Witterings from the Woodshed – meet Brash

Meet Scottish Field’s new online columnist – Brash McKelvie.

You turned up. Thank you. Let me briefly introduce you to the cast of characters that share the vicissitudes of my life:

Scragend – a Rhode Island Red of indeterminate age and foul nature.

Shitting Cat – does exactly what it says on the tin.

The Beloved – a paragon of virtue and a self-appointed critic of most of my thoughts and actions. Snr and Jnr Orifice – our fledged offspring.

There is a supporting cast of badly trained mutts, neighbours and ducks.

The inner sanctum is the shed – not grand, certainly not a’ man cave’, and dresses hopelessly to the left, but I have more enjoyed an occasional cigar and tot of usquebaugh in there than in any Pall Mall club.

So there it is. Just a fool and a hen making utterances twice a month. I do hope you can join us. 

Scragend and I, old friends working in our communal hideout, the shed, had been exceedingly busy.

Scragend – busy rearranging stray bits of straw and oats into a comfortable nest on my chair. Me – busy sorting out old rags and oil with a view to cleaning up the garden tools for the forthcoming spring onslaught, in fact I had just completed the overhaul of one spade, and was pondering if it would be morally corrupt to celebrate by having a small snifter, when the Beloved hove into view.

‘There’s my Turtle Dove waving an olive branch’ I thought to myself, as this morning had seen a somewhat ‘choppy’ start to the day.’

No, there’s my turtle dove waving a piece of paper’… this never bodes well – and the Beloved, stepping lightly into my shed, thrust said scrap of paper in my general direction with the accompanying; ‘That is how it is done’. I had been accused of not having a romantic bone in my body. This is probably true.

I come more from the school of ‘jolly nice’ rather than the (wet) proponents of the flowery verse. However ‘jolly nice’ can, dependent on circumstance, seem somewhat brusque, if not a little ungrateful.

Don’t get me wrong, empathy I have by the bucket load and will shed a tear with the best of them at a stranded penguin, seal, pangolin, but.. put the animal on two legs and without feather, fur or scales, and add in it being of the opposite sex.. then all empathetic understanding, potentially leading to a romantic encounter, shoots straight out the window to be replaced by a manic rictus grin and mutterings of ‘jolly nice’. It is a miracle that I am a parent.

And so it was, this morning, after one of my ill-timed ‘jolly nice’ utterances I found myself in the local supermarket purchasing the necessities of life AND a £5 poke of lilies. Fairly sure this would be the sticky plaster to the current misunderstanding I returned home to present this obvious and
meaningful token of my affection to the Beloved.

Suffice to say it was not many minutes more after that before I was in the company of Scragend and the garden implements and the £5 poke of lilies.

And the day just took a further nose dive. The scrap of paper was some editorial piece from the luxuriantly lock’d Neil Oliver. Some whaffle about what he did for his wife’s birthday. Why do I find the man so annoying? Beautifully parodied in the comedy series Burnistoun, his character was, allegedly, the one wafting about galleries and shaking his tresses whilst looking direct to camera and uttering ‘and then there’s ME’. Perfection. Loved it.

But I duly read his piece wherein he elegantly and sparsely writes of a true romance. It would appear that he has known his wife for some thirty plus years and further into the piece he then goes onto say ‘Whatever time I get with her will never be long enough’. Damn the man and damn his hair too. What price ‘jolly nice’ and a fiver of flowers now?

So there I am, left in the shed, with a hen, an oiled tool and some lilies.. yet there’s still that rogue/juvenile element in me that can’t help but think that in some remote parts of the world this would constitute romance personified!