Autumn/Winter 2023

The garden produced bumper crops of cucumbers and corn, while mice or rabbits scoffed all the peas and purple kale. The flower gardens are almost there and provided some colourful displays into autumn. A combination of weather and additional away trips has meant the winter work is still not complete but hopefully will be by the end of the year (with a bit of help from John).

Although we had done some child sitting for The Birches during the summer, our first experience of dog sitting took place when Ralph was left at home for the October school half term. Whilst I’m sure he would have loved a trip to The Netherlands with the rest of his family, he seemed very happy with us and was ‘nototheraball’, behaving perfectly on a run up Tinto and at Strathclyde parkrun.

Despite suffering from a summer of aches and pains involving bouts of ‘furniture-walking’ and trips to the physio, Suse took the bull by the horns and entered the Tinto Twin night and day ‘O’ event in Pollok Park. Here, she surprised everybody including herself, by winning her age class and now has the trophy to prove it. Meanwhile, John was last in his favourite race at the Taynish National Nature Reserve. Perhaps attempting such a challenging event just after having flu and covid jabs wasn’t the best idea.

Although the new van had proved more than acceptable on trips to Glasgow, we decided that it need to be tested on a longer run before finally committing to its full camper van conversion. Accordingly, we invited ourselves to visit relations and friends in Chesterfield, Pontefract, York and Sunderland. Suse’s cousin’s wife dying meant adding in Wolverhampton and brought the round trip to a total of 1000 miles. Apart from the funeral obviously, we thoroughly enjoyed seeing friends and relations we hadn’t seen for some time and added the Van Gogh exhibition in York to our 2023 cultural experiences.

Not all of the horror stories we were told about fisticuffs at Gretna Services and the like were true but the e.v. charging scene in England is much less co-ordinated than in Scotland. We came away thinking that being dedicated orienteers probably helps with becoming comfortable about longer e.v. Trips, especially in England. The meticulous planning undertaken for our rail adventure in the spring has to be applied to driving an e.v. anywhere. Fortunately the trip doesn’t have us looking for a trade-in. Far from it, the van is now booked in for its first phase conversion (windows and pop-top roof) in mid January 2024 with the remainder scheduled for March.

Because of his professed aversion to ‘heuchter cheuchter’ music, Suse was left somewhat puzzled when John agreed to attend a practice session for The Loch Fyne Occasional Rehearsal Band – a ceilidh band. She is convinced that alcohol must have been involved but actually the invitation was by WhatsApp. Two practices later, the Band played for a select audience in Tarbert and a good time appears to have been had by all. Listen to this space…