One word? When seven would do…

Tuesday – I am not at all sure what happened on Tuesday during the daytime. I know we had a long Skype chat with Ranger Mike and Casey in the evening but the daytime activities totally escape me.

Wednesday – Sarah and Clive arrive, which probably means at least some of Tuesday was spent digging out camping mats, sleeping bags, cooker and kettle for them as we had them looked out and in the car ready for them. Ady and I met the boat – we had several deliveries including CoOp food and our new strimmer, so Ady took our stuff and their stuff along to the campsite while I walked along with Sarah and Clive and their dog Rusty. We got them settled and left them putting up their tent as we drove back along and came home. We had lunch, set up the strimmer and did some strimming, Davies and Scarlett went to check for post. Sarah and Clive came up for a cup of tea and chat and then headed back down to walk Rusty having arranged to come back up for dinner later. I finally finished off the strawberry bed and then got dinner sorted.

Sarah and Clive came up and it was a really late, whisky fuelled night ending after 2am!

Thursday – Sheerwater boat trip. We packed up lunch for everyone and called for S&C on the way past the campsite. We saw very little – a few porpoises, some scant seabirds but it was a glorious day out there and the sea was like a mirro – flat, calm, turquoise and reflective. Just a stunning day to be out on the water. S&C wanted to go to the ranger talk in the evening so we arranged to meet them for a pre talk beer. It was a night when lots of Rum folk were out so we stayed rather later than planned and in fact S&C caught us up walking back home. Ady cooked dinner which was lovely and it was a much earlier night with them heading away around 1130pm.

Friday – Another mental block of a morning, I have a feeling it was really showery so we were mostly indoors although it cheered up around lunchtime. We went down to collect stuff from S&C and took their bags and kit along to the pier for the first boat as we were  collecting a meat delivery. We said goodbye to them, went to the boat and wheelbarrowed all the stuff up. Ann from Soay’s book had arrived so I read a chunk of that aloud with Scarlett properly listening and Ady and Davies dipping in and out. It’s compelling reading but that is likely due to my utter fascination with Ann anyway as a character of the last 4.5 years of our life who we don’t really know yet see every week. Oh I’ve just remembered that I did booking the ferry to and from Harris & Lewis and sorting out car insurance at some point earlier in the week.

Ady and I went down to the village for a few beers before dinner but were home by 830pm.

Saturday – I’d been sleeping badly and had a poor night so woke still tired. Scarlett and I chatted in the morning, listening to the radio and crocheting as it was too midgey to go out. Ady came home at lunchtime after a shift in the hostel. It remained midgey but we walked down to the village and did some bramble picking around the campsite. A really nice curry for dinner and more of Ann’s book in the afternoon.

Today – a better nights sleep and a bit of a lay in for me. Then an hour or so wood chopping and stacking up, a bramble picking walk with Bonnie followed by the first jam making of the year. Ady has been dismantling an old pig house to move across to a fresh area. I promised Scarlett I would go river swimming with her this year and as summer is running out and today was a very warm, non midgey day it felt like a good opportunity so her and I did that after lunch. It was mad – really cold and a stumble-y walk to get to the spot but really good fun and just lovely to be swimming in a river, not sure of the last time I actually swam or was so immersed in water. We had about half an hour in there before heading back and Ady made cups of tea / hot chocolate to welcome us back.

Vee – an SNH volunteer who has been here for 3 weeks and is off tomorrow popped up for a cup of tea and chat before we went off swimming and Mike popped up afterwards so quite a sociable afternoon. We had a lovely roast dinner and a couple of episodes of Lost. With all muscles used in wood chopping, bramble picking and swimming I am sure I will sleep well again tonight.

Thursday – in the morning Megan the student came up with her friend Molly to explain about her dissertation which is a mapping project and leave some questionnaires and maps with us. Scarlett packed up the rucksack with lunch stuff and we headed down to the pier. It was a busy Sheerwater with a few visitors, a school trip and various islanders having friends visiting who also came along. We spotted a pod of porpoise fairly early on and then a large pod of about 20 or so dolphins which stayed with the boat for quite a while splashing about and swimming alongside us. Dolphin and whale encounters never lose their joy and magic, despite how many we have had in the years we’ve lived here and this was no exception.

