It’s been fairly hectic – as a family we’re quite close even if we rarely meet up much, so there’s plenty to catch up on when we do. Both my brothers are sailors – eldest has a 25-foot yacht in the Medway/Thames area, t’other has a whopping ocean cruiser currently in Antigua – and as my mother used to sail a small cabin cruiser and both my daughter and I have dinghy sailed as well as occasionally crewing on yachts on holiday, the chat over meals can get quite technical with chat about fractional rigs, how to dismount a mast to replace internal rigging and how embarrassing it would be to need to call a mayday in at your mooring buoy because you’ve discovered your boat might be sinking (it wasn’t, as it happened, but apparently it was ankle-deep in the cabin because there was a leak in the engine exhaust where seawater is sprayed in to reduce the exhaust gas temperature)!

I still haven’t got the extra paddocks done – though I did spend an hour untangling coiled electric fence so I’m ready to run the wire out tomorrow morning and get the horses onto fresh grass. The dogs had a bit of a gallop with George this morning when I took them down the field – they zipped under the fence and were playing in the long paddock down the back fence when the ginger giant spotted them, and he did his best display-of-magnificent-beast approach, neck arched and snorting as he cantered over to investigate – at which point the dogs realised they were trespassing and shot off…. in the wrong direction. When they realised I was the other side of George they split, sprinted either side of him and came straight under the fence again, cunningly leaving him snorting the other side (thankfully!)

The chickens have been enjoying my brother’s presence – he’s a vaper, so every now and again he goes and stands outside for a while, inhaling assorted vapours… and giving them the chance to stand around his ankles, talking to themselves while pecking his ankles non-stop. To think I was concerned they’d take time to become tame…the little horrors chased me up the mounting block pecking my ankles when I was trying to get the fence wire untangled and wound onto a drum, and they follow me all round the buildings, chatting away, when I’m trying to clean out ferrets or whatever! It’s very companionable, but occasionally irritating as I try not to fall over them.

The additional social stimulation seems to have done my mother a lot of good, so I need to find ways to keep that up after our guests leave tonight!

 

Today has been largely a housework day – my eldest brother is staying in my spare room this weekend, while brother number 2 and his wife (whom we’ve not met yet!) is staying in my mother’s spare room. That’s currently set up as my daughter’s computing and VR gaming space, so tomorrow will also be a housework day – there, instead of here.

I have finally got my cooker working – largely kicked into action because my gas cylinder ran out last night. Tonight’s dinner was cooked on the electric cooker, which works perfectly well (many thanks, Elen – I’ve got there eventually!)

I’ve cleared out a lot of clutter from the pantry and the spare room, which means the workshop is now cluttered instead. I do have more room to get that squared away better, though, since all the horse gear is now in the feed room/tack room area.

This morning and Sunday was largely spent cleaning out my mother’s conservatory, which has taken the joint efforts of my daughter and myself as well as far too many hours of scrubbing, dusting and surreptitious chucking of rubbish when my mother wasn’t looking!

I haven’t managed to track down the short in the electric fence yet, I haven’t managed to get another paddock fenced off, though I have the posts in for another and nearly a third and I do still hope to get time tomorrow to run the wire for those two paddocks tomorrow morning, if my brother’s bus isn’t too early! The horses have spent most of today in the boggy end of the field and I’d like to get them onto a different paddock before they’ve eaten everything edible and take themselves in search of fresh pasture! Hopefully I can keep building up the length of time they spend on each paddock as we go along – boggy end has had 4 days, the next will hopefully keep them occupied for as long, but paddock number three will have had 8 days’ growth and number four will have had at least 12, so by the time the horses get back to boggy end there should be at least 16 days’ growth on it… we’ll see!

So, off to bed, ready for an early start in the morning, try and get the fence up on at least one more paddock if not two, and then pick my brother up at the park and ride in Ellon, take him to my mother’s and get on with prepping the room for brother the second and wife, who arrive on Saturday…

After yesterday’s very long day, today was another long one.

