Friday, March 29, 2013

After Perthshire

After a sojourn in deepest, hilliest, frostiest Perthshire, I have returned home and now have to sort out  the email mess.
Please don't click on links if you get an email from my helen mccookerybook account! If you do so by accident, then please change your password and run anti-virus software.
This has happened to lots of yahoo users over the past few weeks.
It took seven hours to drive back, through some of the most spectacular countryside in the British Isles- Scottish mountains, border hills and then Lake District mountains.
Hats off to my rickety old car, square-set and low-slung, common as muck but a swifty little steed if ever there was one and with a boot so huge that even a duo-Offsprog quantity of silly luggage fits into it, with room to spare for disgusting sweets from the Crieff sweet shop and exotic crispbreads from the House of Bruar, coach-stop destination for thousands of Highlands day trippers.
I irritated my brother while on holiday by singing a version of 'House of the Rising Sun' that went 'There is a house in Blair Atholl, they call the House of Bruar...'.
Feel free to add verses about Johnstone's of Elgin knitwear, quilted jackets at every turn, lemon curd, and Walker's shortbread in collectible tartan tins. Oh yes, and stern German waistcoats in boiled wool, unfeasibly expensive shoes, and a floral blouse section that induces a migraine at a hundred yards.
Somewhere behind the massive faux Scots baronial sheds, there is a rather beautiful waterfall, the Falls of Bruar, which charmed the adventurous Victorians who celebrated it with etchings and delicate watercolours in the days before paint-by-numbers and digital photography.
I wonder what the Falls-fairy thinks of the ever-spreading consumer-cabins that crowd around her toes?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's years since I was last at the House of Bruar! I don't thinnk I ever bought anything - just marvelled at the thought thhat people would actually pay that much for clothes!!