She lives in a house, a very big house in the country…

Some of the more observant among you may have noticed a distinct lack of bloggings in recent weeks (or should that be months?). “But what has become of our intrepid Fi Pants?” I hear you cry. Well, since we last spoke, I have upped sticks and relocated to The Middle Of Nowhere, or more precisely, here:




This is *********dale Lodge in the far flung reaches of northern Scotland. And when I say northern, I’m talking just about the same lattitude as Stockholm, St. Petersberg and Oslo. I think. Its not far off the Arctic anyway. And its bloomin cold.

So here I am, its finally happened, I have relocated in order to conduct my fieldwork that's been so long in planning. This basically involves lots of forests, pine martens, poo, mud, dirty fingernails, and for this week only: snow. We’re pretty much snowed in at the moment. We may have to eat the dog if food runs too low. But then again, she’s providing far too much entertainment as a moving target for snowball throwing, so maybe we shouldn't be too hasty.

So who is this “we” of which I speak? Well, I now have two field assistants, or rather, minions, to do my bidding. More than anything, they are two great guys who keep me entertained and in fits of giggles. But most importantly they're here to fetch spiders out of my bedroom. This is them, Daniel (left), and Richard (right):




The character in the middle is Nigella. We made her during a particularly hard day out working in the woods, snowtracking martens. As we couldn’t actually find any pine martens to snow track *ahem*, we turned our attention first to snowball fights, and then to who-can-build-the-biggest-snowball-contest, which naturally progressed to creating her. In the name of equality we thought it only right to build a snowlady (you'd never have guessed we've each got a girlfriend over 200 miles away now would you??).

So pine martens are the main reason we’re here. That’s what its all about. And aren’t they worth it? This is Drew, or rather Female #3 (the other two being Lucy and Cameron). We’ve caught three males so far too (BA, Murdoch, and Face. We’ve yet to find one smoking cigars. Its quite civilised with equal numbers so far, and will do wonders for my stats - don't you just love it when a plan comes together?).




The only down side is that unfortuanately, being “here” means a noticeable absence of television, mobile phone reception, broadband internet connection, and most importantly: pubs (the nearest pub being a whole 8 miles away). Did I mention that I'm also missing my dearest Shezzypants? The reason I haven’t blogged for so long is because BT are useless and even my dial-up almost never happened.

So since living with such technologically primitive isolation we have learned a great many things, the most important being: 1.) that early man spent most of his time inventing narcotics such as alcohol for good reason. 2.) that poached eggs really are the food of Gods, and poaching them to perfection is an artform that too few take time to master. 3.) that peanut butter is the universal bait with which one can trap just about any animal immagineable. 4.) that having a shower only once every 4 days makes having a shower all the more pleasurable. 5.) that Encona hot pepper sauce goes perfectly with every food group known to man. I’m afraid I’ve already forgotten all the more interesting tales to tell of our time here, and it seems we’ve developed a slight preoccupation with food. All we seem to do is talk about, prepare, or eat, food. But as food is one of my favourite preoccupations anyway I can’t complain really.

So that’s that. A short yet dull explanation of my absence to date. I will try to do better at keeping up to date in future, but sometimes, when the highlight of your week is finding a really fresh pine marten scat, these things are probably better left unsaid.