"Worth waiting for"

As I set out

I set out on a sunny morning to visit the road above Liapades – a village on the gentle side of Corfu’s western cliffs, a kilometre off the Corfu-Paleokastritsa road.
Riding and then wheeling my bicycle, I’d found the secret road before. I’d picnicked in a vineyard from where I saw a blue V of sea where the steep coast breaks into Paleokastritsa – the only harbour on the west coast of the island. In the car, she driving of course, I tried to guide Lin there. Stumped, after struggling to negotiate a succession of steep alleys out of the top of the village, we argued for an hour.
“There’s no such road. What a waste of time!”
This time I cycled from Ano Korakiana to where one of the five roads from our village leads west to the busy route between Corfu town and Sidari in the north. Until the lights that restrict traffic to single file through Skripero. Trucks and coaches scared me as they always do, despite years of cycling. One mistake, a wobble in the back draft, I’m a crushed beetle. Mark asked me in the bar why I don’t wear a helmet.
“You think it’d make a difference?”
A kilometre beyond Skipero I turned left onto a small road, escaping the rush of the traffic. The road wound through woods and meadows levelling towards Dukades, its rooftops seeming to nestle under the cliff that hangs over Liapades Bay.

In lowest gear I peddle up to and through the square where people – villagers and visitors – are sitting happily over drinks, shaded by vines. I continue down again to the Paleo Road, a short ride to its junction with the Ropa Valley road which climbs past a disused taverna proclaiming itself “always open” – probable casualty of the unending 'loop of doom'; downhill again for half a kilometre to a side road that leads to Liapades.

I peddle up to the plaka’d platea, across it  into a narrow exit heading steeply upwards. I dismount and push. The village slips behind. I see Ano Korakiana in the distance, through olive trees.

Now I’m on the narrow metalled road I was seeking. This time I follow it further, until it levels among olive groves and vineyards with fleeting views towards high Angelokastro and the roof of the monastery of Paleokastritsa...

...A file of two-stick ramblers comes by, descending. I cycle on a kilometre or so to a breeze block apothiki where the metal road stops and the route divides into three.
Hm? I select the track that leads down hill curving inland. It's hotter, hardly a cloud in the sky. The path becomes unrideable. I walk. This walk-pedal combination suits me, as though I were travelling with a horse. Down the track goes; yet circling, without obvious direction, between hollyoak, broom and oak – land that seems without obvious ownership; forestry. Now and then it levels and is smooth enough to cycle but then it rises again becomes more rubbled before sloping down again. I wonder where this is going, but hope for a useful destination. I stop to sip water.
After an hour the path has been going up, still winding. Without views I’m losing my direction. I’m sure I’m about to join another path or road that will get me downhill. Instead I come to one final slope before the track ends at a levelled space....

Dead-end with a view

...affording magnificent views across the island to the mainland between Parga in the south and the tail of Albania to the north.

I’m in the company of two big diggers, recently used, sweating oil and diesel. They’ve carved out a flat space between boulders tugged out of the red ground.
“So! Having colonised the coast, the property business is driving into the interior, preparing foundations for two ‘desirable’ retreats with lengthy drives”

For all the view, I’m angered by a path that’s led me to a building site. Another sip of water in the heat. I’m walking back the way I came. I see a small side track I’d passed on the way up. Ah-ha! It leads steeply down to a small building sprouting pipes – a pumping station. I can see the Ropa Valley road over the trees below. Clusters of Meadow Brown butterflies rise as I wade through high grass and wild flowers. I’m surrounded by bird song, pigeons cooing, muting the sound of distant traffic on the road I’m trying to reach.

I rest the bike and prospect. Here's another apparent cul-de-sac - a pile of bull-dozed stones...

...but just beyond it is an abandoned olive grove, but I still can find no downward path. I think I’ll try the end of the grove. I retrieve my bike; wheel it through the grass, heave it over a low dry stone wall...

...walking further into the grove. Surely there’ll be a way out at the end of this. The ground is flat, covered in twigs and crisped olive leaves. The boundaries are impermeable – banks, dry stone walls and thick undergrowth.
But for the heat and the olives this reminds me of explorations in the Highlands, hemmed in at times by near impenetrable forestry tracts. I retrace, wheeling back up the steep and overgrown side track. Another kilometre’s walking. I see another road – green and shaded, looking as if made longer ago...

