Tag Archives: Scotland

Royal Highland Show

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It’s been a busy week. On Monday, I made a revisit to a welfare case, Tuesday and Wednesday were spent catching up on paperwork and courses that I should have completed as well as having an appointment with a doctor from occupational health. Thursday I was third duty vet and yesterday, I inspected a chicken farm with a colleague up north of Ayr.

As some of you will know, I had some major neurological issues between 2017 and 2019. These mostly cleared up after I started physiotherapy and had some coincidental corticosteroid injections for a seemingly unrelated issue. I never received a diagnosis, but the problems I had still recur when I’m very tired, and I still tire very easily. My line manager referred me to occupational health as this means that coping with duty vet on top of my day to day work is currently too much.

The doctor has recommended that, though I will still cover nights and weekends, I will be temporarily relieved of the daytime tasks until I am more familiar with what needs to be done. She also recommended I should go to my GP and get myself rechecked. I imagine that could be a long job, involving lots of tests, quite likely with the same end result, but I will keep you posted.

With all that said, I was incredibly touched that another colleague from Lauder, who I’d never met before, invited me to come and do my first ever stint as third duty vet with her and doing it with someone else in the room with me, who was perfectly willing to help, was altogether a different experience. It might be difficult to organize for new starters to do this, partly because so many people still work from home, post Covid, but it would prevent a lot of anguish. So many people I have spoken to describe being in tears when they are stuck on duty vet that I have also reported it as a health and safety issue, but the reality is, we are understaffed and there’s not much that can be done.

Anyway, the best day of last week at work, was actually Sunday. I travelled through to the edge of Edinburgh on Saturday night, and at 07:45 on Sunday morning, I reported for duty as one of the official APHA vets at the Royal Highland Show.

Our routine remit didn’t sound too onerous. We were asked to walk round all the animals once to check on health and welfare. There were other vets at the show to deal with any front line injuries or illnesses. I did read our contingency plans before I went, which detailed what we must do in the event of a foot and mouth outbreak and other unpleasant scenarios, but fortunately none of them happened and instead, it was a lovely day out. The rest of this post then, is going to be taken up with photos from the show. I hope you enjoy them.

Quite appropriately, the most heavily featured breed in my photos is Highland Cattle. The amount of work it must take to have them clean and tidy for the ring is phenomenal. I chanced upon a young woman wielding a long hairdryer on hers and asked if I could take photos and she agreed.

I also loved the belted Galloways.

Though it must be a lot of work to present such beautifully turned out stock, the Highland Show is a real, family event. Again, I asked if I could take a photo, but here, the whole family were gathered around a calf that was being preened.

The Holsteins, for some reason, are shaved all over, before going in the ring. I watched someone carefully running their clippers along the spine, leaving some of the standing up hair, working to get a perfectly straight line, to give the best effect. I didn’t photograph that one, but it was interesting to compare the slimline, dairy cattle with the sturdy beef cattle. For obvious reasons, one of those is bred to not put on any flesh, but to direct energy into milk production, the other is bred to have as much meat as possible. I saw a breed that I hadn’t come across before – the British Blue – which has double muscles. I give you a baby Holstein, then a rump comparison, Jersey dairy cattle, vs a British Blue.


There were even more breeds of sheep. I don’t have so many photos of them, but I was struck by the fluffy cuteness of these black nose sheep.

And these fabulous horns.

There were ponies and heavy horses…

And right away, at the far end of the show, there were goats, alpacas and chickens.

All in all, checking out all the animals was a very long walk and by the end of the day, I had covered twelve kilometers. I felt very pleased though, at having such a wonderful day out as part of my job. I hope you enjoyed the picture and I will see you all again next week.

Ayr and Back

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After a pleasant weekend in Yorkshire, Andrew, Triar and I returned to Dumfries last Sunday, but I didn’t stay there long. I had booked a trip to Ayr to go out on a welfare cross-compliance visit with a colleague who needed support. I drove up and we worked on the paperwork together on Monday. The visit was planned for Tuesday and I wanted to have plenty of time to go through everything, but it was also good to catch up with some other Animal Health Officer colleagues I had worked with before in Stranraer.

I stayed in the Mercure Hotel, which was clean enough and had a decent breakfast, though the bed and pillow were so hard that I was surprised that I managed to get a reasonable night’s sleep. The British obsession with hard mattresses stopped making sense after a few years in Norway, where the mattresses are all soft and it feels like you are sleeping on a cloud.

I awoke in the morning to a cloudy day and a rather noisy friend outside my bedroom window. I confess I had been quite amused the night before to see a discarded half bottle of some unknown liquor on the flat roof outside my room. It’s so very Scottish to see that. With apologies to my Scottish friends, Scotland really does have a litter problem, as well as a huge penchant for drinking. The streaking of my window with bird poo might have been a hint, but I hadn’t really expected such a close encounter with a seagull.

