The Deep North

The Lady Novelist is embarking on another work of fiction. It’s official — as indicated by the formal opening of a new writing-book, which is always a bit of a moment. This will be carried about for some months and needs to be fairly tough. I was delighted to find, when I visited Signor Valese last summer, that he had come up with a striking and distinctive red and white paste-paper which even I should have some difficulty in losing, I hope. Another indication of sap rising: I have bought quantities of dahlias in a variety of pulsating shades of red, orange, and near-black, mostly the latter. We lost the existing dahlia collection to the general collapse of the Refugee Gardener, and I hope this year we’ll get on better.

Well, all bullet points were ticked on my trip South — saw new agent, did final edits for an article in the British Library, gave paper in Oxford, had haircut, spent some time with my mother, etc. etc. I have come back to find a new computer. The old one had become the bane of my life for a whole series of reasons, the letter A which has been sticking since Miss Kit was sick on it, the way it would sieze up every few minutes, and so forth. However, with computers one is invariably out of the frying pan and into the fire. I will doubtless become accustomed to it, but Windows Explorer is treacherously different, and will no longer display all the picture icons in a file as thumbnails but only one at a time, the delete key is in a different place, and in all kinds of subtle ways, the laptop, which is in effect a sort of prosthesis since I conduct about 80% of my life through it, doesn’t fit. In time, I trust I will squirm around and make it comfortable, but it is not yet my friend, and I don’t seem to be able to install my scanner. The keyboard’s not bad, though. I’m sure it will all sort out.

I’m off to London tomorrow, and very much looking forward to seeing something other than snowy fields. Life has been utterly dominated by weather for more than three months, and it’s getting very wearing. As the Professor was saying this morning, it’s the having to think about it ALL THE TIME. A gay social whirl of the British Library, going to, and giving, papers in Oxford & discussing the progress of an exceptionally tedious project stretches before me, but anything is better than this and at least I can get a haircut. We went into the garden centre today to replace some pots utterly destroyed by the frost, and I discovered the existence of a special feeder for finches – there’s a very small, oil rich seed called niger which goldfinches et al love, and which would pour straight out of an ordinary feeder. I’m only sorry I hadn’t discovered it before, because how these tiny birds have coped with the winter I can’t think. Perhaps they haven’t. Anyway I look forward with interest to seeing when they discover it – it’s hung up in my garden. To continue the nature notes, the big tabby and white cat is still with us, and seems to have moved in, though it all seems quite amicable, and there has been no dissent from the existing rough cats.

Colman no.2 has appeared, so I think we’ve just lost Mrs Black. But the cats are looking a bit desperate. Their chubby, bearlike proportions are induced by short legs and lots of fur, and I wonder how much cat there is underneath.

There are changes in the cat world. We haven’t seen Mrs Black for about a fortnight, and we haven’t seen one of the Colmans for three or four days, so we are coming to the sad conclusion that this brutal weather has been too much for them and they have frozen to death. None of them have looked at all ill, it’s just that the nights are long and it’s been down to -15 . They are at least ten, and have had a square meal every day of their lives so they haven’t done half badly for feral animals. Another reason to think that we have lost at least one cat is that there is a large tabby and white animal, who has appeared in the last few days, and is joining the remaining Colman and Fillan at handout time. Mutual relations appear to be wary, but not actively hostile, which leads us to think that the newcomer is female. How cats detect a cat-shaped hole in the ecosystem I do not know, but they have remarkable gifts that way. Miss Kit is also well aware of the newcomer. She’s been acting fairly strangely. Going out for her ablutions, she has been tiptoeing about as if she thinks the ground might open and swallow her up, sniffing suspiciously at the soil and examining every twig. She’s also off her food, and generally looking depressed. The fact that there is a large, strange cat about certainly accounts for some of this, but the Professor had occasion to visit the vet today to pick up some thyroid pills for the old dog, and got into conversation with the most intelligent of the nurses who happened to be on, and asked her if she agreed with our impression that cats were finding this winter very difficult. She agreed completely — the surgery has apparently been inundated with cats with nothing apparently wrong with them, but depressed, off their food, acting a bit crazy, or whatever. It’s the incredible length of this winter, and the way it’s kept coming back like Dracula: with pampered house-cats, it’s brought on some kind of Feline Seasonal Affective Disorder; the ferals, presumably, have taken just as much of a psychological mauling, plus of course facing the dire, purely physical, problem of keeping warm. I fear that one of them at least has had as much as she can stand.