I’ve marked out the positions for the next lot of fence posts with white plastic posts – I now need to go out and put up another ten fence posts to get the second long side of the paddocks up and running.

I haven’t managed to track down the short in the fence but the horses have been kind about not trampling through it anyway.

This is what’s left of the two trees – lots of brash and two huge stumps. Each of these is a good bit taller than me, so they’re about five foot six or so! The ancient gate between them has disintegrated, unsurprisingly, and at some point I’ll put a new one in – until then the brash is doing quite a good job of discouraging any attempt to leave that way!

I also had a lot of mucking out to catch up on after the horses had been in all yesterday, to break up the monotony of fencing!

Along the way I’ve been making inroads into the weeds in the field – with assistance from the hens, which is not always very useful as I’m attempting to swing a billhook!

This kind of work is quite hot and sweaty, which is probably why it was traditionally a winter job – by the time I’ve cleared all the weeds I expect it will be winter… if not next spring!

Along the way, we managed to fit in my mother’s blood tests – iron, folate, liver, kidney, blood sugar, blood count, vitamin B12, thyroid, white blood cells and possibly also Uncle Tom Cobley… fingers crossed they find something wrong, because those are all reasonably fixable. We’ve been told to call for results on Friday.

 

After some very hard work over the past few days, there was a good working space and access for the tree surgeons this morning. I brought the horses in for the day, incarcerating the girls in the horse barn while George and Abe lounged around the stable shed and yard, which meant I could get on with fencing off the first section of the field for paddocks while the electric was off and perimeter electric wire down along the road side fence for the lumberjack work.

The trees came down rapidly – the tree surgeons cut a wedge out on the side they wanted the tree to fall towards, cut nearly through from the other side, then used their heavy winch vehicle to haul the tree down smartly exactly where they wanted it. They trimmed off all the small stuff from the main branches and tossed that back over the fence into that odd triangular patch I can’t explain or use, so it’s now officially the insect and small rodent wildlife sanctuary!

Having done that, the skeletons of the trees were hauled to the house end of the field and cut down into ten inch sections, which I now need to stack somewhere to season thoroughly.

In the meantime, Michelle and I used the post hole augur to cut the holes for ten fenceposts, so the odd-shaped wet end of the field is now a fenced-off paddock, and there’s a twenty-pace wide strip running the whole length of the back of the field, with gateways prepared ready for four more paddocks to go in over the next few days, as and when I can find the time!

There’s a short on the fence somewhere and it’s not getting up to its full zap potential, but I’ve run out daylight tonight so fingers crossed the horses respect the electric tape overnight – I’ll try and fix it tomorrow.

Mum spent the day at the croft as well. She seemed better for being outside a good while, though she didn’t do much. She wandered around the field a bit, started out pulling ragweed for me but then couldn’t differentiate between the ragwort and a yellow meadow vetchling that also infests the field (but which doesn’t need pulling out). She also spent some time cutting weeds in the good paddock, which is fine because everything needs to be cut down to the ground so if it doesn’t squawk it’s ok.

The chickens are getting brave – two of them came to help me clear weeds down the new fence line and got about halfway down the field! They’re wandering all over the goose paddock as well as the yard, buildings and yard now – if I left the house door open they’d be in the kitchen in ten minutes.

The horses are not thrilled to find a stonking great fence in their field but the dogs are thrilled, since they can now come down the field with me!

The silkie chicks have been off heat for a few days so yesterday we moved them out to the shed, instead of them living in the office. They now have a bigger cage near the quail and seem quite happy there, so that’s great. I spent a bit of time today cleaning up the office and shifting furniture around, so now the filing cabinet has arrived in its final position and tomorrow I’ll try and sort through the paperwork, chuck out anything irrelevant and streamline things efficiently.

George has been magnificent today – all hooves up smartly several times over, soles tapped and some good turns on the forehand. He also demonstrated half-pass, though admittedly he was trying to get round Poppy at the time! Still, a Suffolk doing half-pass is worth watching.