This was just before I was about to go downstairs and I toyed with the idea of bringing back a slice of toast for the interloper, but out of respect for the hotel windows, I decided any more encouragement was not a good plan.

As this was also my second week on the Second Nature plan and I had pledged to do fifteen minutes exercise each morning, I decided to take a walk before breakfast. Though it’s not obvious from the photo above, if you squint at the area, over the rooftops, to the left of the tree my room did technically have a sea view, so I thought I would walk in that direction.

Wandering the town near the hotel to find a restaurant, the night before, I had been rather put off Ayr. The place had a run down air, though the Tempura restaurant (which Donna had recommended) was very nice, with lovely friendly staff. As I walked down towards the beach, I saw another side to it. While still run down, it was obvious as I walked down the wide street, with its substantial, terraced townhouses, now converted into solicitor’s offices and charity headquarters, that this had once been an attractive and prosperous place.

As I cleared the end of the houses, I saw a building that I knew, before I rounded the end of it to see the signs, that it would be called The Pavilion.

To my left, there was a huge swathe of flat green land with pathways crossing it. I thought of Triar and wished he was there.

The Scoopalicious Ice Cream company was another nudging reminder of the golden age of Scottish seaside, west coast towns. An ice cream shop run by an Italian family was another staple in all the resorts that the people of Glasgow escaped to.

There was a pleasant sunken garden…

And a fountain, complete with a fairly traditional traffic cone.

Though the sky was filled with clouds, the mountains of Arran were visible across the water of the wide bay as a reached the sea. To my left and right, there stretched a broad, sandy beach, and again, I found myself wishing Triar was here as he would love to run free across that vast expanse of sand.

I was tempted to venture down onto the sand, but time was limited. Turning back, I was unsurprised to see that The Pavilion was indeed called The Pavilion and was fronted with another southern, Scottish west coast tradition, some rather tired looking palm trees.

As I walked back up the road, I felt that odd sense of sadness and nostalgia such places bring me. Ayr and Largs were not part of my childhood, but many of those my age from Glasgow and other smaller west coast towns can remember visiting those places as children, when they were still popular holiday destinations. I found myself thinking I might come back sometime, for a weekend, and set Triar free on that beach to run.

The rest of my day was taken up with work. The welfare visit went well and I hope I left my colleague with a clearer view of how to carry out an inspection. Back in Dumfries, I have spent the rest of the week catching up with cases. I have written the first draft of a witness statement for a welfare case that might go to court and carried out a disease and cost risk assessment to allow one of my farmers with a TB breakdown to bring a new bull onto the farm.

We can’t go to Yorkshire this weekend as tomorrow, I will be working at the Highland Show. I spent yesterday reading the contingency plan for what we would do in the event of an outbreak of serious disease in the animals at the show. I understood the plans, but found myself hoping we wouldn’t have to implement them as it would be a huge undertaking, trying to sort animals, people and vehicles into groups that could leave and groups that couldn’t, with various stages in between involving gallons of disinfectant and chaotic queues.

I will finish with some photos from Blackbird Lane. There are cows in the fields now and different wildflowers growing in the hedges. The hawthorn bushes have lost their spiky, white blossom and are beginning to form berries, that for now are a muted, brownish red, but will become bright and red as the autumn nears.

Have a good week all.

TB, Cairn Holy and a Tasty Tart

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Andrew and I were in Yorkshire last weekend, which feels like a lifetime ago, but it was a lovely warm day on Saturday and we went on an ice cream hunt, which on the face of it wasn’t very successful. The firstly place we went to was styled like an American Diner, but it was so noisy and there were so many children leaping about that we turned and walked back out. The next place we tried, after consulting the Oracle of Google Maps was a small, village shop, but the only parking we found was in a field, which some canny farmer had mown and was charging £10 per day to enter.

We ended up doing a big circle back to Grassington, where fortunately, we bought a cone, but it wasn’t quite the ice-cream parlour experience we’d been searching for! Grassington is very pretty though and the drive back was too.

On Tuesday afternoon, I met up with some women I met on social media. We’d been chatting online and they were part of a women’s group I wanted to join, so we met for a coffee. I’ve been worried about Andrew being here for the summer with nothing to do, and to my delight, it turns out one of the women owns a small media company in the area. She does some work with young people, so later this morning, Andrew has been invited to a scriptwriting workshop in a cafe in town. He’s read the script they’ll be working on and has some ideas, so hopefully he will enjoy it. If Andrew wants to work in film, the most difficult part might well be finding a way in, so any experience and contacts he can form are a good thing.

I was through in Stranraer again this week, on one of my TB farm cases. We’re still waiting to see if TB is confirmed, but it’s looking more likely and so my Veterinary Advisor and I went to the farm to assess the boundaries and history of animal movements on and off the farm. If TB is confirmed, we will need to move quickly to start tracing where it might have come from and where it could have spread to, so now we are prepared to move to that stage without delay.

