Interesting Times, in the Chinese sense

We are at the Wood for New Year. The roads were pretty good, though there had obviously been a lot of snow and the fir trees in Perthshire, in particular, were looking very spectacularly snowy. The glen road was not bad, either, though not quite so amazingly clear as the time I came with Livy. The only difficulty was when we courteously went into passing places for other people to pass, and then had to dig ourselves out of them. Moral: always carry a sturdy shovel when travelling in the Highlands in winter.

We did not even consider driving down our track, and rather regretted not having taken the sledge out of the attic and brought it, as everything has had to be carried down to the house on foot, of course.

Here, we found that there had been a power cut and, more importantly, all the taps, and presumably all the pipes, are frozen. Since then (nearly 24 hours on) the electricity has been off again, and the pipes are still frozen. One of the pipes to the washing machine has sprung off its connection; but, so far, the only other freeze-related water-supply occurrence has been the discovery that there is a leak in the pipe from the well, fortunately outside the house, and controlled by turning off the pump.

Donald is off on holiday until Thursday but is aware of our problems and will be with us then. How he will deal with the leaking water supply is His Problem, and we just hope we will not have to throw too much money at it. So until then we are reminding ourselves how much worse it could be, hoping that we don't get a practical demonstration of exactly how much worse, and hunkering down. (Literally, when it comes to those functions for which having a working water system is so useful.) (Let's just say that there will be part of Roy's projected grass plot that will be quite nicely supplied with nitrogenous and other solid fertilising matter.) We are reasonably well prepared for this sort of thing, mentally, because of Another Place; but the new experience is melting snow for water. (I have a feeling they did that in one of the Olivia Fitzroy books, perhaps The House in the Hills.)

At the Wood in snow

The trees look perfectly lovely and the mounds of snow are of the perfect, powdery, just like icing sugar variety; so in spite of the cold and the difficulties, we are enjoying the beauty here.