Parking the bike, I scout this for half a kilometre. It leads straight down through overhanging trees and shrubs with no compromising curves and rises. Surely this way will get me to the valley floor. Back to my bike and I’m free-wheeling swiftly beyond the point explored; steadily down, sun sparks flashing through the passing greenery. At last I’m heading somewhere. But – oh-oh - around a slight bend and I arrive at another olive grove quite surrounded by forested banks;...

...a secret space, choice location for a coven; no way out except the way I came. Do people cherish such places; choose them for their isolation?
Finishing my bottle of water I begin to relish the idea of a very cold beer – recalling the well-known scene from Ice Cold in Alex, when John Mill’s, runs his finger down the condensation on the outside of a fluted tumbler of just-poured beer, looks at it for a second, drinks it in one and declares to his three companions, “Worth waiting for”.
I trudge back up the green lane to the rogue track I shouldn’t have chosen. The remaining two I'll explore another day. No more diversions now. I open the ginger beer I’d reserved. Loosening the cap I lose a third of the sweet drink in released bubbles. Back, after three hours wander, at the point where the road divided I cycle smoothly back to Liapades; chastened. It had been like one of my dreams of being inescapably enmeshed in obstacles to my intended destination. I didn’t stop on the way for that beer, but headed down the Sidari road, fast down hill. At Doctor’s Bridge I turned north again for a gentle two kilometre pedal up to the Ano Korakiana turn, and another two to home, parking the bike and strolling down to Piatsa.
‘Mia Megali, please, Stamati” Mark joined me.

 “Lovely ride!” I said “I’ve been exploring the woods above Liapades”

Hair cut

There's no question that my hair needed cutting. But it leaves me feeling uncomfortable. Lefteris told me about a barber - Tantis - in the Jewish Quarter.
'Very good!"
I dropped by this morning at 10.15 and was sat down by the window almost at once, my hair cut with finesse in hardly 10 minutes for €8. Mike, Welsh by birth, is at least bi-lingual, clearly respected by his Greek customers.
"Just leave your folding bike outside. No-one will touch it"
Of course not.

After, I went to the butchers on M.Theotoki, and bought one and a half oven chickens. I'm having friends to supper on Wednesday.
Thursday, Friday, Saturday were days of grey weather, wet and even chilly weather...

...but Saturday evening hinted at the forecast for Sunday, when I decided to set out to cycle up to the top of mount Pantokrator again having tidied and tuned my larger bicycle...

...doing a last minute check on our upper steps just before 9.00am, then pedalling slowly and steadily upwards...

...Leaving behind the village dogs barking and cock's crowing. Just before St.Isadoras I turned sharp right off the road and up the rough track that cuts across the sides of the mountain above the village heading for Spartillas...

Hardly half a kilometre up the path I heard footsteps behind me. Stephanie on her morning walk-jog with the dog.
 "Blimey Steph! I thought I had the mountain to myself this morning"
She continued, just ahead, to a small perch in the verge, made by Wes, to have a drink before turning home...

...and touching a tree, reciting the lines from the sweet wise* anchoress Julian of Norwich
"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well"
My path continued eastward, turning the corner towards different views from the slopes, my way roughened by rain-washed fissures in the path so that I'm wheeling over rubble...

...before the track smooths and leads over slopes, up and down, onto the metalled road that leads though vineyards to the road from Spartillas...

This is the track that Fokian, Mayor of Ano Korakiana, would like to see metalled all the way from Isadoras to Spartillas

...and so, to the turn upwards just south of Sgourades into the mountains where the landscape - north to the peaks of Albania and south towards Parga - grows panoramic.

The road that leads through vineyards and vegetable plots to the Spartillas Road

Just before one-o-clock I'm enjoying a diplo skirto and the views from the summit.

Albania from the grounds of the monastery on Pantokrator

It says in one of the recently unearthed Apocryphal books that ‘while life has no guarantee of ups to balance its downs, an elemental truth of cycling is that the discomfort of every ascent guarantees the free wheeling pleasure of an equal descent.

