DRIVING OUT of the village to take Inka a walk, I saw a pack of about forty geese preparing to land in a grass field that slopes down to the road. I pulled into the side to watch them. The low winter sun picked up every feather of their plumage.
LIFE IS a series of firsts. A reader told me she was disturbed by a tremendous commotion of flapping wings outside her kitchen window. What was clearly a much larger bird than the regular songbirds that visit her bird table, appeared to be in difficulties.
REGULAR READERS know of my interest in our old language; words and expressions of another age and others which have fallen altogether out of everyday speech. And I regularly come across new ones.
UNTIL A year ago I had unquestioningly accepted the family tradition that all Scottish Whitsons sprang from the loins of “three Norwegian brothers who, in the old Viking days, came over in their galleys and remained in Scotland. One landed in the estuary of the Tay, one in Berwickshire and the third in Galloway.