I was driving back to Dumfries, when I found myself in a queue of traffic. It’s a fairly difficult road for overtaking long queues, and this one was particularly frustrating as it was going slowly round the bends and speeding up for the straight parts. Seeing a sign for “Holy Cairn” I made a snap decision that this might be a good moment to go and explore one of the historic monuments that are scattered along the A75.

This is a hit and miss activity. Sometimes you can follow side roads for miles and find nothing, or you do arrive, only to find you’re looking at two stones on a hillside. This time, however, I found a good parking space and went through a small gate to find what looked initially like a circle of standing stones…

… but which on closer inspection, had been the spectacular entrance to a chambered cairn.

There was an information block in the corner of the enclosure, which told me a little bit about the cairn and its excavation, but the best thing it told me was that there was another cairn, further up the hill. I followed the track up, to find another, rather different cairn. The entrance to this one was a little less spectacular, but it was sited in such a beautiful place that I could only stand and gaze.

I read the information here too. Long-time readers might remember my trip to Stonehenge where I was amazed to discover that animal herders came down from Scotland to celebrate the winter solstice. I found myself wondering whether the people who used these cairns were among those who made that trip.

The plaque told me the cairns dated from 4000 BC. When I looked up Stonehenge later, it is thought to have been started in 3000BC, so these beautiful cairns were in use a thousand years before Stonehenge was begun. As ever, I felt the wonderful calm feeling that I always get when viewing something ancient or ageless. It’s always a wonderful reminder of how short and insignificant my life is in the grand scheme of things.

And finally, I had been gradually gaining weight, ever since I moved to Arctic Norway. Winter hibernation is all very well, but when winter lasts from October to May, it’s a large chunk of the year to take a break from walking, which was something I had done to keep myself healthy for years. I had hoped to break the bad habits when I came back to Scotland, but there is far too much temptation and I haven’t lost anything at all.

I asked at my GP clinic for help and they have signed me up for six months on an app called Second Nature. It tells me it’s going to help me break my bad habits and form some new and healthier ones, so I will be starting that on Monday. My main hope is to lose enough weight so I can start to go up hills again without creaking to a standstill within a few yards. There’s no weighing and measuring foods or calorie counting, which is good as I can never be bothered with all that. I’m also glad they didn’t offer me drugs. I want to improve my lifestyle, so hopefully this will help. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Of course, I am back in Scotland, and true to form, my colleagues in Stranraer, on hearing this, convinced me that it was essential that I should make the most of the last few days before I began, so this was the result. Have a good week all!

Back to the Grind

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Andrew and I were out a fair bit last weekend. Waiting lists for dentists in Dumfries are so long that I have joined my mum’s dental practice in Addingham. Fortunately my teeth are fine and now also clean. Andrew came with me on Saturday when I saw the dental hygienist. We had lunch afterwards. In a deli on the edge of town.

On Sunday, we drove back to Scotland. As it was a lovely day, and there was plenty of time, we decided not to head along the main road to the motorway, but instead drove up through the dales, to Hawes then Kirkby Stephen, then up the old A6 almost to Carlisle. I didn’t stop for many photos as it was warm and we had Triar in the car, but we did stop for lunch in an inn called the Fox and Pheasant at Armathwaite. The roast dinner sounded lovely, but more suited to a chilly autumn day, so we both had pizza, while Triar sat hopefully under the table.

I can’t say my first week back at work has been great. I did have a lovely day out, inspecting a very well-run farm with my colleague Lauren, but that was the only high point.

One of the most negative things was receiving an indirect message from the financial service that deals with wages and expenses. When I moved here from Norway, it inevitably cost a lot. One of my considerations when I saw the advert for this job was that they were offering “relocation support” for “some of our locations”. I was originally offered a post in Penrith, which would have been nearer my parents, but I asked about other posts where expenses might be available and I was told Dumfries was one of them.

The offer was made and I accepted, booked in my furniture removal (which in itself, cost more than the £5000 on offer) jumped through the hoop of getting several quotations from different removal companies (quite a faff in itself) and then made the long journey over.

There was an ongoing email discussion about the expenses and I was mildly suspicious when nobody seemed to know exactly how I would go about making the claim. The expenses information I was sent was ten years old, but I kept hoping those in contact with me would be able to find someone who knew how to do it.

That’s often the way in the civil service. There are many different functions and often, it’s about finding the right person, but even when I was in post and began to make the claim, it remained unclear. The form was off putting. It was obviously designed for those who already worked in the civil service and were being compulsorily relocated. Nonetheless, I was assured it was the correct form, so I filled it in as best I could, gathered all the paperwork and sent it to my manager, who sent it onwards to be paid.