The aftermath of viva-ing the Northern Gentleman was having the externals for the week end. No hardship, since they are cultivated and interesting characters: this morning, after a leisurely breakfast-cum-dissection of aspects of the Reformation, we took them off to visit our local castle, which is a grim fortalice which has been subjected to occasional bursts of prettying it up over the centuries, never very consistently, or for very long. It was a day of brilliant blue skies and the sun warm on your face somehow coexisting with temperatures of about -3 and after a fearsomely cold night. The walk up to the castle through light snow was quite unproblematic, but after going through a gate pierced in a kind of curtain wall, the way down to the courtyard gate proved to be something of a challenge. It was a downward slope, no more than five or ten degrees, but the result of the temperature fluctuations over the last couple of days was that it had become a sloping sheet of ice, running with surface water, too thick to break by standing on it, and, rather fascinatingly, with water visibly also running underneath it. Also, of course, incredibly hard to walk on. You don’t often meet sloping ice. We got to the castle by way of an extensive detour. The interior turned out to be colder than outside, a besetting problem with medieval tower-houses, and had the odd texture of a place which has been subjected to bouts of restoration at intervals of many decades. The contents are a bit hit or miss, but it did contain one object of utter magnificence. Thrown across a bed upstairs was a patchwork dressing gown, nice small patches, made of various species of checked and striped woollen blanket and the softer kinds of tweed, and carefully lined with something silky. It was beautifully designed and must have been as warm as toast. The Professor was to be seen gazing at it with the look of a man who feels a project coming on.

Those who know and care about the Northern Gentleman might like to know that as of about midday, he is now a Doctor of Philosophy. He appeared for examination in a very cool linen suit, looking considerably more elegant than anyone else involved in the enterprise, and proceeded to display both cool and sang-froid to a marked degree (aided in this by the thrifty policies of the University of Aberdeen, this is Saturday, and so all the heating in the building had been turned off). Cool? sang-froid? Hah. We were all bloody freezing. But despite that there was an elegant defence of an extremely able thesis, and now it is all over, and congratulations are in order.

I went into Aberdeen today, exams business. It was iron-hard frost this morning, about three below by 10 am, having clearly been much colder during the night. I dealt with my administration, filled a bag with library books, and put myself on a 2 o’clock bus, simply because the Prof is once more poorly and I wanted to get home. By the time I was waiting at a bus stop, it was a good deal milder, well above freezing, and I just went home. The Laird of the Pink Castle rang in a bit after that, saying How are you? — at which point I discovered that for all the uneventfulness of my travels, about 18 ins of snow had fallen on Westhills, just outside Aberdeen and about five miles north of the road I’d been on, and various other places he knew of had been deluged. One got a sort of picture of capricious deities sitting on clouds and upending buckets of snow over the region. ‘Ooo, let’s see if I can get Inverurie’. ‘Direct hit on Fyvie!’. Etc. I do wish we could persuade them all to go to Aiya Napa instead, given their primitive sense of humour they should fit right in.

Tolerable gravel is a phrase which occurs within both the letters and the novels of Jane Austen. Clearly, people knew what it meant at the time, and I think I do too. Upper-class women’s shoes were thin soled with glue-stiffened fabric uppers, but with tolerable (thick enough, well drained) gravel, ladies could walk on ‘the gravel walk’, intended for the purpose, in seasons other than the brightest summer, and thus could still venture outdoors, without getting their stockings wet. We do not have a gravel walk. We have wellington boots, a post-Austen phenomenon. However, due to the age of the house, we do have something Austen would recognise, which is a carriage-sweep, a tear-shaped path which allows you to get a vehicle to the front door and out again without reversing (horses do not have a reverse gear, at least, not when they are pulling a carriage). Over this winter of leaves, snow, more snow, and general horror it has come to look infinitely depressing, stones hammered into mud. Our new garden help is in possession of a tip-up truck, and this has allowed him to start on a transformation: he can tip a line of gravel off the truck, rake it flat, move the thing a foot or so forward, repeat … having personally been involved in gravel spreading enterprises, I know very well that ordinarily, half the problem is that you get the stuff delivered in a pile somewhere, and have to wheelbarrow it to point of rest, and rake thereafter, and so the truck takes half the effort out of the considerable labour involved. The transformative effects of un-decayed, kept up looking paths, should not be underestimated. The whole set-out looks miles better. And having personally walked on it in sandals, though our policies at the moment look as if the Glastonbury Festival or a herd of mammoths has roared through, viz., a sea of mud, I can say, once more, we have tolerable gravel.

