The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Jam today, gone tomorrow
A surprise visit from daughter Cait and son-in-law Gibson came at just the right moment.
We – the Doyenne and I, that is – were about to light the barbecue even though barbecuing for two seems a somewhat forlorn business and you cook far more than you need.
Then the phone rang. Cait was calling from Whitehills, a couple of miles along the Moray coast from Banff, from a marvellous fish shop called Downies, a long-established family business that has been selling fish for 120 years. It was only the second time since lockdown we’d been together, so it was special.
We had a much more convivial barbecue, exchanging news and catching up with news of grandson James. And as Caroline, our usual fish lady from Gourdon is on holiday, they brought us fresh herring and delicious lemon sole from Downies. Mind you, they went home with a couple of jars of the Doyenne’s newly made raspberry jam – quid pro quo, it’s called.
Swallows amazin’
A reader from Dunning called to tell me that over the summer months she has been enjoying the sight of more than a hundred swallows flying round her house. She had been intrigued to watch as wasps took over a swallow’s nest, chasing out the birds and building a byke in it. She called in the pest control people to remove the nest and the wasps and the swallows are building another nest in its place.
This was a first for me as I’ve heard of wasps hijacking a nesting box but never a swallow’s nest. I agreed with her that it is quite late, but certainly not too late, for swallows to be nesting, for the tail end Charlies will still be here in late September. I’d be concerned for the juvenile birds having too little time to build up reserves for the long flight back to their winter quarters in southern Africa.
Raspberry bonanza
It’s wild raspberry time and we spent a useful morning picking not just red berries, but yellow ones, too – two and a half pounds of red and a pound of yellow. It’s only the third time I’ve found enough yellow berries to justify making a picking.
By the time you read this they will be red and yellow wild raspberry jelly – a first for the Doyenne’s jam kitchen. Her red jelly is to die for, so I’m looking forward to testing the new variety. It’s that time of year again when the
Doyenne could give the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth a lesson or two on how to run a steaming kitchen. I hesitate to open the fridge in case an eye of newt or toe of frog stares back at me from a plate.
The new red currant jelly is safely stored away, the raspberry jam – cultivated berries – has already been plundered by Cait and Gibson. A kind friend has given us seven and a half pounds of blackcurrants which have gone into the freezer meantime because I’ll be out this weekend picking rowans for rowan and apple jelly to accompany our roast lamb and venison.
Kilty, kilty ….
Recent exchanges in the Craigie Column about Valentine’s postcards caught my eye. I collected them myself, mostly of north-east towns and scenes, until the Doyenne grew exasperated finding them all over the house and issued stern rebukes. So I sold them at Taylors Auctions in Montrose, keeping just one of my home town of Montrose. The card is a picture of a kilt and sporran with the message: We’re near “kilt” wi’ kindness in Montrose , an unsolicited testimonial to the good folk of the town, surely.
The kilt can be lifted to see what the Scotsman wears under it. A bit racy you might think for the times it was posted, in 1912, (postage a halfpenny!) but decency, thankfully, was preserved.
Twelve photographs of well-known views of the town unfold from beneath the sporran – the beach, the academy, Sleepyhillock Cemetery, the old suspension bridge which was replaced in 1927, the harbour, Scurdyness lighthouse and Ferryden. It’s not a postcard any longer but a historic record of how the town looked more than 100 years ago.
Simple pleasures
Driving home with the Doyenne on back roads we saw a partridge with three tiny chicks standing on a track into a field. We stopped to watch. The hen bird was immediately alert. Three more chicks pattered out of the short grass and joined her. Four of her young slipped away into the undergrowth, the other two froze on the track behind her, flattening themselves until they looked like nothing more than a couple of chuckies.
The mother hen was clearly getting agitated, so we wished them luck and continued on our way. It’s simple, domestic countryside scenes like these that make writing this column such a pleasure.
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I hesitate to open the fridge in case an eye of newt or toe of frog stares back at me from a plate