to the lodge so that we could thaw out her feet. The snow boots had been forgotten and the feet were suffering in trainers. The tepid water, cool to my hand, that I told her to put her feet in felt hot to her and the warm-up was painful. When life was restored to the feet, I tucked her into my duvet with handwarmers – well, footwarmers.

Spanish Chestnut in the forest of larch and firs

Some more of the Spanish Chestnut

The icy stream in which Otei washed her hair!

Winter larches

In the afternoon we divided into two groups, and while one group did a challenge course, the other did quad biking. Then we swapped. Everybody got to do everything and everybody got cold.


Sunday saw us wrapping up warm again. Well, some of us did, and some had to be led back to the lodge and told to put on three more layers. We did a sensory trail with a chap whom the kids called Shaggy after the character in Scooby Doo. They were fascinated by his size thirteen boots. We all had a go on the giant swing and the zip wire, and we tried, while shivering, to learn how to survive in the wild. While the survival instructor was talking, I saw a red squirrel – my first sighting – just a little uphill in the forest from where we were.

The Cubs and Scouts did really well in challenging conditions. The hardest thing for me is being kept up past my usual bedtime by romping, chomping kids!

Driving home on Sunday evening, Toad, who had come back for us in the Rattletrap, said he had nearly run over an otter at Mussel Kate's Brae when driving home from delivering Toadlet and me to Dalguise on the Friday. Mussel Kate's Brae is a wee hill in The Road a mile or so north of the Boggy Brae. Kate lived in an upturned boat on the slope not far above the high tide mark, selling mussels that she collected from the loch. He had also spotted a merlin in Glen Fruin on his way to archery practice on Saturday.

Spring snows

Another snow dump is forecast for Scotland for tomorrow, with gale force chilly gusts. No wonder the daffodils are taking their time flowering. But Mr Toad reminds me that back in 2005, the heaviest snowfall in Milngavie (that's Millguy, with the stress on guy, to non-Scots) was in April! It melted pretty fast that time, but we are further west now and the hills across the loch are still white. Definitely a cold March, this one.

The view from my bedroom for most of March. Sometimes whiter.

Ancient Hush

As we stood in the ancient pine forest near the RSPB Osprey Observation Lodge by Loch Garten, I said to Toad and Toadlet: "Listen."

They listened and then said: "What?"

They expected to hear something. We don't listen very often to silence. Most people never get a chance. I can go days, weeks, months even, without ever feeling the need to listen to a radio or a TV (not that we have the latter), or any other kind of manufactured sound. Even if it is good sound, like wonderful music, I can – indeed I want to – live without it most of the time. The apparently common practice of wanting background noise all day long from a radio or TV, or one's iPod, not only leaves me cold, but actually terrifies me. I'd go bonkers if it was imposed on me. When  I go to a concert, I go to listen intently; however good a recording, it's never the same as 'live'. Concentration is high and exhausting, but 'what I get' from the music is immeasurable.  Having other things going on at the same time as listening, or having to work and concentrate on something else at the same time, would be trying in the extreme.

A background of natural noises – of wind or sea or stream, of birds – is entirely different. I can live with that, and do as much as possible. Most of the time, I regard my sensitivity to noise as rather strange – unusual at any rate – mainly, I think, because that's how other people seem to view it. (Don't worry; I don't mind being found odd).

This all came to mind this morning as a result of two things. For the first time this year, I noticed the sun's rays slanting from 20° south of east into our front room. The daymark for this is a sycamore tree in the copse in the field by the eastern corner of our garden. Sunshine getting into our north-east facing room is always a welcome sign of spring. Today the rays got as far as a third of the way along the north-west wall. By midsummer, the early sun (when there is any!) will shine straight into the room as the sun rises over the hills on the far side of the loch. As the day progresses, it slopes off to shine on the more southerly aspects of the house, as you would expect. I do love its early morning appearances in the north-east room though.

The second thing was a passage I read in Billie Wright's book Four Season's North which I'm thoroughly enjoying:

The day is bright and sparkling, deep-shadowed in the thickset woods, sun-slanted where the trees stand apart. As in all forests in all seasons, there is an ancient hush here, too, a great stillness deepened more by the snow cover blanketing the forest tundra, subduing the voice while exciting the imagination. These moments of connectedness with what we know as the primeval are so very rare today as to be unknown to many. (p.57 in my version, ISBN 0-87156-555-2).

