A Different 'Memory Wanderer'

When we moved up from Suffolk I thought The Memory Wanderer had probably reached the end of its useful life, so I announced its closure, only to restart it a few days later when my camera began to burn with the photos I was taking in and around our new home town of Golspie in Sutherland.

It's now apparent that the new TMW will be a rather different beast from the old one, very much more like the Kilchoan Diary - which is good, as it indicates that, instead of spending my days looking back at old memories, I am now building new ones.

I understand that the change may disappoint some of my readers, particularly those who found some pleasure in the material I have managed to keep from my days in East Africa. Most of that is now sitting inaccessibly in a huge warehouse somewhere in Suffolk or Essex waiting for us to find a bigger house to buy up here - currently we are staying in a one-bedroom cottage.

One of the pleasures I look forward to is exploring this very beautiful part of Scotland. Each day we walk and, at the moment, at least part of each walk is new. So, for example, this afternoon we wandered northeast along the coast, along a fairly well-established path, past the monumental pile that is Dunrobin Castle, seat of the Earls and Dukes of Sutherland.

It's exciting to be exploring a new place again, good for us at our age. It would be even more pleasurable if we did not have to continue to wage a long battle to update all the paraphernalia of modern living. Just changing our addresses in the multiple organisations to which we are attached has taken hours, and some changes have gone catastrophically wrong: Vodafone continues to lock me out so I've had no mobile for a week.

Such stresses just fell away as we walked in the low winter sunshine.