Thwarting the thief of time – by blogging...

There is a certain irony in the fact that after perusing a fascinating article about procrastination on the BBC Viewpoint page last night (and recognising too many time-wasting traits for comfort) I suddenly felt spurred to pen a long overdue blogpost.  There is undoubtedly further irony in the fact that, by turning my attentions to writing this blog, I am neatly dodging a host of other – possibly definitely more urgent – tasks...

After the plethora of ‘pre-fifty’ pontifications published in my last blogpost, you’d imagine that in the three weeks since I penned it, I’d have been exuding positivity and rigorously pursuing a ‘sensible’ diet for a middle-aged woman who is striving to achieve mens sana in corpore sano by August 7^th, 2013.

Yes, after all my heady promises about becoming a ‘half-full bottle of Irn Bru’ person and getting into shape to embrace my half-century, you’d imagine that by now I’d be oozing wellbeing and starting each day with a lowfat-milk-and-branflake-fuelled bellow of “Say ‘no’ to negativity! “ You could imagine all that – but you’d be wrong...

In my defence, there were a couple of setbacks on the positivity front. Firstly, my beloved little Shetland pony Veness (named after a place on Orkney) – whom we’d been treating daily for laminitis for the past 2 months – suddenly fell seriously ill with internal haemorrhaging during the weekend that we were en famille (almost) at the Olympics.

Luckily, Veness was being cared for by the eminently practical P (she who single-handedly cooked dinner for 80 at DD1’s 21^st back in June). P called the vet immediately, and the only explanation he could offer was that being desperate to eat any greenery (because we had to keep her off grass in deference to her laminitis), she had possibly eaten a poisonous leaf from a neighbouring tree, perhaps wafted into her small enclosure by the wind. As Veness was on a diet of dry feed, she would no doubt have avidly gobbled up anything remotely green, even things Mother Nature would normally have told her not to.

So it was that on Friday, 10^th August, I had the rather surreal experience of standing in the middle of the wonderfully upbeat and inspiring Olympic Park in Stratford, fresh from watching the GB women’s hockey team winning a bronze medal, and giving our vet permission via mobile phone to put our lovely little Shetland pony down.  It felt utterly wrong not to have the chance to say goodbye to her and, even now, I still look out our kitchen window every day while washing the dishes and expect to see her peeking cheekily back at me from the field shelter. P thoughtfully cut off a small piece of Veness’s forelock for me to remember her by, and I’ve squirrelled it away safely.

Columbine, aka Combine, the Highland pony is looking rather ‘sheepish’ with her new field companions (Spot and Cocoa the Shetland tups)

A further (much less serious, but still frustrating) disappointment came in the form of yet another injury to Son+Heir. After at least 30 seconds of contemplation, he had opted to forego our long-planned family sortie south to the Olympics in favour of an unexpected invite to join Scotland U21 men’s hockey squad in Germany, for their final weekend of training games before the European Championships in Holland (still happening at time of writing).

Sadly in the second training game against a top German club side, Son+Heir was on the receiving end of a hefty tackle from a former German national senior team player, resulting in a re-dislocation of that unlucky left shoulder. Not only did this unfortunate incident rule him out of contention for the European U21 Championships team, it also means that nearly three weeks later, he’s still not able to wield his hockey stick in battle.  Still, at least the shoulder is steadily improving, thanks to the interventions of our friendly local physio.

Meanwhile, out in the Sparrowholding garden,  green things that should be growing and thriving are - quite simply – not! [That bottle of Irn Bru is looking less full by the minute, n’est-ce pas?!]  The leaves on the lovely Victoria, our valiant plum tree, have evidently been hosting that lethal larva The Very Hungry Caterpillar – plus all his chomping caterpillar friends in Scotland by the looks of it.  Not one of the baby plums that I spotted earlier in the season has survived, and the same goes for the nectarines in the polytunnel. Only one of the 20 apples on the apple tree has resisted the relentless ‘summer’ rain splurges, and now – to top it all – the potatoes have succumbed, perhaps inevitably given the season, to blight. However, on the POSITIVE side (pour in a generous measure of Irn Bru), the blackcurrants and Tayberries were plentiful, and the spinach in the polytunnel is proving superprolific this year.  Better still, the peas have formed a promising crop of pods, so it’s not all doom and gloom J

Holy Moses – a holey plum tree! 