The Glenlivet Escapade

The story of our expedition to the traditional archery contest, the Glenlivet Frostbite Quaich, which I put my name down for at the turn of the year, is going to be essentially a story of incompetence. It was one of those times when my withitness was not working full throttle, shall we say.
          The journey on Saturday started well except that I forgot my waterproof trousers (minus one point). Ah well, the weather was dry at least, if cold. I could always wear the jogging pants under my baggy cords for warmth, a la Roger in Swallows and Amazons. We tested what The Crianlarich Hotel had to offer in the way of coffee and snacks and gave them full marks (+four points) for the shortbread (me), the flapjack (Mr Toad), and the white chocolate fudge (Toadlet). Also for the coffee. Onward! We trundled through Killin and alongside Loch Tay. We spoke of the Tilt tilting into the Tummel and the Tummel tum(b)ling into the Tay, and made our way to Aviemore where we were booked into the youth hostel for the night.
          Except for a bunch of ski-ing Hullabaloos in the room next to us (there were three of them but they sounded like six: –three points. I hope you're keeping the tally!), the YH clientele were interesting and chatty about their proposed walks for the next day. I don't recall hearing any Scottish accents though. I did ask the Hullabaloos (young men old enough to know better) to quieten down or go along to the common room if they wanted to be noisy when other people wanted to sleep in the "Quiet Zone", but my polite request was not very successful. Next time, if there ever is one, I'm doing the ferocious granny/bellowing Akela act. Growl! I noticed they kept their heads down when I passed them in the corridors next morning though. Perhaps there's hope for them to become civilised yet.
          So, Sunday morning we headed out coffeewards again. I had brought some coffee bags that I found at home lurking in a cupboard, only to discover that they were decaffeinated no bloody use and too bitter for our taste anyway, so I wrote on the lid: "Decaffeintated. Blergh! Help yourself" and left them on one of the YH kitchen worktops. They vanished pronto. Freecycling at its best. We had teabags too but although there's supposed to be a similar amount of caffeine somehow it never seems like that. Strange really, when I went nearly twenty-five of my adult years without drinking coffee and being addicted to tea. Apparently it's for the caffeine that people drink Diet Coke. Funny animals, humans. Do other animals do drugs like us? It wouldn't surprise me. Blackbirds certainly loved the gin-laced sloes I chucked on the compost heap once!

          We set off in search of the public hall at Glenlivet. I'd printed directions. What could go wrong? This is where you start laughing at my incompetence. To begin with, I'd taken the event venue address from the 2012 contestant application form instead of the 2013 one (-1 point). The 2013 one, though supposedly a pdf, wouldn't open (I think I can have +1 for that). Well, that should have been okay because the organiser emailed me the correct address twice. But, oh dear, I'd got the googlemaps directions to the wrong one (-2). When young men who didn't look like archers (you can tell!) started arriving at the venue where we were, we began to suspect something. When they started putting football boots on, we began to wonder. Mr Toad spoke to them. They thought perhaps we could shoot arrows alongside their football game. "You might have to duck a lot," said Mr T. Unfortunately, what I had not done is print the email with the correct address (-1. Seriously negative now!). We could have headed to Aberlour in search of the place but we would have been late for the event registration by then. I felt a Right Charlie! All that way and no archery event! Mr Toad and I have now both managed to miss an outdoor archery tournament: him in February by mistaking the date, me in March by mistaking the venue. I'm not keeping the score any more; you get the drift!

          We photographed a mangelwurzle slicer outside Glenlivet Public Hall. At the time we didn't know what it was but some people in Norfolk know about such things and told us. Thank you, Norfolks!

Mangel slicer

We went back along the road to the old packhorse bridge over the Livet.

The Toadlet on the Livet packhorse bridge

It used to have three arches but the farthest one was destroyed by floods in 1829. Toadlet and I explored it and inspected it by going on it and then read the notice asking people not to.

Oops!

We went to Loch Garten in search of ospreys. They don't arrive until late March. So we went to Loch Morlich to eat our picnic. A piercing, perishing wind was blowing straight across the loch off the snowy peaks to just where we were sitting.

Loch Morlich 3 March 2013

Looking south across Loch Morlich

Toadlet shouted Home! so home we headed — by the dead end diversion route as it happens. You guessed it – I was driving. Toadlet had faith in the iPhone satnav app that we wise old ones didn't have. On the plus side we saw some parts of Scotland that are very different from the part where we live – more rounded mountains for a start; Rannoch Station at the dead end – and which we probably wouldn't have chosen to explore except by accident. Bonny country but not where we wanted to go. Once we got off the winding roads Mr Toad took over the driving (he drives faster than I do so my driving is better for preventing car sickness on the windy bits (that's wyndy, not windy)) and we sped back along the north side of Loch Tay, once again in known territory, and so, eventually, home to the Boggy Brae.

Toadlet mentioned maths homework. We said Oh, pish! tell the teacher some wild goose chase story about having to accompany us to Speyside for an archery contest that didn't happen, and if s/he suggests you should have taken your homework to the youth hostel you can mention the Hullabaloo skiers, and then all about being driven along the north side of Loch Rannoch instead of Loch Tay, and having to trundle around the base of Schiehallion to get back on route, and the wild goose chase thus taking much longer than expected.
We think she did the homework on the school bus on Monday morning, which is probably what she would have done anyway.