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It’s been a long time coming, but a physical (rather than paper) start has been made on our new Village Hall. The contractors came in for an initial preliminary start and dug some (more) holes, but these were their holes, they will eventually be part of the hall, and so are different to all the previous holes, which were dug so we could see what was in them (nothing). But the field really looks different because of the wooden level markers they have put in. I am sure each vertical stake with its horozontal cross-piece is very carefully placed, but at the moment they look like crude crosses from a spaghetti western after John Wayne has gone AWOL with his Winchester. On our commute to work we are suggesting suitable sound-tracks for the end of the film.

It’s been a bit windy lately. Which has had a bit of an impact with the ferry, or rather the lack of it. The skipper makes the decision whether it is safe to tie up or not, and we aren’t really as well-informed as he is so it is pointless to argue, but the wisdom ofgambling by using The Isle of Mull instead of Lord of the Isles is open to question, and has proved to be a bit of a disaster, trapping folk on Coll who were booked to leave on Tuesday and had to stay until Sunday, and then had to leave without their vehicles. Another casualty was the fuel tanker so those of us with diesel cars are persuading them to run on fumes until Thursday at the earliest when there is space for the tanker and an available trained driver. Still, we do have time to accurately guess how much we will be paying for it; I favour £1.70 a litre.

The lucky petrol car owners aren’t getting away scot free though. The council are replacing the bridges up the East End and at Clabach (Clabach occasionally gets labelled on the BBC weather maps). Anyone imagining a river and an arched stone bridge with walls would be disappointed, Coll bridges are little more than concrete planks across a large ditch (which is probably why they are being replaced), but as the road is a dead end and there is no alternative route the petrol cars need to decide which side of the rather small gaping chasm to park. The road disaster accompanying the airport is still fresh in the memory, so there is a bit of concern that the large cranes involved in lifting the new concrete planks (weighing 4.7 tonnes) will leave us with more damaged road, albeit with beautiful bridges.

I originally titled this ‘Never too old to learn’, but hang on, I don’t want you all thinking I am older than I am (in my head), and anyway, it was more of an achievement or a discovery than a lesson.

I am very fond of beer. Not the fizzy frozen stuff (lager) but slightly warm slightly flat stuff. I prefer the paler types and this part of Scotland brews some excellent varieties although I am still mourning the demise of Atlas brewery from Kinlochleven. I am also very fond of malt whisky. Peaty is very acceptable, so is smooth mellow Speyside and all sorts of sherry casked types, and the cask-strength and single cask ones have an extra depth of flavour, although that might be helped by the fact they normally come in larger glasses (for the ‘nose’ you understand). Getting married introduced me to wine, and while it is difficult to talk with much knowledge without sounding like a cardigan-wearing snob I like Spanish reds, Merlots and Reislings (and pretty much everything else too).

Gin has always been a drink I resisted. It smells of disinfectant. When I started drinking it was half as much again as a pint. I was still asserting myself as an individual and wasn’t prepared to hide behind a ‘female’s’ drink (although then I would have got away with not buying a round too) and why would I want to drink a small drink in a pub, pubs are for beer drinkers, I did all my drinking in pubs then (no beaches). Over time (not long because I’m not old (in my head)) not liking gin became a habit, something that did not require any thought or decision making, and sometimes it was useful to not drink at a certain time of the day, I generally caught up later. But at Christmas we went relative visiting, and while we were at (and staying at) my brother’s, with his wife and mother-in-law, the offer of gin was made again. I naturally said no. And then I thought ‘b****y hell!’ I don’t have clue whether I like the stuff or not, so I changed my mind. My brother had to get another (enormous for gin, slightly smallish for beer) glass out and filled it with ice cubes. He had got out a bottle of Blackwoods (the real reason I thought I try it then) and poured in a very generous measure. He was then very mean with the tonic because they are drinking the smart uncontaminated Fevertree brand and it is dearer than Shhh…you know who’s. And flavour was fantastic! Now I know what they mean by ‘botanicals’ because there were all sorts of flavours in there, in many ways I think it is a subtler drink than malt. When he wasn’t looking his mother-in-law and I topped up the tonic to make it closer to a 50-50 mix (he was very mean with the tonic, or very generous with the gin). And after the second of these measures the conversation became somewhat more frivolous and we didn’t drink much wine with supper, and I wasn’t even tempted by a whisky right at the end. It can’t have been a proper gin because there was no evidence of the ‘gin-downer’ feelings that are supposed to follow the consumption of said spirit.