Bothersome blight – our once healthy potato plants don’t look so good now...

All in all, HunterGatherer and I have one very good reason to be hugely grateful. For despite the various minor horticultural horrors that we may be facing, at least we’re not full-time tenant farmers trying to scrape a living out of this precarious, weather-governed, growing game!  I positively shudder to think how my brother and father (Farmerbruv and Farmpa) must be feeling at the moment.  Indeed, I suspect their bottle of Irn Bru is looking pretty darned empty...

Facing up to failure as I flail towards fifty

This week something rather perturbing happened: Yours Truly turned 49. Why so perturbing, you might wonder? After all, it’s just one more year. But this, of course, is not just any year: it’s a landmark, because in just one more short year (and years feel exceedingly short by the time you’ve notched up nearly half a century’s worth of them) I shall be ... cue slightly disquieting music... fifty. I can’t quite make up my mind how I feel about this, but one thing is for sure: I am painfully aware of how many sinister character flaws I had intended (but have so far failed) to “address” before I hit the big 5-0. 

This list of personal aberrations to be conquered in twelve measly months is alarmingly long: get fitter, lose weight, subdue my plethora of paperwork into some semblance of order, be more organised and focused in my copywriting and translating tasks, eat more healthily, make significantly more effort to dress in something other than baggy jeans, a holey (no, I don’t mean holy...) rugby shirt and wellies (or even sandals and socks!), veer away from a distinct tendency towards pessimism and start to ooze positivity instead. Aaarrghhh - where to begin?!

Let’s start with the positivity issue. Half full or half empty – which type of bottle are you? According to my beloved offspring, I am a typically Scottish half-empty Irn Bru bottle.  Personally I prefer to call it realism – finely honed by the intermittent buffeting one inevitably experiences as one navigates one’s way across the choppy waters of life. What’s more, I am pretty confident that in another 30 years, the said sprogs’ life experiences will have sent their cynicism into overdrive and then they’ll finally understand where their grumpy old mum was coming from.  Anyway, as I see it, I’m in a win-win situation, because if I expect things to go wrong and they do, then I have the satisfaction of having been right. And if, contrary to my Calvanistically cautious expectations, things do actually go right, then I can be happy that they did – despite having been wrong... The logic all seems perfectly sound to me ;-).

Two other little idiosyncrasies that I am hoping to tackle in the coming 360 or so days are 1) being a tad too pedantic and 2) being slow to let go of past mistakes. Now whilst being an unashamed pedant has its (not “it’s”...) definite advantages when it comes to being a proofreader, my inability to forget failures is something that I seriously struggle with. Daughter No2, on the other hand, has no such problems and could certainly teach me a thing or three about never brooding over her mistakes. The reason? Well, partly because she hardly ever makes any mistakes (according to her...). But more importantly, on the rare occasion when she does concede that she might just have got something ever so slightly wrong, she simply says “I can’t change that now” and moves on without a backwards glance. Unlike her fond mama, it has to be said...  

Just take the example of my Higher results (rather topical this week, given that this year's Higher results have just been released here in Scotland and are “the best ever”).  I should confess here that out of all the academic exams I've ever sat, I only once dropped to a B grade – and that was in my Higher maths. Now, most sensible people would be very happy to have only one B, but being the self-confessed sad perfectionist that I am, that blinking 'B' still haunts me to this day. Try as I might to forget about it, it is always there, lurking in the back of my mind.