We found the drake runner duck dead that morning which was pretty devastating – not least because it means we can’t breed runners ourselves for next year without a drake. Since then we have lost a couple of muscovy ducklings too. We have now penned the remaining muscovy ducklings and are keeping a close eye on everything. We are not sure whether there is a murderer among our own birds or if something else is happening but have been working to eliminate possibilities, one of which is that Bonnie may simply be running through during the feeding frenzy and crushing them. So she is now kept in at feeding time.

When we got back from the boat we managed to fix up the gate from some old bits of a mini polytunnel we rescued that Mel & Em had had and abandoned mostly broken when they left last year. The pieces fitted together to be just the right size to make the frame and I have stitched netting on to it. It is not quite perfect but so far no birds have broken in so it works.

Friday – I worked Post Office in the morning which was mostly chatting to Neil 🙂 I had planned outside stuff after lunch when  I came home but the weather was not on my side for that as it started raining as I walked home and carried on most of the afternoon, so instead I did some baking with Scarlett – several batches of cookies for her to ice, some breadsticks and biscotti for Italian night and pizza and bread dough. Ady and I had arranged to meet Mairi at the shop for a beer so we braved the rain which had all but stopped and headed down for a couple of drinks. Home for pizza and Lost.

Saturday – I had an hour or so of crochet and tea drinking before heading out to do some weeding as the sun came out. I cleared a strawberry bed which had gotten very overgrown and uncovered some runners to plant in. Ady came home so I came in for lunch with him. I made the tiramisu which didn’t really work as I added too much cream I think so it was very runny. It tasted delicious though.

We headed down to the village around 6pm for a couple of beers before the evening started. We had a really good night – loads of food, lots of people, some music as Mike and Jed played so I got to sing, plenty of random nonsense at the end of the evening as we discovered stabilo fluorescent marker shows up really well under Jinty’s new fly zapper blue light so were all drawing on each other to make tattoos… classic Rum larks! Davies and Scarlett headed home around 10 ish, we followed around 1am.

Sunday – Mairi came up for lunch and stayed a good couple of hours drinking tea and catching up. It was nice outside for a while but then got really midgey so we retreated indoors. We had planned afternoon fishing and it had gotten late so we almost didn’t go but we roused ourselves and headed down and did really well catching 22 mackerel between the three of us. Scarlett doesn’t really like casting and reeling in so she takes fish off the lines for us and is happy to kill them. She will do gutting too but prefers not to so Ady tends to do that. Davies is really good at fishing and enjoys it a lot and we now have three decent rods so everyone is happy. It was very midgey towards the end, just as we had all gotten rather icky with fish blood, guts and scales too… it had gotten later than we’d realised too so it was gone 7pm before we got home having washed out our haul and put them in the freezer on the way home.

Dinner was crazy late but very delicious.

Today – Ady and I took a load of washing down to the village this morning, picking some brambles and sticking them in the freezer, calling in to the shop for some bits and generally bimbling round the village while it was done. We bought it back up to hang on the line and have some lunch. It was really windy so I had a couple of hours on the internet catching up on various things including putting in a butchers order, replying to emails, getting the new car insured, booking the ferries for our holiday in October. We’re going to a holiday cottage on Lewis for 5 nights with bath, wifi, washing machine, dishwasher and freezer. Looking forward to watching crap TV, having baths, eating ice cream… it’s only half an hour from Stornoway so plenty of getting a fix of the bright lights when we want it and beach walks and lazy days when we don’t. We’ll have the night before in Fort William, a day on Skye before the late ferry across to Harris, then come back via Ullapool for a dentist appointment in FW and a last night back there before Ady gets the train and ferry back to Rum to meet Jen who is croft sitting for us, while me and the kids head south.

I rang my parents to catch up with them – they are up here in just over 2 weeks. Dinner was stir fry and my hand slipped while adding the chilli powder making for a rather hotter dish than normal. It was nice though! Very early dinner all eaten by 9pm in stark contrast to last night.