My mother’s state of mind is slightly chirpier than it was and she enjoyed a visit from one of her weaving friends this afternoon, but this evening a nurse practitioner check-up confirmed either the original infection wasn’t killed off or there’s another, so we’re now supervising four tablets of something other antibiotic each day on top of her regular meds. I lingered a moment after Mum left the office this evening and asked about the car keys, but the answer was ‘oh god no, don’t let her drive – not until the memory clinic has seen her, but probably not ever’ – which I decided I’d keep to myself rather than distress or enrage Mum with it.

I don’t know what she’s been up to tonight but my daughter just called to check paraffin wax candles aren’t actually toxic, because she thinks Mum either tried to eat some tea lights or possibly tried to make tea with them….

Odette came to trim hooves this morning and we began, as usual, with Little Madam Dancer, who is convinced that if she copies the vile expression Poppy uses towards the poor geldings, it will magically produce anything she wants.

It doesn’t.

I made a start on teaching her that pricked ears means treats this morning (instead of pinned ones) but she still tries the evil face before accepting it might be worth trying pretty face!

She behaved well for Odette, however, allowing all her hooves to be lifted, rasped, balanced on the stand and rasped some more. She has the most beautiful pale golden hooves with a super shape to them, mostly because she’s been trimmed religiously every six weeks since she was just a little foal.

After Dancer we did Poppy, who accepted things with a certain resigned air, but Dancer was being a pain in the neck, barging into Poppy and sending her staggering, trying to pick my pockets and so forth, so we took Poppy out of the barn to stand on the little tarmac patch outside, leaving a startled Dancer in solitary splendour in the barn.

There was whinnying, but after a moment Dancer realised she could still reach to touch noses and settled down again, so we got back to Poppy’s hooves again.

Partway through the second hoof, Poppy was completely distracted by a roe doe bounding up the field across the road, where the oilseed rape has now been harvested and the field shaved down to a few inches of stubble. I patted her a bit and she settled again… until the same roe doe came bouncing back down the field a minute later! Poppy came completely unglued (for her), whisked her hoof out of Odette’s hands and swivelled around to give the deer the full bug-eyed head-up tail-raised Arab stare.

I didn’t notice the deer being impressed, I have to admit.

After we’d regained Poppy’s attention and finished off her hooves, it was Abe’s turn. He’s decided mud fever is a Good Idea and has scabs across the backs of both hind hooves (he changed his mind about it being a Good Idea afterwards, when I filled a bucket with water, added hibiscrub and then plunked his hooves into it up to the fetlocks, one after another. This made it all a Bad Idea.)

George thought the whole thing was dreadful, because of course he doesn’t get much attention while I’m holding the other horses for Odette. He got his chance to enjoy attention afterwards, when I went round all his hooves and asked him to lift them – then tapped each sole a few times with a hoof pick, which he accepted without fuss. This is great progress for him and earned him handfuls of treats! I’ll give it a few days at this level and then start actually picking out his hooves. He’s still self-trimming amazingly well and all he really needs is a bit of tidying around the edges, though Odette thinks we can balance his hooves a little better once I can lift and rasp his hooves under her supervision (she’s still not thrilled by the idea of doing George’s hooves herself!) She did admit, however, that considering the first time she saw him he was trying to lunge over his door to dismember people, he’s come on hugely. She’s now willing to stand within reach of him and just keep a hand on his cheek to hold his mouth well away.

Odette also took Dexter rabbit away with her. Her pair of pet bunnies turned into a sole survivor a few months ago and she’s been looking for a 4 or 5 year old male rabbit to be a companion to her Rosie, and since I only have 3 does and 2 bucks is a little ridiculous for the numbers, I offered her Dexter. She’ll get him neutered and he’ll have a super life as a pet bunny from now on.

