
YOU CAN choose your dogs – but what about your in-laws? I heartily approve of the Doyenne’s family, so we looked forward to a visit from her big brother and his wife and put our heads together to think what we should do to entertain them. (…read on »)

FRESH IDEAS from a young mind are entertaining and stimulating, so I was pleased when grandson James joined me to walk the dogs. We took the track through the woods to the small loch that lies about three quarters of a mile behind the house. I wanted to see if the pair of cormorants I wrote about some weeks back were still there.

LOLLIPOP MAN to a brood of mallard ducklings was not on Arthur Grewar’s mind as he drove into Brechin, but approaching Brechin Castle gates he saw the duck with eight ducklings making their precarious way along the roadside. A lifetime countryman, Arthur knew the danger the wee family was in if just one car drove too close to the verge. (…read on »)

“FOUR AND twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” – driving through Edzell earlier in the week I nearly got the first two. Two blackies shot out of a garden on my side of the road, one in hot pursuit of the other. They streaked between me and the car in front and were in danger of meeting an untimely end splattered across the windscreen of an oncoming car. There was a tremendous exhibition of split second aerobatics and they scraped their way out of terminal danger. (…read on »)