Last night, there was a horrible coughing in the back kitchen, not unfamiliar. The boiler again, making a pitiful, consumptive, ‘Doctor, will I ever dance again?’ sort of noise. Resignedly, we called our brilliant plumber, only to discover that he has gone offshore. An accumulation of people not paying bills, which in my view is a sin, never mind a crime, when the victim is an independent tradesman, plus, which put the tin lid on it, a defaulting apprentice. Every now and then the politicians and the media work themselves into a froth about why aren’t there more apprenticeships, but having an apprentice is a major public service. Their hours are controlled like those of an au pair (thus, if he finishes at four you have to work out a way of getting the laddie home, since of course he can’t drive), they have to have a day off a week, or is it two, to attend college, and beyond that they are paid, and you can’t put what they cost onto the customer. So this is a vast contribution to the public weal for which you get precious little thanks. Stevie undertook to spend five years working for the firm after he’d done his time, and in fact, after a mere three months, said he was awa’. He has a job working for Barratt Homes or thereabouts, plumbing in identical new kitchens, and thus learning absolutely nothing, so if this recession continues he may be on a fairly sticky wicket. And now you know where cowboy plumbers come from. Be that as it may. We are terribly sad about this on various counts, but re. the consumptive boiler, our friend recommended a pal, who turned up this morning. What he discovered, plumbing the boiler, was that it contained about 6lb of soot. On several occasions in the last few years, Stevie has in our hearing been told to tidy up the boiler while his master went on to a more complex task, and I do rather think he didn’t. Meanwhile of course, a soft impalpable cloud of greasy blackness boiled out of the boiler, and settled upon almost everything, and still more fatally, got on the soles of everyone’s shoes. Fortunately it was Honey the Hamster-Loving Hippie’s day. The kitchen and the back kitchen both had to be cleaned twice, Poor Honey looked as if she was about to break into ‘Way down upon de’ Swannee Ribba'’ by the time he was finished , and black smuts went so far, so fast, that the professional carpet cleaner is coming tomorrow.

This has been the first day of a new venture in help with the garden. We’re not sure what to make of this chap; but it may simply be that he is shy. Not unknown among rural types. He has done an excellent first day’s work, and he is clearly keen to do more. But we have a new rule and intend to stick to it. He gets paid, somewhat over the going rate, in his hand, in cash, at the end of the day. If we have to get in the habit of keeping money in the house then that is what we will have to do. It’s different with someone like our friend the Hamster Loving Hippie, who gets paid up front at the beginning of the month, and comes most faithfully to clean up after us, with never a problem and changed days by negotiation when necessary. But we have come sadly to realise that with outside help, though the gardeners and handymen very much like being paid up front at the beginning of the month, since there is any amount of bad weather to be had in large helpings hereabouts, the result is that you go to the bottom of the queue: rather than building loyalty, the thinking goes, ‘Okay, that’s money I can count on. So if x wants me tomorrow, that’s extra, and I’ll find a day to get out …’ and then he doesn’t, and it all goes pear shaped. The logic is self evident, and the result is that the gardener gets more and more in arrears with days brought forward for a summer that never comes. We have spent a small fortune on garden work which hasn’t been done in the last three years, and I’m afraid that the new chap will feel the benefit of this accumulated wisdom.

The snowdrops are out in increasing numbers, and very welcome they are too. But it’s always nice to see the first flowering bulb that isn’t a snowdrop, especially since the snow only melted a couple of days ago. I’m therefore delighted to report that there is a small but real clump of purple crocus on the bank, the first of hundreds. I planted a thousand scillas and grape hyacinth last autumn. Surely some of them will come up — and I’m finding plenty of primrose crowns though the flowers are some way in the future.