On my way down to the village to pick my mother up after that, I passed a wood pigeon that looked odd, so I stopped to investigate. It seemed undamaged and healthy enough, but limped on one leg and couldn’t get into the air, merely flapping a few times and crashing again. I threw my coat over it to capture it and installed the poor thing in the footwell of the car, still under my coat. This meant I had a good diversion for Mum’s irate state of mind – she’s extremely cross that Michelle and I won’t give her car keys back, but given that this morning she’d forgotten who Michelle is and kept referring to her as ‘your friend’ I’m in no hurry to let her loose behind the wheel yet! Mum and I delivered the pigeon to the New Arc, our local wildlife rescue centre, where he became patient number 917 this year, and then came up to the croft to hack down docks in the goose run for the afternoon.

In self defence I detoured into Mintlaw on the way back to Mum’s house and we picked up fish suppers for dinner, rather than allowing Mum to cook anything.

i fed the horses after I got back, and since Abe was lounging about the yard at a loose end after finishing his 3 nuggets and half a mouthful of spieedibeet (he’s still tubby!) while the others were still ploughing through their heaped scoop of feed each, I did a bit of work with him in the yard, practicing his knee lifts, some back and forward, and then I lined him up alongside the raised step outside the workshop and did some leaning-on-horse, which he accepted without a blink or a twitch so we finished the session with handfuls of treats (and George’s accusing stare from the other side of Poppy, where he could see me treacherously associating with and, even worse, feeding That Little Grey Thing instead of himself.)

First thing this morning George delighted me by lifting up all four hooves politely, without trying to apply his teeth to me anywhere, and he held up each hoof for a couple of seconds at a good working height, too! I didn’t try to touch his hooves, but maybe tomorrow I’ll touch them with a hoof pick, just lightly.

He also enjoyed a nice groom all over, and this was the first time he’s started the conversation that usually runs ‘Hello George!’ ‘nicker’, so this morning we had ‘nicker’ ‘Hello George!’ instead, which was lovely!

After that it was back to elder care. I managed to get a cancellation appointment for Mum with our local GP, which at least allowed us to confirm that the infection has been knocked on the head. The GP also said the mental confusion may take another week to settle, so we’ll have to grit our teeth a bit longer.

While we were there, however, the GP asked Mum to take a memory assessment. It was simple enough – what date is it, what month, day and year, what were a few items off the desk (pen, telephone, water bottle), fold this piece of paper in half and put it on the floor, write a short sentence, then identify the three items again.

The only bits Mum got right were folding the paper, putting it on the floor and writing a short sentence.

We came away with a referral to the memory clinic. Hopefully they can come up with something useful.

I took Mum up to the croft after that and got her involved in hacking down weeds. I only have a week left before the tree surgeons arrive, and I need to have a pathway cleared for them into the field so they can access the trees in question, so this morning I wanted to get one of the unused field gates open and start hacking through the docks the other side of it. We’ve made a pretty good start on the job, with the weeds cleared through to the electric fence in the field. I need to pull the electric fence down next and rearrange it, I think.

I might say the ‘help’ of the chickens was not entirely appreciated. It’s disconcerting to have a beak picking weed seeds off your trouser seat while attempting to snip through dock stems with shears!

I delivered Mum home mid-afternoon and got a text an hour later. Apparently she and Michelle had successfully turned some frozen chicken into horrible-tasting chicken korma between them.

The day ended well, though – I managed to spend five minutes with Poppy without Dancer involving herself, and we worked together on her walking with me at liberty. I managed to get her from the signal she knows (touching my fist) to taking a step forward on my open-handed ‘walk on’ signal and then up to taking three steps between clicks over the space of about 20 seconds (she’s a bright horse!) and then put lots of three step sequences together to walk around the barn together. She enjoyed it and my attention, and it was a great way to end the day. At the moment the horses are keeping me sane!

Monday I started unloading the car and trailer, putting things away again. All the animals were fine, and I was just settling to my breakfast at eight am when my mother arrived on the doorstep.

Perhaps it was the few days off but it seemed much harder to deal with her all day!

