Freeing violets

 It has been a pleasant afternoon with no rain and a lessened wind force. I have been freeing violets from the oppression of tough grasses and a cotoneaster. The violets seeded themselves into the cracks and crevices of the steps leading up to the shed. This year they did not flower very well.









Happily, this afternoon, I discovered that they had been spreading themselves near young ferns and under the cotoneaster to the side of the steps. Perhaps there were more flowers than I realised, or perhaps the few flowers I saw were champion seed pingers. Whichever it was, I'm hoping for a violetty spring.



Before I came in for tea and biscuits I looked for daffodil and snowdrop leaves poking out of the ground. I usually see some during December but not this year.

Boggy Brae banana walnut bread

Yesterday I made some banana and walnut tea loaves in my maternal grandma's old bread tins. They have interesting bottoms: an extra piece of metal has been added that stands away from the from the bottom of the tin and has air holes. I'm presuming this was to prevent the bottoms of loaves from burning.

bread tin bottom

Although I make a chocolate banana cake quite often and have its recipe in my head, I wondered if tea bread with nuts would have any particular requirements. My recipe tin is often more productive than recipe books, or even searching online, so I had a rummage. The tin is full of recipes I've written down, that other people have written down for me, and that I've cut off food packets and boxes. It provided a banana bread recipe from an Oxford friend and something off a packet of something — walnuts perhaps.

The actual ingredients and quantities I used were as follows:

4oz butter
4oz soft brown sugar
one and a half oz golden syrup (I have a very handy weighing spoon for awkard stuff like syrup; see pic below)

Melt those ingredients in a pan, then add:

4oz chopped walnuts
4 mashed bananas
2 eggs
9oz wholemeal self-raising flour
heaped teaspoon of baking powder

Bake at 350ºF/180ºC till done (I turned the tins around after 20 minutes and left them another 15. I think! In short, cook till a skewer comes out clean from the middle of the loaves).

Handy weighing spoon. Goes up to 200g
depending what you're weighing and whether it will fit!

Updating my photos on the iMac, it seems I took an accidental selfie while I was making banana walnut bread, and that I was having fun.

Cycling on Great Cumbrae

Went full Norwegian today to Largs and then onto Great Cumbrae again for a bike ride. Lovely cold day but four layers of clothing and three on my head meant I was toasty. We went up one of the inner island roads (there are two) and the bikes and we got a bit clarty coming down to the ferry slip because the road was muddy after some hedging activity. I'm still in shock cos Toad not only washed the car when we got home but the bikes as well!! Shoulda seen him with the pressure washer! Is washing bikes even a thing? Anyway, it's fine by me for someone else to keep my bike all shiny.

Third pic is what we decided is Cumbrae's swimming pool. 

Arran (pic 4) stayed cloud topped but pretty all day.

Mellow yellow sallow

Looking up from my holly lopping the other day I was struck by the beauty of yellowing sallow leaves. Sallow can be a bit of a nuisance in a garden and it's not very good for firewood so I try to keep it in some kind of check. If the spreading branches of this plant come any lower (see pic below) I'll probably lop them. I've removed some already, those that I bumped my head against once too often.

Left to itself I think a good deal of Boggy Brae, especially the lowest, boggiest parts, would probably become sallow carr. Where my childhood family first lived on the Fylde was willow carr, called Oldfield Carr. I didn't appreciate the name's meaning at the time but thinking back I do remember some huge willows that we climbed and, where big branches looped low and up again, they were our rocking horses.

For those who are new to the Boggy Brae garden, the thing with the white rubble sack over it is an archery target boss. The bit of shed to the left is the old goose house, now being used as a small woodshed. Up near the top right corner those familiar with the Sentinel Tree that lives up the hill may be able to make out its photobombing antics.

The holly lopping mentioned above was to give a young oak more space and light. It has survived, with a little help from chicken wire judiciously applied, having its young bark nibbled by roe deer so now I reckon it's raring to go. There are several other self-planted tiny oak trees in the garden too—two years ago was a rich oak mast year. I'm willing them on where there's space for them but have had to pull out a couple of dozen that sowed themselves too near the house.