That was in January and I have been waiting since. During that time, I have bought a house, thus tying myself down. My manager has been trying to chase it up, but I confess, with my cynical mind, I was wondering whether someone, somewhere, was going to try to weasel their way out of paying me, and the message I received on Monday (directed to my line manager, but sent on for info) made it clear I was right.

It stated that they had been delayed as they were investigating my claim. It went on to say that, as a new entrant, I was ineligible for relocation expenses. It would have had to be explicitly mentioned in the original advertisement, and that they hadn’t been able to find any reference to it. They realised that “Sarah will be disappointed” but there was really nothing they could do.

Reader, I was not disappointed. As any normal human being would predict, I was angry. There is an ongoing problem in the civil service in that everything has been cut to the bone and many of the benefits of working for the service have been slashed away. As I said, when I filled in the form, it was obvious there was no longer provision for relocation for new entrants, however by then, I was already in post and all the expenses incurred.

Back in April, when I was waiting for interview, I realized the advertisement had been taken down. I wanted to make sure I had all the information, so I dug back through a government portal and found it. I took screenshots to make sure I didn’t lose the information while I might still need it. Luckily, I hadn’t deleted it.

Admittedly it uses the word “support” and not “expenses” but I think you will agree, there is no mention made of this not being available to new starters. I was told at the interview that £5000 should be available and that was confirmed in various e-mails afterwards.

Underneath the anger though, what I feel is sad. There are a few people in my part of the civil service who’ve been here a long time and it’s obvious there used to be a lot of benefits and good things that have been taken away. Now there’s a never ending mill of trying to attract new staff, then losing them as demoralization sets in, or they rush for promotion as that is the only way to get a raise, since the wage bands and incremental raises have been removed.

I have been here six months and though I can see there are parts of the job I enjoy, I have half an eye on the job market, looking for other opportunities. Given how much money the civil service has already spent on the process of getting me on board, and given that I have hit the ground running and already am managing a significant workload, it seems very shortsighted to be messing me around like this. Anyway, I have sent my complaint right to the top of my section and we will see where it goes. In the meantime, if anyone knows of any good jobs in Dumfries, I’m all ears!

Have a good week all!

Blackbird Lane

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It’s been a quiet week at work. As a veterinary inspector, I am on a rota four times a year for detached duty. During that time, I can be deployed anywhere in the UK where there is a disease outbreak. I was on the rota for next week, so I was half waiting for a call to come in, and I had kept my calendar clear of visits. I wasn’t sure when I would be told, but I was out inspecting a rendering plant on Tuesday with G, who told me that if I hadn’t heard by now, I could probably assume I wasn’t being sent anywhere.

I must say it came as a relief. Normally, I’m all for travelling to different places for work. I love a bit of variety and the current outbreak work seems to be bluetongue inspections and blood testing (last year’s bird flu – higher risk – not so pleasant) but I was exhausted after moving and the house is still in chaos. Triar was also unsettled so, much as he loves visiting Mum and Dad, it seemed better all round to be staying in our new home for a while. It also meant that I could plan my workload over two weeks instead of rushing through it.

The rendering plant visit was fascinating. I dare say most would find it grim. They deal with animal waste products, so stuff like fallen stock (animals that died on farms) and slaughterhouse waste. The products they process are high risk, so they have to heat them to a high temperature, then separate what’s left out. What impressed me, is that even these waste products are put to good use.

They remove as much fat (tallow) as they can and send it to make biofuels. Their fat is used to drive buses. The remaining meat and bone meal is sent to a power station and burned to produce energy, then the ashes become fertilizer. The plant itself has also recently invested in machinery that recirculates the heat, so that it’s twenty five percent more efficient than it used to be, and if the price of tallow drops, they can even run the unit using that, rather than selling it. Given how much of our household waste goes into landfill, it was good to find out that this waste is being put to much better use.

I was feeling a bit down when I came back from Yorkshire last Sunday. I had flung everything into my new house and then had to go away, so I knew I wasn’t coming back to an oasis of tranquility. Donna had suggested celebrating my arrival with gin, but she had a friend round and there was no way I could leave Triar to go and join them. Practical as ever she immediately suggested that she and Debs could come round, bringing the gin with them.

They arrived with gin, tonic and extra large ice cubes, which apparently are better as they don’t melt so fast and dilute the gin too much! Having allowed Debs to pour (in the knowledge that Debs pours with a very generous hand) they didn’t even get as far as sitting down. Seeing I was overwhelmed with everything, they offered to do what Donna had done when I last moved, and unpack my kitchen.

There wasn’t really any room for me (it’s a little house) so I went and cleaned out the sticky, hairy bathroom drawers, which I confess was helped along by being gin fueled. There’s quite a lot still to be done and cleaned, but having the basics in place makes life much more liveable.