And my mathematical misery is not completely alone in my murky cerebral recesses, because keeping it company are the  failed cycling proficiency test (the result of my far-too-busy farmer father's failure to fix the brakes on my bike before the test and a crushing blow to any 11-year-old!). There is also a skulking lone German word “Nelke”, which had the audacity to pop up in my O’Grade German exam (bear in mind that we’re now talking 34 – thirty-four! – years ago) and which, Ach Du Liebe, I did not know. My agony was made infinitely worse upon emerging from the exam hall, when my arch rival in the German class informed me smugly that he had known it meant “carnation”. I'm ashamed to admit that ever since that moment, I’ve struggled to subdue a wholly unreasonable resentment towards this lovely, unsuspecting flower species.

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight and (many years of) maturity, I can see how utterly ridiculous this relentless self-flagellation about such minor failures is. Any life coach worth his or her salt would tell me to put these things firmly behind me and move on.  And they would be 100% right.

So that is what the next 12 months are going to be about: changing my paradigm as I flail through my fiftieth year - putting myself to rights. That means I’ll be cutting down on calories (and yes, that includes my favourite cocoa bean derivatives), forcing myself to tackle the mile-high pile of paper on my desk (and the kitchen table and the coffee table and the sitting-room floor ...), and stop punishing myself perpetually for things that happened a very long time ago and that were never really that important in the first place. It’s not going to be easy - nothing that’s worth doing in life ever is – but luckily, I’ve never been afraid of hard work. In fact, I have something to say to you, “Oh 50^th year of my life,” (I knew that vocative case that I learned for my Higher Latin would be useful one day...): "BRING IT ON!"

A gold medal and a golden wedding aniversary

Pushy parents often get bad press, but there are times when – as a parent – there is a strong case for being at least moderately pushy, and one of those times is if your child has a natural talent that they wish with all their heart to pursue and which thus needs careful nurturing.  “Nurture” sounds like such a positive, gentle word, doesn’t it?  Yet supporting a youngster who happens to demonstrate a particular sporting skill from an early age brings with it an immense responsibility. The huge commitment which has to be made by parents is often financially draining (especially in the case of pursuits involving expensive equipment) and always time-consuming. 

This sacrifice by parents (and indeed sometimes by a budding sportsperson’s entire family) was alluded to by the mother of South African swimmer Chad Le Clos the other night, after he stormed to victory in the 200m butterfly.  And she is not alone in her awareness of the commitment that serious sports training involves for the mums, dads, grandparents and/or extended family members who loyally transport swimmers to pools, runners to tracks and hockey players to pitches come rain, hail or shine, day in and day out.

I remember once hearing rugby player Phil Vickery being interviewed on radio, just after his autobiography had been published. He spoke movingly about the fact that during all the years he was training with local, district and national squads as a teenager, his mum would have to sit waiting in the car for him – sometimes in the freezing cold with a blanket over her knees and a flask of coffee for company.  And the former England captain was very obviously genuine in his gratitude to her for being prepared to put up with a degree of discomfort on a regular basis in order to allow him to pursue his dream.

Even at a much lower level, I hesitate to calculate the number of miles that I’ve driven over the past decade, transporting Son+Heir to a succession of hockey training, matches, camps, more training sessions, etc. By now my carbon footprint is probably roughly the size of a Hebridean island, purely as a result of these sporting forays (and that's despite having shared transport with other hockey mums wherever possible). The time commitment is not inconsiderable either, though I don't grudge one minute of it, for I'd far rather that Son+Heir was engaged in real live sport than pretending to play it on a computer game (the Sparrowholding has always been an XBox and Playstation-free zone).

                                             Practice makes perfect

Take last weekend, for example: 6 hours on Saturday and Sunday sitting proofreading in an Edinburgh car park during a Scotland U21s training camp (not wanting to drive home in between for risk of the dreaded carbon footprint becoming Scotland-sized!). This coming weekend it looks likely that I shall be spending another 2 x 6 hours in a similarly exotic car park in Glasgow (although at least this one has the benefit of being within walking distance of House for an Art Lover , which does excellent afternoon teas!).

