Lesson and a half in the University of Life

Rattletrap's engine did start yesterday so Toad set off in it along the coast road. He feared diesel spillage and an airlock in the fuel pipe if he drove up steep hills, plus the automatic transmission has been a bit iffy for a while. In short he didn't want to be in a remote place if he broke down.

I opted to 'follow' in BlueCar by taking what we call the "over the hill" route via Glen Fruin over to Loch Lomondside.

We were heading for a scrap metal place called Carberry over Dumbarton way. I think it should be Car Bury.

I got there first and there followed a lesson and a half from the University of Life.

BlueCar took me down the road just before the turn off to the metal yard. I realised this straight away as I drove down a street with permanent caravans either side. Then I saw a couple of men and two little kids so I stopped near them to ask for directions. Perhaps what one of them said was not our family name but it sounded like it (and not many names do!*) so I thought they must be expecting the Landcruiser. The guys offered to get in the car with me and show me the way! I said:
"Hang on a minute! And what about the kids?"
They, decently, stepped back and went to get their own car with which they'd lead me to the yard. It seems it was perfectly safe to leave the kids (two or three year olds, I reckoned) running around on the street. That was quite nice to see, there are so few places where kids can do that nowadays.

During our conversation both then and later in the yard (called Dennistoun Forge so I wonder if there had been an old forge there once), these guys, who had soft Irish accents and not the local Scottish one, were asking me questions about the Landcruiser to establish, so I thought, what parts would be usable. Their story was that they did off-road driving in old 4x4s and there were three old, battered and muddy ones with raised chassis at the top of the street that would seem to back up that claim.

I got to the yard/forge and waited for Toad. Toad didn't arrive. I rang him and it seems he was stuck in a traffic jam in Dalreoch, from which jam it would only take him two minutes to get to the forge. Fine. Two minutes passed and quite a few more. Toad still didn't arrive. I decided to drive back along the lane a little way as I felt BlueCar was taking up space in the yard that might be needed for something else.

Shortly after I parked at the side of the lane, the two guys I'd met earlier drove up with Toad and dropped him off. They had bought Rattletrap from him. They'd apparently given him the same story about needing spare parts for their off road adventures. They were apparently interested in the wheel axles in particular (one of which was replaced a few years ago, though with a reconditioned rather than brand new one). Still, I could tell that Toad wasn't entirely comfortable with the deal he'd just made because I saw, as he came round BlueCar to get in the passenger seat, that he was verbally memorising the registration number of the Irish guys' rather splendid and new looking Range Rover and tapping it into a phone note.

Toad had some cash but no piece of paper to prove that we were no longer the legal keepers of Rattletrap. He had witnessed one of the guys signing the relevant bit of the Registration Document but had no name or address. Uh-oh. I drove off. We pondered and considered. We decided to go back to where I'd first met the guys. In the drive opposite where they'd parked their Range Rover was Rattletrap. We parked across this drive and Toad went to knock on the door. I stayed in the car and saw the man who answered raise his hands in a classic "I don't know nuffink, mate" gesture. Uh-oh again. Except that at this point, it turned out, Toad had said "Okay, in that case I'm going straight to the police."

At this point it seems Guy3 remembered who had just sold him the Landcruiser and where he lived, which was across the street. He told us to wait and he crossed the road and "acquired" the part of the registration form, including a name and address, that we need to send to DVLA. When I saw the rather illegible signature of the guy who'd bought Rattletrap from Toad, I thought it looked like the name Lawless, which was an amusing touch.

Guy3, who did sound Scottish, said he'd bought Rattletrap for his wife because she has lots of kids. It wasn't clear whether he had lots of kids too. I mentioned the chassis rust for him to be aware of. If he can fix it himself, good luck to him. We just didn't want to spend the amount of money on Rattletrap that the chassis repair plus others was going to cost at our local garage.

So it seems the axle blarney was just that, blarney. We are such innocents in the world of eloquent hooey!

Goodbye, Rattletrap. You served us well.

*I use my maiden name for this blog, mainly because when I started it I didn't know how public I wanted it to be.

