Hi Honey, I'm home!

Well I had a wonderful few days. We packed so much in I feel I've been away forever.
And my two friends, who hadn't met each other before, got on really well, which is always nice to see.

I haven't laughed out loud to the point of crying for in quite a while, so that alone made the trip feel like a fantastic tonic. We had lots of running gags going on, not least Barbara putting a six pack of beer in the freezer and forgetting it until it was a frozen, fizzing, spitting bomb. And the old lady across the street kept watching us from her window with great suspicion, while appearing to smoke a massive spliff.

We worked hard and played hard and the garden open day on Sunday was blessed with perfect weather and big crowds. We ran the PGG, the Professional Gardeners Guild, plant sale and I got some great material for poems and stories just from all the customers we met - including a former boss of mine from way back. Just shows you what a small world it is. The head gardener gave us lots of goodies to bring home and I've just spent the morning planting some of them and planning where else to put the rest.

I took a lot of pictures, but as I shoot in RAW format I have a big editing job ahead of me.
So this is one picture of Culross, a place Beth and I visited on the way north.
It was the site of one of Scotland's first coal barons from the 16th century, this was his kitchen garden.

On the way home we visited Louis Grassic Gibbon museum on the Howe of the Mearns, and now I want to read Sunset Song again. Here are few lines of his that I jotted in my notebook:

"We talked the moon into morning"


"the next you'd waken with the peewits (lapwings) crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying into the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you'd cry for that - the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies........"

Such fantastic language by a man dead at thirty three.

And then I came home to the wonderful surprise that I got placed in Shameless Lions Writing Circle Awards. I'm really thrilled, as I know there are a lot of first rate writers in the circle, and to be honest I feel a bit of fraud even trying to compete with you. So a big thank you to Shameless for all his hard work in organising it and to everyone who voted for me, you've no idea what a boost it is to my confidence.
And congrats to Kay at asithappens for her well deserved placings.

And now I'll proudly display my certificates, although I won't put them in the sidebar as I always mess up the html margins when I do!