The Deep North

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.

Our wicked friend the Papyrologist used to change the subject ruthlessly when he’d had enough of a topic by saying ‘Bored now. I spy with my little eye something beginning with — S’. Answer, Sky. Or if we were in a car, it might be, R, and Road. The rule was, the answer had to be brutally simple and obvious. I’m beginning to wish that I could do something similar with respect to matters domestic, because the story of the mid morning was I spied with my little eye something beginning with M, and the M in question belonged to a Malfunctioning Immersion Heater. I don’t know if these are a peculiarly British phenomenon, so just in case, it is a sort of giant kettle element which lives in the boiler to speed things up if you need a lot of hot water in a hurry. Because we are conserving heating oil we have been doing our hot water off the immersion, and the bloody thing, tried beyond its limits, has gone phut. Another thing I spied with my little eye a few days ago began with D or possibly S, which is to say, a Sodulating Self Defrosting Deepfreeze: I think there was a point where the wretched machine found it was colder outside than in and its heat pump went into reverse; we are therefore now gnawing away at its contents in order of magnitude. Fortunately I did not make a thrifty post christmas purchase of a turkey or anything of the sort, partly because nobody I know likes turkey, and also because I haven’t been shopping. On a more cheerful note, the merry roofers of Aberdeenshire are promising amendment of their ways. How nice.

It is quarter to twelve and I have just been out with Miss Kit. As Barnyards predicted, the water has gone right down, the dam is still a dam, the path is no longer a river, and so forth. But as we wandered about in the pitch dark under a clear black sky strewn with blazing stars, the night was inhabited by a most peculiar noise, or noises, a sort of deep, rhythmic swashing and thumping combined with something a bit like a giant trying to get the last out of a milk-shake. Peering ineffectually into the gloom with my torch, I concluded that an enormous block of ice, the whole top surface of the lake, is punting about gradually defrosting (it’s now well above freezing), impelled against the dam at intervals by the force of incoming water — which in turn is causing some degree of asphyxia in the outflow pipe. It really does sound most peculiar.

We woke up to our own little local version of Venice’s recurrent nuisance. All that snow, prompted by rising temperatures and quite a bit of rain, came off the hill in the course of about twelve hours. In past melts, we’ve had water lapping at the edge of the track: this time the track itself was under water. To add to the excitement, what was under the water was ice, impacted to the point where it can barely be persuaded to melt, and extremely slippery. Moreover, as with Venice, it is no longer possible to tell where the track leaves off and the plunge down into the 15-foot deep dell alongside it begins. The Real World Consultant and the Arts Correspondent were here for the night, for a somewhat belated exchange of Christmas presents, and we were not a little worried that they might be stuck here till the waters went down. Fortunately the RWC is a really good driver, and also fortunately, because the water is backed up against the side of the steading, it’s not to any significant extent in motion, so they got themselves away. Further news from the outside world suggests that we haven’t seen the worst of it. Barnyards turned up, having kindly agreed to take bags of haylage and other equine necessities up the hill in a tractor (the neighbours’ car is currently living down here, because the track up the hill looks like the Cresta Run, and the field is now too soft to take a vehicle). He was supposed to be meeting Miss T’s Dad who was out buying said haylage, shavings etc., but who seemed temporarily lost in Aberdeenshire, accepted a cup of coffee, and brought us up to speed: two of the buildings in the steading have caved in under the weight of snow, on top of a variety of valuable machinery; and the steading yard, which is where all that lovely water is going, looks like a river in spate. Then Miss T’s Dad turned up, explaining that the main road at Fyvie is under nearly three feet of water and the bottom end of Turriff is flooded, so he’d had to go round by complicated routes to get back to us. It all sounds a bit much, and it is just as well that tomorrow is Sunday. Miss T, by the way, had a date to go snowboarding in Aberdeen which she didn’t want to miss, and my ex-Gamekeeper is here for a few days, back from chatting up the penguins in the South Atlantic, so he simply carried her across the flood. Bless.

We rang Keith the Plumber, who told the Professor about a valve on the boiler which was there to let air out — it took several goes but in the middle of the morning we were finally rewarded by the thing firing up. Also, most of the snow came off the roof in the course of the night, and somewhat to our surprise, the gutters didn’t come with them. The gutter over my study is twisted out of shape and has broken, but hasn’t actually fallen off and I’ve only found one slate so far. Not bad, considering the pressure it’s all taken: also on the ground outside my door are the glassy sausages of ice which fell out of the gutters. I can see the box hedge, for the first time in about ten days.

With the kind help of Miss T’s parents we once again have fuel, acquired in 20 litre drums and poured into the tank. Between us we put I think six drums in last night, which proved not to be enough to push the airlocks out of the system. We found this morning that those saints in human form had left us another six drums of the stuff, so it was a question of getting it into the tank between the two of us. It is thawing quite noticeably so everything is covered in slippery ice, and the first attempt did not go at all well. We then embarked upon a routine of decanting the oil into a watering can, which went a whole lot better. We are rather hoping that when Miss T’s dad gets home from work he’ll manage to get the boiler started up. It’s very good that it’s thawing though the immediate effect is to make everything even more difficult.

Evening update: the boiler continues sulky and recalcitrant. Miss T’s Dad has for once admitted defeat.