The Honeysuckle Stump

When we first came here, there were two large stumps of spruce trees on the south-east slope. They had been Christmas trees that a long ago Boggy Brae family had not wanted to part with. Clearly they had been left to grow rather large and must have prevented a lot of light from getting to the house and garden. The photo to the left shows the upper stump which became the honeysuckle stump as honeysuckle began, of its own accord, to grow over it. At first I encouraged this. Some string I tied around the stump to hold up the honeysuckle shoots is visible in the snowy photo below from March 2008.

Gradually the amount of honeysuckle growing over the stump increased until the stump was hidden. A birch tree seeded next to the stump and ferns, including bracken. By last year there was a lot of plant but not a lot of flowering. This year I thought I'd let the birch tree grow so that the honeysuckle could grow up it but it still didn't flower much...

June 2015

...and this month I decided it needed a haircut. It was all getting a bit messy and just large–we'd be having reduced light problems again at this rate.

December 2016

So I backed the rattletrap, which already had fence wire from the fuchsia hacking down at the front (not finished yet), closer in to where I was working.

fence wire for the dump

Underneath all the honeysuckle stems I found two fungi growing on the stump–a lot of the pale yellow lumpy fungus and a hoof-type bracket fungus.

I shoved all the stems, the birch tree and various other gunk into Rattletrap, went inside to eat two rock buns and drink some tea, and then set off to the dump. A condenser (I think) that the boiler service man took out of the boiler went too.

Something tells me I'll be tidying up around this stump for a while yet.

The dark stuff among the honeysuckle stems is ivy.

Something also tells me that mudguard on the rattletrap needs a new piece of gaffer tape! 

The lower spruce stump is a whole nother story for another time. (I know 'nother' isn't officially a word; I think it needs to be; a whole other doesn't feel right!).

lower, or Lophocolea, spruce stump

After I'd returned from the dump and was eating lunch, I saw a wren troglodyting about in the debris left by the stump's haircut. That was nice.

That cotoneaster and those breeze blocks

With a little help from Toadlet, I got this far with That Cotoneaster. Whenever I say or think that word I think of my dad, who died in April 1993: he always, deliberately, said Cotton Easter.

Some roots got left in the ground as simply too difficult to get out. If they resprout, I'll mow them down. Out of the old and partly dying rhododendron next to the Cotton Easter bank, I got quite a pile of firewood, mostly just snapped off with a little help from my boot.

So then I had a neat slope and clarty boots.

As I rolled the breeze blocks to the Rattletrap to take to the dump, one of the whole ones broke into pieces. This made it much easier to lift.

off to the dump we go

A spot of pruning

In spite of heavy showers at night and now again, it was dry this afternoon, so I decided to prune a cotoneaster and to shove the dry branches into the Rattletrap to be taken to the dump as and when.





I kept the thick, trunky branches to use as firewood in due course. Plonked them on top of a stump to season.

The place where the cotoneaster was, along with a couple of small holly trees that I also don't want, looks a bit bare now. The plan is to get rid of the breeze blocks and the roots of the trees so I can mow over the edge and get at the rhododendron hedge with a hedge cutter more easily.
There were several cotoneaster seedlings. In a way it's a pity to cut it down as bees like the flowers, but there is more: see the golden cotoneaster at the corner of the terrace behind the stump in the last picture. There's plenty of that.

better view down to the loch too!

Wayside flowers on the road to Lochgilphead

I was delighted to see stands of Purple Loosestrife on my way to and from Lochgilphead today as they don't commonly grow near the Boggy Brae.

The A83 is a tricky road to pull over on so I'd missed a few stands of the flowers before I saw a dirt track turn off into the forest. Just as well I was in Rab the Rattler (alias "the truck") which is happy on squishy mud. Someone with a posh car wouldn't have opened this gate and turned around in here: 

But I did

A tiny part of Lochgilphead in a back lane

In the same back lane a lovely red honeysuckle

Travelling home again I had a better idea of the best places to stop so that I could get a picture of the swathes of wild angelica with purple loosestrife mixed in

Lots of marshy areas like this just off the road

absolutely full of wild angelica

Some purple loosestrife with meadowsweet

and here with more, very tall angelica

Finally a lovely tall ash tree near where I stopped.

You can just see the corner of the rattletrap bottom right.

And between travelling to and from Lochgilphead I had lunch with a friend. As the crow flies we do not live far apart, but as the roads go, following the winding coasts of sea lochs, it's a fair distance. A lovley journey between mountains and alongside beautiful lochs though. A happy day.