Home alone...

...give or take twenty odd goats, four hens, two cats and two guinea pigs.....and three or more builders - they all need looking after you know. Jussi has taken the girl to Hamburg - how will I survive?

But hey - let's gossip. There's a family out west who are not universally respected for their entrepreneurism - though thrusting and successful business people they are. They're not universally respected cos it's the done thing to be down on people who make the effort and succeed. People who try and fail are far more admirable. Amongst their many enterprises they are nearing the completion of a couple of new holiday homes - built on land even less suitable for farming than even your average croft, and built, I think, sympathetically but not traditionally - you know, the sort of thing HRH would have kittens about.

An excellent use of land - and a great way of investing in bringing people and their gold to this backwater eh? Well - maybe -. The only problem is, so it is rumoured, allegedly etc... the problem is they don't own the land they've built on. I mean obviously no one else was using it so who cares eh?

Not uncommon this. In fact there's a bit of a scandal going down Assynt way. One of the local movers and shakers over there, a crofter, applied for planning permission to decroft some land and build a couple of houses and everyone was supportive - permissions granted no problems. Until, that is, someone noticed that the land she decrofted wasn't hers in the first place, its common grazing land - so - aaah - pistols at dawn, toys out of the pram. The crofter has now accused the crofters who share the common grazing she was trying to build on as 'fickle and vindictive'. Fun and games.

All these problems arise because the crofters commission doesn't use maps. So when it comes to deciding what land belongs to where it tends to come down to what Angus remembers his grandad telling him when he was a lad. Not altogether legally watertight. The Scottish Government wants to introduce map based records, but they want crofters to pay for it. Turkeys and Christmas perhaps.

One of our neighbours 'accidentally' put up a building on some common land. All the shareholders scratched their scalps, pursed their lips and agreed - "ach it's fine". We're far more civilised over here - barbarians out west so they are.