remembering summer

30th of July, 2011, 8pm
I'm writing this curled up in a woollen rug by a crackling log fire, having at last arrived at Inverpattack Lodge. We broke our journey at The Soldier's Leap, where we ate apples and walked barefoot on the rocks above the river. Dragonflies darted across the water.

We arrived at the house, hastily unpacked, and then piled back into the car for the short drive along the road to 'the beach' - the shore of the loch really, but it's long and sandy and bordered by pines. It's just past the fairytale-looking gatehouse, and as you drive up the road you get a glimpse of white sand and dark water through the trees. There were warm patches in the water, and we capered about like mad things before racing back to the beach to hop about with towels and dry clothes and sand-shoes.

10pm
The fire has died down to grey wood ash and one smouldering log. The upturned branches of the feathery fir in the garden are a fuzzy black against the pale grey-blue of the sky. There have been mugs of tea, and homemade ginger biscuits, and now we are sitting companionably with our books, occasionally reading aloud bits that strike us as particularly interesting or amusing.

The house is comfortable, in a slightly run-down sort of way. The chair covers are all faded, with worn patches on the arms. The hearth-bricks need to be properly cemented, and the front porch still leaks. There are no books, only sales catalogues for Fine Art auctions, and things like 'The Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust Christmas Gift Catalogue'. Yes. Really. It's full of things like rifle cases and game safes, and personalised champagne bottles.

The pictures look like they have come in job lots from various auctions - colour prints of grand houses, town markets and harbour scenes in the lounge, 18th century prints of grape sellers and green bean sellers in the hall, and religious pictures of a vaguely Italian flavour in the dining room. Given all that, it's big enough so that even with 11 of us it doesn't feel crowded. And there is a very nice large footstool in the lounge that is just right for propping your legs against.

31st of July, 10.15pm
The fire is smokily falling about in embers. I think the wood may still be a bit damp from the woodshed. Even the weather was damp today - dull and cloudy. We had a lazy morning with newspapers and cups of tea. We finished a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle of Ludwig the Mad's castle in Bavaria, apart from the sky, because -really- what point is there in bits of blue that all look the same?

We took a walk up the road behind the farmhouse before dinner. The weather cleared up a little on our return; we could see the rock face above Inverpattack bathed in sunlight, with dark clouds behind.

1st of August
Another dull and damp day. Woke around 7am and curled up in one of the chairs by the window in the lounge, with a mug of tea and Mountains of the Mind. Caitlin came back from a run to the beach for a swim. I thought this was an excellent idea, but in the end some of the others wanted to come too, so we all piled into the car and drove down. I had my red cotton dress on over my swimsuit, and it billowed up and clung a bit, but once we were in the water it was fine.

It was freezing - even colder than Saturday, but I took it slowly this time so I would get used to it. The hardest part is once it gets to above your waist. Did more swimming this time. Swimming into the waves always seems more satisfying than swimming back to the shore - the shore never seems to get any nearer. We ran up and down the beach to get dry.

Back at the house, in the warm shower, my palms turned purple with the shock. Recovered with hot coffee and second breakfast. Swimming in lochs is so much nicer than in public pools. You can see the trees and the mountains, and watch the mist coming down.


3rd of August.
On the way to Fort William we stopped by the road along the loch so that Malcolm could swim out to the little island with the ruin. He's wanted to do it ever since he saw it. Katy and I sat on the rocks by the side of the water and watched. We ate some rolls and shared a packet of crisps and crunched on apples. They were the kind with the shiny red skin that tinges the white flesh underneath pink when you bite.

From a distance, the island looked like a small Wild Cat Island. I sat warming my bare feet on the rocks. Small rock-spiders crawled in and out of the shade. We watched Malcolm's head bobbing in and out of the waves. Once he got near to the island we lost sight of his head against the rocks, before we spotted him moving up to the tree-line. We waved our arms and whooped and yelled 'Well Done!' He raised an arm, and disappeared into the trees. We looked down into the peat-coloured water, and waited for him to return.

Back on the road, we made a detour to High Bridge - the site of the first action of the '45. There was a cairn by the side of the road, with a sort of path leading off into the woods. There were thistles everywhere, and broken branches fallen across the path. The wooden platforms across the boggy patches had boards missing, and the footpath was overgrown. We turned towards the sound of the river, and then we could see the ruined arches of the bridge.

It is made of grey stone, and has a rusty red splint of ironwork spanning the broken arch. It sticks out at an odd angle, and ends abruptly in mid air, never reaching the other side. The central pillar has a larch tree growing out of it, spearing straight up to the sky. Below, the river is a narrow gash in the rock; folded stone layered up to form deep cliffs. The tree trunks are covered in soft moss, and the bank falls away steeply beneath your feet.