Several days later during the festive period I reinforced my likingness by drinking Bombay at my brother-in-law’s. It wasn’t as good, and I might have concluded that gin wasn’t really worth bothering with, just something that could safely be endured (like olives), but Blackwoods is different and I am now a gin drinker!

Still languishing in the ‘I Don’t Like’ drawer in my virtual filing cabinet are sherry, liver and gravy, fruit tea infusions and Marmite, but I’m not old yet, there is plenty of time for my taste-buds to mature!

I got a bit worked up over Calmac recently. They were having to put a fence up on the Common Grazings, or at the edge of them, or somewhere. Not mentioning the Common Grazings is a good way to keep friends. But there was a fence. The burger van is closed for the winter, but hadn’t actually left its spot due to apathy, or extra works vehicles and a generally too-full yard, and it appeared it was now in the way of the fence! I immediately got hopping mad; it is parked in a perfect flat spot with a view out beyond the pier to the Treshnish and Mull and Jura on a very clear day, and there isn’t anywhere as suitable to put it and there would be hassles with getting more planning permission and land ownership would be disputed and why do things that work have to change. So I wrote a stinky email to CMAL and prepared to get nasty. I could have saved all the bad-feeling mental effort as we had an apologetic message left on the phone the next day, and then the contractor rang to ask where the best place to put the fence around the burger van was and then I got a very nice letter explaining why they were fencing, and stressing they had never intended to disrupt the burger selling. So I was very happy and my faith in Calmac was not only restored but they had leaped into the number one spot in my list of companies.

And then yesterday afternoon we learned the Thursday boat was cancelled. Due to weather. Or due to a weather forecast, because they don’t actually know how bad the weather will be at Coll and Tiree until they get here. And this morning it wasn’t bad at all. It was certainly calm enough that I could go looking for the compost bin lid that disappeared last Tuesday (when the boat managed its usual two calls at Coll). I wasn’t trying to use the ferry, but the office was hoping for a doughnut delivery, and the especially charted Hebridean Airways plane was too full for luggage, and there was absolutely no room for doughnuts! Three cheers for the airplane, I was always 100% in favour of it(?)

Not many folk come to Coll for some retail therapy, although there are more possibilitiesthan most visitors anticipate, with the shop regularly stocking mangos and avocados, and there are two craft shops and a gallery for refreshing the parts food cannot reach. The good news for gourmets is that the cafe has just been redecorated and the top room has been filled with shelves and exciting exotic ingredients. Olives, dried figs, at least four types of poppadom, those large glass sweet jars filled with star anise and several types of peppercornsand nuts and seeds and flour and all sorts of healthy(?) and organic stuff. It reminds me of Christmas. I’m particularly pleased because before we moved to Coll we shunned supermarkets and shopped at the market and independent delicatessens and the downside of living here is how much harder it is to do that (without spending much more than I want to buying perishable food by post). Is it ethically better to buy organic butter from Tescos, or any old butter from Island Stores? I feel I may be in a small minority asking myself these kinds of questions, but I won’t need to ask it about dried ingredients so often.

Meat is easier and last night we had a lovely rib-eye steak (my current favourite) which compared very favourably with a rump steak we bought from another farm earlier this year. It wasn’t as cheap as Tescos, nor was it as pink and wishy-washy and it wasn’t sitting on one of those horrible plastic nappy-things either. I know not everybody can afford to spend a larger proportion of their income on food, but it is strange to think we try to educate our children to have values, and then buy purely on price, rather than value. By buying from your local community you make a statement saying you value them, and what they produce. They have the same right to a fair return as I do to be paid at least the minimum wage. ‘Every time you spend money you cast a vote for the kind of world you want to live in’ is a quote I have stuck up by the computer so I look at it before I go online and am tempted to find the cheapest left-handed widget possible, rather than one built to last and made by people I would prefer to support. I can’t afford to eat steak every week without spending less on something else (beer), but when I eat it I want it to be good,     very good.

End of sermon.