My new street does seem rather lovely. There are three rows of cottages in what was once a village outside Dumfries, but which has now been assimilated. My street doesn’t go anywhere and I am almost at the end of it, so there’s not a lot of passing footfall. I’ve said before, that it seems like something out of Harry Potter and that feeling hasn’t gone away. I’ve been taking a Triar out morning and night and every time I seem to meet someone new. There’s Gary next door and Kay along the way, who has a little dog called Hamish, and apparently there’s a lovely old man across the street, who’s 93. He was born here, I was told, and wants everyone to feel welcome, so I hope to meet him soon. Everyone has been incredibly welcoming and it does feel like I’m living in a friendly village, rather than in a town.

And so the best part of my daily routine at the moment, is walking Triar. At the end of our street, you can take a left turn down a lane. It’s bordered with hawthorn and it’s filled with wild flowers and birdsong. It’s not (so far as I know) called Blackbird Lane, but that’s what I’ve called it in my head, because they are everywhere.

They sit atop the hawthorn, regarding me with their bright eyes, seemingly fearless. The males, with their sleek black plumage and cheerful yellow beaks, compete with one another for the best perches. I caught sight of one of the quieter brown females last night with a worm in her mouth, so perhaps she already has young somewhere.

I see house sparrows too, in the hedges and flitting around, but what I find particularly wonderful is the birdsong. A Norwegian friend from the Arctic posted on Facebook this week “the sound of spring” with film of a newly unfrozen stream, emerging from the ice. A wonderful sound indeed after the winter silence, but here in south west Scotland, spring is filled with birdsong.

Just listening to it fills me with joy, but a while back, I downloaded an app, which records the song and tells me what I am hearing. I remembered it a couple of nights ago and it came up with sparrow, blackbird, wren, great tit and blue tit. Last night’s rendition was even better, though it did miss the wood pigeon that was calling in the distance. Finding out which birds are there makes the whole thing even more wonderful.

So there is a lot to do, but also a lot to look forward to. Today, I have to go and buy a stepstool so I can reach the ceilings. The previous owner smoked in the kitchen and the smell still lingers, along with the yellow stained paint. I’ll need to wash it all down before I can paint it. A colleague recommended a joiner to me and he came round yesterday to assess how much work it would be to put in insulation in the roof.

He suggested that, as we would have to pull the walls down to put the insulation in, if I was considering putting in a bathroom or toilet upstairs, it would be better to do the whole thing at once, and check the wiring too, if that was a viable option, so he might come back today with an electrician and later with a plumber. If he can really organize everything for me, that would be a miracle.

But priorities are priorities and the most important task of the day, apart from my tours down Blackbird lane, is to go out and buy some gin and tonic in the hope of attracting in a friendly neighbour. Said neighbour may have to bring along some extra large ice cubes as my freezer needs defrosting before I can use it. Currently it is scented with six month old cigarette smoke. Obviously I should have defrosted it before I moved in, but lingering ice odours hadn’t crossed my mind! I’m going on holiday soon, so that will be a good opportunity for defrosting, cleaning and airing.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this little trip down Blackbird lane. I am looking forward to seeing what grows there through the summer and also exploring further as the mud dries up. Have a good week all!

From Nostalgia to Duty

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My son John and his girlfriend Yoana visited me last weekend. Though it was raining most of the time (in true, southwest Scotland style) John suggested we could go to New Lanark for a visit, so that’s what we did.

New Lanark holds a special place in my heart. For those who don’t know, it is a former 18th century cotton spinning mill village located on the banks of the Falls of Clyde, where social reform became very important. The lives of those who worked in the mill and their families were improved through schools, education, reasonably priced food and medical support. It’s a living village too – there are still tennants living there, and apparently very long waiting lists to get an apartment.

New Lanark

I think I might have visited with my parents, a very long time ago, but my fondest memories are from when John and Anna were young and we went there every year at Christmas time. There’s a ride you go through, where you sit on moving chairs and are taken on a trip back through the darkness of time. At Christmas, it gets set up like a kind of magical grotto and the filmed clips of a child that grew up in New Lanark, are replaced with an elf-like girl called Holly. At least that’s how it was back then, though that is twenty years ago now.

Millworkers’ apartment block.

The site has been undergoing improvement for a long time and it was lovely to visit again. Some things struck me, now that hadn’t really done so before. One was that the classroom, where the millworkers children were taught was a very large, airy room, with a high ceiling and lots of natural light. The contrast between that and the small, low ceilinged apartments, where large families occupied one or two rooms, must have seemed incredible to the children when they began to attend school.

Robert Owen’s house is on the left.

The other was a comment in the film, where the mill workers’ working day was described. They “only” worked ten hours per day, potentially from ten years old, but there were evening classes so that they could be educated if they wanted. I only work eight hour days and am struggling to motivate myself to write in the evenings. It’s incredible to imagine a world where working ten hour days, six days a week, was considered humane, but there it is.