Son of Big Chief Running Water, according to an ancient joke first recorded on the walls of King Tut’s Tomb or thereabouts. You might think, though, that if it’s minus ten or less at night and below freezing during the day, water coming through the ceiling would not be the complication you first thought of. Ahahahahaha. How wrong you were. In the midday sun of successive days, the snow on the roof has melted down into the gutters. There it has become ice. It has subsequently, or consequently, penetrated the wallhead, due to the warmth of the house, such as it is. We have water pouring into the sitting room because surface melt is sheeting down the front face of the house, the situation gutters are basically designed to prevent. When the big freeze starts the gutters will probably fall off. It is perfectly possible to design houses for sub-arctic conditions, however, this is not one such. It’s a lovely house, but heavy snow lying for more than a month is simply beyond what it was designed to cope with. Nice Calum up at the garden centre has lost one of his greenhouses — the roof was staved in by the sheer weight of the fallen snow. Barns and so forth have suffered the same fate here and there in the county — corrugated iron is a much used roofing material hereabouts, and very good it can be, but it does enable you to put quite a lot of space between supporting joists and in present conditions this is looking like anything but a good idea. We wait in dread for the thaw because even before all this started, the flat roof of the utility room was once again letting in water like nobody’s business. There’s two feet of snow sitting on it, so what will happen when it all melts won’t be nice.

Well, the good news is that if Barnyards ploughs the back drive for us, the oil tanker will be able to reach us, probably. The bad news is that having lost a tractor in a snowdrift (no, really) he can’t do it till Monday, though he has managed to get round his cattle, I’m pleased to say. Here at the house, the Spirit that Built the Empire is being splendidly manifested on all hands. We are keeping calm and carrying on, like the poster says. Last night’s dinner was very jolly, despite taking place in a freezing cold dining room, something which the company affected to ignore. Upper lips were being worn so stiff it’s a wonder anyone managed to eat anything. Meanwhile, outside, there is now so much snow that it is taller than a cat. One consequence of this is that Miss Kit has taken to performing her ablutions in my footprints. Over the days, I have made a strange, tunnel-like track down my garden and veering off to the end of the wood. I was standing in it this afternoon alternately watching Miss Kit sitting in a wellie-boot hole, nothing visible of her but the ears, and a sinisterly glorious sunset of flaming coral and gold shining through a lattice of completely white tree-branches. Once mission was accomplished and we started making our way back, I noticed that the rough cats, who of course have exactly the same problem with being in over their heads if they try and strike out across the frozen wastes, have been following her example, and the floor of my tunnel is punctuated with the proverbial piss holes in the snow. There are stupendous icicles hanging from the gutters — the biggest are about three feet long — providing a certain incentive to nip through the door pretty sharpish.

The Professor had arranged to come back here today with the friends he has been staying with in Edinburgh. I could not have been more pleased, but have spent the day having forty fits about getting them in — and getting said friends out tomorrow morning, since they have come up in order to catch an plane out of Aberdeen — due to being surrounded by the Winter Wonderland which has already been blogged to the point of catalepsy. More snow dumped during the night, so by this morning, we were looking at fifteen inches on the track, and when I rang Barnyards the farmer, who sounded as put about as I have ever heard him, he said he had beasts un-fed, un-watered and inaccessible and he’d get to it if he could. You couldn’t say fairer than that and I rang off with apologies. But the wonderful thing is, he did get a snowplough up to us, bless him. That sorted out the biggest problem as I saw it at the time. which was how to get a seven month old baby, with paraphernalia, along a track some three quarters of a mile in length, with snow up to your knees. Only leaving me with the next problem down the line, which is that at about eleven this morning, we ran out of heating oil. We should have had a top-up in late December, come to think of it, and doubtless they held off in hopes of better conditions for their very heavy tanker, and conditions got worse and worse. And worse. So where we have got to, is: seven people in the house, one of whom is awfully wee, no heating other than the space-heaters we use in our studies to avoid turning on the heating during the day, plus the fire in the sitting room, and the glad news from the BBC that this is scheduled to be the coldest night of the year so far. Oh. great.

We had another six inches of snow in the course of the day: it’s up to the top of the wellies and anything but entertaining. Miss Best Friend is still okay with it, and forges about like a small black tank. Miss Kit has to be carried to the end of the garden, and when put down, will scratch a frantic little hole and let go. Sometimes thereafter she gets a sudden lease of boldness induced by sheer lack of exercise and goes charging about for a bit, a legless body punting about in the whiteness looking like Dougal from the Magic Roundabout. The Northern Gentleman is escorting his missus to the top of the track, where she has left her car, each morning, and is meeting her each evening — they were slogging back tonight and wondered momentarily whether it would be easier to go over the fields, when Miss BF went off road, and vanished. She dug herself out after a bit but it did suggest that at lest you know roughly where you are with the track, and with everything else, you don’t. The birds are grimly ravenous. I continue to feed the little ones, and they have stopped even caring if I watch. Miss BF and I were passing the outflow of the lake the other day (it splashes down about 10 feet below the track) when a heron erupted from the depths, huge and ghostly, wings flapping like wet grey sheets. I think that, unlikely as the area is as a fishing ground, it was the only bit of open water for some way around, and the poor thing was hoping for the best. All the twigs down by the outflow are fanged with two-foot icicles, beautiful, in a horrible sort of way. There is so much snow over everything it looks like the Sahara desert, and in moonlight, everything goes blue.

The Professor and Dr Biswell left yesterday morning for Manchester: Dr B absolutely has to get back to work, and the Prof had people he wanted to see. The idea was to get as far as Edinburgh last night and go on today — the Edinburgh bit worked fine, but by this morning the friend in Yorkshire he was supposed to be going to see was completely snowed in. So he is staying where he is for a couple of days (actually, in one of the most beautiful houses in Scotland; so I am not feeling too sorry for him). Dr Biswell, having added a duvet, a shovel and quantities of food to the stuff in his car, just in case, has cautiously carried on South to Manchester. I am sitting tight, marking essays and looking at the gently falling snow. There’s a wren twitting about outside — the poor little thing looks completely spherical having, I suppose, stood all its feathers on end.