I was Mrs Post Office this morning as Jinty is off for a few days. On the way down the hill I discovered a dead chick – mysteriously without a ring which is very odd as we ringed all we had released… It had blood in it’s beak and when Ady investigated further it was quite bruised so appeared to have been squashed. Nothing had eaten it so we suspect probably our geese of treading on it, hopefully in a non deliberate way but they have been known to kill things by ganging up. We’ll keep an eye on things but the birds generally seem to be shaking down ok together and establishing pecking orders between the species and the old and young. Hopefully this was a single casualty.

Post Office was pretty quiet – Neil and Dougal came for a bit, Ross called in, Ali popped by for a chat. A few tourists were around too. Ady came down to bring some laundry, take some stuff to the freezer, collect some other stuff and walk back with me. While he was with me Fliss, Ian and Kim called by for various shopping. I finished up Post Office and we came home for lunch.

This afternoon’s job was finishing the final panels on the fence which we did, but inevitably took a little longer than expected. We debated and considered various options for the door which is now the weak point in terms of preventing birds and deer getting in and think we have sorted it but it got late and midgey so we abandoned it for today at about 630pm. It had been really breezy all afternoon but suddenly the wind dropped and it was midge hell. I am still itchy now.

I made dinner, Ady rang Chris, we watched Lost. I had another bash at connecting a new printer we have bought for making labels and posters but it’s one of these clever ones with a higher IQ than mine so I messed about for about half an hour which is my limit for things I don’t understand or have sufficient interest in to try and learn before packing it up for another day. Life is too short to get frustrated with things I can’t do. Ian has offered to help so I will have one more go, maybe tomorrow, and then take him up on his offer.

A student came up to the croft earlier, she is doing her dissertation on Rum and some sort of mapping project. She asked if she could come back up to ask some questions so we agreed on 11am tomorrow. Thursdays are a bit of a dead day really with the Sheerwater boat trip right in the middle of the day so that should not be too much of a drain on our time. Tomorrow after the Sheerwater, midges allowing, we should get the gate on the veg cage. I have been looking at stuff we can still sow this late in the season and am feeling very excited about growing stuff again now I know it is safe from the deer and our birds as I have lost too much crops to them this year and lost heart rather.

I spent some time down there weeding today and clearing up, it’s going to look great once it’s all done.

Friday was a raining all day sort of day and we had felt secretly relieved to be not welcoming Mike and Rose til the following day as the ferry was cancelled due to technical issues. They had found alternative accommodation and we were planning a quiet indoors day, some dvd watching and an early night all round to get ready for them arriving the following morning. A flurry of Rum emails went round updating everyone with boat info and it turned out the Orion was bringing foot passengers and the Spanish John was bringing freight after all. I checked the time and Mike & Rose would have had less than an hour to get to Mallaig and get on board so I decided not to try and get hold of them but then had a text from Mike to say they were in Mallaig and would be on the boat!

Which meant a period of frantic tidying and a dash to the pier to collect them! I took them to the camping cabin where they were staying and then brought them up here to the croft. We tried to introduce their cocker spaniel Breeze, to Bonnie but Bonnie was not at all hospitable so we elected to keep them apart for the remainder of their visit. I suspect it could have worked but it felt too risky to bother trying for the sake of a few hours so we either kept Bonnie outside while Breeze was here, or shut her in Scarlett’s room which is where she tends to hang out of an evening anyway.

We had pizza for dinner and a really nice evening with them before they headed off down the hill to their cabin. Because they were keen to be ‘home’ before dark it was earlyish nights to say goodbye for their whole trip which was quite nice as it meant we got to watch an episode of Lost before bed each evening.

Saturday – Ady went off to work while I did some crochet – I’ve caught up with myself a bit and made four midges the last few days so we have a decent cluster of them back in the shop again = I think we decided the collective name for a group of midges is a ‘Bastard’ 😉 Bob the pig kept getting out so we did some pig fence adjusting to deal with that and I re=pitched the blue wigwam tent which was wet and needed to dry out before being packed away.