We had a highly cultivated Friday night which was so tiring I’ve only just got around to recording it. First of all we were due at Aberdeen art gallery, where there was an opening and private view: an Aberdeen based artist who at the age of 77 suddenly decided that she really wanted to go and paint in the Antarctic, and did. You will readily surmise that the Professor got roped in to write about the results for the catalogue. Vast numbers of people turned up, and you might have thought that le tout Aberdeen was there except that when we slipped away and walked to the Pisky Cathedral, that was also heaving with the culture-minded, who were attending a concert of mostly modern choral music. We were there, once more, on account of the Professor, who wrote some of the words for a new piece celebrating the 500th anniversary of the dedication of the University Chapel, and thus ended up in the front row with the Boss. This put us within 10 feet of thirty-odd professional singers, which at points I came to feel was a mixed blessing. Much of the concert was lovely, but I was left reflecting, not for the first time, that musicians, while highly sensitive to vowels, can be awfully obtuse to language. A young Latvian composer had set a poem about the moon which put one in mind of E.J. Thribb, and another chap had been so unwise as to compose words of his own for a piece called ‘Water Moon’, a queasily saccharine mixture of images which were the verbal equivalent of a sub Pink Floyd album-cover from the 70s. I’m sure the harmonics were all doing well and fine, but I began to feel that the old adage ‘anything too silly to be said can be sung’ was being tested beyond all previous limits.

We now have a gleaming new cooker. It was delivered without fuss, despite the snow, when promised; when the delivery man was misled by his SatNav and sent to the grain-store (this happens) he rang up for instructions. The Cooker Whisperer turned up within an hour of the van’s departure, and fitted it. Also, it fits the space, and I can still open the proximate drawer, which I hadn’t been betting on, since when I measured the space and compared it to the cooker specs, I knew the thing would probably project 1 cm beyond the worktops, which in fact, it doesn’t. All its bits seem to be there, and it is even now cooking off the suspicious plasticky smell which attends new cookers. I am now reading the manual, something which is generally done only by Dr Biswell, but he isn’t here. I have got as far as p. 10: Ceramic Hob, only to be brought up short by the first thing on the list of DO NOT:
1. Do not stare at halogen heating units.
Well, dearie, there are many who would say we lead sad, sad, lives and don’t get out enough (especially at the moment), but at least we are seldom reduced to staring at halogen heating units. Are they shy?

According to NASA, who ought to know, ‘It has been established that 2009 was the second warmest in the global record and the warmest ever in the southern hemisphere record. In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 0.8°C (1.5°F) since 1880 [according to Nasa GISS figures]’. It’s hard to believe, looking out on a landscape of unbroken white which is causing the local inhabitants to say ‘whaur’s your Global Warming noo?’ with monotonous regularity. Out there causing trouble, it seems, even if locally it is freezing cold and we are still snowed in, a state of affairs which is apparently down to something called Arctic Oscillation.

Today’s paper-pushing, student-calming and so forth ended in a curious sort of gig which was entertaining 43 Arab maidens from the Emirates. They have been on some sort of empowerment course in Dundee, and were up for a day’s worth of Aberdeen, where it was, on and off, snowing. We therefore excused them Plan A, ‘A Walk Round Old Aberdeen’ and substituted a lecture with powerpoint pictures, improvised at the eleventh hour. I must say, they are clearly a very bright bunch, as an audience, they were both courteous and lively, and I can only say that whatever empowerment has been going on seems to be working. The chador does not necessarily result in a switching off of higher mental processes, whatever the French President might think. We had a schedule for this event, but the thing we hadn’t reckoned on was the aftermath. Not questions, but, I strongly suspect, a Courtesy of the Modern World (I encountered it in Japan). They wanted to take their photos with us. I can’t really think why they want stout, grey & shabby Aberdeen professors, other than to demonstrate that the event took place & they were there, in case of Questions Later, but they did. They were commendably efficient about the whole thing, and asked politely if we minded being on their Facebooks, but even so, as with weddings, it took FOREVER.