So when I admire all those Olympians (be they winners or losers), whose relentless schedule will have involved a gazillion times more training and travel than I can ever begin to imagine, I also spare a thought for the legions of family members who supported these athletes in their quest to be the best. And I also understand the delight and pride of those parents when dreams do come true and their child wins a much-strived-for medal. Few could have failed to appreciate the reaction of Chad Le Clos’s inimitable dad, Bert, to his son’s victory, as seen in this BBC interview. I’d like to hazard a guess that at some point in the past, Bert will have had the “pushy parent” label applied to him, yet by being pushy in a positive way, he has allowed his child to fulfil his undeniable potential. Bert has every right to be proud of his son – and he also happens to be endearingly funny!

Although still sticking loosely with the theme of gold, now for something completely different... Last week we celebrated the Golden Wedding Anniversary of my beloved mum and dad (aka Supergran and Farmpa).  Now, as I’ve described in previous blogposts, Yours Truly is a botcher extraordinaire when it comes to baking. I can render a cake flat from 60 paces and brutalise (or perhaps even brittle-ise!) a biscuit without blinking.  For these very sound reasons, the family opted to commission a cake to mark the occasion from Celebration Cakes in Perth.  And these gateau gurus certainly went to town on the decorations, all based on photos and info that I gave them about the happy couple. As I'm sure you'll understand looking at the photo below, we were delighted with the result :-).

 

Golden Wedding Anniversary Cake - yum!

Farmpa is sitting happy as Larry aboard his beloved Grey Fergie tractor and Supergran is sitting beside her tennis racket, fresh from thrashing her latest opponent. It would appear that the strong competitive streak (this is, after all, the woman who had Farmerbruv and Yours Truly out in the garden practising sprint starts the night before each school sports day...) never fades, no matter how old you are!

Eccentrics make the world go round

I probably appear fairly eccentric to a lot of folk: I don’t smoke, I don’t drink alcohol, and I usually only swear when someone whacks me in the shins with a hockey stick. Only on the most special of special occasions do I wear make-up or don any form of finery: I am at my happiest in comfy leggings and a pair of (even in the summer) hippopotamusly muddy wellies. [NB: Spellcheck changed that last word automatically to “willies”, but luckily I spotted it in time! Although maybe it cleverly predicted my meeting with The Naked Rambler later in this post...]

Looking at my parents, it was evident that I was destined not to fall readily into any particular stereotype.  My mum (aka Supergran) was playing still tennis with (and beating!) teenage lads in the village till she was well into her 60s.  Sadly her tennis playing came to a premature halt after she broke both wrists simultaneously in a spectacular fall involving a camera, some children, and a dog chain turned tripwire – but that’s another story...). Supergran once walked round a Farming of Yesteryear Show at Glamis Castle for an entire afternoon wearing two completely different coloured shoes, having been so busy speaking to all and sundry that she didn’t have time to look down at her feet until she returned to the car several hours later and went to change into her driving shoes.

Meanwhile, my dad (aka Farmpa) is regularly to be overheard telling anyone in the vicinity: “I’m nearly 80 you know”. But that doesn’t stop him being out on the land first thing every day, and often he doesn’t come back in for his lunch until the middle of the afternoon, having been caught up chasing runaway cattle or filling potholes in the road.  He can only very occasionally be prised away from the farm – and that’s usually to attend a farm sale or to pick up spare parts for some malfunctioning machine or other.   Farming is, quite literally, his life.

My parents’ non-conventional behaviour was perhaps most evident a couple of years ago when they decided to deliver a (full) hive of bees to the Sparrowholding . I did express concern about the wisdom of this operation, given that it involved a 40-minute drive up the M90 in the dark, but my worries were brushed aside and I was assured that adequate precautions would be taken.  And they certainly were.  In the picture below, you’ll see the gung-ho duo of hive removal men who arrived that evening, complete with one  hive, complete with  30 thousand bees (give or take a few) in the back of the Landover.  You’d think that given their great age, the pair of them would have learned to “bee” sensible by now...