It took me just over four hours to get up to the top of the mountain - 900 or so metres - and less than two to dawdle back via Sgourades and Zygos. It took longer trudging up the hill to Sokraki where I had an early supper at Emily's, before descending on free wheels to Ano Korakiana.

I'm a little surprised and always delighted at the distances I can cover by walking, or, sometimes, when a slope is steep and I’m tired, by steady trudging. On the cycle journey to and from Pantokrator I walked three times: on the rough track from the church of St Isadoras up to the estancias beside the main road between Sgourades and Spartillas, about 3 kilometres; on the final ascent to the top of Pantokrator, an especially steep zig-zag kilometre; and 2 kilometres up the hill between Zygos and Sokraki, most of which I could have cycled earlier in the day, but now truly trudged.
Sailing, without a motor long ago, taught me how slow passages get you places. If a steady breeze gives 4 knots for 24 hours, you’ve covered more than a 100 land miles; at even 3 knots you cover over 80. Walking and cycling up long hills, skeins of invisible spider web, tickling my face, glimpsed as sudden bright lines that flash in and out of sight; the whippy tails of road-basking lizards scuttling into the grassy verge; birds unseen in the scrolling frieze of greenery – olive, cypress, oak, hollyoak, fig, prickly pear, bramble, bracken, and a jungle of summer flowers, some seeded into time clocks much bigger than dandelions’...

...lichen on drystone walls and roadside boulders; and, the kaleidoscopic surface of things, especially the road – a nail, a bottle top, the shape of a twig impressed in the tarmac when it was rolled. Layers of repair; starting cracks, some already moss riven.  Even fecklessly cast litter is defeated by the green abundance of beloved Greece in late May. I peer down wells beside the road; cool, sinister, echoing with a ‘plump’ from my pebbles. Kandylakia, tended with flowers, a wick flame floating in oil...

This stretch - hardly a kilometre - up to this Kandylakia from the Spartillas-Sgourades road seems the longest peddle

...The bicycle - faster than walking but especially when nearly as slow, toiling up a long winding slope - affords even more quiet than walking. No footsteps or stick-tap. In the morning I heard a cuckoo – intermittent as is their wont -  for half-an-hour along the track towards Spartillas. Now and then a gentle breeze from the north rustled the scenery, bringing the tinkling of sheep bells. In the late afternoon, just above the little bridge at Zygos, there came the sound of rushing water. Peering from the edge of the road, over nettles and tree tops, I could make out the sparkle of a stream fed by two days’ rain. All along my route every colour of soundless butterfly; bees everywhere, but invisible, amid the greenery; louder, a lone bumble bee bumping into flowers; and when resting on the ascent to Strinnilas, the muted soundscape of the whole island, the occasional rumble of planes leaving the airport, heading north over the mountains; the buzz of a strimmer and the up-down sound of approaching and departing cars. Many went by, and back past me, after visiting the top of Pantokrator, stopping now and then for their passengers to capture a memory of the landscape on a tablet. I saw bicycles too, ridden by younger more accomplished cyclists, on much finer machines than mine, climbing - effortlessly it seemed - up slopes too steep for me to cycle.

Mount Mikhalakadhes – 852 metres, 2700 feet - on route for the top of Pantokrator "I was cycling up the side of that!"

Supper in Sokraki soon

*I write 'wise' for her discourses following the revelation that 'it was necessary that there should be sin'. I know of no lamp that I, sans faith, can hold to the darkness of what I've read of human depravity since I first studied the Shoah שואה in youth. Julian wrote only God can allow us to stare into the abyss, yet see light. I strive to make sense of Primo Levi's suicide. He is a Jew, yet an atheist, who, in his life-time, I believed had, having been forced to descend into a hell, returned from that man-made inferno, to speak and write to us, with optimism - my catechism.

Puncture makers

Every time I wheel my bicycle down the public path from Democracy Street, beside our house, to the lower road to cycle south I need to check my tyres for small puncturing thorns – pretty flowers like small yellow daisies grow into soft green seeds....

Tribulus Terrestris - a most appropriate name passed on to me by Annie Hawkins on Facebook

... that dry, tenacious hard and multi-spiked strewing themselves along the rocky path beneath the greenery of the ground cover, attaching themselves to my tyres, breaking off, if not removed, and working their way through to inner tubes.