Ady cooked a really nice curry for dinner, Mike and Rose came up around 5ish having spent the day off exploring.

Sunday – We re-pitched the bell tent and assessed the damage from the storm last weekend. It’s fixable but probably not really suitable for the air bnb renting out. We are researching some other tenting options for that for next year. It was a fishing competition from the pier so we called for Mike and Rose and headed down there. Quite a few folk came along and it was great fun. We caught a fair few including Davies’ first catch and Mike fulfilled one of his bucket list tick offs in catching, killing, cooking and eating fish. We brought back a couple of mackerel, a trout and a pollock for starters as Ady had already got a joint of our pork in the oven cooking slowly. Mike cooked the fish and we ate like kings! It was a later night than I think they had planned but really enjoyable.

Monday – we had arranged to meet M&R to give them a castle tour. I called in to the shop to pick up some more lures as we had decided to do some more fishing later. I held on to Breeze while Ady took Mike, Rose, Davies and Scarlett around the castle. Fortunately Bad Neil was around with baby Dougal so he and I walked and talked while Ady was doing the tour, catching up with Ross and Ian too.

Ady and the kids drove along while I walked with Mike and Rose to the pier to wave them off on the boat, then when the boat had gone the four of us took our rods and did an hour or so fishing off the pier. We did really well, a shoal of mackerel came in and Davies and I were pulling out a catch with every cast. We got 15 worth keeping and had a real production line going of me and Davies fishing, Scarlett taking them off the hooks and Ady processing them (killing and gutting them). Scarlett also had her first catch.

Ady and I collected animal feed and a load of slabs of tinned food from the shop, brought it part way back in one car, transferred it to the other one and brought it home. We managed to forget the meat we had taken out of the freezer and so had to walk back  to the first car to collect that. We realised afterwards we had also forgotten the cider and orange juice but didn’t bother going back again…

Today – Ady emptied the animal feed from the car and collected the forgotten cider and juice, I did a fix up on the bell tent, we listened to Popmaster and then we spent the day fixing up the fence around the veg beds. We are 3/4 of the way there with just one side left to put up tomorrow and a gate to construct. It looks fab and will make such a difference. I made steak pies for dinner inbewteen and then Ady and I sat on the sporran for over an hour listening to music, chatting and having a beer. It was lovely 🙂

Scarlett has spent most of the day beside the river, Davies has made the most of having unlimited power as we’ve had both solar and wind today so has been doing online-y stuff.

And glad to be home 🙂

Monday – I did post office in the morning while Ady and the volunteers moved wheelbarrows full of gravel up the hill. Ady brought Leo along to the post office to meet me from work and we took him along to the pier to wave him off. It was great to have him here, he really got the most out of his time here and hopefully not only had an experience he will take away and remember but may also come back again. I handed the shop keys over to Jinty who was back and then we came home. We had a quick lunch and then caught up with Martin, Katarina and Jean for some further path building (Ady) and finishing off cloches (me). I managed to complete all four of the frames I had assembled parts for and get them covered with plastic. A visitor appeared for a chat, first with Ady and then with me, asking questions about what we can grow here, how we improve the soil and so on. It made me realise how much we have learned and what we have achieved and how it is all an ongoing process.

I cooked dinner, had a shower and a further frustrating phone call with my parents…

Tuesday – The volunteers and Ady were feeding the animals in the morning when I became aware there was a woman and small child hanging out by the bird pens so went out to investigate. It turned out to be K and I, wife and son of N the farrier who we know pretty well as he visits Rum regularly to do work with the Rum ponies and used to live here on the island. I last saw him when I brought Kira and the peahens over and he and I gossiped all the way across on the ferry. I’d heard of K as she also used to live on Rum – it’s how they met – but never met her. She was over with him for 2 nights and had brought I up to see the birds having heard we had lots of them. Really lovely to meet her and put a face to a name. N and K are another sad loss to Rum in my opinion – we really need young, energetic, at the start of their adult life journey types to bring hope and promise and stuff. They came and met the pigs, we had a bit of a chat and then they wandered off and I went down to join the others. They were all busy with path building and as my strawberries have been on my to do list for weeks and I had finally sorted the cloches the day before I decided to make them my task. I thinned the plants in the cloches by the polytunnel which have been super productive this year and had sent out loads of runners to give them room to spread out for next year and planted all the thinned plants out under plastic in the new beds. If they all do well we will have about 10 times the amount of space / plants as this year and we have done *really* well this year. Fingers crossed for us being strawberry barons next year!