I stretch the truth a bit with that title, as this post is really about potatoes, but I’m beginning to realise this is becoming a gardening blog, and there must be dozens of them about.

Back in the allotment in the spring I spread a lot of seaweed. Not enough to cover the plot, but a good thick layer on half. It was full of wriggling bugs and some rope but it didn’t half make the plot look tidy. I planted my spuds on the seaweed covered half (and the onion sets went on the other side) and pretty much forgot about them. Some were Cara (I think) and some were pink fir apple, leftovers from the mother-in-law which she hadn’t eaten. I don’t like pink fir apple much, it takes ages to cook and won’t mash. I pretty much forgot about the potatoes until a month ago when we needed some and the shop was shut. I wasn’t expecting much as the onion sets had been disappointing, most had barely grown enough to be called shallots, but even small potatoes would have been better than none. The pink fir apple haulms had died off so we dug those first and the seaweed had really done the trick; big pink not-too-knobbly tubers. Strangely the taste had improved too; not dry and they cooked in normal time (they still don’t mash). On Saturday I dug a row of Cara and they were pretty impressive too, big baking sized spuds with hardly any bug damage, and loads off each plant. We had chops and mash for tea, I was really missing mashed potato. But I am a convert to the benefits of seaweed. I had dismissed it as another gimmick coast dwellers like to brag about to us normal people living inland but not any more. I will be back with my wheelbarrow soon to start collecting it again, because if nothing else, it will make the plot look smart for at least half the year!

Sorry, did I mention tomatoes last blog? Trouble is, I am beginning to dream in tomatoes. Grow your own veg they say. It’s not exactly new for me, if we were very good we could visit next door’s garden and collect cabbage white caterpillars when we were kids. After we had collected all the caterpillars we collected snails and woodlice. We had been persuaded snails ate woodlice. When I win £1,000,000 I will commission a budding cartoonist to do a sketch of a snail stalking a woodlice!

I didn’t need to garden (in a mental health way) when I was working in the hotel; I was always busy and very aware of the seasons, but office life is different. And it has the bonus of civilised predictable hours so this was a summer of gardening.

One rule of tomato plants is that there will always be too many. You nurture three trays of seedlings, lovingly transplant even the sickly weak ones, move them about en masse in a vain attempt to keep the correct label with each variety, finally plant out barely ten per cent of them, and then get given all sorts of extra types to try by everybody else who has about 200 seedlings to squeeze into a ten foot row! And I had an all-glass greenhouse this year and planted about sixteen feet of plants - Red Alert (very quick to crop (and die) but not the best flavour, although that is hard to notice when the first ones are almost ripe), Tamina (good cropping potato leaf variety, medium size fruit and okay flavour), Gardeners Delight (my favourite and indespensible), a plum one from the mother-in-law (unusual because it isn’t a bush and had millions of flowers, but fruit is slow to ripen), a beef one from the mother-in-law (not keen, the skin is marked and they drop off before they are ripe), and another ‘ordinary tomato’ which was planted late because I couldn’t find anywhere to put it. Fortunately the Red Alert have been dug up and the last type isn’t ripening yet, because the others are producing industrial quantities of tomatoes. We have taken litres of tomato salad to every barbeque we have been invited to (even if we suspected it might not be a barbeque), the freezer is full of sauce, I have jars of chutney, we don’t have a fruit bowl, just a bowl of tomatoes and today I had a tomato with my afternoon cup of tea. I love tomatoes, the excess of a glut and the knowledge that some things can only be enjoyed for the moment, you can’t save fresh tomatoes for the winter any more than you can save a sunny day, so even as I bring in another five litres of tomatoes and wonder what to do with them this time, I revel in my riches. I am a tomato millionaire!

Today is the start of winter; I want to blog again. It has been so long I had forgotten my username I had to look it up, just as well we didn’t get deleted after two months silence or I would be stuck.

Looking back over the summer it’s a bit hard to say where it went. There was the burger van and some good chats with first-time visitors, the Coll mag (almost ready and horribly late), five-day-a-week working (good because I don’t think I like part time) but very few trips to the beach, only one lot of visitors (and they earned their keep covering the polytunnel that doesn’t fill with water, and planting beans and things in the one that does (beans have now drowned!)) and lots of not-completed jobs that will now have to ‘wait until the summer’. This summer I learnt:-

the vuvuzela is very loud and hard work, I admire tremendously anyone who can make that racket for a whole football match, but as a five minute warning it is excellent.

