Last trip in Ripples

The wee boat's gunwhales are disintegrating, she has a hole in the thwart, and her benches are rotten. Ripples, as we call her, has just done her final journey. Her years of floating service are over. Early in the morning, at high tide, we swept the snow off the blue wooden benches and launched her for the last time. Her last duty was the tour to the caravan to pick up an empty calor gas bottle, up to the bridge at the head of the loch where it was swapped for a full one, back to the caravan to drop it off, and then into a crack on the shore where she will sit high and dry as the tides fall away now that the moon is waning again. Once she has dried out a bit, she will be perched up-ended to live out her days as a shelter, a place to go and sit out of the drizzle and contemplate ripples on the loch. It was sunny as we rowed her up and down the loch, but as soon as she was abandoned on the shore, a squalling blizzard swept in, like the close of a film, as if taking a boat out onto the loch will never ever be possible again.

Seaweed

Each day for the past week I have been gathering seaweed from the shore of the loch. I have a big back basket that I made about 8 or 9 years ago, with help from a friend, at a weekend workshop in Helmsdale. It's a traditional creel made of hazel and willow, and when I strap it on my back I feel connected to generations of women before me who have trudged back up from the shore with seaweed for the garden. I am always amazed by how many strands of nylon rope and fragments of plastic are tangled up in it. I've now gathered 8 baskets full of bladderwrack - one for each vegetable bed, one to mulch the fruit trees and one to mulch the soft fruit bushes - probably enough for this year.

This morning it was low tide, and there was a film of ice on the weed. I watched it disintegrate in the sun, knowing that each sparkling crystal structure, the fractal coastline-pattern of each tiny window-pane, would last only a few minutes more - even if it survived the sunshine, the creeping tide would soon wash it into invisibility. One long, lingering, melting moment later, the ice was gone.

Beached

The pontoons at the harbour are being extended so the big boat, Vigilance, which normally spends the whole winter safely tied up, has spent the last couple of weeks in a precarious position on the shore of the loch. Why not on her summer mooring? Because the running mooring for the little boat, Ripples, has snapped and the broken chain can't be replaced until we get some fine weather. To make matters worse, Ripples' gunwhales are finally giving way so her days of useful service on water are over. The replacement boat, as yet unnamed, is not yet ready for launching. We can't leave Vigilance hanging on a mooring in the middle of the loch with no wee boat to row out to reach her.

So Vigilance is tied up on the shore, enduring the storms. She floats at high tide, and is beached as it goes out. Yesterday, as the water level lowered, she toppled over too fast, onto a sharp stone. Water dripped from the resulting hole. This morning, the pressure was down to 960 and it was two days after new moon - the resulting spring tide was enormous. This, coupled with a south-easterly wind, had tugged one of the ropes free. It is nerve-wracking and I'm just an onlooker, not the one tying the knots and wrestling with tyres and fenders.

The tide's been right out and it's coming back in again now. She'll be floating again soon. How much water is she taking through that hole?

Hibernation almost over

The normal signal here for end-of-hibernation is the first primrose. The diary over the past eight years shows this to be normally early-to-mid March, and occasionally late February. This year the first primrose was out on December 29th. Did someone say 'climate change?'

Despite what the primroses are doing it has still been determinedly wintry, but the days are lengthening fast now and the trees are jumping with birds. After a raw wet January and a snowy start to February, we have been blessed by a week of dry, bright weather. I have been digging over the ex-raspberry patch, getting the soil ready for (dare I say the word?) spring. Robins chase each other, competing for worms as they turn up on the spade. Early in the morning, they command the tree tops, leaving those long listening pauses between their trills.

The big thrill this week is the installation of a polytunnel. After a last minute change of plan for its site, it will nestle in the shelter of the woods beside the bath and winter bed shed we call 'the lounge'. It's a big job. Carting all the tubes, wood and fittings into position and plotting and staking out the ground took a morning. Then construction could begin. This involved first measuring out and hammering in two lines of five ground tubes. Then the hoops could be made up, complete with their surprisingly complicated complement of bolts and joints. The ridge tube, corner stablisers and cross-bars completed the metalwork. That was yesterday. Today we worked on timber door frames (one for each end) until the drill ran out of battery. I am impatient for completion, but there is still a lot to do: complete the door frames, make doors, dig trenches all around to bury the cover, acquire some suitable flooring. Then we will need a warm, calm day to wrap it in polythene. I can't wait to be Christy.

Poems, letters and birds

I return from cyber silence with a burst of good news. First, what could be better than having a poem in the Scottish Poetry Library's choice of this year's twenty Best Scottish Poems? And then the post box delivered up three exciting brown envelopes: one containing the page proofs of my novel, The Last Bear, due out in March 08; one containing the signed contract for Paper Trails, my non-fiction book about the paper industry, due out in July 08; and one with a letter from the lawyer confirming that I am one step closer to registering legal title to the house site.

As if to warn me not to fly too blindly amid these thrills, when walking this morning I found a coal tit unconscious beside the road, still warm, presumably stunned by a collision with a vehicle. I carried it gently back to the croft and tried to keep it warm, but it has not come round.

Long house

Having given up on buying the croft house, I am pleased to be able to report that there has recently been progress on the house site - the Crofters Commission has agreed to decroft the site and the land-owner's solicitor is drawing up the new title, so I will shortly be handing over the money and becoming the proud owner of a half hectare of paradise. The next step is to get a house design to put in for full planning permission. Every second day I find myself with a new sketch.

It must be small, very small. Partly because that's all I can afford, partly because the smaller it is the less energy it will consume but mostly because I love little spaces. Perhaps it's because as the youngest in the family I always had the smallest room. At college I had a succession of wee rooms and loved them all. I adore the intimacy of a tiny caravan. I am in ecstacy in the womb-like comfort of a tent. I wrote most of my first novel in a tiny bender I made myself, which I used to call my womb-room (sadly, it blew away in the 2005 hurricane). So I am set on what my architect friend calls a 'micro-house'.

But what shape should it be? For the past while I have been getting obsessed with the idea of making it a tiny version of a Viking long house, stove in the middle, throne bed at one end, perhaps five times as long as it is wide, but not much wider than a double bed. This is also the shape of one of my favourite buildings in the whole world, the Fasting Palace in Heaven Park in Beijing, which consists of five square rooms in a row: bedroom, study and three public rooms. The emperor would get up at one end of the building and work his way during the course of the day to the other end, then back again, spending some time in each room. He began and ended each day writing poems in his study. A lifestyle to aspire to, I feel. I fancy a miniature open-plan version of the same thing: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, dining room, lounge, all arranged in one long thin space.

Stags

There are red stags roaring for sex out there. All pumped up with testosterone, trying to gather a harem of hinds and prepared to fight off the competition to get them. Most of the time the stags just stand on the horizon, posturing to each other, but if necessary they'll try to nut each other into submission, if they don't get tangled up in each others antlers first.

It's a queer noise they make, much more of a groan than a roar, not unlike a cow in calf. It's as if when roaring was handed out, dogs and bears got the consonants, so they go 'rr...rr...', and the stags got the vowels, so they can only muster 'oa... oa...' The result sounds more wretched than fierce, but presumably to a hind it's as sexy as Tom Jones.