Travelling the World 5 Scotland Edinburgh and Anstruther
I should point that these stories are “mine” in the sense that I do contribute but in the way a project manager might. I get the bones down but then more than half the effort goes to the editors, Ruth and to a lesser extent Beth. But then again Beth’s photographs are usually much better than mine. I try hard to stay up to date but the editing team is a bit slow on occasions. Writing fills the inevitable time when one needs a break hiding out in one’s “digs”, not tramping the streets or touring yet another castle, abbey, church or just trying to find a feed.
Wednesday 16/10/24
After a busy time in Belfast posting the last story from the airport we have a very short flight to Edinburgh in an aeroplane with proper propellers. We do a fair bit of ‘rats in a maze’ training to get out of the airport and pick up the hire car but we are away!
For some reason we wind up with a manual Nissan Qashqai SUV. It’s back to the old days as my last manual vehicle was the Great Wall ute stolen in Halls Creek in 2022. It’s a bit of a re-learning curve and there’s a few bunny hops out of the car park but it does come back to you. We are heading for Stirling to visit a castle - Ruth’s suggestion!
By © User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46446772
We pass these curious sculptures on the way to Stirling. They must have had a budget by the look of it.
The Kelpies are a pair of monumental steel horse-heads between the Scottish towns of Falkirk and Grangemouth. They stand next to the M9 motorway and form the eastern gateway of the Forth and Clyde Canal, which meets the River Carron here. Each head is 30 metres (98 ft) high.
We need to kill several hours before we can get into our apartment so we head for Stirling and Stirling Castle. It is an hour or so up the road and we abandon the car in a “pay on foot” carpark. Beth is much taken with the description. Basically it means you have to pay at a machine before exiting - not just wave your credit card at the boom gate!
We stroll the streets and find a cafe for lunch. The town is pretty touristy but not that thick. We walk to the castle and it’s a fair climb - they do after all put castles on high ground! We sign up for the entry and join a very entertaining guided tour led by a bloke called Patrick dressed in tartan trousers. There’s the usual string of stories of battles fought and lost, Kings and Queens coming and going, the Tudors, the Stuarts, the Jacobite rebellion, the clans, a lot of James’ and Marys’ some of whom lost their heads! Then there are the buildings built and destroyed or taken down for renovations - something called Slightings. The place was used as a military facility until recently (late 1960s) and they converted many of the buildings into more utilitarian purposes as dormitories, stores, offices etc. After they moved out a huge renovation project was completed in 2011.
Do visit the Wikipedia link as it is a fascinating story. The events at the castle tangled with much of Scottish and English history which is not my forte but still fascinating.
I ponder the significance of the need for the super wealthy or powerful. It doesn’t seem to have changed much over the centuries. The characters are the same - Trump, Musk, Bezos, Murdoch etc. Some good (depends on the reader), some bad (again depends on the reader) but some just evil (still I guess depends on who is telling the story). They in their ways are fighting their wars, building their edifices of different kinds. Where would we be without these outliers?
Anyway the guide was an interesting character and we thoroughly enjoyed a couple of hours “doing” the castle. A highlight was of course to treat ourselves to a soft serve ice-cream from the purpose-built Stirling Castle ice-cream van at the entrance. We got into a long story of how the ‘flake’ chocolate is made - Beth assures me it is simply a case of adding water when tempering the chocolate, not some secret Cadbury process. Turns out that ‘flakes’ used to be manufactured in the UK but now apparently they’re all made in Egypt - who would have known! I make my claim that I made the machine that makes at least the chocolate (25 tons a day) for M&Ms in Australia (at least I did the control system design and wrote the software). Our ice cream man is amused that we could wind up on opposite sides of the world discussing chocolate in the light rain.
An easier stroll back into town via the ‘Iceland’ supermarket for some supplies. We notice that there are many more supermarket chains here than in Australia where we are dominated by the two majors, Coles and Woolworths.
We find our way to our apartment once again thanks to Beth’s expert navigation. There’s a bit of a glitch at the end though when I scrape a wheel rim on the kerb. Hopefully our extra insurance will cover it.
Beth again battles the secret code/key lock arrangement (amongst the garbage bins this time) and strange doors that lock upwards and we are in! We are staying in an area called Cannon Mills in a very comfy one-bedroom apartment. Beth is going to stay with her old Brisbane school mate Olivia Bentley, who lives and studies in Edinburgh.