I really really can’t play darts anymore. (I knew that really, I just keep hoping I’ll remember how to throw. Roll on the pool season)

If you put a lot of chicken s**t where you plant tomatoes you will get industrial quantities of tomatoes and have to get a food dryer to process them.

Interns are incredibly useful, I know now what a ’slit glass cleaner’ is.

This winter I learnt I am very rusty at blogging.

We (he) did a good deed today with a washing machine (perhaps. It might not have been an effective ‘good deed’, but we won’t know until tomorrow, so today we bask in the feel-good factor), and as a reward we escaped work, the garden, the Coll Magazine and the barn and went to investigate a ruin in what used to be waist-high heather.

When we moved to Coll this ruin had planning permission. It has since lapsed and the council refused to renew it because the site was ecologically fragile. Walking on the burnt heather wasn’t quite as easy as I thought it would be because the stalks hadn’t burnt completely away, and still acted as trip-wires. The ground is generally dry, although the mossy bits are still boggy, and there is a thick layer of dead heather, moss and other dead stuff, so the ground is soft and well-mulched and I can’t imagine any seeds will germinate. Some coarse, very bright green grass is showing, and some bluebells were coming up in the burnt bracken patches. I thought we were just having a quick look at the ruin, but the next bracken patch, the top of the hill, a possible wall all beckon and we amble along, zig-zagging along the easiest route. This is fine until I sit down to empty my boots. I am not really dressed for serious exploring. My jeans are mega-cheap from the super-market (very unethical), and shapeless and very tight. My boots are cut-down wellies (ethically good as I am extending their life) and very comfortable for slobbing around the polytunnel, but not suited for walking through dead plant remains and ash unless the main aim is collecting random samples. We have turned back and are heading west. The sun is low and as I can’t see well enough to aim for something interesting my motivation wanes. Finally the breeze blows my hair, desperately needing its spring haircut, into my eyes. If I wait long enough (another month?) it will tuck behind my ears, or I could just grab the scissors now and complete the scarecrow effect!

Even with the lack of ground cover, this part of Coll seems relatively devoid of tumbledown walls, but there is plenty to distract the walker with no particular place to go. And we won’t be the first to recognise what a fantastic place to live the old ruin would be.

Yup. Spring. It keeps disappearing but I reckon it’s here, so it is time to be outside enjoying it!

Actually it is much more enjoyable under glass and polythene, warmer and more comfortable. Not necessarily drier in the tunnel, because on the days that aren’t spring and it rains, the tunnel still fills up with water, but I have taken advantage of the days that are spring and the water goes down, and planted potatoes, sweet pea plants, a few broad beans (very old seed so most didn’t germinate) and mangy tout peas (Neil in the shop has a hate / hate relationship with mangy tout peas).

In the greenhouse, remember the greenhouse? The greenhouse with more plywood panels than glass because the sticky silicon didn’t stick, and the putty was eaten by the hens? That greenhouse? We got some more sticky silicon. Two types, just in case. Then we waited for a dry warmish day. We waited a long time, but eventually spring came and we risked putting some glass back in (and evicting the hens, who had enjoyed dust bathing). And the sticky silicon stuck to the glass! And the frame! And not especially to the fingers and the step-ladder, so the greenhouse was hen proof and I moved some poor spindly tomato seedlings in. Because we were being cautious we hadn’t bought much of either of the sticky silicon tubes (BBC 4 says silica is the commonest mineral on the planet) so there was still a lot of plywood panels and another order to Screwfix (what did islanders do before Screwfix?) before we could finish the job. And today was almost summer, and while I was in the village and up the North End drinking tea he put all the rest of the glass in, so there are hardly any plywood panels (not quite enough glass), and no shady ends, and the tomato seedlings don’t look spindly, and it would have been much better if I had noticed, instead of having it pointed out to me (I’m not very good at being contrite (lack of practice?)).

But all this gardening is having a detrimental effect on the blogging, and I am only managing this because he is outside with the telescope looking at Saturn and Mars and grumbling about the longer evenings because it takes too long to get dark.