Duncan Harley

There’s a forecast for rain tonight, but I doubt if it will come to much, and the Chinese folk next-door have been chucking rubbish into my front garden. Lucy of course is mainly oblivious and is tucked up in the shed. It has a black-felted roof and is splendidly warm despite the fairly obvious clutter. At some rotund age or ever she is quite entitled. “Do you know how old I am” she purrs as the vitamin-enhanced cat-soup goes down.  As I say, she can do more or less as she wants in her dotage. My son says she is 22. I disagree and suspect a year older. The railway station cat at Aberdeen lived to 26, but Lucy probably doesn’t really care about such niceties. Last week, and despite her age, she took lumps out of a local tom, and I don’t blame her. I may yet set her on the Chinese next door – that is, if one is allowed to even say such things nowadays. They, the Orientals, are probably very very very fine folk. But chucking stuff into a neighbour’s patch kind of makes a moc...

We had a wee gander round Gight yesterday. The temperature hit the mid 20s and the boots trudged some six miles around a circuit known locally as the Braes of Gight. And braes they certainly are. Both Janice and I struggled to complete the circuit. Plunging variously down some 300ft to the River Ythan and back up again makes this not a walk for the faint-hearted and, as folks more used to the more gentle gradients of abandoned railway tracks and the like, it fairly took our breath away. Of course, the essence of this walk is the association with Byron. Not that I am an avid reader of his work; but I am drawn to the man on the back of that epithet ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know.” With somewhat uninspiring opening lines such as “O Thou! who rollest in yon azure field”, “When energising objects men pursue” and “We do not curse thee, Waterloo!” it’s a wonder that anyone reads Byron nowadays unless forced by academic requirements or perhaps an overenthusiastic zeal for the days ...

The blogosphere is a funny old world really. An article in today’s Guardian set off a train of thought about a long dead pal. Nigel was his name if you must know, and he picked up road kill on a whim to feed his many cats. There were at one point thirteen of the feline buggers living and shitting in his living space and the sheer cost of Felix must have strained his resources to the hilt. Hence the feeding of rabbits, pheasants and the occasional flattened fox to his co-habitants. He lived in a series of variously run-down country cottages of the type commonly available in those splendidly hippie days that were the 70’s, then the 80’s and perhaps the early 90’s. His last place was a well-used caravan over at Monymusk at the back of an old mill. The kind landowner had agreed on a peppercorn rent on the basis that the mill and its adjoining miller’s house would be his for a few decades, providing he agreed to renovate it to a habitable standard. Well, Nigel was no easy tenant. An...