Not long to sit around and we are off to find Liv’s pub which Beth assures us is not far - a 20 min walk according to Google - and just as well as it is raining lightly. Our walk is mostly through an up-market part of town with big three or four-storey tenement buildings (not sure if that counts the one or sometimes two levels of basement below the ground level). It’s a mystery to me how these are drained? It would be easy enough now but these buildings were built long before the introduction of electric and sump pumps. Beth’s answer is probably pretty correct - they don’t - and the downstairs apartments are full of damp and mould! Ruth is amused as many of the residents haven’t pulled their curtains yet and she can perve into the living rooms and kitchens as we walk past. How the other half live, especially those in the street with a substantial private park/garden across the cobblestones!
We find the pub feeling ‘moderately wet’ (seems my jacket is not very water proof) after our walk.
Beth’s friend Olivia works here part-time. She is her first ‘friend’ from the Mater Dei Primary School in Brisbane. They went to different high schools but have remained close. Liv has been here in Edinburgh for 6 or 7 years now. She is studying biology with an aim to get into environmental conservation and grow mushrooms on the moon! There’s talk of doing a masters and a PhD and years of study ahead. Meantime she works at the pub and lives in a small flat in the old part of town near Edinburgh University. Beth is off to stay with her for a couple of nights, equipped with some eggs and some butter for breakfast as Liv is vegan.
The pub is pretty relaxed, and we have an excellent dinner - pies for Beth and me, pasta for Olivia, and grilled salmon for Ruth - not a hint of batter to be seen! Even better as Liv has used her influence to get us a discount with the chef.
There are some characters in the pub - especially a big fellow called Mark with his dog ‘Gordon’, a Lakes Terrier as in a ‘Lakes District’ breed. Liv explains that the dog is treated as a customer. He sits up on a bar stool beside his owner, getting a friendly pat from other regulars. The pub is filling up for the weekly quiz night.
We leave Beth and Liv to natter away while Ruth and I make our way back to our apartment, hoping my ‘navigator’ finds the way. The return journey doesn’t seem nearly as far, it’s not raining much, and it’s mostly downhill.
Thursday 17/10/24
Need to catch up with a few home chores this morning - time for a sleep in, some clothes washing, and arranging meet up with nephew Nick Baker and partner Georgina for a drink this evening.
Ruth and I walk up into town to meet up with Beth for lunch at a Thai place (Ting Thai Teviot) near the university. It’s not bad but we reckon Grandma’s Pantry in Ashgrove in Brisbane is better! We walk around the Royal Mile past St Giles Cathedral but are not keen to pay the 6 pound entry fee unless we stay for a few hours. We’re entertained briefly by a busker outside who manages to scare quite a few passersby in his disguise as a guitar-playing puppet - we give him a coin for his efforts.
We go to a few curio shops that Beth has plotted to look for possible gifts then go our separate ways - Beth back to Liv’s place, Ruth and I to 123 Bellevue Road for an afternoon rest before heading out for another longish walk to St Vincent’s Pub to meet up with Nick Baker (Matthew and Jenny Durack’s son) and his wife Georgina, both archaeologists living here in Edinburgh.
We covered a lot of ground with Nick and Georgina with lots of talk about visas and how to get residency etc. Georgina, who is due to have a baby in mid-December, is working on her PhD. We understand she is deemed to be a “person of high potential” having graduated with high distinction from a prestigious Australian university (ANU) and has the more secure ‘student’ visa. Nick can live and work in the UK on her student visa, and is currently working “digging in mud” for an archaeology firm. They seem to be in a very good place with a house, jobs, study etc. They both love living in the UK and it looks like their future is here. A brief catch up but very good to see them on their home turf.
As an aside the St Vincent’s pub is another very dog friendly establishment. People put photos of their pooches on the walls and there’s at least two or three dogs walking around unrestrained - looking longingly at a jar of ‘doggy treats’ up on a ledge!
Nick and Georgina head off to walk back to their home (down towards Leith I think) and we are looking for dinner as it’s getting late. ‘Vinnies’ does not do dinner (it’s much too small to have a kitchen anywhere) and it turns out we are just a street or so away from Liv’s pub where we were last night. We head there for dinner before the kitchen closes and find Liv in ‘work mode’ behind the bar. As I do I eavesdrop on the conversation of an earnest young couple with open laptops at an adjacent table. The conversation had something to do with software but was curiously devoid of any content. I think in the end they were students trying to do a business plan assignment about the next great ‘.com’ scheme.