                                                               Bee prepared!

Mark you, even their eccentricity pales into sorry insignificance when compared with someone whom I encountered today in a nearby village.  There I was, sitting in my car slurping an amazing ice cream from the local Italian supermarket when an approaching figure caught my eye. He was wearing a broad-brimmed bush hat, a rucksack and hiking boots – and nothing else. For the figure plodding along the pavement was none other than the Naked Rambler, naturist Stephen Gough, recently released from Perth Prison after six years of incarceration for insisting on walking in public without his clothes. 

Blending naturally into the scenery

Being an inquisitive journalistic sort, I hopped out of the car and walked alongside him for a few strides, to ask him where he was headed. Quick as a flash (perhaps an unfortunate analogy, but you know what I mean!), the UK's most renowned rambler produced a brand new OS map, which he opened partially to point out his planned route. By some strange coincidence, it went straight through Kinross, out into the countryside for a couple of miles and right past the end of our road.  On a sudden impulse I said: “Would you like a cup of tea when you pass by?”  His eyes immediately lit up and he said, “Actually, yes, that would be great. I’ve grown used to the taste of water, but tea would be really good." We rapidly ascertained that he didn’t have a mobile phone to let me know when he’d be passing (“Er, I did have, but the battery went flat while I was in prison for six years...” Of course, it did – idiot that I am!).  

So I returned home, filled a flask with some tea (milk, with no sugar, as I’d had the presence of mind to ascertain during our briefest of chats) and drove back to find him already out of Kinross and heading south.  On impulse, I had also popped a couple of cupcakes in a plastic bag, not being quite sure about the Ps and Qs of food acquisition when you’re wandering naked along the highways and byways of Britain. When I handed my paltry pickings over, he seemed genuinely grateful, but was obviously keen to get going – and as I’d noticed a police car lurking round a corner not far away, I didn’t blame him.  His final destination, Bournemouth, is a dauntingly long way from rural Kinross-shire, so I wished him well for his journey and returned home. As I drove, I pondered a society in which violent robbers and gangsters often seem to be able to avoid the long arm of the law and operate with impunity, while a comparatively harmless eccentric can spend six years banged up in a Perthshire prison. It’s a funny old world, although possibly not quite so funny when you consider the huge amount of tax-payers' hard-earned money that has been consumed footing the bill for his extended prison stays...

Puddings, ponies, packages and potatoes

At the end of last week, I spotted a link on the BBC News website, inviting me to find out “Where are you on the global fat scale?” I should have known it would be a mistake to follow this alluring link into the virtual ether – it could only lead ultimately to deep depression. And it did. It also led to the discovery that my BMI is at the absolute highest it should safely be (25) by UK standards - the same as an indigenous Malaysian apparently.  Other members of the Twitterati only compounded my misery by then announcing gleefully that they were equivalent to natives of countries such as Liberia and East Timor (i.e. both considerably lower BMIs). Thanks @gallopen484 and @ALifeInWellies ... You sure know how to kick a girl when she’s down ;-) My pursuit of svelteness was not helped by a rare foray to M&S this week, where a vision of loveliness met my eyes : a Jubilee-inspired Eton Mess cheesecake, which miraculously floated down off the shelf and dropped itself delicately and suggestively into my basket. It would have seemed churlish to refuse...

Anyone for pudding?

Fortunately for me, elephantine as I may be in global terms, I’m still not the heaviest female occupant here at the Sparrowholding – our Shetland and Highland mares, Little and Large, both tip the scales at greater weights than I.  (Or at least I haven't checked, but they'd better!) 

Little is still on a starvation diet because being a native pony, she doesn’t cope well with the richness of the summer grass and ends up with a nasty equine lurgy called laminitis. 

Little: the expert pill repeller                       

The vet has prescribed her medication for a metabolic problem, but is she's incredibly adept at sifting the pills out of her feed and leaving them triumphantly in the empty trough.  – very galling for the stablehand (aka Yours Truly).  In desperation, we have hit on a cunning plan involving a pestle and mortar, in the fond belief that she’ll struggle to spit out every last tiny grain of the problematic pills in powder form. Mark you, according to the vet, they’ve never come across a pony who refused to eat these tablets, so no doubt contrary Little is busy sieving the powder through her teeth as I type...