I managed to get her to go home only when I told her I wanted to get to her house and would follow her there, which was true enough (the frozen chicks are stored in the big freezer at her house). Following her along the road was quite a shock, though – she veered between the cats’ eyes and the gutter erratically, swung onto the wrong side of the road to turn left and was in the middle of the road all the way down my single-track lane, making no allowance for oncoming timber wagons or anything else!

Once in the kitchen of her house, Michelle and I persuaded her to hand over her keys. She’s not safe behind the wheel – and neither’s anyone else in the vicinity! Michelle told me that in my absence she’d had to drive home because Mum couldn’t remember how to do a hillstart to get moving in my yard – where she’d parked on the flat!

She’d also poured all the wild bird seed into a tall bucket, added some water and given this to the geese. Fortunately Michelle had served up their preferred mixed corn in their preferred flat bucket as well.

I got back to the croft at lunchtime and caught up on some mucking out before being called back to the village because Mum couldn’t remember how to cook dinner.

After that, I got back to the village and fed the animals before being called back to the village because Mum was bored and wanted to go out. I took her to Tyrie Kirk in search of the Raven Stone there, a Pictish symbol stone, but alas, by the time we got there they’d locked the church door and we couldn’t get into the porch to see the stone.

I got home finally at about nine at night and had lunch before going to bed, exhausted.

Sunday I started off by taking the dogs for a walk, down to the sea and then along the beach a bit. It was fascinating because a bank of mist formed in the middle of the strait just offshore, flowing along the strait, over an island there and then on to climb up a cliff and pour inland! Quite magical – I have no idea what the cause of this phenomenon might be but it was amazing. Alas, I didn’t have the phone with me to get pix.

Once the dogs had stretched their legs, I fed and cleaned out the ferrets and went to talk to Rhapsody. Katrina had told me she’d damaged her check ligament in an accident with a fence, and seen by daylight she really has done a number on it!

She’s sound at walk and apparently has been seen to trot a little, but mostly she doesn’t put the hoof down flat and she doesn’t straighten that leg properly, instead keeping the knee flexed slightly. She’s an old girl and long retired (early-onset arthritis) so provided she’s not suffering the way it looks doesn’t matter and she’s not being asked to do anything but walk around her field anyway.

Once Katrina had finished feeding her guests, we went for a scramble around her woods and field, then went to a very dangerous local place for breakfast – a combined excellent cafe and second hand book store called the Bog Myrtle! They supplied a plate piled high with freshly-cooked pancakes, butter, cream and strawberry conserve together with a pot of Earl Grey tea and I reckon I feasted like royalty!

I even managed not to buy any books.

I had planned on heading out on the road around noon, but when I packed everything and everyone up again and pushed the car’s starter button, nothing happened. Not even a click, a glowing light or anything!

Katrina’s neighbour came over with his big Hilux truck and we tried jump leads. Nothing. We tried putting a multimeter on the battery, which claimed to have 12V in it. The radio and power socket both worked. c

I called the AA, who said they’d send someone. ‘Someone’ was a garage in Portree whose owner turned out to know Katrina’s neighbours well and was as baffled by the car’s behaviour as the rest of us! There were no fault codes on the system, no reason for it not to work… so he took the positive lead off the battery forfive minutes, which forced a computer reset. After that the car started first time and ran perfectly.

I can only assume it liked Skye and didn’t want to come home.

In the end I managed to hit the road at 4.30 pm and arrived home at 10.30, not having let the engine stop along the way (I did pull over a couple of times but left it running, just in case). By then I was exhausted, so it was simply a matter of popping the ferrets into their cages, unloading and feeding the dogs and then collapsing into bed.

Ajax and Rambo looking perky

The ferrets enjoyed their breakfast of chicks on Saturday morning, then it was time to clean their cage and tidy up the Scottish Ferret Club stand ready for the public to arrive. Once cleaned and shifted into a good position at the back of the stand under cover of a gazebo, the ferrets were left to amuse themselves (something they’re good at) while I fed the dogs and then did a solid fry-up for myself to last a good while into the day. After that it was all hands on deck to finish setting the stall up, followed by packing away our various camps and getting most of the vehicles off the stand and into the car park.