We have another good feed but head off before the threatened bagpipes arrive for the live music night! A piano accordion is warming up as we head out the door.
Friday 18/10/24
Who would have thought I would turn 70 on the other side of the world! Happy birthday to me!
A slow start to the morning as we pack up and prepare to meet up with Beth and Liv at 11:00ish at a donut shop where my ‘birthday cake’ is being procured. Ruth does the key drop off in the lock box by the rubbish bins. It’s all very well this unattended check in/out but it’s a bit of a pain getting the instructions right. It’s our first solo navigation attempt without Beth and her magic car play - we do OK and don’t hit anybody getting up and over the Royal Mile and past the tourist throng. We do wind up going a long way down a tiny street to be told by some construction workers that the road ahead is closed. There’s no signage of a road closure but we can deal (just) - a tight ten-point turn in front of a mob of construction workers, cement trucks and building gear and we’re back off the way we came!
We have some time to kill before we can check in at our next stop at Anstruther in Fife to catch up with Ruth’s cousin Mary King so we head for the nearby centre of St Andrews. You drive along some great roads here in Scotland but then all of a sudden you are on a narrow secondary road with little/no room for passing traffic. The Scots seem to know what to do but it’s a bit daunting for us tourists, especially when a huge tractor towing a trailer load of manure bears down on you - who gives way to who and where? It’s also a mystery to me why they have such huge tractors to work in such tiny fields - it might be an EU subsidy thing? Anyway we arrive in St Andrews and go round and round trying to find somewhere to park. We nearly give up but one magically appears and I don’t even need to do a parallel park - just as well!
It’s relatively warm and I mistakenly think I will leave my jacket in the car. Not disastrous but I realise fairly quickly it is a foolish move - there is a definite chill in the air when out of the sun. St Andrews is a beautiful town - think narrow streets, little laneways, churches, ruins, nice flower beds outside the university buildings etc. One notable thing though is the number of executive buses disgorging loads of Americans with their luggage and golf clubs ready to take on the famous courses around St Andrews. Obviously golf plays a major part in the local economy here and there’s lots of golfing ‘merch’ in the shops around us. Not my scene but good luck to them.
We are looking for a pub with food and more urgently a loo, but Liv explains the ones we pass are all “chain” pubs owned by the Bellhaven group. They’re probably OK but they don’t have a soup on the menu so that is a NO from me. We end up at Forgan’s, a curious place down a bit of an alley lined with vegetables and produce. Inside a big space is strangely fitted out - not sure what their theme is but think sort of heavy industrial with a bit shabby. There’s lots of newspaper print lining the walls, a huge steel shelving rack and a wall with a row of what might have been saddle packs or school bags. I quiz our waitress about the significance of the bags. She is a tall girl with dark curly hair, bright eyes and it turns out a quick wit. She thinks for a while but admits she has no idea but is more than willing to make up a story for us! She comes from Philadelphia (her mother Scottish, father American) and is studying philosophy and psychology at St Andrews. She lives at her grandfather’s place in Anstruther (where we are going) and is halfway through a four-year course. We have an excellent lunch - a vegan burger for Liv, steak sandwich for Beth, mushrooms on toast for Ruth and cullen skink (seafood chowder) for me.
I did mention earlier that Liv is very into mushrooms. It reminds me I should try and find the photos of the famous fungi explosion one year (late 1990s?) at the VA NSW when the pine forests around us we covered in every imaginable species of fungi, including the bright red conical-shaped ones with white spots which I understand are very poisonous. I should be able to find the photos if it was in the era of digital cameras, but before that it could take longer as those photos are all buried in boxes in the downstairs room at home. I’ll ask her to keep me up to it on our return. It would make a good TheOneAbout story.
Ruth is finally successful in the quest to find a hat for our overseas jaunt. It comes from an accessories shop called Islander where staff are busy doing a handbag making workshop in the back room. By the look of things it might be golfer’s wives filling in time while the husbands are out “on the course”. At 60 pounds for a one hour session you’d hope they get a handbag out of the exercise.
We hit Tesco to load up some supplies and booze before heading to Anstruther and a four-night stay.
