Stormy weather among the trees – and a stark vision for Remembrance Sunday

It was Storm Alex last weekend, wasn’t it? I get confused with which low pressure coming in from the Atlantic is responsible for which storm that has rained on our parade or generally washed out our weekend.

HV Morton, who had a bit of a love affair with Scotland, wrote in his classic travelogue, In Search of Scotland: “…nowhere on Earth is quite like Scotland. It is an incredibly beautiful and moody country. No, it isn’t all sunshine, flowers and warmth….There is only mist, wind, rain, the cry of the curlew and the slow clouds above damp moorland. That is the real Scotland;….that is the Scotland that even a stranger learns to love.”

I don’t recognise that picture which is just too bleak an introduction to the country about which Morton generally wrote very realistically and entertainingly – and him with a good Scottish surname, even if he did live all his life in England.

I reckon he was allowing himself to get emotional about his ancestral homeland and travel journalists shouldn’t allow themselves to get emotional about their subject.

Robert Burns, son of a farmer and a farmer himself, faced the elements daily in all their moods and took an altogether more practical view: “There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more – I do not know if I should call it pleasure, but something that exalts me, something which enraptures me – than a walk on the sheltered side of a wood or high plantation on a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy weather howling among the trees and raving over the plain.”

I can identify with those sentiments and Inka and I had just such a walk last Saturday. We took ourselves off to woods near Edzell known by some as Capo Woods but which I’ve known since childhood as the Crow Woods. We walked on the sheltered side of the woods and the stormy weather howled among the trees. I can’t say whether it raved over the plain because we didn’t venture beyond the shelter of the wood.

Like HV Morton I enjoy this moody Scotland, and like Burns I find it exhilarating to walk beneath the shelter of tall trees hearing the wind howling through the treetops.

I miss one thing, though. For a time we lived in a house which had a Wellstood stove in the kitchen. Above the stove was a rack to warm plates before they went to the table. I kept my cap on it so that whenever I went outdoors in stormy weather I had a warm bunnet to keep the aged pow cosy. I still have the bunnet but I miss the stove.

Holly trees and yew trees have been ablaze with red berries for several weeks now. We all associate holly with Christmas – deck the halls with boughs of holly, and all that – and there have been several comments that the berries have ripened early and so we can expect a hard winter. I’ve checked my tree books and both species have fruited and ripened in their proper seasons, so we shouldn’ t be pessimistic.

My father was an enthusiastic amateur wine maker and there hardly seemed a fruit or vegetable that he didn’t consider making into wine. Hedgerow cordials he called them, which was dangerously misleading as some of them, especially his peach wine, had a kick like a demented mule. He talked about making holly wine but thankfully, never got round to it.

Just as well he didn’t have a go with yew berries. Their pink flesh is supposed to be

edible but the stone, or pit, in the centre is poisonous. However safe anyone says it is I’m wary of eating the flesh, just in case something horrid has leeched out of the stone and gives me a pain in the peenie. Now, that’s a fine old-fashioned Scottish saying which I doubt you’ll hear echoing round the hi- tech walls of Ninewells Hospital.

It was actually a Victorian catch-all diagnosis for any pain which young women in particular experienced in that part of their anatomy beneath their pinny, or pinafore, and for which there was no immediate explanation.

Tomorrow will be Remembrance Sunday when we honour the dead of the two world wars and the other conflicts of the last 100 years. It was a bit of a coincidence to be rearranging a lot of my books at home and discovering again an anthology of poetry called Work-A-Day Warriors by World War

One poet Sergeant Joseph Lee, 4 th Battalion Black Watch, Dundee’s “own”, which suffered dreadful losses particularly at the Battle of Loos in 1915.

In The Carrion Crow, a crow contemplates the death of a soldier: “I look upon thee live, it said, /That I may better ken thee dead; /That I may claim thee for my ain/ When ye are smoored among the slain.”

Just another meal for the crow.

My father’s peach wine had a kick like a demented mule

WILD WOOD: A cathedral of autumn colours on the road to the Crow Woods, near Edzell. Picture by Angus Whitson.