
HOLIDAY COTTAGES and family pets don’t always go together; but the Doyenne and I have come back from a week’s holiday at Loch Melfort where dogs are welcome.

I SPENT a fascinating morning with Councillor Bob Spink, retired Arbroath fish merchant and encyclopaedic authority on Arbroath, in particular the fishing community.
LANGUAGE EVOLVES and words fall out of fashion; some even disappear altogether to make way for new ones. Expressions like a ‘box of spunks’ for a box of matches, ‘fleg’ for fright and ‘queine’ to describe a young girl, have certainly dropped from common usage since I was a youngster.

PERSONAL INVITATIONS from grandchildren can’t be ignored so the Doyenne and I, and dogs too, hotfooted it down to grandson Fergus’s fourth birthday celebration last Saturday. You forget how few children are needed to cause mayhem, and I hoped they would run out of steam before I did. A pious hope as it turned out!

THE GEESE are back – it’s more than a fortnight since I saw the first of them down in the Lothians. But one skein passing over the house earlier this week particularly caught my attention.