Pottering about the countryside

I have had a strange week. I tell myself that weeks like this are unusual, although I do seem to have a few of them. I left home at 6.00 am on Monday to travel by train (the only efficient form of travel if you actually want to achieve anything while you move) for Thurso on Scotland's north coast. It is a long slow journey - a colleague made the train journey from Paris to Edinburgh as quickly the week before - but does give an opportunity for uninterrupted work. The view is also pretty good although frustrating as I travel along the rivers Tay, Helmsdale and Thurso all populated by fishermen as I tap at laptop keys. I went there to see people in connection with an excellent project with which we are involved at work. I met them, I slept in a friendly hotel and then I left Thurso on on the 6.50 am train on Tuesday to return to Edinburgh - another eight uninterrupted hours with the exception of polite chat with fellow travellers who were on their way to Berwick upon Tweed. I was jealous. I visited the office. I made a fleeting appearance in the office on Wednesday morning and then went out to clients. I went from that client to Perthshire where I joined a Scottish Wildlife Trust field trip to The Hermitage, had dinner, slept in a friendly hotel and then left Pitlochry at 6.00 am on Thursday to meet clients in Livingston. I went to the School Sports. I have been in the office all day to day and then I went home (via the pub!). It has felt, although has probably not been, shambolic!

Entertaining?

For the first time since "the Bobs" (as our builders were predictably christened by us despite all their names being Andy) left we had people for dinner last night. Our guests were drawn from what I think pass for the usual sources - work, university, parents from school. We had been to one couple's house for dinner recently and she had cooked fantastically so a degree of pressure to perform was being felt. While a back street driver on these occasions I enjoy the rituals of feeding people - finding and polishing silver; choosing drink; the hopeless hunt for muslin culminating in the decanting of port through a pair of tights; buying good cheese; rushing home; carefully washing such good things as we have afterwards; putting everything away through the morning haze of hangover (and yes I have the inevitable wholesomeness of the school coffee morning to cope with).

While I enjoy all that, the best bit is having people here, some of them people we used to see every week and now see all too rarely, and laughing. I can't at this point remember where the conversation went (it will come back and I'll cringe later) - I just know that, as it always does in this house, it descended rapidly. My broad philosophical approach to entertaining (if its sensible to have such a thing) is to put people in a place where they can have fun generally involving the consumption of drink, but then expect them to return the favour by doing so. We had a great time last night - good guests, who can come again.

The Edge of Summer

Today has been warm and this evening balmy. I drove home with the car roof down, it was still just light at 10.00 o'clock, the air smells of cut grass and one of our neighbours had a party in their garden. It feels like the front edge of summer.

I like the way the seasons change and am as happy with the move through autumn to winter, with its short days and dark journeys home (Edinburgh is a city particularly well adapted to those sorts of days), as I am with the lengthening days of late spring and summer. It is the variety I like and, by the time we have had one season, I am ready for the next one. I particularly like the front edge of each season, when the change is obvious and the new season fresh and ahead of us. Summer holidays are pending (not that I've got the length of booking mine), the parks are full of cheerful lunchtime refugees from hot offices and sports days, school concerts and doubtless exams fill the minds of children. It is too easy to wish time away - Friday beckoning on Monday, July holidays beckoning in June. I should try to shed sufficient busyness to enjoy time for its own sake.

The Garden

My father is and my grandparents are/were keen gardeners. Both sets of grandparents, having gardened in their respective (long established) gardens, created new gardens in their retirement. I'd like to create a new garden, ideally starting before I retire, but need to find somewhere I believe I can live for long enough to make the exercise worthwhile.


I hope that my Edinburgh garden, while undoubtedly suburban both in location and scale, is not in terms of approach. It is not a tidy, well thought out space, but rather a gradually developing mass of plants round a square patch of grass - lawn would be to flatter it. It has fruit trees and vegetables; we have planted new trees marking significant occasions or received as presents; it has a very smart bench (currently undercoat orange, but soon to be elegant white again), out of keeping urns, a wire sculpture of a pheasant (my 40th birthday present), a swing, a Wendy House and various compost sources, including a wormery. It fulfils a variety of functions: a place to play; a place to garden; a place to sit in the sun; a place to entertain (in our tent if necessary); a place to practice golf/casting; a place to dry washing! It has two peaks, April when it comes to life with blossom, daffodils, tulips and new growth and June when, in the late evening, it becomes an almost beautiful place in which you can't see the weeds for the plants and delphiniums, self seeded poppies and sweet peas provide a show of colour which, while not passing for order, might seem meant.