4 of the 6 tablets left - rest of feed was cleared, of course!

Large is, as her name suggests, is rather ... er .... large. Like Little, she is following a restricted grazing regime on bare pasture at present, and is being topped up with a daily Halley’s Ad Lib Blox, containing alfalfa and straw fibre, but, critically, no sugar.  Hmmm, maybe I need to be nibbling on Blox rather than Twix as part of my calorie controlled diet. (Don’t try this at home...)

Large: an expert electric fence jumper
Moving swiftly on from paddock to garden, I can report that one row of our potato plants (the red multipurpose variety known as Rooster) is flourishing in the raised outside bed (see below). Sadly, the plants in the row of Charlotte (salad variety, in front of photo) seem to be either non-existent or seriously stunted at the moment.  And of course, we’re keeping our eyes peeled (note cunning potato pun!) for any signs of blight.  The combination of warmth and relentless rain has been taking its toll in other parts of the country and this insidious disease is threatening to reduce many commercial crops to slime. All the more reason to try to protect our precious little crop! You never know, by the end of the season, we may need roof-top missile launchers (is this what's meant by "spud" missiles?!) on the Sparrow residence if there’s a national shortage.

Peas and beans and potatoes popping through the ground

Meanwhile, the strawberries in our small outside bed are still resolutely green, but at least they’re reasonably prolific. Our only problem is finding any of the eponymous straw to bed them with.  The stuff seems to be like gold dust hereabouts, so we’ll maybe have to let the berries take their chances. The plants in the polytunnel have produced a few decent berries, but sadly most of them have been almost too small to be of any real use. Took a photo recently of one that was a rather endearing shape and texted it to the three Sparrow chicks as a fruity token of maternal affection (see below). 

With love from mum

And in other news from the smallholding ... last week I eventually managed – after much prodding and pushing! – to persuade two chocolate fleeces into an former feed bag, which I then encased in two green garden refuse bags and despatched from the local PO to yarn and spinning devotee @EdenCottage. Not sure what her local postman thought about the smell of eau de mouton emanating from the package but, judging by the photos she's sent, @EdenCottage is already busy doing wonderful things with the wool.  As an avid fan of all things ovine, I’m curiously excited about seeing our Shetlands’ ex-jackets transformed into something new, so I’ll be following her progress with interest.

All packaged up and ready to go: 2 chocolate fleeces

Weebruv (he may be 46, but he’s still my little brother!) obviously reckons he doesn’t have enough on his plate looking after the farm, horse feed and sawdust briquette business, plus multifarious guinea pigs, dogs, ponies, cats, wife and kids (not necessarily in that order!). So today he and his trio of offspring headed off to St Andrews to uplift some hens. We received an excited text this evening, complete with photo of their first egg, “hot” off the hen-press. Fortunately, as our neighbours up the road from the Sparrowholding have free range hens, we are in the perfect situation of being able to enjoy local free range eggs every week, but without having the distinct tie of tending any endearing feathered friends ourselves. What some might call an 'eggsellent' plan!

Hot off the hen press

Music festivals, dislocated shoulders and banana bread

Last weekend we spent most of the daylight hours in Edinburgh (watching Scotland’s U18 hockey boys playing in the Celtic Cup) and the nights back at the Sparrowholding, where we were serenaded in the misty distance by the steady thump of drums from the T in the Park music festival. Usually this auspicious occasion in the Scottish music calendar heralds the springing up of a tented village in our garden (as per last year’s photo below). However, this year - with the daughterly duo 500-ish miles away in Cambridge (i.e. just out of earshot) and Son&Heir busy wielding his hockey stick in Edinburgh all weekend - none of my brood was attending "T".