After dinner, we all decided to play cricket on the beach. The boys set the wicket and stumps up, and Katy and I collected things to burn, as the midgies were descending. We made three attempts to steal embers from a camper's fire further up the beach, and we succeeded just as we were on the point of giving up. The wind blew towards the cricket players and foxed the midgies for a while. Malcolm smoked his pipe, and walked up and down the beach. We spent the rest of the time going back and forth trying to find things to burn. Once the light had completely faded, and the embers had died down, we piled wet sand on top and headed for Inverpattack.

5th of August
The glass in the windowpanes of the house is old glass, the kind that almost distorts the view outside if you look at it from a certain angle. I like it better than new glass. It seems gentler, somehow. It softens the outside; blurs it around the edges and makes it look like a painting, or a slightly out-of-focus photograph.

But I can't see out the windows now, as it's dark and the curtains have been pulled. Jacob and I are the last ones sitting up. It's a quarter past 11 now, and I can feel tiredness pricking behind my eyelids. The fire is smouldering away. It's gone out, really, but Katy wanted to burn the last of the logs. I should probably be packing.

on the river

We had a good time at the farm. We lazed about in the garden with newspapers and books and mildly alcoholic beverages. I had brought my 'Flowers of Britain and Europe' book, and Gerald and I went around the garden ticking off various plants. Katy came to stay, and we walked along the riverbank to find a good paddling place. There were tiny fishes darting in and out under the bridge. Lots of nettles and hogweed. We traipsed alongside the horse field until we came to the stepping stones, and we sat and dipped our feet in the peaty water. After a while, we decided to walk back up the river in the water, and scramble out as best we could by the bridge. Katy and I chorused 'Dark brown is the river, golden is the sand. It flows along forever, with trees on either hand...'

Gerald looked at us and shook his head, 'You girls...' he said, and splashed further upstream in silence.

foxhat tearoom

This, it turns out, is another winner for Ayr. Individuality is returning. It's been open since early March, and sells clothes and household objects as well. Now, by that I mean that it sells Joules clothing, and beautifully-made dresses in cotton-lawn, and little, wispy bits of scarves. And 'household objects' means retro metal signs, re-conditioned furniture from a local source, oilcloth by the metre and olive spears and salt spoons and strings of fairy lights. I actually found my brother's birthday present in there (it's on Friday, and I feared a fruitless search through town, agonising over two or three things that I didn't really want to buy him, and that I wasn't sure he would very much want either). But I was browsing after tea and -lo! there it was on a table. A little, metal bottle opener with a silver stag's head at the end. It has a pleasant weight in the hand, and is tactile and attractive as well as being useful. There was a letter-knife as well, which I much preferred, but boys never do seem to open letters properly and I'm sure the bottle opener will get used much more than the letter-knife would.

The tearoom is set just in a corner of the shop, with a large wooden dresser to display the cakes on. It's styled like a room in a house, with a fireplace and wood-burning stove (not a working stove, unfortunately) at the back, a standard-lamp, and wall-paper on the back wall. The (vintage) chairs all have Cath Kidston oilcloth seats, and the wooden tables are all painted the same colour of sage green-blue. The china is 'proper' china, with matching cups and saucers and cake-plates. Grandma approved. Tea for two was in a large teapot, and we had individual Victoria Sponges. The sponge was very light, but there wasn't enough jam - I only had a little in the centre of my cake. They also had scones, malteaser slice, and various biscuits. Tea and cake for two people came to about eight pounds in total, I think, but I wasn't paying, so I don't know exactly. The tea was teabags, not leaf.

lunch at Dulallys

Work today really tired me out for some reason. Hoovered all of the rooms except the spare bedrooms and the drawing room. Hoovered the stairs (killer on the knees) and the upstairs and downstairs hall. Cleaned three bathrooms and mopped the kitchen floor. But -good thing!- Rosetta gave me an extra fiver as I was leaving.

'Because we're going away for two weeks.' she said. (which means I won't be getting paid).

So I decided to go out for lunch. I popped home, picked up the netbook, and cycled along to Dulallys tea room. It's only been open about three months, since the last tearoom there closed at the beginning of the year. It has vintage and retro signs up on the walls, pictures at odd angles and clocks showing the wrong times. They have a good range of (leaf) teas, as well as cakes, scones, sandwiches, soups and light lunches. Tea comes in a proper teapot, with a knitted cosy (you can buy your own to take home) and vintage cups and saucers.

