Scaffies, zulus and fifies!

To those of you from Brechin who have reconnected, no- "Scaffies" don't refer to the rubbish collectors! They are all types of traditional boat though as far as I could make out there was only one Zulu at the Portsoy Traditional Boat Festival.

A great event- boats, music and traditional crafts all on display and all for an entrance fee of a fiver ( though I think my chemotherapy journey accounts for the fact that the girl selling the tickets insisted I was an OAP concession. Ach well- maybe I'm older than I think). There are two boats of note in the photo and both are "Fifies". The green one in the front of the harbour wall is the Swan which sailed to Portsoy from Shetland. The sails of the other behind the Swan is the Reaper- a 70 foot fifie which is also part of the Scottish Fisheries Museum at Anstruther in Fife. ( By sheer coincidence I've just been watching Coast and there was Reaper sailing up the Fife coast!) You can judge how large the sails are by comparing them with the folk in the photo. Don't miss the festival next year if you are "in to" traditional boats.

But as well as the enjoyment of seeing the boats, it was also reassuring that I was able to go there at all and to do so on my own. Yes, Elspeth let me out to play on my own though the cost was regular texts home to let her know I was OK! But this is my drug free week( apart from my warfarin and diabetes, so was feeling quite well though it was a bit tiring. But given that on Thursday I drove to Perth, had four meetings and then drove another 150 or so miles to Portsoy all in the one day then that was pretty good by my standards. For those others on lenalidomide/revlimid I hope its reassuring that I'm still able to do things like this. I had also planned to go to a vintage tractor rally ( do you get the impression I'm maybe born into the wrong time?)near Portsoy on the Sunday but heavy rain meant that was cancelled.

For those of you who saw the article in the Scotsman last week- no I didn't say that all myeloma patients looked healthy and overweight. What I did say though was that some of us- a wee group at Edinburgh- tend to look healthy, we are a bit overweight( I'd like to get off the steroids) and have difficulty convincing some folks we are actually a little bit ill. Since my kids now know, I can tell you that I've been told that I can expect to have optimistically a year or 18 months left. So I'll keep the blog going as long as I can and as long as folks are interested- we've now had over 1600 unique visitors and I've had some nice comments from folk.

Right - off to dream about old boats and tractors whilst still waiting on the final bit of my solar panel system!