I’d made a couple of veggie pasta bakes for the volunteers lunches the night before so Ady popped them in the oven to warm up while I finished off what I was doing and then we gave the volunteers their lunch and I came in to pack and supervise Scarlett’s packing. We said goodbye to the volunteers and Ady took Scarlett and I down to the pier to head off on the Sheerwater. It was a bumpy crossing and a really busy boat – so odd to be on such a familiar space but not going to a familiar place. We got in to Arisaig, found the car, called in to the Spar for a bottle of wine (for me) and some milk (requested by Alison) and headed to Alison and Leon’s. We got there around 7pm. It was really midgey and they were trying to settle three chickens and three ducks who had arrived the day before and were not settling well – two of the hens had pecked the third badly and then started pecking the ducks, the ducks were terrified and had not eaten or drunk anything. I shut the chickens out of the run and got the ducks to eat and drink, checked over the injured hen (she was fine) and advised not letting the other hens back in until it was almost dark and time for them to roost, then putting some sort of enrichment in to their run for them to prevent boredom the next day. Another of those ‘Oh actually I do know what I’m talking about…’reminders for me 🙂

We had dinner and variously headed off to bed. Scarlett worked out that actually she can use facebook messenger without reading and writing by using voice recognition apps which she was very proud of herself for. I do love the way she has engaged problem solving, creative thinking and IT skills to circumnavigate literacy! 😉 It does at least serve to support my ‘literacy is important but not the be all and end all’ stance… I was definitely asleep first. Most amused that my children after ten hours apart were mostly keen to catch up with each other online from their respective locations.

Wednesday – Scarlett and I were off and away before 10am, arriving in FW with time to grab a pastry for breakfast from Lidl before heading to the dentist. Scarlett had her palate expander refitted and the train track braces put on her top and bottom teeth. She was offered a choice of colour of bands and asked if she could have rainbow but was told she could only choose two so she went for blue and green. So she now has a mouthful of metal. As ever with Scarlett she is being brave and stoical about the whole business. She’s taken a few painkillers – one tooth in particular has quite a way to move so will likely be sore with every adjustment and she is getting cuts or rubs to her mouth in various places so has been busy with the dental wax sorting that out.

We had the whole day in FW – a trip to the secret charity shop (two a couple of miles outside FW which we only discovered this year), all around the FW charity shops, lunch AND dinner at McDonalds, Morrisons shop, Lidl shop, Superdrug stock up, a chat with the woman at a newly opened craft shop which will be running crafting courses. We bought a cd of David Attenborough talks which we listened to in the car, collected a reservation for Ady from Argos and bought some stacking boxes from Poundstretcher to fit on our wheeled luggage trolley thing, inspired by our recent Swiss volunteers who were using something similar for all their stuff. We arrived back at Alison’s at 8ish and I was offered a bath which I gratefully accepted with a large glass of wine and my kindle 🙂

Today – we headed off to Arisaig, called into the Spar for last minute bits, I dropped Scarlett and all our stuff off at the marina and took the car back to the car park, dropping the key at the keysafe and getting very wet walking back to the marina. I had a cup of tea, bought our tickets and we were first on the boat loading all our stuff on board. It was a really, really crappy crossing. Zero visibility, incredibly choppy, about half of the 18 people aboard were sick, Scarlett included. I felt queasy but was very focussed on being one of the half of stoic folk handing around sick bags and mopping up vomit, a real Dunkirk spirit aboard the Sheerwater today. I was thinking this morning that actually I almost feel like an adult sometimes these days, when I was talking about something to Alison and Leon the other nights saying ‘well that was 30 years ago’ and telling Neil the other morning about how we bought our house when I was just 20, over half my life ago, when Neil himself was 3 years old! I felt like a grown up today on the boat. I’m really stiff now from sitting tensed for such a long time in the cold though, I was bracing myself against the rocking while focussing on staring at the horizon and supporting Scarlett who was lying across me, my thighs feel all bruised from 90 minutes of being flexed!