A line of golden setae

The sun was sinking as the smoke from my small bonfire drifted up the garden and its rays shone through the  bright setae of the moss growing on the trunk of the fallen wild cherry tree.

It was high winds one night in December 2013 that brought the old wild cherry tree down. We knew it was affected by the parasitic fungus, Laetiporus sulphureu (Chicken of the woods), so its collapse was not totally surprising. One of its offspring is still holding part of it up. The same storm also brought down a tall eucalyptus which added some interest to the climbing frame.

Some of the eucalyptus wood is still in the woodshed. It burns well in the stove. Some day I might shuffle up the old cherry trunk and start sawing branches....

Rain later

This morning I woke to a starry, clear sky. The weather forecast said "rain later" so I cycled to work thinking that it wouldn't matter if I got wet on the way home. There was a ten percent chance of rain when I would be on my bike. Toad and I have often interpreted that ten percent chance, as the met office call it, to mean that we'll be in the raining ten percent of Argyll. This interpretation works well. Today I took a chance based on the clear and starry, crescent moon lit sky and got wet, well, damp. Hey ho.

Based on the weather forecast I expected to get wetter cycling home but as it happened the 40% chance of rain for that later time meant that my cycling home period was dry. So I had a chance to stop and chat to a raft of eiders on the loch. They were very chatty. There was even a wedge of blue sky over to the north-east.

 

It was light enough not to need bike lights by then but I have pinned to the back of my Aran cycling jersey the back half of the reflective whatsit that Toadlet used to wear when walking to school in the winter. I also have reflective stuff round my ankles. I'm one of those strange, old-fashioned people who just wears ordinary clothes for cycling.

Even without that whatsit the light wool should be easily visible in car headlights. I have good bike lights too. Most drivers around here seem to know how to overtake cyclists properly but it never hurts to be hyper visible.

Of bike rides, rain-washed hills and bats

Yesterday Toad and I drove to the Pier Cafe at Stronachlachar beside Loch Katrine, stoked up on coffee and cake (well, Empire Biscuit in my case. I test them wherever I go if they look appetising enough. Stronachlachar's got 9.5 just trailing behind the 10-er at the Perch Cafe in Garelochhead. My gran's, which we called Grandma biscuits, are the benchmark against which all others are held), and set off in light rain to cycle round the Stronachlachar end of the loch and along the north side to Trossachs Pier where we would hop on the boat, Lady of the Lake, to come back to where we started.

At the start of the trail we met a couple in a pickup truck closing a barrier across the road. They said it was the first day in a week that they'd been able to drive out because of landslides blocking the road. We have had very heavy rain, even for Scotland, over the last week or so. The extent of the devastation became evident very quickly as we rode along. Toad, who had done this ride early in August, was shocked at the difference from the idyll he had seen just three weeks ago.



Officially the road was still closed to cars (it's a private road anyway so there is never a lot of traffic) but we carried on. We didn't meet anyone coming the other way until we were over half way along the twelve and a half mile track. Toad's phone app logging mileage actually recorded 14.77miles but officially the distance seems to be 12.5.


While we were still on the south side of the loch hillside scars from landslides on the other side were very visible. Flood plains had been well flooded too, leaving grass caught in trees and on fences. I hoped no-one had been in the white car (see below) when it got washed against the trees.



I recorded a short burst of the sound of this wee burn and tried to imagine the noise as land slipped and what had been small streams burst, quite literally, their banks.

It was still bonny looking down to the loch through the trees and the downhill sections of our ride, standing on the pedals and whizzing down at ~25mph, were great fun. Toad was impressed with my uphill efforts too. My recent rides to and from Garelochhead seem to have improved my fitness at that.

After half way we began to meet other cyclists coming the other way so readiness for braking had to be maintained during downhill whizzings. People starting at Trossachs Pier, where some had hired bikes, had been told that they wouldn't be able to cycle all the way to Stronachlachar. We told them they could.

Towards the end of our ride I enjoyed some moss banks of the kind that I remember reading about in poetic writing of old.

We had tea and scones at Stronachlachar when we disembarked from Lady of the Lake and I untied the string that I'd used for cycle clips because it was needed to tie the car number plate to Toad's bike on the back of the car. 

