dear diary ~ still here, still busy

Hi there, how are you all? It seems an age since I ventured here…I have almost forgotten how to edit a photo and write a few words.

So sorry to those readers who have been patiently waiting for a new post to appear, I could say that I have no excuse for not writing sooner other than my life is really very far removed from the peaceful retirement DH and I had planned and we find ourselves with no time to spare after fulfilling obligations and appointments. And that is partly true, but there is another reason I have not been able to write recently, one which has been a bit distressing and is the main news of this post.

It is with a heavy heart that I can now say that there will be no more stories from our beach cottage in Scotland. Many of you will have followed our adventures when we visited the cottage …all the ups and downs and the drama of the flood in 2014, but as many of you know it had gradually ceased to be our happy place since the little caravan site neighbouring our property was taken over by a young man who had desires from the beginning to drive us out. Within months he had managed to get rid of the people who had been on the caravan site for some years, removing their older caravans at a cost to them and gradually replacing them with expensive new ones sold on to new people at a higher rent. Where there were two or 3 caravans sited just below us he changed this into boat storage instead. As we left he had increased the number of boats and the sea angling competitions he organised to one a month during the season. Some of the villagers are quite annoyed at the extra noise and activity down on the local beach where they launch the boats with a tractor but can do nothing about it. It appears that anyone can run a business using a public beach.

Our cottage and land was his only means to expand his business further into a larger boat storage facility and he tried every type of bullying during the last few years, crudely chopping down our hedge alongside the lane (which earned him the title of machete man), putting a barrier across the lane (our only access which he wanted to keep locked), installing a huge noisier extractor fan on the back of his kitchens only yards from our back garden, blocking the access into our drive with boats and tractors, allowing greasy sewage from his kitchens to spill out of the drain and run down our banking, hiring a bird scarer pointed at our woodland and also putting up security cameras that directly looked over our property. Other than that just generally making a nuisance. Every time we went up on a visit we became more anxious wondering what we would find next.

We had originally bought the cottage with this stunning sea view in 2004 to renovate ready for our retirement but sadly this dream has now come to an end. There were numerous reasons why we really needed to give up the property but safeguarding ourselves from the toll of the mental stress was foremost. After much soul searching we decided there was no point in continuing to deal with this person that made us so unhappy no matter how beautiful a place it was.

There were other factors too…we recognised that my mum might be one of these people that live well past 100 and going to live further away in Scotland would just not work out. She is now 99 and very needy; her memory is getting quite bad and as soon as we have made a visit she forgets and is asking when we will be seeing her next as if we have never been. Presently, we travel for 3 hours (including a short stop) to see her for a couple of hours between the carers visits and wheel her to the nearby park and back and then travel back home for 3 hours. We do this as often as we can, one snag is that she likes us to go on a Sunday so we leave Saturday free to prepare for the trip and then Monday to recover.

With more frequent visits we were finding it difficult to fit in a visit to the cottage and stay for any meaningful length of time. With 3/4 of an acre of garden it needed a lot of attention from us, attention we gladly gave as we have a passion for gardening but not being there often enough it was soon becoming unmanageable. The first and only time we tried to go for 3 weeks we were called back after the first week to help with a family emergency at home. We never tried again! To add to everything the journey up there was more tiring for us even with the hotel break overnight at Carlisle to rest my back.

Everything felt right to let it go but equally everything felt wrong, but in the end we had to let our head rule over our heart this time and reluctantly last May put the cottage up for sale. We made our final visit last October, the caravan site owner, as expected, made an offer for our cottage and land when we put it on the market and we accepted. We had other interested parties, (one of whom came from a neighbouring village here at our Yorkshire home) but in the end our conscience would not let us sell to some unsuspecting person who would think they were buying an idyllic place only to walk into a load of unknown problems in the future. It is probably for the best that the neighbouring caravan site and our cottage and land have been reunited as a whole as they once were at the beginning of last century when it was a Creamery.

We were heartbroken to leave this sleepy little village down on the Mull of Galloway, the place that once seemed like a little piece of paradise. Packing up after 20 long years and finding new homes for all the things we couldn’t bring down home took quite a bit of time. Our static caravan in the garden, which had become our refuge after the flood of the cottage, had to be sold too and a lovely lady purchased it and transported it to sunny Spain. Saying goodbye on the final day to my beautiful garden and the sound of the sea was indescribable and even now tears are very close to the surface all the time…we are both still grieving for a life that was almost within grasp but we couldn’t cling onto any longer in the hope that our circumstances would get any better soon.

And they haven’t….we are as busy now as ever and never on anything that we would ideally choose to do as it has been a year of helping other members of our family. Mum has been increasingly worse…not in health more in her moods and endless complaining. In addition both our daughters decided to move house this year, one moved unexpectedly over Easter and is now more or less settled. The other is presently in the throes of moving. We are decorating and gardening at her new house and providing childcare while they pack up the old one. Hopefully they will be installed before the new school term in a couple of weeks.

We may still go back to Scotland for a holiday, after all it was my husband’s home town, and he has family there. He was born in Stranraer and lived at Castle Kennedy Gardens on the estate for a while with his grandma and grandad (who was head gardener there) so there will always be ties that bind us to this area. We decided not to go this year though, it would still be too emotional for us especially as we heard shortly after leaving that nearly all the trees in our little wood have been chopped down and soon the cottage will be demolished too as the new owner has made a planning application to build a new house on the spot.

So now my journey is on a different course…I am not sure where it is taking me to but when time allows I will be back blogging, leaving a written account of my day to day travels.

We have just returned from our family holiday in Scarborough. We had the best weather, dry hot and sunny. No rainy day amusements for the grandchildren required this year.

And now… this week….. back to the decorating of course and more childcare, oh and a visit to see mum at the weekend.

I do hope you are all having a lovely summer, I do drop in to read your stories when I can and try to catch up with your news, I might even comment occasionally.

Bye for now x