The idea was fillet steak, with a discount voucher at the Green Door, and take Stu and Steph to the Opera. The reality was somewhat different. Parking at festival time in Edinburgh is made a trifle more difficult as they remove large streets of parking for parades and security, at one point we were driving up a narrow street with a guy pretending to be Frankenstein walking down towards us – we finally parked at one end of Edinburgh and made our way through a packed Grassmarket and up Victoria street to the Green Door clutching our voucher for a free bottle of wine and 10% off the delicious steaks. It was now an Italian restaurant with no free tables (and that was before we waved a discount voucher at them). So it was back down Victoria Street trying all restaurants until we reached the one that actually had a free table and a friendly waiter in a kilt – Maison Bleu and delicious the food was and nice the decor and wet was the wine and expensive the bill but you can’t put a price on happiness.

It was unusual that the opera was at the Usher Hall, but hey we had seen naked Swedish women performing Tosca in the Leith council chambers one year. It was even more unusual when it turned out to be a concert performance so no acting, no grand and imaginative scenery and the conductor had just had a daughter so didn’t turn up, leaving an enthuasiastic and energetic woman conductor to take charge of the colourful choir. Stravinsky’s ballet suite Orpheus sent Stu to sleep but the icecream arriving woke him up – even that wasn’t real in that the delicious Musselburgh dish revealed a variety of E numbers and no cream. After the interval the heat was hotting up and the Usher Hall had replaced its CO2 rich air conditioner with cardboard fans. Stuart was seriously requiring elbows and knees to wake up now as the singers wailed their way through Oedipus Rex with no special effects of eyes gouged out. Still at least I enjoyed the music from the grand circle and especially the fact that the others didn’t although at least I didn’t take them to a Portsmouth Sinfonia concert (where each player uses an instrument they have never played).

Kim was a judge at the Shell STEP awards, which she always enjoys and at least this year they supplied her with the briefing notes a few days beforehand rather than at the actual awards.

Barbara, celebrating losing her serial cheating disabled lover, let me back to her party, where previously I had demonstrated fertitlity rites with a couple of women under the full moon and in front of the Coldstream clergyman. I enjoyed the waddling ducks in her pond, the pears and figs from her trees and in particular the nude photograph (not of Barbara nor the ducks). Everyone brought their own fare which typically resulted in a wonderous combination of delights – especially in this case with the desserts. We left before the full moon this time, and without the waddling ducks, to give a standing ovation to the Pink Floyd tribute band Shine On and the particularly delicious diamonds backing girls who were doing a passable emulation of the girl at the start of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected but this time not in silhouette form.

The sheep provided some entertainment by one getting her horns stuck in the fence and bleating musically until Stuart and I trooped over to see why she was bleating. She had managed to get her head through to munch the grass (is always greener) through the fence but forgot about the horns and couldn’t get back. It took a minute or two to calm her down and work out the topological solution and she was off with Kim singing ‘Horn Free’ from the fence.

The rain is still pouring down, our field has large puddles and the muddy patch is now in danger of swallowing a small herd. Talking of animals, and perhaps the rain is to blame, Flora the highland cow is in love with Roo the racehorse and moo’s endlessly when Roo leaves to go for a ride or a bit of showjumping, otherwise she lies at Roo’s feet gazing lovingly up at him. Roo showed that he should be better named Buck-a-roo as he bucks and kicks when his food arrives, probably in a preventative manner to stop the sheep having any. The sheep don’t seem to be in love with anyone but themselves, although our dog and cat are in love and greet each other with a passionate embrace each morning.

The rain meant no flying so we stopped in all day Saturday to watch the entire first season of Dexter as I did a worldwide hunt for fresh Samphire to go with our fish – apart from frozen and pickled samphire I wasn’t having much luck. Even the obvious samphireshop.co.uk only sold sausages online (I guess sausageshop.co.uk had already gone). There was a superb radio programme on first thing about the hijacking of an airliner on the ground at Karachi from a survivor. The pilots bailed out forcing the plane to remain on the ground and the British chap figured the Americans would be the first to be shot but hadn’t counted on the bravery of a stewardess who discarded white american passports as she knew they would be executed. Unfortunately this left the Brit in the front of the execution queue and he was forced to the front of the plane and had to kneel down with a gun at his head for 6 hours of questioning and general terrorism. If he had been fatter and not covered with a beard he reckoned he would have been shot – so before I step on another plane it looks like weight loss is going to have to take place or beard growing at least.