The spiked seeds attach themselves to the tyre and break off, leaving one thorn to work its way into the inner tube

“We’ll just have to drag it all up”
“But there’s so much of it”
“I know and I thought it was so attractive”
“It must spread on shoes and paws. When there were sheep and goat around these little spikes must have worked into their hooves. Horrid if you’d try to walk this path barefoot.”
“We’ll not only have to unroot this stuff. We'll have to sweep up all the seeds that are mixed up in it and on the ground”
“I could use another path to and from the lower road but ours is the only one I know that doesn’t have steps”

On Monday the weather turned grey, cooler and humid, a steady south wind streaming the new Greek flags on the crags above the village.

By noon increasingly jaundiced overcast released a soaking downpour that continued for an hour, interrupting Lin’s work remaking the uneven narrow steps between our garden and the terrace beneath the balcony.

With the SDS drill set on hammer using a broad chisel I shattered two small chunks of obtrusive stone, leveled the front of some steps and eased off plaka from two more.
“I do like using this thing”
“Your man-drill.”
“Yes indeed, And it’s 5 minutes to 2. I’m done, so no noise in siesta”
I went back to the wardrobe project in our bedroom while Lin continued on the steps. By the end of the afternoon our bedroom was untidy with tools and the support I was making for four fine old pitch pine drawers that we’d recovered from Brin Croft and brought in our hold luggage was not coming together as we’d planned.

The space we’re filling has no right angles. Even the floor and wall are less than horizontal and vertical. The ceiling beam to which the completed doors are attached starts 55 cms from the wall and is 10cms closer at the other end of the bedroom, whose ceiling is 5 cms higher at one end. The whole beam is inclined at a medial angle. There’s no point of reference. My prototype chest for the drawers seemed to sit neatly to the left of the wardrobe door upright; but more careful offering up, checked with spirit level and eye told a different story; everything vexingly out of kilter. I summoned Lin to help. She was soon using galling past tense imperatives.
“You should have made up the whole chest of drawers framework freestanding, and then fitted it in”
“Yes well I didn't”
“As I suggested in the first place”
“No you didn’t”
“Yes I …”
Even as we argued the framework started to collapse.
“I hate the ruddy thing. I’d like to start from scratch”
“No need. I’ll do it”
“Then you’ll see how difficult it is”
“It’s very simple if you just follow instructions”
“Hrmmf”
I gave up, tidied the tools and vacuumed sawdust. Reculer pour mieux sauter.
“Tomorrow we need to get ready for having people to supper. It’s tidy-up day.”
A week ago Lin and I were at Belissimo’s in Limonia, a small platea off  Nikiforou Theotoki. We’d caught the 1300 bus from Ano Korakiana. €2 each to the city and the bus to ourselves but for one other passenger all the way to town. I’d asked at the information kiosk at the bus station about the new timetable.
“It should be by the weekend. It will be decided which buses will be elim-in-ated”
I walked a little ahead of Lin.
“I’m going this way” she called continuing on Zavitsianou to make a dog-leg into Theotoki while I continued via Vellisariou and Solomou, losing her amid a bustle of visitors from the three cruise liners in port.
I was sat next to the door beneath a shade just before 2.00 asking for a fourth chair. Richard, slightly stooped, entered right, and the waiter seeing him, a regular guest, heading my way, acknowledged our table and me with the minutest of nods. Then Lin followed
“Did you run?”
“No I did not. You dawdled”
Can it be only this year that Lin and I were walking round the rim of Vesuvius, when she fell and cut her mouth and had stitches in the A & E above Torre del Greco and we walked on to catch the train to Herculaneum; mum already dead two months and Richard P back from near fatal illness? It was warm then, blue and sunny enough for ice cream. And in mid-May was it that we – Lin, I and Chris - met with Richard at Harry’s in Perithia, discretely shaken at how he’d altered?
“Tell me” asked Richard, who’d filled the minutes before Chris’ arrival with an account of the final revisions of his latest book “the difference between hip-hop and rap”
Chris, who would know exactly, diffidently obliged. We were reflecting on the term hip-hop in Roger Cohen’s op-ed in the NY Times - 'Why Greece Is Not Weimar' - which called Pavlos Fyssas ‘a leftist hip-hop singer’.
“The eggvolk killed Fyssas for what he sang – rap – not for how he danced – hip-hop”
“But I’m unsure” said Richard “that he was their original target...Fyssas was with friends. There was an argument in a place, a bar in Keratsini, with one Golden Dawn member. He called up followers on his phone. A score arrived and in the ensuing attack Fyssas was stabbed”
We ordered village sausages, roast chicken, chips, and, for Richard, tomato and taramasalata and lettuce and we shared a Greek salad; the feta one thick square on top. I passed the bowl to Lin to break the cheese and dress with oil.
“There’s no salt or vinegar on that so add it to your plate” said Lin. Bread came crusty and soft.
“Narrative, Richard! I just saw a film called The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. When I watched black and white cowboy films they were all black and white. Then we had the guilt films”
“Little Big Man”
“Dancing with Wolves much later, and lots more. Then we started to get films where there was always a chronicler, a journalist sending stories of the Wild West back East, making it up as he went along. Unforgiven? W.W.Beauchamp? George Hearst in the Deadwood series. This last film with Brad Pitt as Jesse James was all about making the myth with the events depicted being staged and debated by some of the participants and their audiences in Manhattan. Deconstruction used to be a complicated idea teased and dismissed as academic la-la, now it’s in the multiscreen franchise movie houses….These days you don’t even need an idiots’ guide. For all Richard Dawkins’ contempt, it’s become common sense. Even boring.”

