Hoots & Havers with James Irvine Robertson August 2005
‘Slow Down, Speed Kills’ shouts the road sign at Logierait. At least that what it says to the cars travelling in front of me. Some people are bird twitchers. I tend to be a road sign twitcher and am delighted on behalf of those who work in the road sign department when they find yet another location to shoehorn in another item of their road furniture.
This one appeared, thrilled us all, and then disappeared again. At any rate I stopped noticing it. Perhaps I, or rather the cars in front of me, were going below the speed at which it lost its cool and yelled at them. Then it was back again, as ratty as ever. I am tempted to tease it and try to find its trigger speed and the point at which it decides that enough is enough and upbraids me.
Normally I have a deep aversion to being lectured to by inanimate objects. The worst I knew was a roll of lavatory paper in a one-time workplace which had on each sheet ‘With the compliments of the management. Now wash your hands’ which never filled me with gratitude for their generosity of my superiors, and managed to make me resent having to wash my hands. |
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However I don’t mind the Logierait sign. It may be because I have control. It is up to me to decide if I feel like annoying it as I pass. Technology would surely allow it to actually tell me what speed I was going and that would open up a whole new avenue of fun.
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I don’t drink and drive. The main reason being that, anytime we return home after midnight, there’s a very good chance that we will be stopped by the police. As we potter carefully into Aberfeldy, the Land Rover - more of a jam roll than a jam sandwich - slides out and sits on our tail.
It’s rather dangerous since I immediately stop concentrating on driving and peer into the mirror to insure it is the constabulary, then worry about where the 20 mph signs start and stop, or how much to cut the bend in the centre of town to demonstrate that I’m not driving too carefully thus showing drunkenness, or too recklessly to show the same.
We turn left at the traffic lights and are always allowed round the corner before the blue light starts flashing. Then we stop, the man gets out, approaches the window for a sniff and reels back as the small and fluffy dog erupts from slumber on the back seat like a demented dandelion clock and tries to take his nose off.
Our house is actually within 50 yards of the usual stopping place. With a bit of tricky driving I was once quick enough to hide the car snugly in the garage before the policeman caught up and he spent some ten minutes prowling the immediate neighbourhood trying to establish how the car had managed to vanish. That was fun.
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‘Memoirs of a Highland Lady’ is a splendid book. For those that don’t know it it’s the eerily pin sharp memoirs of the childhood of Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurcus at the beginning of the nineteenth century. She mentioned the isolation of a Buchan women.
She married a native of Badenoch and none of the locals could understand a word she said. The Highlanders, of course, all spoke Gaelic. Many by this stage were beginning to speak English, but theirs was a school English or one learned from the families of the lairds who were bilingual from the necessity of making careers in the army, the law and other professions which took them to Edinburgh or London.
As Miss Grant pointed out, the Highlanders were perfectly at home with London or Edinburgh English, but as for Buchan, and other forms of Lowland Scots ‘the Dutch would have comprehended it as easily as the Highlander'
The people of Cornwall had their own language which was in decline by the seventeenth century. They learned their English from teachers, parsons, soldiers and they, too, spoke and still speak, a form of English without the rich accent and vocabulary of their neighbours in Devon. It is from this that the natives of Inverness have earned their reputations as speakers of a particularly pure from of English, for they learned it as a foreign language.
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I used to live within a hundred yards of a badger sett. I also lived within a hundred yards of a psychotic dog, a large and truly evil beast that used to trot round to decapitate cats and bite anyone that dared show their face. Its owner refused to do anything about it until it ate the leg of a Social Security man who was coming to give away money, and that was the end of it.
But on one occasion dog and badgers met. I was walking with this neighbour and the dog. The animal disappeared into the little wood where the badgers lived and, a couple of minutes later, it screamed and came out of the trees on three legs, sobbing. It was a wonderful moment. In the words of an expert I once consulted, badgers have an extremely powerful, crunching bite. The dog was on crutches for a fortnight.
We have badgers round here but not that many. In fact I’ve never seen a local one. I saw a fox by the Recreation Centre in Aberfeldy last week, but that’s not quite the same thing. In south west England where I was once a farmer, they’re all over the place and their numbers are growing fast and this creates a bit of a problem because many are affected by TB and they pass it on to cattle.
It used to be controllable because the badgers were killed. In one part of the south west the Min of Ag pest officer had actually contracted TB from milk as a child which seriously damaged him for life, so he was always sympathetic to farmers who were faced with a surplus of badgers and helped to eradicate them, but times have changed. They’ve changed so much that 3,000 farms have now restrcition orders on them because their cows react positively to TB tests and this means that the economic life of those farms is frozen.
So what’s to do? There’s one small area down there which is free of TB. The experts looked at it and found that there were very few badgers. Officially it’s happenstance; unofficially some people took matters into their own hands and killed most of the badgers. Farmers can’t use conventional poisons because they’re illegal and show up in post mortems, but paracetemol doesn’t. So sales have rocketed. It’s very naughty, but I sympathise.
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