I’ve made a bid on a house. It’s a small, terraced cottage with two windows and a door at the front, but like most such cottages, which originally only had a couple of rooms, it’s been extended at the back and has bedrooms in the roof space. The main part of the house is old, with thick stone walls.

There seem to be a lot of houses Scotland where the fireplaces have been removed and this is one of them. There were originally fireplaces in both downstairs rooms. Presumably there was a time when real fires were considered too dirty and inconvenient and anyway, new build houses don’t have them, but after so many years in Norway, I would love to have a wood stove. It’s possible that there’s an intact chimney behind the blocked off fireplace, but equally possible there isn’t. That isn’t something the surveyor would look at. What I do find fascinating is that it’s now quite common to have an electric fire with an entire fake fireplace built in. They’re quite nice, but it’s kind of funny and sad and also a demonstration that the old fireplace was quite a focal point in any room that people sat in and a TV in the corner doesn’t quite hit the mark when it comes to making a room feel cosy.

I’m having to feel my way through the buying process. I’ve been away a long time, and like other things, the process has changed somewhat. Parts of it are still the same. Some houses are listed as “offers over” and a price. That was traditionally the initial move when selling a house in Scotland. The hope was that several people would be interested, at which point a “closing date” would be set. That was the date by which any bids had to be made. The bid had to be made by a solicitor and it was blind – nobody knew what anyone else was bidding, so if you really wanted the house, you had to make a high bid and hope for the best.

Houses that had been on the market a while and hadn’t sold with “offers over” could then be moved to a “fixed price”. That meant pretty much you knew where you were. You could bid that and it would be accepted or perhaps bid a little lower and might still be successful.

Fixed price seems to have disappeared now. I think I’ve only seen one house listed that way. Now there are two other standard wordings which are “offers in the region of” and “offers around”. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between those two, but quite a lot of houses seem to go on directly in those categories.

The one I’ve made a tentative bid on is “in the region of”. I say a tentative bid because at this stage, my solicitor is in a verbal negotiation with the estate agent (also a solicitor) about what the owner might accept. I assume I’m paying for the solicitor to carry out this discussion on my part, but that the full work of putting in an actual bid hasn’t started yet. In Norway , it was up to me to check out everything was all in order legally with the house I was buying. Here in Scotland it’s hers.

I’m glad though of this tentative bid system. When you want to buy a house with a closing date, you have to bid blind and with a popular house, there’s a good chance several people will have to pay their solicitor to do that work, with no house at the end of it. I think I liked the Norwegian bidding system better, though I do remember that momentous feeling of jumping in with a bid on my mobile phone, knowing that bid was legally binding if accepted. Using a solicitor puts a layer between me and the process that takes some of the pressure off.

As you can probably see from the photos, Triar and I are taking a lot of walks at dawn and dusk. It’s nothing like as extreme as it was in Norway, but it’s good to see the days lengthening. C took me out on a welfare visit on Monday, albeit a very brief one. The report had come in from a vet at the slaughterhouse, which seems to be quite common here. For minor welfare issues at the abattoir in Norway, I’d probably have looked at the case myself, assessed whether I thought there was a significant problem and then dealt with it myself if it was something minor or if I thought an animal had been transported when it wasn’t fit.

Here in Scotland, those cases come to us for assessment of welfare on farm and the local authority decide whether the laws on transporting animals were breeched. Many of the animals also go through markets or are bought by dealers on their way to the slaughterhouse, which adds in another layer of complexity in the case and stress for the animal. When looking at a welfare case that went to market and was bought by a dealer who then sold it on to the slaughterhouse, you have to consider whether the market that sold that animal on and the person who bought it there ought to have spotted the problem. Also whether the issue worsened during that process. Much less complicated when it’s only down to the farmer who sent it and the driver who brought it.

Still, that case and another I dealt with myself have helped me get to grips with the system a little bit. I will probably be capable of managing minor cases myself quite shortly. Now I have to start to get to grips with dealing with tuberculosis investigations, which look equally complicated, perhaps more so. That’s something I haven’t been involved in at all in Norway, so it will be interesting to learn.

I should imagine it’s going to be mentally quite tough. The farms we visit will be dealing with confirmed outbreaks and though the aim is to get rid of a risky disease, telling a farmer that some of his animals will need to be culled, and sometimes many of them, isn’t going to be easy. TB is quite slow moving, but also near silent in the early stages. It can spread a long way before anyone picks up that it’s there. Still, trying to control notifiable diseases is a major part of my role and I’ve moved to an area of Scotland where the density of farms is relatively high. The important thing is to learn to do the job to the best of my ability. If the farmer is going through something tough, the last thing I want to do is add to his or her problems.

Thanks for reading. Have a good week!