Sunday morning opens with that dream period of listening to BBC Scotland’s church service with a hymn that was the bastard child of The Brady Bunch and something from Disney’s Beauty and The Beast – we reckoned the teapot was singing, the candelabra was conducting and the piano was playing itself. The best part of the early morning church service is the sermon – this time it was the all time favourite The Parable of the Talents (no this isn’t a middle eastern version of Britain’s Got Talent), but sounded somewhat like Conservative party rhetoric as the tale is told of a master giving (or lending) his servants talents (about a thousand dollars apparently). The first trades his 5 and gets a 100% return, the second trades his 2 and gets a 100% return whereas the third buries his single talent. The master returns to reward those who had traded up and took the single and I assume mud covered talent from the third and gave it to the richest servant, throwing the talentless one out to gnash his teeth.

After the Sunday swim we were press-ganged into volunteering at the Kelso Triathalon, Kim and I spend Sunday afternoon in the rain with a stopwatch and sodden paper attempting to work out as runners passed the almost invisible finish line breathless and grimacing or scowling, which was their tattoo and which was their race number written in pen on a random body part. We took shelter under the Herbalife tent (the logo looked like cannabis so I can understand why their products were so popular) with the chap who services the fire extinguishers from our airfield and a thin Aberdeenshire chappie who munched the Herbalife chocolate bars continually and knows one of our microlighting chums – what a small world it is sheltering under a tent waiting for another scowl from a tri-athelete. There were a couple of accidents to liven up the event, one in which two cyclists were too busy getting on and off their pedals that they collided and the girl had to be taken by ambulance to the local hospital which, in this new improved NHS, simply suggests they go to the main hospital. We thawed out with any remaining gutbusters and polished off various Chinese foodstuffs and cider and wine (not in the same glass but it wouldn’t have made any difference).

My animals are now working together – Flora uses her horn to unclip the electric fence and the sheep throw themselves at it to knock it down then they all (cow, horse and sheep) eat the grass that has grown around it before making escape up the wall to rape locust like any foliage around. It took a good hour with our log man to unravel the electric fence with Flora listening patiently to our plans to reerect it and with Roo following me around and rubbing his head on my shoulder to slow down fence erection.

Stuart and Steph returned from an action packed trip to Sicily, crashing the hired car and romping up to a crater of Mount Etna, mud bathing on Vulcano and a night in the Yotel at Gatwick. Sicily sounds a fabulous place to visit with great wine and pleasant towns and Greek temples.

I spotted it in the Scotsman along with lots of other nostalgia loving adults if the queue at the Pleasance for Trumptonshire Tales with Brian Cant was anything to go by. A delicious lunch first at David Bann’s extraordinary vegetarian restaurant with a yummy espresso cocktail, then an hour an a half of pure joy as Brian Cant and Phil Jupitus give a talk show, performance and showings from Camberwick Green, including Windy Millar drinking cider to excess, Trumpton and Chigley.

Paused to pick up a map of Sicily for Stuart, gazed in awe at the naked woman wearing a billboard reading ‘Locked Out Of The Art College’ then it was battling Edinburgh traffic to visit the splendid Richard Long exhibtion at the Modern Art Gallery. With River Forth mud splattered on walls. photos of previous walks and nature sculptures, and an impressive amount of granite in rectangles and circles and crosses we ambled gently through the exhibit, before emerging to the landform in green which looks remarkably like TellyTubby Land (as a mother and her kids had noticed) – so from Trumptonshire to Tellytubbyland all in one afternoon.

To complete the childish experience we visited Debbie who has given birth to the wonderful Dulcie and wet the baby’s head with a nice bottle of bubbly, toured Simon’s impressive new Latvian wood office. Dropped into the Allanton Inn, unsurprisingly at Allanton, but no space for dinner, however, in true Windy Miller fashion I polished off a pint of cloudy cider and picked up a leaflet on the food we weren’t having before falling asleep in the car on the way back, missing the Coldstream Civic week highlights.

The weekend panned out with gutbusting being delayed due to Dez enjoying a long lie in, followed by a clifftop walk at St Abbs – originally the plan was to walk to Fast Castle but our second car pickup fell through. It was bracing with great geological formations and we escaped the rain which typically arrived when we planned to fly. We returned via hte Indian in Jedburgh which following hte morning trend of noone turning up – all the Indian staff were outside as the boss had not turned up. We had a welcome pint in the Spreadeagle Hotel and sniffed around the NightJar which was also closed before toddling down the high street to see the Indians had managed to be let in to allow us to enjoy their tempting fare.

Sunday was the Curling Club car treasure hunt and in child mode again we romped around the Borders with a set of obscure and ambiguous clues. Apart from missing out filling in 10 points of questions (which we did rather well in when they let us do it) 5 of us in the All Road managed to navigate and find each of the tasks and returned to win the welcoming prize of a bottle of wine for each of us, although we came close to divorce at one point. We stayed up to drink the prize and watch the meteors (of which there was somewhat less than the advertised 100 meteors per hour). Not too sure what all the wine has done for my blood cholesterol tests but the phlebotomist took her sample the next day.