The system we use at these affairs is simple; to avoid the ferrets getting frazzled most of them are kept in their familiar cages and runs at the back of the stand. People can look at them but aren’t supposed to handle them there, so they can rest peacefully. Four at a time are put into a handling run at the front of the stand for an hour maximum, during which time club members talk to passers-by about ferrets and make sure anyone who wants to handle a ferret (usually kids) first applies disinfectant gel to their hands, to protect the ferrets from human diseases (they catch colds, flu and canine distemper quite easily) and then the club member picks up a ferret from the run and pops a drop of fish oil on the ferret’s tum. This means the ferret instantly doubles up to lick the delicious flavour off their tums and has no interest whatsoever in who might be holding him (or her) until the washing is complete, so they can be held by toddlers and strangers without concern or risk of a nip. Once the ferret has been distracted, it’s easy to make sure the human is holding the ferret safely and won’t drop them, clutch them too tight or let them run off, so while the ferret is being passed around for cuddles, we can answer questions and make sure the ferret is retrieved safely before anything goes wrong or the ferret gets distressed.

The handling pen, with water dish, tunnel, hidey and puppy pads in every corner, together with four posing catsnakes.

To be fair, most ferrets seem supremely unconcerned about the whole thing and most merely glance up and do a sort of ‘oh, looks like that… meh’ at most when they realise they’re being passed around a group of strangers!

On the hour every hour, we also run a little fun ferret race. The equipment for this consists of 4 wooden boxes about a foot long and six inches square in cross section, with a perspex sliding door that leads into a length of dryer hose. All we have to do is pop a ferret in each box, wind the crowd up and then open the slides… after which the ferrets may come out, turn around, go to sleep, dash halfway along the tunnel and then reverse or whatever else they decide to do! I’m delighted to say Achilles had a go at this and came out of his box in fine style, trotted briskly straight to the end and confidently out – then delighted the crowd by going the wrong way up the next-door tunnel and bulldozing the unfortunate ferret there all the way back into the box! Nobbling the neighbours notwithstanding, he was the winner of his race.

Our stand was next to the ring and it was interesting watching the various displays and classes, including a fascinating display by hill garrons, Highland ponies who still bring the deer back off the hill when the stalkers shoot them. Admittedly, the ‘stag’ they loaded on the pack saddle was a big fluffy stuffed toy, but the principles were there!

This garron is wearing panniers suitable for taking a picnic up the hill!

After the show closed, it was all hands on deck again to clear up, but I had my lot packed into the car and trailer, with the addition of an old display pen gifted by the club secretary and rammed into my trailer, by 5.30, so then we hit the road again, this time heading east as far as Invergarry before turning north and west to reach the Skye Bridge.

The road that skirts the north side of the Red Cuillins is beautiful, and then I turned off and swung west of the Black Cuillins before heading along a single track road to reach my sister’s four acre croft near the village of Uilinish. Katrina and Dave run a very fine B&B called Foxwood in a gloriously beautiful location, a mere few minutes’ walk from the beach, and if anyone’s heading for a holiday on Skye, I heartily recommend Foxwood on Skye as a base for exploring the island!

When I arrived there, we installed the ferret run in the barn, offloaded the ferrets for the night and then settled to catch up in the kitchen. Eventually we’d thrashed out a plan for dealing with my mother’s increasingly erratic behaviour, assuming the antibiotics don’t cure it, and I’d also agreed to take on Katrina’s elderly retired horse, Rhapsody, for a month’s holiday when she and Dave head off to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary!

I watched Rhapsody being born 27 years ago in Wales and helped her get to her feet, so having her back for a few weeks will be a pleasure.

The night came to an end with the dogs and I curling up in the back of the car again, defeating the hungry Skye midges by shutting all the windows!