I was getting at Richard P’s writing; not his newspaper articles about Greece but his books, the one I’m tackling on Brian Friel. This latest one will be a difficult I’m sure – about colonialism, but that’s like saying a novel written in Russia is “about Russia”.
Later Chris, as he’d offered, drove us back to Ano Korakiana, else we’d have taken the Sidari bus and walked from the junction 2 kilometres up to Democracy Street. Later he wrote:

‘R was much better, wasn’t he?...what a lovely wife you have. I don’t mind saying it knowing you will let Lin know because she is hard headed and the right kind of cynical and quiet…sceptical might be the better word…I had something else to say but it’s gone.’ He added advice ‘no more capping…I have decided to try not to cap others' stories. do you realise how much of our chat is capping? I am the worst offender and I notice my frustration. My father never capped. It is a pleasure being able to focus and keep track of the speaker. They are grateful and in my case surprised. I love the discipline. What a bore I have been all these years. It’s insecurity but wrong because with silence and attention comes power and quiet satisfaction.

Dr. Johnson suggested, or was it Boswell himself made the remark? “We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over...” So there is a moment in conversation when something hitherto absent is unaccountably yet undoubtedly present; like an original idea; initially invisible since without reference or context.

Canadian Odyssey

'We have been on some rough roads, hit some pretty big holes etc but both bikes are standing up to the rigours really well and are comfortable to ride. I am riding a Vivente World Randonneur and John has a Kona Sutra'...my friend John Martin, justly proud of hitting the 7000 kilometre mark on his and his friend Alistair Walker's cycle ride across great Canada in search of what makes rural communities work - or not (scroll down for a map of their route on this page of Democracy Street)

About the study: This summer I will be travelling across Canada, west to east, visiting small rural communities in ten provinces to learn about the ways in which people in these places have adopted sustainable living practices. Like small rural communities across Australia Canadian communities are also dealing with significant change relating to economic, demographic and environmental factors. People in these rural communities typically work together in creative and innovative ways to secure their viability and liveability. I am interested in how they organise themselves to do this, how they relate to other communities in their province and with the Federal Government to ensure a sustainable future. Prof John Martin, University of LaTrobe, Bendigo

Meantime my fellow Corfu blogger hums in print the praises of Ken Block - a celebrated petrol head for whom some benighted agency of government was prepared to give the freedom of the city to make skiddy noises:

Have I shoved this latest Ken Block wheelie freak-out in here, or just in my Facebook which has overtaken my blog for the true test of temperatures and times. The man has crazy skills, and clearly crazy contacts because for whom else would they close the place down. One snotty-nosed kid to sneak out the backyard to see what's going on ... round comes Ken sideways in a cloud of dust ... all they'd find would be a splodge of snot on a pot plant.

