A fellow teuchter.

Down in the valley the melon farmer has covered two hectares with plastic poly-tunnels. From up here on the ridge the end result looks quite architectural. It's as if a small ice glacier has taken root .

Off to the Supermarket with the PONs. Angus stays with them while 'The Font' shops.We park in a distant corner well away from any other cars . As is always the case when you want to be left alone it doesn't take long for someone to come and draw up alongside. Out gets a lady of a certain age in a bright red figure hugging spandex tank top and ground sweeping orange skirt. She spots the dogs. Before you can say 'Bobs your uncle' she's tapping on the back windscreen of the car with one hand and waving with the other. To add insult to injury she shouts out  'Cou-Cou Doggies! '. Bob is a fairly affable soul but having the window tapped by what appears to be a large talking wasp brings out the worst in him. He leaps at the back window, snarling at this unwarranted intrusion. Sophie joins in - her bark two octaves higher. The woman shouts out ' What bad dogs ' and wanders away. From time to time she casts reproachful glances back towards us. The back window of the little Skoda is smudged with nose marks.

'The Font' wonders aloud why in the space of twenty minutes things like this happen to Angus.

In this weeks Economist magazine a charming obituary for the Scottish politician Charles Kennedy. A fellow teuchter. When was the last time you saw a declamatory ( and correct ) 'O' being used rather than 'Oh' ? A truly archaic linguistic touch that gives the final sentence special warmth. 

"Yet for the many who mourn him, it is above all dreadfully sad, because he was delightful, and in fact this was the main reason for his success. He was, extraordinarily in politics, without malice. He was never, despite his remarkable precociousness, pompous. His jokes, which were frequent, were usually aimed at himself, the institution he served, or both.

Narrating a television documentary on the House of Commons last year, he glanced up, on camera, at a mosaic of St Andrew that towers over Central Lobby. The patron saint of Scots, he quipped, had been positioned to signal the way to the bar. Though he was a political insider—an MP at 23, for goodness sake—Mr Kennedy’s plain good humour always suggested he had a foot in that ruder soil, the real world, which matters most. And that, O politicians, is why he was loved ".