From: Stokes, Fiona
Sent: Monday, April 08, 2008 06:23 PM
FW: Its
Springtime!!
Tha
thu ann! Ciamar a tha sibh?
(Hello
- How are you all?)
In Gaelic culture they
don’t refer to time in months but in seasons, so I have dated this
blog accordingly;
A snapshot from a
spring morning –
Mark has been reading
his fishing magazines in bed – as the sea fishing season has
started today he checks his tackle bag ;o) (my old pampers changing
bag which apparently has just the right kind of pockets and netting
in it) and later mends the fishing rod I ran over with the landrover.
He announces Thursday he will be down at the pier fishing for
‘errin’ as our Yorkshire mentor Gary calls them (‘Herring’
for us from the south who can’t work out the translation). At last
we can restock the chest freezer with local fish – yummy! Mackerel
seems to be an easy one to catch, but Mark quite fancies trying again
for some Pollock – nice and big fish, and according to Birds Eye
fish-fingers who use it all the time nowadays, it is also high in
Omega 3’s – excellent for brainy boys & girls!
Looking out of the
window it is SUNNY! Hooray! (Later it is raining, by lunchtime it
snows – only to be expected – as they say here ‘If you don’t
like the weather on Lewis, just wait a minute!’.)
Austin is bouncing up
and down on the bed, excited to have discovered the art of telling
jokes – he hasn’t quite mastered it, and really just uses it as
an excuse to talk when he has nothing to say. An example of one of
his jokes; ‘What do you get if you cross a <looking around the
room for inspiration> lamp with a <looking again> carpet?’
I don’t know Austin, what do you get if you cross a lamp with a
carpet? ‘A big fat doughnut!!’ Genius.
Morris still has his
thumb in his mouth most of the time, but does take it out to speak
his growing vocabulary – his and Austin’s favourite word is
“Doughnut!”, don’t know why but they like to shout it out in
joy, or substitute it in any sentence for comedy effect.
I wake up slowly and as
ever my first thoughts are of – MOVING!!
New Home?
I had been waiting to
send out another blog until there was some definite news on finding a
croft, finding a house, setting up a business and starting a new
life. Well, we’re sort of there…. We have found a house, and
some land for a very, very reasonable price, and the bank seem to
want to loan us the money to complete the sale. But we haven’t had
the final say so yet, from the bank, and I try to protect myself from
getting my hopes up too soon. Plus I’ve been scaring myself with
internet articles about banks refusing new mortgages etc etc….. so
I’ll just talk about something else and ask you to keep your
fingers crossed – thanks!
Mark’s work is still
coming in
We had to change banks,
to one that had a branch on the island so we could pay cash in for
Marks jobs. But even the Royal Bank of Scotland cannot help us with
Marks wages, when he gets paid in meat! So far a haunch of venison,
a large bag of mussels a joint of beef and what looks like half a
sheep! I really don’t know how we can account for the spare
Rayburn he was given last week either… But its all good news and
we stand by our assumption that the last plumber that lived in south
lochs died of overwork!
Pairc playgroup
Austin is loving
pre-school! He’s going 4 mornings a week and there are 6 of them
in the class; 4 girls and another boy Lachie. Annabel runs the group
and she plays tapes of nursery rhymes in the background as they’re
playing – Austin’s singing has returned (he refused for a while)
and I love to listen to him singing something while he’s busy in
another room or in the bath! The classroom is at the edge of loch
Erisort and has phenomenal views from the windows on 3 sides. Its
also opposite the croft we’re buying, which is a bit annoying
timing wise, but if we’re in by 2009 there’s still time to save
some diesel! Austin has had a shock however to be one of a crowd
now. This was demonstrated in his first week when Annabel had taken
the group off for a walk to see the snow on top of the mountains.
Austin wanted to tell everyone the amusing story of Daddy climbing
mountains that weekend, and having to run down the mountain, back to
the car because he’d left his lighter behind. Austin is always
amazed by stories of what Daddy does, but when he’d tried to tell
the others he said ‘Do you know, some of them weren’t
listening?!’
Judy Dotter
Austin seems to have an
imaginary friend – he talks about ‘her’ and she pops into the
conversation every now and again. Sometimes Austin will say
something that really stands out – I imagine that he’s heard it
on the telly or picked up a fact from someone other than me and Mark,
but when we ask him about it, he says ‘Judy Dotter told me’. So
far we have gleamed that he knows Judy is not real, he says she is
just pretend, but even though he calls her a ‘her’, he says she
is a little boy. Furthermore he says she lives in the bathroom…..
I’ve done a bit of Freud in my time, but for once in my life I’m
not going to analyse this one! When Mark was little he had an
imaginary friend he called ‘orrible’ – mine was called
Frederick and he was a cute hedgehog….enough now….
Holiday time
Christmas seems like so
long ago, so I won’t go on about that. In short, it was truly
magical!
We also had a trip to
England in October which was so good to catch up with family and
friends from all over. We flew from Stornoway to Edinburgh then
down to Birmingham, so each flight was no more than an hour. I
wasn’t sure how the boys would be, but it was soooo much better
than trying to get them down to England by car! Stornoway airport is
neat and modern, and not just a portacabin in a field (with the
islands further south the beaches double as runways!) and the little
plane that took us to Edinburgh was an ex executive jet from the
80’s, so leather armchairs to sit in and no more than 20 seats –
we felt very special! Our first time back in England for nearly a
year and my immediate thought was – all the cars are so shiny down
here! – I expected the amount of them would shock me, but it was
their new-ness that was more apparent. I also wondered why the hire
car we had, automatically locked the doors when we were inside the
car, but apparently car-jacking at traffic lights has become a huge
problem in cities nowadays (?? What is it about corporations that
they want to feed our fears??)
We also managed to
squeeze in a sneaky holiday in February, just 6 hours south on the
mainland to the Cowal peninsula – 20 minutes from Dunoon, a village
called Kilmun . Again being back in civilisation was strange –
there were lots of houses with no space between them and evidence of
a lot of wealth (all the houses are much the same size, and basic on
Lewis) but then it was a Victorian seaside town and had obviously
been very big in its heyday. A lovely break again - good to catch up
with old friends and make some new.
So I’d better sign
off – thanks for reading another blog. I hope you’re having a
good spring and I hope to be in touch again soon with more news on
the croft…
Much love
Fiona, Mark, Austin &
Morris.
XXxx
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