Not far out of town we see a potato harvest in progress. It seems to involve some big machines, a huge tractor, not many people and a very muddy field. It reminds Ruth of her tattie harvesting experience at Mungoswells back in 1985 - a notoriously wet year apparently.
It’s a short run to Anstruther and another lock box for which we don’t have the correct code. Much muttering and a phone call later and we are in! While Beth and Ruth try and sort out the key code Liv and I engage an older lady across the street in conversation. She’s standing with her wheelie walker beside a big pile of prunings. She’s just had her rosehip hedge cut back - ‘it’s beautiful but it does take over’ she says. A big service bus shows up and she climbs aboard. Off to bingo perhaps? A couple of lads show up soon after with a big grinder and the rosehips vanish! All very efficient it seems.
We settle into our apartment until it’s time to head to Mary King’s house for dinner, a short walk away.
We find Mary fit and well if struggling a bit with arthritis and a bad knee but doing pretty well for 88 years.
She lives in a beautiful house right on the coast with the best feature an AGA stove in the kitchen, which is more a sitting/dining room where we stay put for the evening.
She prepares a great meal. For nibbles she has accommodated Liv’s vegan preferences and produces potato chips for us and apple chips called ‘Scrapples’ for Liv. The apple chips are air dried crunchy apple slices and taste very good.
Mary has heard something about my sailing adventures around Australia and recounts a great tale of her own sailing experience. Some forty-ish years ago when she lived in Buckinghamshire in England she determined to try sailing and signed up for a week’s trial course on a 27-foot sailing boat somewhere off the south coast. She headed off with considerable trepidation tossing the coin on whether she would go and ‘sail’ or find somewhere nice to stay and just have a week’s holiday. Adventurism won out (and the fact she’d already paid for the sailing course) and she was off. I didn’t quite get where about they sailed but she claimed enduring a Force 6 on the Beaufort scale during the week.
Beaufort Force 6 - Large waves begin to form; the white foam crests are more extensive everywhere; probably some spray
Anyway by the sound of it she ended up having a fantastic time and described the events with great enthusiasm. She recalled being a bit surprised, given the times, that as the only woman on board she wasn’t just put on cooking duties all the time and pretty chuffed when galley duties were put on a strict roster basis with the three other ‘trainee’ sailor blokes on board! Not sure that Mary went on to have an extensive sailing career but she obviously had fun that week.
Dinner preparations progressed and Mary cooked (or at least heated) a roll of pork in a way I have not seen before. The pork was in a cylindrical form wrapped in a thick plastic skin and got to the boil in a covered saucepan on the top of the AGA before going into the ‘bottom’ warm oven for another hour. It was excellent, very easy to carve and served with tatties and ratatouille. There were candles on the table and long yarns about lots of people and places. She was amused by our description of the games played in nursing homes - the DIDHEDIEDIDHE mantra (Did He Die Did He) as told by our Durack family mate Paddy McCallum.
Mary has a less exciting description of her rearing her twin baby boys Bill and Hugh in the late 1950s. Her mother-in-law had thoughtfully secured the services of a nanny to help with the babies for the first crucial weeks. Unfortunately the nanny was of the tyrannical old school style who insisted on the washing and ironing of 75 nappies a day to ensure ‘baby stayed dry’! The nanny was around for 6 weeks and laid down the law on how things must be done. Once she had gone Mary carried on doing the “right thing” as stipulated by nanny for a couple of weeks before she admitted this was too ridiculous and dropped ironing the nappies! Still getting anything to dry in this climate before the days of clothes dryers must have been a challenge. Ruth recalls the drying rack raised to the ceiling above the fuel stove from her time at Mungoswells in Scotland to get the washing dry.
In honour of my birthday the donuts (bought by the girls in Edinburgh) were brought out and in lieu of a candle a long matchstick was stuck in and lit for the blowing out. It’s more than enough celebration of the passing of the years which are flying past much faster than one would like.
All in all a thoroughly enjoyable evening.
Saturday 19/10/24
Ruth is off to help Mary prepare lunch to take to a family gathering at Elspeth Skinner’s home (about 45 minutes’ drive away apparently) near Falkland in Fife. I am a bit concerned when Mary’s description on how to get there contains a number of “drive along until the telegraph wires cross the road” type instructions. We think we have something that our Sat Nav can understand - a post code - but that is not quite where we are going but it might get us reasonably close.
Ruth has gone ahead with Mary with the heated up luncheon pies and lasagne (procured from a local farm shop) and we follow half an hour later.