To finish off our day out we drove along to Inversnaid because we were so near. The noise of the waterfalls there was quite something and the view across Loch Lomond to the Arrochar Alps showed us how close to home we really were.

We then trundled, because I was driving (Toad never drives in a trundly way even when I wish he would so it's best if I drive bumpy roads) and happy to go gently on the single track road alongside Lochs Chon and Ard, back to Aberfolye and then homeward. There was a pause in proceedings when we stopped, along with a few other cars, to see if we could help dislodge an ambulance from the roadside mud. All that rain last week has created general mega-squelch once you're off road. Unfortunately a number of shoulders shoving together was not enough. The ambulance probably needed a pull by a tractor or some vehicle with a winch. Fortunately there was no-one needing hospital treatment in the ambulance at the time it got stuck. I think a boat ambulance had been sent to where help was needed instead. The sun had come out by afternoon and there was hardly any breeze so a New Zealander, an offerer of one of the shoulders mentioned above, and who had not had much weather luck during his Scottish holiday, decided to have a swim in the mirrored water of Loch Chon while he had the chance.

I don't often take alcoholic drinks because of medication I take for arthritis but I had a cider when we got home and slept like a log so wasn't aware of the bat in the bedroom until I woke up and opened the curtains. It had probably settled on the curtains so opening them disturbed it. I opened the windows too and after flying round and round the room  a lot it eventually went out by the window.

Windows wide to let out the bat

We know bats live in at least one of the walls of the house and a couple got into the house some years ago when there was a hole in one of the walls by the stairs after a bathroom pipe had been replaced. This time I think it must have crawled through elbow hole in Toadlet's room (damp plasterboard, teenage elbow; need I say more?). It's possible there's bat in her room too but she's still asleep.

Summer hols

Toad spent much of our summer leave drawing and painting, learning new tunes on his keyboard, and mending the shed. I spent much of the first week of mine recovering – hobbledehee, hobbledeho – from a wrench to my back that happened on the first day. During the second week, eldest daughter Rye came up with her boys, Moo and Oink. When Rye arrives it seems she often ends up cooking dinner. I'm happy with this. This time it seems my estimates of how much pasta was necessary to feed however many of us there were, how much cheese sauce to make, and so on, were inadequate. We rummaged through some of Toadlet's student digs bags and found some more pasta which Rye tipped into the pot. She then made the sauce while I did useful things like finding an ovenproof dish to put the giant macaroni cheese in and sending boys in search of more chairs. All the macaroni cheese was eaten. I keep thinking, if Moo and Oink eat so much now, aged nine and six, what will they be like in their teens!?

Here they are making a rope out of goosegrass:

We spent a fair bit of time down on the beach puddling about and searching for treasure. Rye collects crockery handles, for example.

We were intrigued by this beastie that looks similar at first glance to a woodlouse. The stone it was on appeared to be the back of an old tile.

One day we went for a walk around Ardmore Point in the Clyde. It's a lovely little wild nature reserve full of wild flowers. If the tide's out you can walk much of the way on the beach, which we did, but we also had a look in the woods.

Finding harebells

There were some white ones too:

white harebells

Towards the end of our walk we spotted a mouse on the path. We froze and got some photos of it. It seemed utterly unconcerned by us though and even allowed Moo and Oink to stroke it before it toddled back in the the undergrowth. Oink wanted to bring it home and keep it as a pet but he already has a cat so we argued against that idea. Given the mouse's carelessly dreamy attitude I rather thought it would be owl food that night anyway.

The light drizzle that went on most of the day didn't bother us at all. On the way home we shopped for grub for a crowd. Dinner the next day was going to be baked spuds with this and that and something else followed by a colourful fruit salad, Moo's request, and ice-cream, including soy ice-cream for the partner of J-of-the-wolves who has to avoid dairy products.

So that day all three of my daughters were here with their partners, whom I'm calling Pointy, Hilly, and Hezza unless objections are raised. Rye and Pointy hadn't met Hilly yet and no-one except the BoggyBraers had met Hezza, so it was a grand mixing together.

It was lovely having the visitors, thoroughly enjoyable, but I had apparently got quite tired: when I got home from work on Monday my nap lasted four hours!