
I SPENT an instructive morning with outdoor photographer Niall Benvie. The Doyenne and I are really rather hopeless when it comes to photography – we regularly take our camera to weddings and family events and just as regularly forget to even take it out of its case.

NOT CONTENT with thinking he’s an outsize, black West Highland terrier I fear that Inka may now be thinking he’s a cat. He has taken to catching field mice, and he brings their limp little bodies into the house and tenderly offers them to the Doyenne. He cannot understand why his gifts attract so much abuse.

LAST SATURDAY was one of those days when so little seemed to get done, yet there is so much to remember.

SCOTTISH COUNTRY dancing was something I learned as a child, in the time-honoured way, by being thrown headlong into Eightsome Reels, Dashing White Sergeants and Strip the Willows.
It all started at a very tender age with dancing lessons in the Park Hotel in Montrose. When I went to prep school we all assembled one evening a week in the winter term for more lessons from Miss Jean Milligan, the doyenne of the Scottish Country Dance Society, to prepare us for the Christmas dances and parties during the school holidays.