Why should anyone steal a watch when he could steal a bicycle? ~ Flann O’Brien  

The bicycle is the most civilised conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart. ~ Iris Murdoch  

When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments. Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man. And (unlike subsequent inventions for man’s convenience) the more he used it, the fitter his body became. Here, for once, was a product of man’s brain that was entirely beneficial to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others. Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle. ~ Elizabeth West  

Small mammals

When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. ~ H.G. Wells 

The bicycle is a vehicle for revolution. It can destroy the tyranny of the automobile as effectively as the printing press brought down despots of flesh and blood. ~ Daniel Behrman

When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the day’s sensations: bright sun, blue sky, warm breeze, blue jay’s call, ice melting and so on. This helps me transcend the traffic, ignore the clamourings of work, leave all the mind theatres behind and focus on nature instead. I still must abide by the rules of the road, of biking, of gravity. But I am mentally far away from civilisation. The world is breaking someone else’s heart. ~ Diane Ackerman 

… the bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon ~ Bill Strickland, The Quotable Cyclist

Last day of the Tour de France

*** *** ***
On Thursday the Cultivation to Consumption event under pouring rain on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments was lovely.

Chani, Aftab, Chris, Simon, Emma, Danni, Jeevan, Abdul

It began with Aftab wandering around the site collecting vegetables from our sodden plots. I gave cabbage, broad bean, spring onions and potatoes. Nothing to the contributions from the more experienced gardeners like Wesley, Danni, Micheal and Vanley. The cooks were Aftab but also Chani who'd only been recruited at the 'rehearsal' on Wednesday when he'd turned up looking for a plot. As it was he bought an extra cooker, more food, an extra table and his skills.

Food from mine and other's allotments cooked by Aftab on the spot

I'd brought a gazebo from home - a welcome shelter for cooking and eating. Others, turning up in dribs and drabs in the grisly weather, sheltered happily chatting, preparing veg, having tea, and eating in the humble VJA clubhouse. We had three stoves, the extra one bought by Chani to heat oil to fry pakora. alongside the big pot of vegetable curry cooked by Aftab and another burner for the chapatis.

The freshest salad in the world

The rain was unceasing increasing dripping off the edges of the gazebo, bedraggling any who stayed in the open. The sky was greyer than dusk. Everyone helped out digging crops, cleaning and preparing food, cooking and serving it on a steady supply of plastic plates - the young lads from the Bangladeshi Youth Forum in train with Abdul set to with easy enthusiasm peeling, depodding, chopping, helped by Ashok and Jeevan who made up gram flour dough. Amid the gentle bustle and happy fuss things fell in place - an orchestra first dotted with separate tuning, hazards a tune or two and then altogether starts to play. There was food for all; hardly anything left - perhaps some spicy basmati rice at the bottom of one big pot; all else scraped clean, with vegetable preparation trimmings bagged for compost.

Under the gazebo

Aftab and I feel the whole thing went very well, the first of two, with another in the later summer. For this some of Thursday's participants were pushing for a BBQ that could include meat as well as vegetable. One piece of feedback "Get a bigger tent!" Did people learn as we hoped? Difficult to say. Carole from LegacyWM checking on the whole process collected evaluations from the thirty people there.  Our purpose - from the application for the £200 financial support for two events...

...a pilot project in partnership with Victoria Jubilee Allotments and Legacy WM.  The aim is to raise awareness of recycling, composting, growing food and cooking them.  It will work with young people from the Bangladeshi Youth Forum and older people from B'ham Asian Resource Centre to demonstrate what can be done in people’s gardens and how food can be prepared.  We will host two cooking events in the Victoria Jubilee Allotments and raise awareness of the benefits or eating organic food and encourage people to take similar initiatives in their own homes.  It will also look at the negative impact of fast food on health.

I learned and I enjoyed myself. Fixing the learning, working out how far it worked is less clear, but it's the first event other than our very small Diamond Jubilee Picnic held on the Victoria Jubilee since we began in June 2010. I judge it a good start.
*** ***
Amy and Guy and Liz are in the Highlands; the first time my mother has seen Oliver, another great grandson
"Will you get a photo of you with Ollie"
"He's a such a cheery little soul" she said "I've arranged to buy four chickens from Macpherson, down the road - a pair of Light Sussex and Rhode Island Reds. We can collect them when you come up."

Near Milton of Culloden on the Moray Firth