Tonight’s menu included baked potatoes. I was just about to get them out of the oven when the door came off in my hand. Did I curse and blaspheme …? No: for that 1) the little buggers were, by that point, cooked, and 2), far more importantly, I ordered a new cooker three days ago, HA HA HA. I put great faith in John Lewis: as someone who doesn’t really want to spend much time thinking about domestic matters, I have always felt that the nice ladies in White Goods not only know far more than I do but take it infinitely more seriously. This cooker is only two or three years old, but I think I can see how the narrative developed. The Professor, when in Aberdeen, went and said we needed a cooker. He was not interested in a shopping experience, he didn’t care what it looked like, etc. The nice lady in White Goods sized him up, and said, roughly, well, dearie, this one’s a hundred quid cheaper but it does all the stuff cookers do, I’d just go for it. This seemed perfectly sensible at the time, but even over this distinctly short lifespan, the enamel is starting to go, the grill element prolapsed, the screws which attach it to the back have corroded (this is why we decided to get a new one) and the temperature has become increasingly erratic. What I’ve concluded is that this is a cooker answering the non-question, ‘well, you’ve got to have a cooker, haven’t you?’ and its intended life was one of the odd fry-up, desperate sweaty sessions of Family Funne at Easter or Christmas, and not much else. A cooker for non cooks, and therefore barely functional. The good lady in White Goods was I think led astray by two factors, utter indifference to appearances and also the fact that serious cooks generally cook on gas. But it’s a curious thought, the cooker which isn’t really designed to be used.

As the fates would have it, I was scheduled to do my turn at invigilating this afternoon from three to five. All very well, since I am not prone to donning my ruby slippers of a Friday, except that last night we had more snow. Not in vast amounts, at least as far as the view out of the window suggested, but absence of response to this state of affairs on the part of the Roads Dept meant that the bus which bore me Aberdeenwards arrived forty-five minutes late. Things eased off in the afternoon, but when I went off to supervise the exam, I found that once I got off territory the University considered its business, I was slipping and sliding on impacted ice, and as I gathered everything together and prepared to leave, the weather changed its mind. The sky went black and I found myself walking into a blizzard of the genuine, can’t see where you’re going due to eyelashes weighted with snow, variety. I then waited for a bus; six words which in this case covered a fair amount of territory. So much snow fell so quickly that the traffic pounded it into ice. There is a slight incline on the street where I wait, and some vehicles, vans in particular, couldn’t cope and were sliding about as if on a skating rink. An hour passed, slowly. After a while I became aware of the disquieting fact that though the country buses were coming in on schedule, nothing whatever which I knew to have started at the bus station had come the other way, and I began to think, without optimism, of the topography of the city centre — the bus station is on the same level as the train station and the Shiprow (producing one of Aberdeen’s moments of grandeur: coming out of one or other normal and mundane variety of inland transport to see massive, deep-North-Sea-going ships standing at the dock, producing a momentary desire to go to Estonia or at least, Orkney). Union Street, the main thoroughfare, is something like 80 feet up from sea level, so the connecting road is vertiginous. I began slowly to evolve horrid visions of buses piling into the bus station and not being able to get out again; buses are very stable on the flat but their great weight is against them on a steep gradient, and the thought of a bus sliding helplessly back down the glassy hill is not one to entertain for long. The bus inspectors, or whatever they’re called, were, I began to suspect, envisaging something of the sort. So I decided to bale out, and catch an ordinary city bus to Dyce, where I could 1) get a wad of wonga, and 2) find a taxi at the train station. As far as getting out of Aberdeen itself was concerned it seemed to me that a bus was very much preferable, and the city buses, which don’t start from the central bus station, go to Dyce. Unfortunately, by this time, though traffic was flowing in at a normal rate, vehicles of any kind moving out were down to two or three a minute, so I started to wonder if the entire city centre had been involved in some catastrophic accident. I was entertained the meanwhile by something like the Farnborough Air Show; it became increasingly obvious that planes had been trying to land at Aberdeen for some time and were being refused permission — their lights showed up very clearly in the black frost, and I could see at least eight in the sky at any moment, making curious abstract patterns. Eventually, a town bus turned up, and took me to Dyce. I got my money, and pounced upon a taxi driver who was disgorging a fare at the train-station. This pleasant individual then took me home, where the first priority was food (not having eaten since breakfast, which by 9.30, after four hours of bus stops and so forth, was beginning to feel like an awfully long time ago), then, once fed, BATH, hot & prolonged. I emerged from said bath to find Peter had vanished; and some time after that he appeared with our saintlike neighbours and the melancholy fact that my chivalrous taxi man had got himself well and truly stuck on the track, and after failing to solve his own problems, had come back and roped in the Professor who in turn roped in the Neighbours and in the end the poor fellow had been dispatched back in the general direction of civilisation. All I can say is, it’s been a long day.

