St Andrews Day

     I wonder how many know that St Andrew had a horrible death in Greece, crucified on a cross like the one on the Scottish flag. He refused an ordinary cross like Jesus because he did not feel worthy to share the same death. So he was tied on with ropes and  took 3 days to die.
    Scots claim that some of his bones came to Scotland about 732 AD and eventually to St Andrews Cathedral. These were destroyed during the reformation.
     However in 1879 another of his bones was sent to us from Amalfi in Italy and in 1969 the Pope gave another one to Cardinal Grey. These now reside in the Metropolitan Cathedral of St Marys in Edinburgh
     I think this is (perhaps) a day that means more to expatriate Scots than resident Scots. We spent 2 years in Canada and it was a very big deal out there. All those with Scottish links would get together and become thoroughly maudlin about "the good old homeland". Kilts would be donned with all sorts of wonderful accessories  One year the local paper published photos of the local kilted gentlemen, but only from the waist downwards. Readers were invited to guess the identities!

Waiting in all day for deliveries

      Surely one of the most annoying things of our present age is having to wait in all day because some big company cannot organise themselves well enough to say when they will arrive at your home to deliver something or do some job etc. In  'the good old days'  there was no problem with this and companies did not have the use of computers to help them plan or a mobile phone which could be used to give warning of their arrival. Surely computers and mobile phones should make it all so easy and they should be able to give superb service.
     I feel a bit guilty complaining about this, after all I am a pensioner, and don't have to leave the house to go out to work all day and every day.
And - even more guilt here - the delivery was for several boxes of wine!
BUT
We waited in all day
When it arrived it was all wrong
And we now have to wait in all tomorrow for them to remove the wrong stuff and give us the correct order.

Skyfall for pensioners

    We went to see Skyfall yesterday, the latest James Bond film. It is very good. I appreciated the introduction of some real story and emotion, whereas my husband loved the car chases. We both appreciated the scenes filmed in Glencoe here in Scotland  - a real bit of MAMBA country - presumably chosen for that reason.
     But it made me feel old. I have known so many James Bonds, from the gorgeous Sean Connery (still my favourite by miles) to the present Daniel Craig, who is beginning to look a bit too old. I even have a photo of myself on the beach in my teens with Roger Moore - who was not a good Bond.
    No the Bond for me will always be Sean Connery, the milkman from here in Edinburgh.
   Very sadly though, I now despise the man. He lives abroad with all the money he has made and yet he continues to interfere in our Scottish politics. I don't think he should be allowed to comment on the politics of a country in which he no longer lives or pays tax, a country he has run away from to avoid paying taxes which could have gone towards making a better Scotland. - Oh, but he was so dishy in his day!

Weird facts about bank notes

And here are a few weird facts about bank notes (Bank of Scotland ones)
Scottish notes are still printed in Scotland and they are legal currency in all of the UK.
Do you hear that all you rotten English people who look at me as if I am a criminal when I try to use one in London
But
Scottish notes are NOT legal tender - neither are English notes. The only legal tender are pound coins (and some others)
The very best way to see if a Bank of Scotland note is a forgery is to rub the darkest part of it against some white paper. Some of the dark red paint will come off because the paint never properly dries.
Another way is to roll up the note - and the picture at each cut end should match up.
Every note ever made has a serial number. Notes are destroyed every 2 years or so. A bank clerk has checked every serial number since the beginning against those known to be destroyed and has found that, to their surprise, there are quite a lot of notes still out there - somewhere. Lets hope their owners don't all come into the bank on the same day and ask for their value in pound coins!

The history of banknotes

I am back in the big city of Edinburgh - Scotland's capital - where it is history month.  So I took myself off to a most enlightening talk about the history of the banknote given in the Museum of Banking which until fairly recently was the headquarters of The Royal Bank of Scotland.
Apparently bank notes where first used in Europe by The Royal Bank of Scotland in about 1711.  It was a huge advance in banking because it meant the bank could start to pretend it had money that it did not have. I reckon that this was where the system went wrong. This was where the rot set in

Tea and long ago school

Afternoon visiting (at any time) in Sutherland still means being offered a dram or a sherry followed by a feast of pancakes with homemade jam and cakes and tea from a pot, drunk from proper cups and saucers. I got talking to my hostess about her childhood there. Her family had a small croft in the hills and she walked a long long way each day to her primary school. Her secondary school was too far to walk to, so the children would weekly board with households in Golspie. There were hostels, but they were for the children from the West Coast, who boarded there for the whole term. My hostess would go home each weekend as she lived near enough to do that. She could get a train and then walk. She was the only child in the house where she boarded and she brought her own food from the croft because that was cheaper. She brought eggs and potatoes and was expected to cook them herself (from age 11). She always had to be in by 7pm.
She remembered one year (perhaps 1942), the snow was so bad that the children were told that they could not go home. They pretended they had not heard and went anyway - a whole crowd of them - determined to get home at all costs. She said they almost did not get there. Even the district nurses car was quite covered in snow

