Vive La Difference

Scotland is a modern country and is similar in many ways to wherever you are reading this, but the differences in people, places, and things are usually what we find most interesting, so here's a little peek at things you probably wouldn't see wherever you are.

Through the bedroom window at 5am: a new calf. Red like his/her momma, sturdy and on his legs.

In the kitchen garden: A cat making his way along the peak of the slate tiled roof of the old farm cottages like an aptly named cat burlgar or ninja with his head down and fur ruffling in the Caithness gusts. (He's probably heading for the back door--a hole in the roof that the cats use to get to the dairy maid's cottage when they are looking for a meal or a place to hide out from their hunting in the barns and around the fields).

In the bakery where I get my breakfast and milky coffee a badge on the waitress that says "Say aye tae a pie."

In the paper:

• An article about a man convicted of "riding his horse furiously to the danger of the public"
• A full page article about the Orkney-Canadian connection.
• A sad-eyed photo of the queen accompanying an article about how she is selling off her dairy herd. "The queen is understood to have been saddened by the situation." Not even the queen, apparently, can find a way to make dairy cattle pay. That is a long sad story and this is a short post.

So that's a brief note from the Lake Wobegone of the North. These articles (and more) were in this morning's Press and Journal (www.thisisnorthscotland.co.uk). The really local papers for me are The Caithness Courier (comes out on Wednesday) and the John o Groats Journal, which comes out on Friday.