Despite their absence, I did still do a late pick-up run on Saturday night – to collect DaughterNo1’s boyfriend plus two of DaughterNo2’s friends (another parent having done the Friday run). Amazing that even without the darling daughters here, they still manage to involve me in raking out my old taxi hat! Fortunately my several years of previous experience prompted me to take a roll of bin bags with which to bedeck the seats and floors of the trusty wee Corsa. Just as well I did, too, as the mud at TITP on the Saturday was welly-deep (see photo below). Talking of wellies, early on Monday morning I spotted a lone muddy welly lying on Kinross High Street.  The car park of the town’s Park and Ride area was a sight for sore eyes too (NOT!). I really don’t mind all the extra folk in town, the slight inconvenience of roadblocks and the inevitable noise that the festival creates, as the visitors undoubtedly give the local economy a welcome boost.  What I do mind, however, is the ubiquitous litter that’s left lying in the aftermath. Perhaps festival goers haven’t come across that quaint Scottish expression: “Pit yer rubbish in the bin, ya tumshie!” (Direct translation: please put your detritus in the waste disposal receptacle provided, you turnip)...

 Campsite at T in the Park

 Mud, mud, glorious...

 Lonely without you

Er, hello: does anyone here know what a dustbin's for?

This week has seen a catalogue of poorly creatures and plants in and around the Sparrow residence.  Little, the Shetland pony, is still suffering from laminitis (painful swelling of tissues in her feet caused by rich summer grass). This means the vet has consigned her to the stable, which she hates, as well as prescribing a cornucopia of pharmacological products (already costing more than the said Shetland pony herself is worth).  Also downing the painkillers (though not equine ones!) yesterday was Son&Heir, who was on the receiving end of a particularly pernicious tackle by a Welshman during Sunday's international match.  Result: Welshman - 1; Son&Heir’s shoulder - 0. Spot the strapping in the photo below - and the makeshift sling concocted by the team physio out of a Scotland tracksuit top! To add insult to injury, the Scots were 1 goal up against the Welsh for almost the entire match, only to concede a goal in the last 17 seconds before the final whistle.  Very frustrating, but nothing like the frustration felt by another Scottish sportsman on Sunday afternoon, I suspect!

 One-armed hockey bandit

 One day I'll play for Scotland...

In addition to the warmblooded wounded warriors, there’s my out-of-sorts orchid, a gift from the daughterly duo a couple of years back.  Despite having flowered prodigiously for the past month (about five delicate flower heads on the go currently), it is looking distinctly peaky.  One of its leaves has turned yellow and appears to be mouldy.  Anyone out there know anything about the maladies of orchids?  I'm desperate to save the poor plant, but I suspect it might be on its way to the great greenhouse in the heavens if I don’t instigate dramatic orchid-healing measures soon.

 Poorly orchid

And now (I saved the best for last) to the final photo for this post, which shows a masterpiece of culinary endeavour created around midnight this evening by DaughterNo1’s boyfriend and myself: a chocolate and banana loaf. We can confirm that, in the words of the song, it was "truly scrumptious" as we couldn't wait till tomorrow to check. BF is actually an Oxford engineering student, but that is of little consequence to me: what is of considerable consequence is that he can cook - well.  Not only that, he tidies up after himself, and has been known to stack and unstuck the dishwasher twice in one day.  After my experiences (the stuff of horror films) of trying to get Son&Heir not to leave foodstuffs growing - er, I mean lying around – in his room, it is a complete revelation to have an incumbent lad who assists on the domestic front.  Not only that, he’s paying us rent each week while he does his internship in Perth.  Which leads me to wonder whether I could perhaps enforce a similar rent arrangement on Son&Heir who is now back home. I suppose it's always worth asking (even if you know the answer in advance...).

Chocolate and banana bread - a midnight treat!