We find ourselves on more narrow roads with impossible speed limits and no advisory speed signs. Sometimes you get a bit of a squiggle sign which sometimes means dead slow, sometimes you could make it at speed - it’s all very inconsistent to me. Sometimes I feel a bit bad about travelling at what locals would think is a very slow speed or at least way below the 60mph limit. Invariably a van is aggressively “up your arse” but what do they expect you to do when there are many signs saying, “oncoming vehicles in the middle of the road”! Somehow it sort of works and there are many very patient drivers.
In the end a last-minute call to Ruth reveals the final navigation secret to get us the last 500 metres or so down a narrow farm lane way - simply turn left at the green grass triangle and it’s the house on the right!
We find Ruth and Mary at Elspeth’s lovely home ‘Wester Lathrisk’. It was once the gardener’s cottage but has been substantially renovated and extended since she moved here from the ‘big’ house up the road.
A fine table has been set for lunch. There’s lots of chat and good food consumed.
We look through some wonderful books recounting the adventures of four of Elspeth’s grandchildren - two sets of twins belonging to her daughter Judy (the Friends brothers) who crossed the Atlantic in a rowing boat in 2022, raising money for charity along the way. It puts my little sailing adventure a bit to shame.
In the way of these things, I struggle to work out where people fit in. I will have to leave that to Ruth to sort out briefly as follows.
The Kings, Skinners, McDowells, Lucas’s and le Flemings you will read about during out UK adventures are all part of the extended Nimmo family. Some branches stayed in Scotland (and England), while others ventured out to Australia and New Zealand in the late 1800s. Ruth’s mother was Cath Nimmo from Oak Park Station in North Queensland. The various branches of the family have maintained strong connections over the years.
Elspeth is Mary’s sister-in-law who was married to her brother David Skinner. He died unexpectedly in December 1998 of a thrombosis while visiting Jamie and Fi when they lived in South Africa. He had just retired from being the managing director of a funds management firm in Edinburgh.
Ruth recalls visiting Lathrisk in the mid 1980s and being a bit intimidated by David after being entrusted with one of his very expensive Waterford crystal whisky glasses. She was trying to make her way safely (in heels) to the dining room across what seemed like acres of polished timber floors with the glass tumbler in her hand. She had already consumed several very stiff malt whiskies by this time so the challenge was real!
Jamie, David’s son, and his wife Fi now live in the main house at Lathrisk, or at least part of it. There is a 16th century building apparently made from reformation stone and a Georgian addition with the two halves once being joined by a spiral staircase. Suffice to say their part (the Georgian side) is a magnificent home with lots of treasures and no doubt a few secrets and drafts. One tale tells the story of the ‘joined’ houses being once owned by a smuggler of French brandy. Apparently he made a lot of money out of his trade but in later life lived as a hermit in a single room above the kitchen and staff would be instructed to leave food for him at the bottom of the stairs so he didn’t have to mix with anyone.
We were shown around the house by Fi as Jamie is a bit obsessed in the afternoon vacuuming up some of the autumn leaves before a forecast Atlantic gale arrives tomorrow. He did this with a big ride on mower with a catcher - a satisfying but slow job. He has worked in finance/funds management but is now semi retired, working with some boards and charitable organisations. He’s a very keen golfer and chairman of the finance committee of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews. He has to travel the world occasionally representing the club at golf tournaments - a tough job but somebody has to do it!
I was very impressed that the house contained a number of evidently very old and beautiful clocks. The surprising thing was they were all wound and ticking away. Jamie apparently has a weekly routine to wind them on a Sunday. One of the clocks is a complex thing and apparently unique. It is of a full height grandfather style with a huge face, intricately engraved to show the items below.
Legend has it that Mary Queen of Scots tethered her horse to this copper beech when it was a young tree while staying at nearby Falkland Castle. Sadly, they are very worried about the tree’s health as there is obvious fungal activity in the roots and several limbs have fallen in recent storms.
Fi is into horses and is very enthusiastic about her share in a local ‘jumps’ horse and its winnings - making enough apparently to cover the training fees for the last 6 years!
Talk of horses leads to a discussion about the Oak Park Races. Jamie and Fi have declared a trip to Australia in 2026 and we are encouraging them to come in June/July and make a trip to North Queensland to coincide with the races. We hear from Mary that Jamie and Fi are ‘doers’ and if they set a plan they will see it through. Jamie worked at Oak Park Station for six weeks or so back in 1980 when he was on his ‘gap year’ so it would be a return of sorts. The Nimmo family sold Oak Park Station in 1984.