A beautiful roof-garden has been set up on one of the old mills.

Robert Owen, the social reformer, who brought in the improvements for workers in New Lanark, eventually left to set up a new project in America called New Harmony. This project fell apart within a few years. Reading between the lines, a lot of the people they attracted had lofty ideals, but weren’t necessarily hard working.

View from the rooftops.

It’s easy to see with hindsight, but it’s obviously much easier to improve the lives of those who started out with very little and were used to hard labour than it is to form a new community of truly equal people. If Owen had really wanted a socialist paradise, he could have considered whether it was possible to make all those in New Lanark equal. I think then, he might have realised he couldn’t achieve that without reducing his own circumstances to close to those of his workers, and I imagine that was why he set off on an unrealistic vanity project, rather than really setting out to achieve equality.

Back to work and I am unexpectedly working this weekend as the duty vet for Southern Scotland. This means that if there are any reports of suspected notifiable diseases, such as foot and mouth or bird flu reported, I’m the vet who will be sent out. Equally, if there’s an urgent welfare issue that’s so bad it can’t wait, that will be my job to tackle as well. My car is currently loaded up with boxes full of all the kit that I might need, which is quite eye opening as there’s so much of it. I know that in an outbreak situation, I would have to arrange clean and dirty areas in my car and, as I didn’t have much warning, everything has just been thrown in. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for now. Complicated routines take time to organize and I had less than a day to find everything, without anyone local to help me out. Roll on Monday!

The steam engine that drove the mill when the water in the Clyde was low was housed in the building on the right. The ropes that drove the machinery would have been inside the glass bridge. The mill race goes underneath the building on the right,

Tripping

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I finally made it out of bed on Monday, just in time to go back to work. By Tuesday, I was on the road again as I made my way to Edinburgh for a conference, where APHA staff from all over Scotland came together to meet and learn.

When I drove over to Stranraer, I was craving memories and was rather disappointed at the lack of familiarity. Although I grew up in Penicuik, which is not very far from Edinburgh, and that I went to university in Edinburgh, it hadn’t crossed my mind to hope for something similar. It hadn’t crossed my mind that our route wouldn’t take us on the featureless motorway network, but rather through a load of places that were embedded deeply from my childhood.

We passed through West Linton, then Carlops: familiar names and places from long ago. But it was when we reached Nine Mile Burn, where you can turn off to drive to Penicuik, that I had that sudden feeling of nostalgia.

My adult life has been interesting, but I was fortunate enough to have a very happy childhood. One of my sweetest memories is of climbing onto a low hanging tree bough and sitting in dappled sunlight with my friend, Sharon. We had been watching Robin of Sherwood, Sharon had pictures of Michael Praed on her wall and we were at the age when everything still seemed possible. If there was one moment in my life that I could go back and relive, I am fairly sure that would be the one I would choose as it is so unsullied. A young man fractured my mind at university and by the time I was 25 I’d had skin cancer twice and I think that’s why that memory of unsullied innocence is so precious. I’d love to relive it with Sharon, but she also got cancer and she didn’t make it.

Goodness, I hadn’t expected this to take such a sorrowful turn, but those sweet, sweet memories do come with a hefty dose of melancholy. Anyway, the road carried on past Nine Mile Burn and we passed Silverburn, where my parents once considered buying the farmhouse. It was run down then, but now looks very smart. And then the Pentland Hills were on my left and those really were my old stomping ground. I remember some names: Carnethy, Scald Law, East and West Kip. Scald law was the highest hill, but we more often walked up Carnethy, or took the path over between the hills to a wonderful waterfall, though I don’t remember its name.

Pentland Hills – I think this one is Scald Law, but feel free to correct me!

The hotel in Edinburgh was very pleasant, though very much a typical, identikit modern hotel, with no distinguishing features. I’m still at the stage where there’s lots to learn, so there was plenty of new information to pick up. I enjoyed the evening meal, although the milk chocolate cheesecake, which I expected to be a sweet and fluffy concoction was more like a dark chocolate brick of solidity that even I couldn’t finish.


The conference ran from lunchtime on Tuesday to lunchtime on Wednesday, then on Thursday I had to go to Ayr to have a mask-fitting appointment. This was to check whether I can use the FFP3 masks at work safely. This involved having a mask on, which was attached to a tube which monitored the air I was breathing, while performing various manoeuvres. As this involved marching on the spot, while moving my head around in various ways, and then counting out loud, while trying to breathe normally, it was quite a challenge, given that I am still coughing after being ill, but I survived without falling over, and now I am officially allowed to use a mask if I have to check out any sick chickens.

Much as I love travelling (especially those identikit hotels) and consider it a definite perk of my job, I am rather looking forward to next week, when the most distant visit I have booked in is to Castle Douglas.