Tatties, fleeces and toads

Manic is the only word that sums up the past week, so I've condensed this post into a mini 'photoblog'. As previously reported, the household numbers were reduced just before the weekend by the departure of the daughterly duo, who headed off to keep order amongst visiting foreign language students in Cambridge. Before they departed we took a photo of the three "ladies of the house" - or rather of our feet, because we noticed we all had pink footwear on!  Two of us were dressed for a summer in Scotland: one of us (DaughterNo2) was not...

Incidentally, DaughterNo1 texted this afternoon to divulge that she had been up till 3 a.m. this morning supervising a teenage lad throwing up following closet excessive alcohol consumption. DaughterNo2 also reported having had to call paramedics following a similar incident! Seems the teens and alcohol problem isn't just a British one...

Monday brought an invitation from my parents (aka Supergran and Farmpa) to lunch with them at The Brig Farm restaurant near Bridge of Earn. Loads of yummy fresh produce, most of it locally sourced. Re-sult! As we munched lunch, we exchanged news, which included me showing Farmpa a photo of our beans, peas and potatoes which are now through the ground. 

The pair of them immediately looked distinctly smug and revealed that the potatoes they are growing in their rockery (don't ask!) are way ahead of ours.  That's when I played my potato-growing ace and showed them the photo of our first boiling of new potatoes, fresh from the polytunnel this week. Tah dah :-). And very tasty my tattie trump cards were too!

The polytunnel also yielded a few strawbs and a few spears of asparagus early in the week - though HunterGatherer rapped my knuckles for picking the latter. Apparently you're not supposed to harvest asparagus from June onwards (to let the plants regenerate for next season).  Sad that, as there are another few spears already  waving at me and I'm looking at them wistfully, but I dutifully haven't laid a finger on them.

Last night I harvested several stalks of rhubarb from the "fruit" section of the veggie patch.  Something had gone wrong with the thicker stems - they were sort of spongy inside, as if the liquid had dried out.  I don't know what was up with them - perhaps just a bit too old and shrivelled (know how they feel!). Still, I stewed the younger stalks in orange juice and honey, and added them to my porridge this morning. Not sure what that combo will do for my IBS, but hey, I enjoy living dangerously!

The rhubarb may have been slightly dodgy, but two of the gooseberry bushes are way beyond dodgy. They are decimated!  Some rotten pests (HG thinks "sawfly"?) have dined in extremis on the leaves, so that all that's left behind are bare twiglets - with a sole gooseberry hinting tantatlisingly at what might have been. Any suggestions to avoid this next year on a postcard (or rather comment), please! It's soul destroying seeing the poor bushes like this and it happens every year.

The most important task achieved on the Sparrowholding this week was shearing.  HunterGatherer girded his loins, embraced the backpain and set to work with his hand shears during a (very) rare break in the rain.  He managed to get all the ewes shorn and wormed, and gave the 14 lambs their second jab to protect against clostridial diseases.  Unfortunately most of the fleeces were only suitable for weed control in the garden, because HG had bedded the shed with woodchip in the winter to help keep the sheep dry.  We did manage to rescue a couple of the brown fleeces, though, and I'm dispatching them to a lovely spinning lady whom I encountered on the Twittersphere.

These poor "naked ladies" were thoroughly unimpressed with their impromptu disrobing - especially as the rain is forecast to get worse.  "Better soggy than maggoty," we told them.  (They still looked unimpressed...)

There's been a lot of wildlife - in addition to the domestic animals -  in evidence around the smallholding this week.  Several swallows (or possibly housemartins?) have set up mudhome in our stable, keeping the poorly Shetland pony company.  Here are the babies peeking out and saying "hi" from on high!

And last, but definitely not least, here's a lovely wee toad who leapt out of the middle of the raised strawberry bed while we were working in the polytunnel this evening (HG has planted a bed of spinach so large we may feed the whole of Kinross-shire with it). Mr Toad crawled away under one of the wooden supports that holds the raised bed in place - he couldn't get into our special terracotta toady des res, because it's been taken over by ants! We're fervently hoping that the distant thumping beat of T in the Park won't deter him from coming out later to continue his slug feast.  He's got a lot of eating to do!