Wind farms proliferating like Acne

       A pamphlet dropped through our letterbox detailing plans for a new wind farm to be built on the estate just opposite us to the north west
    The first of these giant windmills arrived a few years ago and we watch them sometimes turning in the wind on the horizon north east of us.
     Many people hated them but I thought they were rather wonderful. Huge moving sculptures. However they are proliferating like acne. I fear that soon every vista and every view will have them. Scotland's beautiful scenery, one of it's few selling points, is being destroyed.
     I have listened to people argue about their cost effectiveness and efficiency etc. The one argument that makes very real sense to me is this. There is no point in building more until someone invents a way to store the energy they produce, or devise a sensible way that it can be sent off to other parts of the country that need it. Up in the North here, we already produce more electricity than we can use. Already many of the existing mills are turned off a lot of the time because too much power has been produced. So why build more and ruin the views.
    Of course every estate and landowner wants to get in on the act and get a wind farm on their property. The government is still paying huge amounts of taxpayers money to them for doing so.
    The estate opposite us is on the market and is not selling. The local crofters did some research because one option was a crofters buyout. They found however that the income from the estate was too little to make it feasable. However, if planning permission is granted for a wind farm, then the estate will suddenly look much more attractive to buyers. It would become an economic possibility. So there are arguments on either side. Do we want a beautiful but dead Scotland or an ugly but alive Scotland?

Salmon spawning and new life begins- even in winter.

I always think of Spring as being the time of year for regeneration - for plants and for animals.  It is a time of newness and of hope and of continuation. Whereas this dismal time of year spells death and decay to me.
BUT - I saw a wonderful thing today, which has quite changed how I feel.
I saw salmon spawning - the mighty king of the Scottish rivers - spawning in the burn at the bottom of our hill. Huge silvery fishes splashing and racing about as the males fight for a female and then quiet as the female lays her eggs in a shallow hollow and the male glides over and covers them with his sperm. And there is life beginning all over again. Magic

The end of the crofting era

I was at a sad but wonderful Highland funeral today. It was a lady in her 90's brought up on a croft in the hills here in Sutherland in the 1920's depression, when life was hard. Somehow the family got enough money together for her to move away and train as a nurse in Glasgow, where she worked till she was in her 60's. Retirement meant coming home to the croft to help out her sister. These two wonderful yet tough women ran the croft until their deaths. This meant lambing in all weathers, at all times of the night or day.
Of the row of crofts scattered along the side of this Glen, there is now only one of the original families still crofting.  This most traditional of all Highland things is dying. No-one wants to croft anymore because the price of sheep and wool has plummeted, making it almost impossible to do without another full time job.
It is the end of an era

Dead deer

My husband loves "Hunting shooting and fishing". Yesterday he had arranged a days stalking. This involves paying and then if you are lucky shooting a deer after hours crawling around in the wet heather and bog. It is something I would pay not to do but , we are all different. Most people stalk earlier in the year when you can shoot stags (with antlers). This is expensive because it is popular. But the hinds (no antlers) still have to be culled every year. They can be shot now and it is much cheaper. It is all  very closely controlled and beforehand you have to have your shooting skills and your gun's accuracy checked by the keeper. He tells you what to shoot and when. The most important thing is safety, the next is humanity ie to kill the deer outright if possible, so that it does not suffer.
So my husband set off in the car at daybreak. Suddenly a deer jumped in front of the car from trees on one side. He didn't even have time to brake before it hit. Luckily he was going slowly or he might have been killed. He pulled in to find the deer but there was no sign of it, it had managed to run away. However, it must have had fatal injuries. It would have gone on to die a horrible slow death.
What strikes me here is the irony. A gun is considered to be such a dangerous machine BUT so is a car.
The deer he shot later in the day after several hours stalking would never have known it was shot, it died instantly. The animal hit by the car would have suffered badly for some time before it died.

Fading memory for dress codes

We were at a family lunch today with my old mother who is in her 90's and whose memory is disappearing at a progressively faster and faster rate. She used to be such a stickler for doing things properly such as laying the table, correct table manners and correct dress code for every different type of occasion from a formal wedding downwards. She now can't remember. Mind you the world has changed and nobody does things as they were done 90 years ago.

Scottish MAMBA

I spent the morning reading about 'Agricultural practice in the Hebrides in 1811'.
 I almost didn't read the article as I thought it sounded very boring. However I did and it was fascinating and very sad and was all about the decline that led finally to the evictions of all the people from those beautiful Islands.
This afternoon we walked through a part of the Sutherland hills where the people met with the same fate.
The walk was beautiful because the country is empty.It is miles and miles of nothings or as some say - miles and miles of b****r all.
This is where the term MAMBA comes from.