I’ve probably gone a bit quiet about my house buying. Compared to an international move, it’s very low key, but I’m now at the stage when all the papers have to be signed, I have to show where the money for my deposit is coming from, and I have to arrange to shift my accounts with all my providers from one house to the other, while leaving an overlap as I don’t want to move everything on one single day. I’m quite excited about buying a house, but it doesn’t quite seem real yet, even though the intended date of exchange is less than two weeks away.

You know, I write these blogs mostly to keep in touch with people, but I sometimes think they will end up being a bit like a diary. Maybe one day in the future, I’ll look back and all the memories will come flooding back. My mind feels odd at the moment. Part of me is chugging onwards, being quite competent, learning lots of stuff, but it’s overlaid with a feeling of there being too much going on. It’s not perturbing me too much, but I do have a sense that there is chaos rushing all around me, while I just wander through it, waiting for everything to settle. I write this weekly and I can’t tell whether any of that feeling is coming across, or whether what I write is as scattergun as it sometimes feels. This week, I volunteered to work as a vet at the Royal Highland Show, and I can’t yet tell if that will turn out to be a marvellous opportunity or a daunting responsibility. Maybe both! Still, you know me. I tend to grab what comes my way and worry about the consequences later.

Anyway, as usual, thanks to anyone who made it this far. I hope you have a good week, and I will leave you with a couple of pictures of Biggar, where we went on school trips to the street museum. I was intrigued by the tiny scarlet door in the first building. I presume the road and pavement have been built up over the years, but anyone using that door would really have to watch their head! See you next week.

Offering

Blog, Scotland, The Vet Who Came In from the Cold, , , , , , ,

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!

Very Expensive Chicken

Blog, Scotland, The Vet Who Came In from the Cold, , , , , , , ,

This week, my fellow senior veterinary inspector, C, took me out on some chicken visits. I guess I may have a poultry vet or two among my readers, but in general, beyond occasional pictures of huge chicken sheds on the news, and the understanding that all chickens came from an egg, most people have probably never thought about where all those chickens come from.

Back in Norway, I worked for a while in a chicken slaughterhouse and I did visit a few broiler units in Norway (a broiler is a chicken specifically raised for meat). During those visits I had to put on protective clothing over my own. This consisted of a full disposable overall with a hood, Wellington boots that were kept inside the shed and a face mask. Biosecurity is very important in any large flock of birds as infections like chicken flu or salmonella can move quickly through a flock with devastating effects.

What I didn’t know then was that the broilers I saw were the end result of an extensive, highly controlled breeding program that took three to four years from start to finish. Obviously I was aware that all the tiny chicks that come onto a broiler unit were bred somewhere, but I hadn’t realized how complicated the process was.


Logically, those broilers must have parents that are used for breeding and egg production, not meat and those flocks are parent flocks. Go back another layer and there are grandparent flocks, then another to the great grandparent flocks. Beyond that there is one final layer – the pedigree or pure line stock, and these are the birds from which all the chicken on your table are originally bred.

Those pedigree stock represent many years of careful genetic selection, which was initially aimed at increasing production levels, but animal welfare is being taken more into account now. When you’re rearing so many birds for food, there’s an extent to which each individual animal doesn’t have much significance, unlike in a small dairy, for example, where the farmer probably knows each individual animal very well. That means that welfare considerations are generally taken at a flock level and breeding birds that stay healthy has to be an important part of that.

As you can probably imagine though, a shed full of those pedigree chickens would be extremely valuable in monetary terms, and even down the chain at the grandparent flock level, each individual chicken is worth a lot more than the birds I saw in those broiler units. The birds C took me out to see were part of a grandparent flock and the inspection was a routine inspection, not linked to any welfare concerns.

I thought the biosecurity with the broilers was good, but before visiting the grandparent unit, we had to answer a whole series of questions about how recently we’d been in contact with other birds and animals and whether we had any symptoms of illness. Any wrong answers and we would have been refused entry. After that, we had to go into a unit where we left all our own clothes at one side, showered thoroughly, then put on clothes that are only used inside the restricted areas of the unit. Even after that, as we entered each individual shed, we had to change boots again. Each shed has its own boots and we had to disinfectant our boots and hands at every stage as we moved in between the houses.

I found the whole process both interesting and exhausting. Taking long Wellington boots on and off and balancing as you step over a barrier to get into them is physically quite demanding, though I imagine it gets easier with practice. Anyway, the birds are valuable enough that I will have to do several visits with another vet before I am allowed out on my own.