Being a hick

I go to London periodically. I enjoy being there for a day and generally take the sleeper down and back to maximise the time I am able to spend and people I am able to see. I attend a regular committee where I am one of only two Scottish attendees - the other is far higher powered than me. There is no doubt I am a hick. The others emerge from the tube out of the City; many of them seem to work in businesses that allow them to concentrate on the sort of policy issues the committee deals with; they see each other at similar committees; they have firm positions on things; they are a pretty impressive crowd. I emerge sleep deprived from the train with my pyjama's poking out of my briefcase; my business encourages my attendance but I am conscious of the cost of doing so and rush around trying to fit other London things in round about it; I rarely have firm views on the matters being discussed and many of them would be a mystery to my clients; everyone is kind about the effort I make to get there, but I am not sure they understand it. Today I am behind with my work and have blisters - I am therefore not sure I understand it either.

There are compensations - yesterday rather then take the sleeper down I caught the first train. The GNER East Coast route remains a civilised journey - at least for the first hour or so I pass through places I know and like - even glimpsing them from a speeding train reminds me that they are there. The London train is one of the few places I can work, uninterrupted for four hours, and be served a decent breakfast. To have done all of that and travel 350 miles, all before 10.00 am is good. The sleeper home allows me to have dinner in London with friends. My London geography is dire. Yesterday I forgot my A-Z. Looking for Victoria (close to where we were having dinner) I walked to Waterloo. On the day of the 7/7 bombings I set off on foot, blindly believing in my ability to walk from Mayfair to Wimbledon - I have never been so pleased to see a taxi and regarded the £45 fare a bargain. Why I walk so many miles in London I do not understand as the public transport system is fantastic - tomorrow I am going walking in the Lake District, assuming my blisters will let me.

Weekends at home

This is the first week-end since before Easter I have not been to Northumberland (even if one week-end all I did was drive down, collect a book, buy the Northumberland Gazette and come home). It is also the first week-end in six months that we have had no real signs of builders, albeit they are not quite finished. It has an air of normality about it. We are going out to friends for dinner; we are having friends for lunch; I am going to a meeting of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop which is running a project about which I am enthusiastic; and best of all I am going to buy a picture. I have traditionally marked my firm's year end by buying a picture and I have intended, for some time, to acquire a Cornish screenprint. I nearly bought (should have bought) a Terry Frost in St Ives three or four years ago. Today The Open Eye Gallery has an exhibition of St Ives artists and so I go, with the intent to spend, to decorate my new, now builder free, walls.

Extraordinary things

Work frequently seems difficult. It involves the application of thought, often against the clock; decisiveness, often on behalf of others in circumstances in which the decision has direct financial or other commercial consequences for them; and a significant commitment of time. When it is really bad (I worked all night last Thursday) I tell myself that there are worse things and that, anyway, these periods of extreme pressure pass and are forgotten as one gets on with the next job.

One of the things I find most perspective inducing is the First World War, or more particularly the way in which those who fought in it seemed to cope, having been removed from ordinary life, with its extraordinary extremes.

My book club book this month is "Goodbye to All That" by Robert Graves - this is, if you'll excuse the pun, a choice of relative gravity after "The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman" which is what we read last month. I read, a year or two ago, Captain James Dunn's "The War the Infantry Knew". Both Graves and Dunn record, in different ways, the life in the trenches of The Royal Welch Fusiliers. It was a different age and lives and the attitudes of people have, of course, changed enormously. Both books however illustrate the capacity of ordinary people to do the extraordinary when required. So, if so many ordinary people could go off and live and fight (and frankly the going off and living seems extraordinary enough to me without the fighting) in rat infested, muddy holes in France and Belgium for years while being shot at, gassed and bombed by a hostile enemy, the odd night up in a relatively comfortable office, shuffling paper can't really be a problem.