Famine to Flood to Famine (to Feast?)

Many thanks to everyone who responded to a previous blog entry, offering food and shopping services while I was snowed in at the castle. As I mentioned in the article, I was surviving on the weirder items in my food store cupboards that had been abandoned due to fear. As it turned out, in some cases, the fear was justified.  :-)

Anyhow, my builders did get through in their 4x4, and eventually brought me some normal rations of milk, butter and bread. And today, I have just done my first proper "stock-up" shop in case I am snowed-in again e.g. buying cans, 10 cartons of UHT and extra bread for the freezer. And while one cannot claim a genuine famine, one can cannot emphasise enough the agony of a cup or tea of coffee without milk in it. :-)

With the latest heavy storms, 4 restored bedrooms were destroyed by water ingress and will need to be redecorated. I have not been brave enough to look in all the water-damaged rooms yet, as this is the equivalent of half of a normal house being destroyed, This would be a tragedy for most people but such incidents are the norm here. 

Water also started pouring into the unrestored room where I sleep. An internal drain pipe had already been leaking into this room for a number of months and has just been fixed-up. This time the problem was not the pipe, but the storm blowing rain sideways through the gaps between the stonework. I had one sleepless night listening to "drips". The second night I moved to a second bedroom. The third night the rain started dripping into the second bedroom, and that was again sleepless. The fourth night, the drips in the second bedroom had largely stopped.

Water also started pouring into my office and onto my head, I had to move my office elsewhere. This was not before the rain destroyed my media drive, where I had begun to build up a film collection again. The previous media drive holding my large film collection was stolen in the burglary! Prior to this, I had been sensibly using a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device with duplication but this broke and has not been within accessible range to fix.

Anyhow, tonight it is Burn's Night i.e. January 25th. Why have you not received your invitation to the Balintore Burns Night that I hold every year? Well, this year it has been banned by Angus Council, who have forbidden anyone from coming to the castle - including my friends.  I cannot think of anything more insane. The Great Hall has just been restored and should be being used for this most Scottish of celebrations. The Victorians would have no comprehension of the logic, and quite rightly so, for there is no logic but instead document-evidenced malice that would in turn offend Victorian morals.

So we are back in "famine" territory. Rest assured, if the Council ever ends the ban, the celebrations will be a high-octane embodiment of the phrase "from famine to feast".

Driving back from the food shop today, at every passing place on the single track road running along the bottom of Glen Quharity, I took a photograph of the Carity Burn in spate. The Carity Burn is the one that runs past Balintore Castle.

The glen normally floods for a day or so due to the snow melt. However, the persistent current flooding is due purely to the recent devastating storms. The burn is normally a thin ribbon at the bottom of the glen, and is barely visible from the road. If temperatures drop below zero, it will get very interesting.

Happy Burns Night!