I’ve been out on a lot of visits this week, most of them with C. I also had a day long course on statement writing, aimed at ensuring we were capable of writing reports that were high enough quality that if we were asked about them in a courtroom, we wouldn’t find ourselves having to answer complicated questions about how we had arrived at our conclusions that the animals were suffering. This is something I learned quite a lot about in Norway, so it was interesting to see how it all compared. It’s very important, for example, that you give concrete examples. It’s not enough to say that the farmer had allowed the animals to become thirsty. Rather you would include observations about whether there was any water available l whether it was clean, whether there were enough troughs or nipples feeders for all the animals to drink and state that when you did give the animals water, that they stood drinking for x amount of time. If you merely said they were thirsty, three years later, in court, when challenged how you knew, you could easily find yourself floundering to recall the specific details of how you drew that conclusion.
If anything, I’ve been a bit too busy this week. There is still a lot of basic information I need to learn and there are courses I need to take to learn some of the basics. Time management and making sure I understand the underlying principles and context is something I need to be aware of as there is an awful lot of work to get through, but I get frustrated when I try to do tasks and simply don’t have the knowledge I need to tackle them.

Still it’s all interesting and I know from experience that I will learn it all eventually. And there are some beautiful days and some wonderful scenery. C took me out on a visit and she took me into Drumlanrig Castle on the way there. She tells me there’s a good coffee shop there, but we didn’t have time when we passed through. We did have time to stop and take photos though! These grounds and trees are so British. For me it is wonderfully familiar. It was beautiful in Norway, but it was always wild in a way the great estates in the UK are not.

I was also reminded, as I basked in the frosty sunlight, that my friends and family in the far north may not have seen the sun yet this year. Polar night officially ended in Tromsø this week, but sometimes it can be days or even weeks before you catch that first, wonderful peek of the sun’s rays after a month and a half. Love to all my friends up there.

Anyway it’s late so I’m not going to write any more for now, though I am starting to progress through the process of buying a house here in Scotland. It’s quite different to the process in Norway and I will probably say more about that next week, but for now I’ll leave you with some photos from evening walks with Triar around the area where I’m currently living. Have a good week all!

Turkey Calling

Blog, Scotland, The Vet Who Came In from the Cold, , ,


I arrived back at Donna and Will’s on Sunday afternoon and we spent the evening putting up Christmas decorations. They’ve got a real tree and Christmas decorations from different people and places they’ve been. I was also impressed they had even more boxes of decorations than I did before my moving rationalisation, when sadly, I had to cut it down to three boxes. Can’t have too much Christmas cheer, in my opinion. The amazing Lego Christmas Village picture at the top of the page is theirs. Building an entire village is real dedication to the Christmas cause.

Although my online induction continues apace (deadline 24th December for the general program) I’ve been out on two visits this week. The first was to a veterinary practice which carries out some Official Veterinarian work on behalf of the government. Much of this doesn’t seem to have changed too much since I was doing it myself back in the early nineties, though we didn’t use much rabies vaccine back then, before the days of pet passports. We inspected equipment such as the guns that are used to inject tuberculin to check for TB and the practice microscope for looking for anthrax. There was a feeling of familiarity, being back in a mixed animal country practice, though the lingering scents of iodine, vitamin B12 and calcium were sadly absent from the stockroom.

I also went on a visit to a fallen stock plant, where culled animals that are not fit for human consumption are taken. Though they’re not going into the food chain, the animals are still tested for BSE or Scrapie (the sheep version). One thing I’m really revelling in is chatting to people effortlessly. Back in Norway, I’d go out with Birgit and she’d launch into chatting about what was happening at that time of year and perhaps more local news. Suddenly I can do it too!

We received a directive about carrying out welfare visits on turkey farms at the time of slaughter. As regular readers will know, killing animals as humanely as possible is something that really energises me, so I was hoping to get involved, but it seems that there are very few in our region and that most of them either send them outside the area or are already finished. This is definitely something I should write in my calendar for October next year. I was asked to do some of the phoning though. I can see I’m going to be leaping into this job like a pig rushing to the muddy corner of its field, only with more disinfectant involved.

Andrew arrived last night from Norway and will be here over Christmas and New Year. Triar was very pleased to see us both when we arrived at Mum and Dad’s, though it was well after his bedtime when we got here. Anna and Lauren will be arriving later today for a weekend visit, so it’s going to be a full house. I went to Aldi on the way to pick up some party food. Another novelty for me. Vol-au-vents, cocktail sausages and duck spring rolls were in short supply in Finnsnes. I miss ribberull meat on my sandwiches though. I wonder if I could make my own.

My furniture should arrive on Tuesday and I’m hoping to take a couple of days off later in the week to unpack. Donna has offered to give me a hand, which I’ve gladly accepted. It’ll be good to get my things back, though I’ll be sad to move out of Donna’s very comfortable spare room. Her social life is so busy that I will need to make appointments to see her, once I’ve moved out. We’ve already booked Pilates classes including one in January though, so we’ll be keeping fit as well as in contact.

Anyway, I’d better go and get breakfast. See you tomorrow for the exciting third installment in this years advent adventure!