Summer rain

The rain starts, the rain stops, starts again and gets heavier. Our visitors, Simon, Eloisa and Lorenzo, due to continue their holiday further north, turn south and head for home. Within two hours the sun is out and the next day is sunny. When to cut your losses; a tricky call. At least they had a swim before leaving.

I’ve been feeding the neighbours’ cats and hens this last week, collecting eggs and admiring Fiona’s wild flowers.

Sapwood experiment: I built the front door ramp and deck from larch already rejected as cladding, some because it included non-durable sapwood, but I was interested to see how long it lasted (somewhere it would be easy to replace). In the photo below you can see the plank’s sapwood edge has already rotted; crumbled in a year and eight months.

Indoors the sapwood isn’t an issue and adds a pleasing variation of colour and tone – as in the shelves below.

I beg your pardon: typing this sounds different. Everything sounds different: wrapping the bread in its bag; walking down stairs; speaking. I’m wearing my NHS hearing aids, fitted yesterday in Oban and to my surprise they have bluetooth, so I can receive hands-free phone calls or stream music. I’m hoping they relieve some of the deaf-old-git difficulties that others have had to endure while trying to communicate with me and shall be monitoring my social interactions with interest.

More wood store: Last week I began sorting wood in the old wood store, filling a couple of buckets to add to the bulk-bag that’s destined for the recycling centre. Finding some useful pieces of chunky timber I decided to add a substantial support near one corner of the new store, before it is filled, when making such an addition would be next to impossible. I trusted neither the flimsy leg I’d already provided nor the precarious heap of stones and wooded wedges. During my comings and goings I’d become sure that the swallows have made a second nest round the corner from their first, so I fitted the new leg and left them in peace. Filling the new store will have to wait and perhaps, with some help, we can minimise disturbance by working intensely for short periods, then giving the birds a good break.

If I’m going on a bit about the new wood store it’s because it’s important to us! We really need to clear the rest of the site so the garden can become a garden, a delight. After five years the building site image MUST GO!

On Thursday David dropped by for a night on his way from Islay, and on Friday helped me swap mattresses (from bedroom to car, from bell tent to bedroom) so Tash and I have a firmer (temporary) bed to relieve her painful back, and he helped me load scrap wood into the car with the sad, trussed-up mattress which only just fitted. On Friday we took it all to the recycling centre in Lochgilphead.

I went to the dump again today, Sunday, with another large bag of wood scraps and some longer pieces too. On sorting a box, of what I thought was just firewood turned out to contain a whole bucketful of unburnable stuff, wood treated with preservative that burning would release into the environment. All I can do is hope that if the wood is recycled (chipboard? cardboard?) then release of the toxins will at least be delayed.

Two other boxes held mouse nests…

With the wider, more useful pieces of larch rehoused the old store now holds only wood that we’ll burn in the winter. I’ll shift it to the new store once I’ve worked out what containers I can put it in; something I can stack, that will let the wood dry if rain blows in and that I can carry comfortably. The new store’s roof is now finished with felt, just in time before the storm, forecast to arrive tonight.

Pine Marten: at first I didn’t recognise the marten, chocolate fur ruffled by the breeze in the middle of the single track Glen Road, head tilted unnaturally, showing a creamy throat and chest. Fresh but very dead. It was still there when I drove back and gone the next day. On a happier note Tash said questioningly, Is that a chaffinch? I looked at the bird on the perch, immediately saw a chaffinch and remarked on the beauty of its particularly delicious blue grey back and rufous breast, then saw the black throat and white forehead; a redstart! Two days running it came and hung out for twenty minutes, flying to pick an insect from the gravel by the house, investigating the old wood store then returning to call from its perch only five metres from where I sat. I managed a fuzzy phone photo but when I had the camera and long telephoto lens to hand it remained absent.

I feel the desire to do a bit more scything, but must first continue to sort and clear the wood and the unsightly constructions where I’ve stored it. Nearly there.