An absolutely wonderful Scots Adventure .: Pernickety guardians.

Friday, August 21, 2026

Pernickety guardians.

The second episode of David Olusogas latest series of ' A house through time ' is broadcast on the BBC. He presents so compellingly that watching it is a joy. This is the first house to feature north of the border and we've already been served up rich dishes of treason and immorality. The programme is a jaunty insight into an Edinburgh that is ' all lace and nae knickers '. I notice he pronounces both 'Wynd' and 'Calton' in an English way .

12 degrees this morning. I'm wearing a quarter zip but head back indoors to find a jacket. The air is at that stage where super fresh turns towards raw. We're refusing to turn on the heating until the new month starts. This self denial is becoming more difficult with every passing day. There's no hiding the fact that autumn is now approaching not so much at an amble but at a sprint. Later this morning we'll dig out the winter duvets and take the light silk ones to the dry cleaners.

The gutter men show up early at 7:15. I only called them yesterday. They look after the wee house in town so we are considered 'regulars' and are treated accordingly. You see many houses, the last wee house before Denmark included, where the majority of the roof is made on pantiles but the first couple of feet next to the gutters are laid with grey slate. I'd always assumed this was because the pantiles had eroded away after centuries of use and been replaced with something harder wearing. The gutter man tells me that the real reason slates were laid was because the rats found them too slippery to clamber up.

At the start of the week there were hundreds of bees covering the lavender beds. The stems were literally weighed down with them. The bees are still there but their numbers have fallen. They work frenetically as if charged by a sense of what's to come. I count a dozen resting on the garden furniture and on the grass around the lavender bushes four or five that have died. Something in the first of the cold nights seems to tell them their time here is done. One minute they're hard at work, then they tire, find a sunny spot where they spend half an hour in a trance and then it's over. The regularity and gentleness of this drawing down of the curtain is remarkable. I'll plant more of the late flowering lavender for them next year. Bees are natures Friar Tuck - always jovial, always busy.

Oddly, the Cabbage Whites remain - and in huge numbers. It has been a bumper year for Cabbage Whites. They seem oblivious to the turn in the seasons.