One word? When seven would do…

What a week (or maybe slightly longer :oops:)

We had a good visit from Mum & Dad. I got slightly fed up with them by about day five but they left on day six and I kept Jan’s perspective warning from friendfeed uppermost in my mind so kept my temper. They both looked to have visibly aged since they were here in October which I find tough. Parent’s mortality is always hard to come to terms with but when you know you will only see them once or twice a year at the end of one or other of you doing a full day plus of travel it hits slightly harder than when they lived a mile away. For the first time we had a fairly frank discussion about the fact we moved here after they messed us about with our proposal to them to do something in with them. They both conceded (in their own unique ways) that they may have been wrong not to take us up on that idea really, particularly since it ended up with us moving so very far away from them and I think we may end up with them moving closed to us at some point.

We did an otter walk, visited the bar open on Easter Saturday briefly with them and generally fed and looked after them very well. Ady and I slept on the floor in the lounge while they had our bed but Dad was keen to sit up chatting with us most nights, with a couple of 3am finished which meant although I was, as ever, sad to see them go I was also glad to get my own bed back and have an early night when they left!

They left on Wednesday, Thursday was an RCA meeting, Friday we had Ranger and Gav up for pizza night which ended up a very rowdy boozy evening with lots of youtube clip watching of literal videos and interpretative dance (Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn?), Gav trying to get home without a torch and me retiring to bed but needing to be ill out of the bedroom window. Classy…

All of which meant that despite an early start and an invigorating shower the car didn’t start quickly and then only managed about 5mph so Babs and co were already starting to walk to the village by the time we arrived at the pier 😳

Chris and Ady drove back while Babs and I walked with kids back to the croft. A fab day trip visit with them which ticked everyone’s boxes. Ady and I got to sit and chat with dear friends, drink tea, catch up on gossip and pretend we are not totally cut off from the rest of our friendship circle, have a wonder down into the village, catch up with various islanders who of course Chris and Babs have met before when they were here last summer. The kids all went off exploring and playing in the castle and managed some screen time connecting, some lego playing, some soft toy worship, some animal stroking, some hanging out on the beach and by the river and more.

A daytrip is lovely, a full 10 hours on a Saturday with no feeling that we don’t have enough space or facilities to accommodate people as they leave to go and do sleeping elsewhere. It feels sad to have them leave though…

On Sunday we could really have done with a day off. The end of a very full week, a deferred hangover for me from the day before but it was not to be as it was putting the plastic on the polytunnel day which as the polytunnel sits on our land at the bottom of our croft meant we had to be there really. So we went down and joined in with ten hours worth of plastic putting on, plastic clip manhandling and general bodging what has already been quite a bodge job of a community polytunnel. At 6pm there was just Gav, Vikki, Ady and I left so we came home, had a large glass of cider each and then Vikki stayed to finish the bottle while Ady and I co-cooked dinner. I suspect the fact that most of the other people putting it up were able to go home to a bath and not have to cook dinner for their two children was lost on everyone but us but it was one of the rare days when I feel the burden of our many responsibilities.

Dinner was lovely though and we all slept really well that night!

This week has been a super productive one. Meetings, planting, making a maternity pen for Barbara Pig, penning the ducks over night which means we get all the duck eggs each morning now, marking the 10 eggs that the broody hen is sitting on and hopefully hatching, getting loads of seeds sown in the polytunnel, the potato council seed potatoes in, digging over my first raised bed and finding four worms in it. Getting the newsletter finished, printed and distributed, doing some work for the ISCAPE project, meeting the man from the Big Lotto grants funding for lunch to talk about the bunkhouse, getting co-opted as a director of the IRCT, doing venison stuff and loads more. The only thing carried over is the ongoing saga of how to get the compost toilet from Ed in Tarbert to us on Rum…

Which about brings me to today. When Marcus, Michelle and Chloe came. The friends with whom we first came to Scotland (not including Melrose which now we live here is so Not Scotland ;)), who helped us with the business plan which won us the croft and who have definitely been a big gap in not having been here before now. So, so pleased they made it in our first year 🙂

We’ve had a lovely day with them. Done the now famous walk to the croft, talked about how the static got here, introduced them to the animals, the kids took Chloe off for their child’s eye view of Rum and introduced her to their world here and we snuck in a little private tour of Kinloch Castle too 🙂 We had the last of the venison sausages we’d been saving for a special occasion and even a tot of whisky in our afternoon cup of tea on the sporran. We did manage to point out an eagle but failed on the red deer. It will not please Mich that on the drive back from the ferry a stag ran across infront of the car at the bottom of the croft. Or maybe she will just choose to disbelieve 😉

Home for leftovers, a bit of youtubing of some shadow ballet artists from Britains’ Got Talent that was being talked about on facebook which led to me finding some of the sand artist from Ukraine’s Got Talent that did the rounds on facebook a few years ago and I was reminded of by the shadow stuff. We also watched a Horizon Special documentary about Tomorrow’s World Science stuff which was very good.

And now to bed. Tomorrow we are all having lions. Unless of course Barbara Pig has had piglets in which case we’ll all be standing around in the newly back mud (rain! First rain in eight weeks!) cooing at the new life on the croft.