"Tautie holiday" time .....

10th October 2016 (Monday) ....10.00    Clouds!    They fascinate me.    This is my problem:  I like clouds, and this morning we have clouds in abundance;

Skein of geese

  and they are forever changing, shape and colours.    The result of this is that, when  I

go out for a pre breakfast walk, I end up ‘out’ for .... well.... just, it was five minutes short of two hours this morning.    I did enjoy being out there... the clouds were a bonus.... but I was ready for breakfast by the time I got back to Ivy.    I’ll go out again after lunch, though the sky looks like we could have showers in the afternoon.

Hey .... the villages are ‘alive’ it must be the start of the midterm break... what we called “the tautie holidays”.     The ‘midterm’ break lasts longer now, because Scottish

Interesting clouds over Elie

and English schools are of at different time.     The “tautie holidays” coincided with the tautie (potato) harvest, and we pupils hand gathered the ‘tauties’ after they had been unearthed by a ‘tautie digger’;  the spinner being the earliest mechanical one that I remember.    Although I was at Waid Academy I ended up ‘tautie howkin’ with pupils from Buckhaven High School;   Balcarres Estate must have come under the Buckhaven designated ‘area’.     This morning felt like a 'tautie mornin' .... chilly.    Those were the days.

21.30    We didn’t get any showers coming our way, but the sky looked heavy beyond the Balcarres ridge.... so it might have been raining up North.    We’ve had a lovely day, albeit cool in the north easterly wind.    The sky is now clear, and it’s cold;   it could be frosty up in the glens.    The geese have been moving a lot recently... huge skeins of them;   many of them feeding on local fields:  they are a good indicator of

Is that a camera you've got there?    I'm ready!

cold weather on the way.

I’ve had a quiet day having felt ‘dizzy’ now and again:  probably some kind o’ bug.    The day hasn’t been ‘wasted’, as I did an ironing... which I enjoy doing, and watching  the television News at the same time;    the Trump v Clinton ‘clash’, being the main ‘news’ .    Jings you’d think that a place the size of the USA could have better candidates for the supreme job of President. 

 I’m going have an early night in bed;  the book I’m reading is getting to the exciting bit:  most likely I’ll fall asleep before I get there anyway.

The weather forecast is for the weather to be much the same as today ... which wouldn’t be bad.

Photographs : Top – one of many skeins of geese coming over the Firth to feed on our fields, Middle – interesting cloud over Elie, and Bottom – my ‘model’ for this morning.