I chat with Jamie and Fi’s son Fergus, 27, who is visiting from his home base in Bristol for the weekend. He currently works in project management/project scheduling (what in my world we would call project controls). He’s worked in defence supply and is currently working on the delivery of a nuclear power station but is looking for a change - there’s talk of a venture in Vietnam next year.
He has been stalking deer in the highlands with a mate for the past few days and has come home with a set of antlers which are now simmering in the jam pot on top of the Aga at Lathrisk. I recommend leaving them on a meat ant nest to clear the last of the flesh but apparently you can’t do that in Scotland - there aren’t any meat ants!
Fergus has an older brother Max who does something in finance in London and a sister Eleanor who’s a marine biologist currently mapping the ocean floor in the Atlantic.
We head home in our separate cars. Ruth goes back with Mary, and the girls and I drive back to our apartment in Anstruther. Beth is starting to come down with the sneezes and the beginning of a head cold so I leave them at home and go to Mary’s for a light supper and a debrief on what’s been a big day out!
Sunday 20/10/24
As forecast the north Atlantic gale has blown in overnight and it’s windy and rainy this morning.
Beth is laid low with a cold and Olivia is also not feeling great - they hole up in bed for the day. Beth had been planning to spend a few more nights in Edinburgh but we all decide this is not a good idea. We will put Olivia on a train back to the city later this afternoon.
Another disaster befalls us this morning. The clothes washing done yesterday is nearly dry but Ruth decides it would do well to have a quick ‘warm airing’ in the combination washer/dryer before folding away. She carefully reads the instruction booklet and selects what she believes is the ‘drying’ cycle only to hear the dreaded water start pouring in! It is a low point to the day and much muttering ensues! The worse thing is the machine has decided to wash on a ‘long’ cycle and it takes ages to finish!
Ruth and I lunch with Mary and she volunteers her sunroom and the AGA stove for drying the heavier jeans. The rain of the morning has cleared to some bright sunshine but the wind is freshening. Mary’s sunroom is amazingly effective - almost too warm for us but it’s great for watching the wind blowing in over the golf course. Mary scores a fair collection of errant golf balls in her garden (there’s a hole just over the fence). I’m not sure what the rules say about hopping the high fence but evidently many don’t try to retrieve their balls.
Mary has been having an upstairs window repainted. The job is made difficult as it is above the sunroom necessitating a full-on scaffold to be erected. The job is finished, and Mary is irritated that the scaffold is still there blocking our view out over the golf course to the sea. I am sent upstairs to the said window to remove the chock holding it a slightly open and to free it a bit from the paint. It’s a three-sash bay window with a great view.
Lots of chat over lunch with stories of Mary’s visit to Oak Park with her mother Nell and sister Jean when she was about 16 years old in 1953. Oak Park would have been very different from the strictures of St Leonards School in St Andrews where she was studying. She talked of horse riding, dancing with the stockmen after dinner, steak and eggs for breakfast, Uncle Russel and Aunt Mabel, Jim and Alice and general station life. There was even the tale of Jim dispatching a snake from the outdoor shower block for her - all very exciting! Her mother Nell was apparently a formidable woman having overcome polio as a child which left her with a weak ankle and a tennis accident which left her blind in one eye.
Beth and I take Liv to a train station in Leven, a 30-minute drive from Anstruther, in the late afternoon. We see a big offshore drilling rig moored off the coast possibly hiding out from the impending gale.
Beth stays home while Ruth and I brave the Atlantic storm and walk into Anstruther itself. Waves are breaking over the stone walls and the road is running with sea water. We only make it a short walk as it really is pretty unpleasant - we’re bending into the wind and hardly able to walk. A couple of blokes at the harbour said the worst was yet to come and were forecasting 100mph winds by midnight. We see a rescue boat heading out into the gale and wonder what trouble they might find. We pick up some supplies for Beth - essentials things like tissues!
A good place to be safely moored.
Ruth and I head out to Mary’s for supper. She describes the blow as a hoolie.
