Off to Sunny Scotland

Time to go on holiday, and not a moment too soon. I think I’ve realised over the last few days how down I’ve been about a few things – work, house stuff, landlady, the ex and so on. Going away for a week will hopefully help to get me back on track a bit more.

I’m flying to Aberdeen this afternoon and picking up a hire car and then driving across to the other side of Scotland to stay in a cottage for a week. It would have been rather closer to fly to Inverness but it was over double the cost so, as I had to hire a car anyway, it was as easy to fly to Aberdeen. A friend is coming over in a bit and we’re going to go to the airport and when we land at Aberdeen, drive to Inverness anyway and pick up someone else and then on to the west coast of Scotland. There will be about a dozen of us and we should have a bit of a laugh, so I’m looking forward to it. A bit of walking, some not doing a lot, some eating, some enjoying ourselves. Just what I need.

Yesterday I contacted loads of estate agents to register with them. A couple of them said that it is a sellers’ market at the moment, so if I see somewhere I like they advised me to put in an offer asap. That’s not really ideal, as given the amount of money needed to buy somewhere, rushing the decision isn’t really my style. An interesting development though is that a friend e-mailed me yesterday and said she might be interested in buying somewhere with me. She could afford rather more money than my other friend which would be handy. The problem is that at the moment she’s travelling and when she gets back will need to find a job, but it’s nice to have options. I’ll see how it goes with trying to find somewhere on my own and then maybe revise my plans and buy with my friend if it doesn’t work out. So I spent some time yesterday filling out some forms for a financial adviser to start the process to find a mortgage and hopefully by the time I get back from holiday there’ll be some property details waiting for me.

I went to the library yesterday and borrowed various books. Normally I struggle to find anything that inspires me, but there were quite a few books yesterday that I quite fancied reading, so hopefully I will have some good reading while I am away. I just finished reading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (who I had always assumed was a woman but is in fact a man). I really enjoyed that, which I was very surprised by because I tend to hate “classis literature” because it reminds me of being forced to read various books when I was at school.

In case you’re interested and want something to read while I’m away, my current reading material is: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (who is in fact a woman, even though she sounds like she would be a man…); The Lovely Bones by Alice Seebold; Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz; Salem Falls and Keeping Faith both by Jodi Picoult. Happy reading – although none of it is terribly cheerful, so maybe that isn’t the most appropriate phrase.

I am hoping I make it back in one piece from this trip. I was walking on Skye a couple of years ago and came a little to close to plummeting to my death than I might have liked. I was with my friend S and he wanted to see if we could reach the top of a ridge, but every route we tried turned out to still not be the top. In the end we decided to climb back down, so we looked at the various options, none of which were ideal – even though it wasn’t that difficult getting to where we were, climbing down seemed much more of a challenge. In the end we picked what looked like the best route down and S set off first. It involved having to climb down facing outward and S picked out the route and I followed. This was working fine until one of my feet slipped and there was just no way to get a grip and I shot down the hill face at a rapid pace. Fortunately S was far enough ahead of me that when he, out of instinct, reached out to grab me he brought me to a shuddering halt. We both went rather silent and just sort of looked at each other and S just said “are you alright?” and I replied “Erm, I think so”. After a few minutes we very slowly made our way down to ground level and it was many hours later before we actually spoke about it because I think we were both a bit shocked by what had happened. I don’t actually think I would have died but it would have been a very long way to fall and I would have done myself some nasty damage. Anyway, should I never reappear, check the local hospitals – or mortuaries...

However, all being well, I am back next Saturday. I might have the chance to blog while I am away but very possibly not. So have a good week and think of me, in what will probably be torrential rain, wandering from tea shop to tea shop. Enjoy.