With Lachlan home again, mum and I have been rather rationed on the dog walks lately. Opportunities have had to be snatched when the bold boy is away on Landrover repair visits or social forays to Edinburgh for a little high life.
Down by the river on a blustery day last week a monumental Mayan pyramid of straw bales had suddenly appeared, as if out of another dimension, on the far side of the Tweed. The river was full and positively racing along. We stood for a while watching two swans ushering a brood of three cygnets upstream. It’s late in the year for cygnets and by their size the two parent swans looked very young so I concluded it must be their first clutch. It was strangely touching to watch the parent birds conscientiously swimming up and down, chivvying the laggard to make sure it wasn’t left behind.
Harvest is in full swing now. At night the lights of the combines criss cross the fields as the last of the wheat comes in. We sat in Anne and Raymond’s party shed a couple of nights ago watching a tractor race up and down the field next door. The baler had been in, but abandoned the exercise after a couple of rows. Much debate over what it was up to ensued. After consideration, Raymond reported it was “whuffling” the straw (tossing it up in the air to get some air in to help it dry a little before resuming baling so that the bale wouldn’t go mouldy in the middle over winter.) Forever more, the final stage of the washing machine programme (when it throws the washing around in a futile attempt to render the writhing mass of entwined pyjama legs, shirts and wellie socks “fluffed up”) shall be the “whuffling phase….”
Today, with lunch out to look forward to, we took a morning walk the long way round the Hirsel woods, hoping to work up a suitable appetite. It was a gloriously sunny morning and after the bright walk between the fields before turning down the hill, the woods seemed tenebrous. Glowing motes flickered in brownian motion across the shade as passing insects caught the slanting morning light on their wings. An ivy shone lime in a shaft of sunlight and the stream was warm pools of amber cut through with perfect pale green circles.
We took the long way past the golf course where gentle thwacks, rueful groans and wafts of aftershave heralded the weekend chaps at play. Up by the lake a bevvy of swans were engaged in a mass groomathon, feathers everywhere….. In the big field, Ivor was lording it, surrounded by an adoring coterie of of young coos, just back from their summer holiday in the field down by the river. Every now and then one of the older Ailsa’s would look over and roll her eyes wearily. Ambling back to the car we spotted a doe on the path ahead. She stopped for a moment then plunged into the wood followed by a fawn. A moment later, where the fence dipped, we spotted another fawn left behind in the stubble field. It dithered, eyeing us warily, before clearing the hedge in hot pursuit.
I drove back past the edge of the woods at Miss Marple pace.
