Welcome to Scotland - just bring a bike.

The refinery at Grangemouth has a 2 day strike and absolute chaos breaks out - panic buying causes rationing of fuel and on going out for dinner now we have to phone ahead to a garage to ensure they have diesel. We are only allowed to buy it in 10 pound increments in Kelso and 20 pound increments in Coldstream and almost got banned by accidentally putting in 20 pounds and 17 pence with the pounds whirling past faster than a drunken dervish. I am mystified as to what people are doing with all the fuel and do they not normally fill up their tanks - a minimum fuel fillup rather than maximum would be better strategy for queuing and probably for fuel efficiency.

Seeing tourist sites in the Borders can be less than exciting so I jumped at the opportunity of spending a night in two of them with the Borders Paranormal Group and the 'Most Haunted' co-star Derek Acorah, the man Paul Daniels described as 'laughable'. Sadly the completely bonkers and squonking Yvette Fielding didn't manifest. Standing in the queue to sign up for the Anthony Nolan Trust sponsored evening I handed over my sponsor dosh and met my co-conspirators Sally and Susan and the well named Borders paranormal group, although subnormal may be a more appropriate description. But hey getting locked in a cell with a bunch of woman is my idea of fun so bring it on. Wot no fluffy handcuffs? And keep your ectoplasm to yourself.

Spring has sprung, the grass has been nibbled bare by the sheep and the snow is falling. Welcome to Scotland. My Spring toilet book is the Bodleian Library tome about the Invasion of Britain by Hitler - it is a fascinating read in the 'see yourself as others see you' genre where the Germans marvelled at our roads but poopooed everything else. To balance this I of course have the Commando 12 action comics together at last with a sprinkling of Achtungs, Gott Himmels and take that you Nazi swine.

This time of year is one where I indulge my passion for technical books and fill my desk with Ajax, Model-View-Controller Patterns, LINQ and C#/F# tomes all held up by a strong lime green man bookend, which doesn't impress people at all that I am a learned man. What does impress people is my new 30 inch Mac Monitor though cos it is just gorgeous - finally I can see my photos at a grand scale and spot all the defects and where I have been going wrong for all these years (purchase a gitzo tripod with a really right stuff ballhead immediately young man). My working world is now a blur of Microsoft research tools and beta versions running on Apple equipment - the best of all possible worlds? Microsoft have finally bought up all the bright people in the world that don't work at Google and some great work is coming out - finally the world of computer science is coming into its own with fast hardware capable of doing interesting things. My Mac Pro has 8 cores with 18G RAM and 2 x 300G fast disks running several VMWare virtual machines to slow it down. This machine is faster than I am, which is probably just as well.

March is famous for coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb. In this case the lamb went out and died after been injured in a stampede for the food trough and froze in the great freeze and had its eyes pecked out by crows before the 'Bring Out Your Dead' chap collected her. And then there were seven.

As for lions coming in - Radio Scotland Greetings Programme on a Sunday morning has the superb knack of putting on great music to have sex by - I don't know if this is a deliberate ploy to increase the declining Scottish population. The Observer proclaimed that scientists were working on artificial sperm (what? is there not enough real sperm in the world?) so I am sure The Greetings programme can have a rolling advert for the new product inbetween musical interludes. Knowing that you are all waiting to hear this week's sex tune - it was Bongo Bong by Manu Chao and I love the way it dances into Je Ne T'Aime Plus on the album.

January is a time of skidding from the Christmas festivities through an alcoholic haze of birthdays and so to celebrate the ritual of purification that February is named after it is time to enter Lent. This year Lent starts on February 6th and ends March 23rd. The Christians have weekends off but being stronger than them I am having the whole period off apart from my anniversary on the 7th. No alcohol, sweets or choccies and yes I don't lose any weight thus proving that all three are not calorific in the least (counter to my risk assessment nurse who concluded I had a death wish when I told her my hobbies and she suggested I cut down on alcohol as it had lots of fat in it!).

Mike hits 50 - yes one third of my life over already and looking forward to my midlife crisis when I am 75. Medical science and Mike have kept step with each other and no-one is surprised more than my doctors as to age so far. They keep sending me risk assessment appointments, as if the anthrax drum incident, russian mafia thug attack, car, plane and train crashes were not enough to show that risk aversion and Mike tread separate paths through this life.

To celebrate and to snatch my last hours of my pilots licence before it expires I flew to Dundee Airport. Graeme and Kim on one plane and Mike and his petrol tank in another with an aide-memoire of RT speak written on the bar mitts I flew over the Forth at a somewhat chilly altitude of 6,000 feet before encountering Leuchars air traffic control. Requesting 'MATZ Penetration' as if asking a two dollar hooker if she did happy hours, I flew over the new runways to descend (strangely you don't get to ask for MATZ Withdrawl but are passed unceremonously onto Dundee Approach as if your performance didn't warrant a shared cigarette).

The call came to 'rescue' my mother from her 'irritating' grandchildren (what, all of them?) and in particular England (what, all of it?) whom she had grown tired of in spite of spending years telling us how wonderful it was, whilst not reading Samuel Johnson. This was not a Christmas request it was a demand. Not being one to simply drive somewhere and back, Stuart was enrolled as co-driver and Mariella our Satellite navigator. Stuart naturally also added to the itinerary by suggesting France to get some wine. Channel Tunnel - no problems with 53 trains a day. We were set.

4:30am and 3 alarms went off (Ali's phone with Ali, my iphone and Kim's hypnosis/relaxation CD). So the entire house was now awake apart from Stuart who was supposed to be going with me. Roused with an operatic awakening he struggled to the car and double checking we went through Change of Underwear - check, sat nav - check, passport - oops Stuart had left it somewhere we couldn't get it at 5am - France was off the itinerary.

Tis the season to be jolly, unless you are a sheep or the recipient of my annual newsletter.

November the 10th is the traditional slaughter time, but we typically skidded past that. Foot and mouth licences were not required now but we needed to tag the sheep. That exercise consisted of first getting the sheep in the front field with Steph on a horse scaring them, an electric fence to discourage them and the rest of us chasing them through the gate. Second stage was chasing the sheep around a log pile with Kim hiding and leaping out and grabbing one or two of them at a time. Mike would then run around with a tag gun and ear tag them. The sheep got wise to this and butted Kim from behind and kicked her in the groin for good measure. We finally had them all tagged and separated them out ready for collection in a horse box.

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November - well I do remember the Fifth, but can barely remember if these events happened in October or the start of November as it is all blurring into one. November is a strange month where Americans wear a beard, Australians a moustache and we burn effigies and let off fireworks - I think we win on the fun stakes.

Ali joins Galashiels Academy on a Wednesday, comes back with new girlfriend on a Friday.
Plus c'est la meme chose, plus ça change [The more things change, the more things stay the same].

I joined blipfoto.com - find me at http://www.blipfoto.com/mikeforsyth - where we put up a picture per day (it must be shot on that day). My idea of photographing my poo each morning didn't go down well with anyone so I have resorted to fluffier imagery.