I had the minestrone soup, with bread and butter, for £3.50. Big chunks of pasta and vegetables. Nice and warming. The teashop has free wi-fi so I checked my emails and browsed blogs while eating - felt very 21st century...I know, I know. This was the FIRST TIME I have ever used a laptop in a cafe. (I put it down to not having a laptop while at Uni.) Then I just had some 'morning tea' (proper leaf again) at £1.80.

It's a friendly wee place, reasonably busy, and I can recommend the scones (I tried one last week). It's nice having a place in Ayr that actually feels like somewhere in St Andrews. Although, if it was in St A's, there would be more people my age in there - rather than people about 30+ years older than me. I find that a lot. Places that -in St A's- would be full of students are places 'for middle-aged people' in Ayr.

*sigh*

spelt and ginger biscuits/lemon drizzle cake

My grandparents won a hamper at Christmas and gave me a packet of spelt flour from it, because I am The Baker in the family and would therefore know what to do with it. It has sat in the kitchen looking pretty since then, because I have been afraid of it. There was a Sophie Dahl recipe that sounded delicious (spelt pancakes with cream cheese and lemon) but I never got around to making it.

For some reason, on Tuesday, I decided that I wanted to make biscuits. Unfortunately, I'd used the last of the 'normal' flour in the bread-maker (yes, I have a bread-maker. Go ahead and Judge Me, all you Sunday Times magazine editors). Then I remembered a recipe in Country Living for Spelt and Ginger biscuits. (Yes, I get Country Living. According to The Times, I am middle-aged and middle-class.)

The recipe was for 35-40 biscuits. I thought this would be too many. I was wrong. I spent Wednesday morning dipping the remaining biscuits into dark chocolate. By the evening there were five left, and that only because I wrestled the tin from my brother's hands.

I made lemon drizzle cake today for some museum colleagues who are leaving to look after castles in the country and museums in the city. Never made it before, and Tana Ramsay's recipe was the first one that popped up in google. Very good, but I made the decision to divide the mixture between two tins. Glad I did. My brother watched both cake tins leave the house with sad eyes.

Happily only one got eaten at the party. He ate three huge slices before it was back in the door an hour.

a tale of april

We rented a house, with a mill wheel in the back garden. The road wound alongside the loch, through fields with new lambs and ended in a farm track with coconut-smelling gorse and tiny violets beneath the trees. We took the farm collies for walks, saw the calves in the back field, and spotted high-hovering birds of prey from the kitchen window. We flew power-kites on the beach and sat on the grass eating ice-creams. We rang a a big brass bell to call the ferry and crossed by boat to a crumbling castle set on an island in the marsh. I saw frogspawn lying like a rope of black-hearted pearls in a river-pool beside the forest track.

My fritillaries have come and gone, the salad rocket is flourishing, the clambering rose is doing tolerably well, although I am waging war with the ants at present. The plum tree has lots of leaves and no flowers and the pear tree has little leaves and far too many flowers. I do not have high hopes for fruit this year. The potted basils are coming along nicely thank-you very much and are enjoying the sun they get in the front room. The trees in the streets all around us are heavy with pink blossom, in every shade from crushed cranberry to palest blush.

I went a walk in Corsehill Gardens this afternoon, after the heat of the day had passed. The lichen on the trees was a 1950s colourway of mustard yellow and teal green. The walled garden is full of things growing - weeds mostly, but they have their place too. The fig tree has new leaves and even some figs growing. The rose trellis is recovering, although it needs encouragement to grow along the way, not up. In the park, the rose bed needs weeded, and the soil turned over. It's so peaceful to wander through under the old trees, with their smooth or weathered trunks, and their spreading branches. I'm very grateful to have such a place nearby to go to, and don't mind doing my bit to make sure others enjoy it to. I took away a whole bag of rubbish that I'd collected. Some people around here don't seem to know that it's a public garden though - I heard one lady protest to her friend yesterday, 'Oh, but can we go in there? I always thought it was somebody's garden.' One summer, I climbed on top of the wall, past the old chimney-pot, and read The Great Gatsby for school. It was warm, and I could look out across the Old Racecourse to Arran in the distance. I had chocolate, and tangerines and apples, and lay there all afternoon, watching people on the path below who had no idea I was up there.

The weather we've been having this April makes me think of summer. It's actually warm outside tonight - that heavy, scent-filled warmth that makes you think of foreign countries and past summers.

happy things

*the bunch of flowers that has lasted (in various incarnations) for weeks
*taking 3 more bags of stuff to the Oxfam shop
*my 'new' teal cardigan, picked up at said Oxfam shop for £3.99
*sunshine
*Birt and Tang Ginger tea
*hearing old friends over the phone
*seeing little peeps of pink on the cherry blossom tree
*snowdrops
*bulbs coming up through the earth