Bleak House

If I ever wanted to take a photograph and put it on this blog (I will figure it out one day), it's now that I've moved house. My new house is known as "Top House", and requires us to drive up and down a bumpy and muddy mountain road to get to work every day. It is rumoured that the house is an ancient shepherd house, believable due to the flocks of sheep which wander the hills around. Inside, it's dark and pokey, has a stairway as steep as a ladder, and my bed is under an eave on the top floor. It's not quite the attic! Otherwise, I would have been a GENUINE scullery maid! As the landscape around is a picture of quiet Scottish winter - grey skies and bare, brave trees, there is only one word that comes to mind: bleak. With apologies to the great man, the literture which accompanies the thought is not Dickens, but Bronte... Wuthering Heights. Sometimes I look out the window and expect to see Heathcliff standing on yonder hill, his black cloak flapping in the wind.

I would be hard pressed to find two more gentlemanly gentlemen as two of the Slovak boys I live and work with. They have persuaded me that Slovakia ought to be, without a doubt, on my list of nations to visit before I die. How beautiful, and how interesting!! Hmm... watch this space!

I will soon be returning to the city for good. I don't know how to say this without sounding very sweet, but I will really miss the heilan' hairy coo's and their calves outside my window! (A very melodious alarm clock!)