World Bee Day biscuits in the bakers. They seem to be identical to their usual biscuits but with a bee replacing the maraschino cherry.
Angus goes into the hardware store for some wire to tie up the roses in the garden at the wee house in town. The roses have flowered in the recent heat, become top heavy and blown down in the overnight wind. The roses cover the sheltered walls that enclose three sides of the garden and some of them must have been there for the better part of a hundred years . Our old neighbour who is now well into her eighties says she remembers them from her childhood. The garden walls have been built with stone 'borrowed' from the cathedral and are aligned to catch most of the summer light . By now they have four centuries of sun trapped warmth in them. On a sunny, calm day in high summer the scent is as thick as silk and you'd think you were in Turkey.
The hardware store is one of those places built over slightly different levels and replete with small dark corridors that lead nowhere. When I ask for wire I'm told to ' Go tae the back and you'll find it near the ladders '. 'Ladders' when spoken by a Fifer is a word that is a surprise even to a fellow Scot. . After five minutes I've found neither ladders nor wire. The man behind the counter does not seem disposed to providing any more information or coming to help me so I settle for some twine , pay and leave.
I do however come across a Baseball Bat Pepper Mill. This is the sort of kitchen device that will have been extremely popular with male students. A three foot long pepper grinder may be a conversation piece but it is not the most practical of kitchen appliances.
We go to the cafe on the beach. It is very windy. In fact it's so windy our coffees are caught by the wind and blown out of the paper cups. This seems to be a good measure of just how windy it is. All the seats in the lee of the cafe building that offer some protection are packed solid with golfers and visitors. Our table has no such protection and is exposed to the full strength of the wind. The lights around the cafe awning soon become dislodged and a loose strand lands on a couple sitting on orange deck chairs. The man runs inside to tell the woman behind the counter who emerges and starts to take them down. We head back to the car and abandon what's left of our Americanos. Scottish weather is a remarkable thing.
The strawberry farm by the bridge is doing a brisk business. They are trialing a new variety. We buy one of the old and one of the new. They're also growing asparagus.
5 comments:
Hari OM
Yes, the wind's a bit of a surprise... am parked in Falkland, tucked away, yet the van is rockin' away. It's also quite a change in temperature. I hold out hope for a little bit more summer to come... YAM xx
Re-using stones of ancient buildings seems a widespread Scottish habit. Many of the oldest houses in my north of Scotland village are built with stone from the now ruined castle on the hill. The castle, once abandoned, became "the haunt of thieves and robbers", so the townspeople hastened its demise by carting away stones for house building.
Very windy too (but also wet) in Sweden, where my husband has gone to do sea kayaking. Sweden seems to have had the same change in the weather as here, judging by what people are saying to him: "it's been sunny and calm for ages until you arrived".
I will be surprised if the café awning survives the wind - it looks distictly rickety!
I think I would love your hardware store. There is a discount chain in Japan named Don Quijote that deliberately creates the same kind of chaotic atmosphere. It's the direct opposite of Japanese minimalism, but it has been so successful that other stores are trying to copy. Your links today are all wonderful. I especially liked the piece about the new pope. I never imagined there would be a pope from Chicago, but for Americans he is a breath of fresh air right now.
You could spend hours exploring that hardware store, and still not find what you came in for. My hometown hardware store closed this year, after 150 years.
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