In the course of pootling about with Google, as one does, the Professor came across the records of the Scottish Parliament, and in particular an Act of 1700 in which William II (i.e. WilliamandMary) confirmed the possessions of the Earl of Errol. These included ‘the lands and barony of Delgatie, with the corn and waulk mills thereof'’, and ‘the lands and barony of Idoch’. And I am sorry to report, ‘the town and lands of Burnside and Laverock hillock’, so we are a farmtown, and not an estate, and thus cannot claim a ‘von —’ after our names. Doubtless the old dog, frightful snob that she is, will be grieved to learn this, though she can console herself with the thought that at least the Hays were VERY CATHOLIC). Personally what I am pleased to know is that the innominate hump of land behind us, into which our little valley is tucked, is actually called Laverock Hill, laverock being the Scots word for a lark. I’ve noticed since we came here that larks flourish in such profusion that in summer, there’s always at least one shouting overhead. It’s rather nice to discover that this has been the case for at least 300 years

When we went to the farm-shop the other day, rejoicing in our newfound freedom to leave the house, we found that Seville oranges had come into season. I have just made quite a lot of marmalade, a process which, as usual, lent new shades and depth to my understanding of the word ’sticky’. Marmalade is funny stuff. I have a Marmalade Theory which is highly perfectionist and rather detailed, the Professor has a Marmalade Theory which is at the opposite end of the spectrum and could be summarised as ‘boil it all up and see what happens’, both of us are capable of producing delicious, though quite different, marmalades, or sometimes, in both cases, marmalades which aren’t so nice, from which I conclude that there is a Marmalade Goddess who waves her sticky wand where & when she sees fit. This is a particularly good batch with a deep, intense bitter orange flavour. Not all the oranges have gone into marmalade — if you are within reach of Seville oranges, let me assure you that if you make an oldfashioned lemon curd (lemon juice, zest, butter, sugar) with Seville oranges, fill it into a sweet shortcrust pastry case and briefly recook so as to marry the ingredients, the resultant orange tart is a truly wonderful thing, and since we have a guest next weekend, I have kept some oranges back for the purpose. Chicken and Seville oranges is another good combination — in fact, if the wretched things were in the shops for more than about a fortnight, I’m sure I’d think of endless things to do with them.

We had a jolly evening yesterday: our friend who supports a quietly vehement passion for the literature of the Scottish Enlightenment on the proceeds of a small but real railroad in New England was visiting the University, and we all had dinner with the Boss. We’d arranged some time previously that when this fixture took place he would come and spend the night with us: hopes of taking advantage of his company and going off to have some fun in Aberdeenshire (newly liberated from the grip of the Frost Giants as we are) were dashed when he said he needed to get South for some other business of his, on quite an early train. We had been told that the University Car was at our disposal to get home in, but it did strike us at this point that the programme as it had developed represented less than no fun for the University Driver, who’d have to be back with us at about 8.30, so we said, why doesn’t he stop the night too? This turned out to be a very welcome move since, as it transpired, the Driver lives on Deeside, about 70 miles from here. As a result, everyone got a decent night’s sleep, and we all ended up having breakfast together, which was unexpectedly jolly since the Driver turned out to be well versed in the work of the national bard, and he and the Bibliographer started swopping Burns poems from memory at a rate to which neither of us can aspire. So virtue, unfortunately, reigned supreme. We left the Professor at home, the Driver dropped our friend off at the station, and then took me to the Uni where I performed a variety of terribly boring administrative duties. Still, it all needed to be done, and it is very nice to feel one’s back more or less in control of life. The fuel tanker arrived in my absence, and we once more have a full tank, discovering in the process that a full-fill as opposed to a top up now produces a bill in four figures. I don’t think we are going to be abandoning our frugal ways anytime soon.