"to blow a hoolie": to be very windy.
or
'Hoolie' [ˈhuːli] is a noun that refers to a wild party or celebration characterized by noisy and unrestrained behavior. It is often used in phrases like 'kick up a hoolie' or 'have a hoolie,' and can be associated with upbeat and lively traditional Irish music known as 'hoolie music.'
Evidently this is where the word ‘hooligan’ comes from.
A quiet evening and a “picky tea” as we had a big Sunday lunch, including a delicious rhubarb crumble made with Mary’s home-grown rhubarb! More stories and reminiscences with the sound of the wind howling down the AGA flue reminding us of the gale blowing outside. There’s some squalls coming across but not much rain. The wild weather reminds Mary of a saying - ‘there’s no atheists on a sinking boat’! Another good one to remember.
Monday 21/10/24
The wild weather has passed us by and the sun is shining when Ruth and I head back to Anstruther harbour to ‘do’ the Scottish Fishing Museum in the morning.
There’s lots of sand and kelp washed up on to the harbour roads from the wild weather of yesterday.
The museum doesn’t have an imposing entrance but inside it turns out to be an extensive labyrinth tracing the history of the fishing industry not just in Fife but throughout Scotland. Ruth declares that she does not want to come back as a herring lassie or the wife of a fisherman. The jobs are endless and smelly - baiting the long line hooks, carrying your husband out to the boat to keep them dry, gutting, cleaning and packing the oily herring in barrels and that’s just for starters. Once you’d done all your home chores as well you were then expected to sit down and knit! Idle hands were not to be trusted it seems!
The museum is packed with interesting things, stories, relics, hundreds of beautiful model boats, and some real old fishing boats including the famous Zulu design which was so named as the Zulu wars were taking place in Africa when the design became popular in the late 1800s. (Strange how a name comes into being). There’s also a collection of steam, diesel and gasoline engines and some not so well executed paintings of boats and people but it’s all done with good intent and obvious enthusiasm.
After our museum stop we hit the pharmacy to get some more cold and flu drugs for Beth and then hit the Anstruther Fish Bar for lunch. It’s not the Wee Chippie we were recommended but the wind is still up and here we are inside. We get some excellent crumbed fish and salad, the salad reminding us both of the chicken schnitzel lunch special we used to get at the Duck Inn Store in Monto in Queensland - sadly now closed. They did the same simple side salad with canned pineapple, beetroot, grated carrot, sliced lettuce and potato salad just the same as here. Our trip from Gracemere to Brisbane down the inland track will never be the same.
We walk past the new lifeboat which apparently is too big for the existing shed - the town is in uproar of what to do. For the moment it sits outside on an elaborate trailer.
After a quick stop at the co-op store we head out for an afternoon walk along the coastal path, past the golf course at Mary’s house, and on to the fishing village of Pittenweem.
The wind is still up. Ruth has to hold onto her hat on the golf course.
Ruth doing a Charlie Chaplin impression with her new hat. On or off for the photo?
We make it back after our brisk walk and enter via Mary’s back gate. I nearly end my days tripping on the step and falling to my knees, but no damage is done.
Mary is holding court again in front of the AGA and she serves up another excellent meal - moussaka, salad and bread washed down with a glass or two.
Many topics covered including speaking, or attempting to speak, Gaelic and my limited understanding of pidgin English in Papua New Guinea. Cousin Angus calls and we discuss visiting his elderly mum Jean in Lochcarron in the western highlands - the next stop on our UK adventures. She’s recently turned 97 and is pretty frail. She has been told to expect a visit so we hope she’s in good spirits when we arrive.
There’s some talk of calling in for a parting cup of tea before we head north but Mary thinks it best we get on the way for what she counts as a long drive - about 5 hours away.
It’s been a great few days in Anstruther - Mary was right when she said we needed to stay “at least 4 days”!
Hi Patrick and Ruth. Very good comments and photos from you about your sejour in Scotland. You are quite diplomatic on your blog, and you seem to have had quite a trip.You have certainly caught up with more than my relatives than me! I hope that Catriona will keep up the hospitality tonight...I'm sure she will.
Am up watching the news on tv re USA election. I do hope that Trump loses, but I don't really like either of them. It seems to be on the spin of a coin as to who will win!
Call me before you depart to Oz if you wish. Tel: 01333 310100.
All the best, Bill.
Love the hat, Ruth. And Patrick…. Think your account and Beth’s pictures are fascinating. I remember Mum talking about Mary, Jean etc and all the Scottish relatives who spent time at OP