We got off at Rum, very very thankful that we at least didn’t have to get back on the boat again in a couple of hours like everyone else on the boat did. It rained a bit on us heading up the hill with our wheelbarrows but was mostly kind and held off tipping down with rain until we were indoors, then proceeded to rain for the whole of the rest of the day and still now. We unpacked, had lunch, caught up with each other and have had a companionable afternoon with the internet on catching up online, listening to Popmaster, I’ve nearly finished off two midges who were both part made, which is just as well as I have sold another one while I was off. I keep telling myself I’ll do one more and then I can do some more bags and I keep selling them so having to carry on with midges. Over winter I definitely need to crochet up a whole stash of them.

Ady cooked dinner, fishcakes at Scarlett’s request. We watched a couple of episodes of Lost. The ferry tomorrow is cancelled – technical issues rather than weather although it is forecast to be really windy and the road to Mallaig is currently closed due to a landslip with the train disrupted too. Our Not Swingers friends Mike and Rose were supposed to be arriving for the weekend so they are having to work out other arrangements, hopefully just delayed until Saturday morning. I have to confess to feeling really bad for them but ever so slightly relieved that we don’t have to do a single thing tomorrow though. The idea of not getting up and not having to meet a ferry is really very alluring.

This week has definitely been too busy. I’ve been doing Post Office shifts as Jinty is off, we’ve had six volunteers here plus Home Ed friend Leo, the weather has been a crazy mix of rainy, midgey and this weekend tent destroying gales. We’ve been taking phone calls from dysfunctional families in Sussex on both Goddard and Davies side and the calendar stretches ahead with yet more of the same. Friends and family visiting, all of which is lovely but exhausting.

We have however had a very successful volunteer event, largely due to Martin, the dad of the family volunteering with us, who is an Ady style work horse! The two of them have delighted in pushing wheelbarrow upon wheelbarrow full of path materials up the hill leaving the youngsters far behind. The French girl came on Monday, worked on Tuesday and left on Wednesday! The French boy came on Monday, sort of dangled about for most of the week, moved his tent inside the bell tent and managed to fill the tent, the camping shelter and general area with rubbish and leave the bell tent door open so it blew down in today’s gales. Leo has been great, really easy company, helpful where he can be and just generally delighting in all that Rum has to offer.

I’ve been intensely hacked off with Julie & Chris and my parents who are all being woolly about when they might want to come up until we finally decided for them all and told them instead. My Mum is being all shitty about the fact we are planning a week in a holiday cottage on Harris & Lewis asking if we have won the lottery?! My Dad has bought us a car which is very lovely and much appreciated but appears to be much smaller than we would have chosen given we wanted something suitable for supermarket shopping runs/ all four of us plus dog / sleeping in if stranded off the island. As I say much appreciated but also annoying for my Mum to be insinuating that perhaps we should not be having a break in October but paying Dad back for the car instead, which he announced to me by saying ‘I’ve bought you a present…’ so not really something I would then offer to pay him back for. I’ve booked tickets for me., Davies and Scarlett to see a live show they were desperate to see and Mum is also annoyed that I didn’t count her in for coming along to that too, precisely the last thing the kids would want and actually something *I* want to do with them anyway… she has plenty of opportunity to do nice things for them /me if she wants to at any given time, she just never chooses to. Argh, anyway, didn’t come here to rant, well maybe just a little.

Leo leaves tomorrow, Scarlett and I are off for dentist stuff on Tuesday for two nights (another couple of evenings of blah with Alison, sigh), back on Thursday and then friends arriving on Friday for the weekend. They leave Monday and then more friends are arriving although not staying with us next week. Then a whole week of nothing before the next lot of volunteers followed by Mum & Dad, followed by Ady’s brother… we are going to be so, so ready for that holiday, I can’t believe my Mum begrudges me it.