If you cannot bring Good News then don't bring any

So, here we are, North of the Border, or rather West of it because if you travel due east from here through Gretna and out the other side you'll be back in England again. That's England in the picture, across the Solway Firth. Berwick-upon-Tweed is about 80 miles to the North of where we live now, but this is Scotland, alright. 

The day we arrived our furniture was still in Sheffield. We couldn't work out how to put the central heating on, there were no firelighters to get the log burner going even if we were capable of doing it and the gas fire doesn't ignite, so it was a cold 'un. I had to admire Petal's quick decision, when we went for an early night on a couple of airbeds, to assign the one that had gone flat to me. Consequently, I spent the night on the floor. As if that wasn't uncomfortable enough, when I did finally get to sleep I was awakened by cats sitting on my feet. They had been such heroes on the journey up that we'd decided to let them roam about a bit on their first night, so they spent it scratching the carpets and walking all over us. 

Next day, though, we solved the heating conundrum, all our stuff arrived and to look at the place now you'd think we had been here ages. Two guys came today and took away the washing machine and dishwasher that had been left behind and everything is shipshape.

Annan has a population of under 9000 and our particular hamlet consists of about 50 or 60 houses and a couple of farms. So far I've met 4 sets of neighbours, only one of whom is Scottish. The others come from Lancashire, so it's not so much Little England as Little Ramsbottom. Places like Burnley and Blackburn are only about 90 minutes away down the M6. John across the road says "We have our own community here." He is a nice guy, as are all the other people we've spoken to, but I don't want to live in an English enclave. I came to Scotland with the intention of assimilating with the Scots. 

I have always been partial to the smell of cow muck and there is a lot of it about; much healthier than the exhaust fumes we've been breathing in for the last 60 years. 

The local folk in town have a lovely accent, as soft as the water; we sound as rough as old boots in comparison and I'd like some of those sharp edges to wear away. I expect living in the countryside to make me a nicer person so I don't want to sound like someone off Emmerdale, the Yorkshire village where 50% of the population are robbers/swindlers/murderers or whatever it is they get up to there nowadays. Even the teenagers smoking fags outside school smiled at us and said Hello. I stepped off the pavement to let a man pass; in Sheffield I'd have expected to be ignored at best, punched in the mouth at second best, stabbed or shot at worst, but here he said "Thank you." 

There are a lot of empty and derelict buildings around town. In the middle of the 19th century Annan had almost as many citizens as Dumfries, but times have obviously been hard lately. The fish paste company that provided a lot of employment closed down earlier this year, the harbour is deserted and the Chapelcross nuclear power station was decommissioned in the last decade; not that I consider that to be detrimental in the slightest, obviously. To the best of my knowledge Chapelcross, together with its contemporary Calder Hall in Cumberland, never produced a watt of electricity. Their sole function was to produce plutonium to be used in nuclear weapons.*

Here are some pictures, taken today on the walk into town and in Annan itself.

* A better-informed person tells me that Calder Hall also produced radioactive cobalt for use in cancer treatment, as well as a relatively small amount of electricity. I stand corrected. Chapelcross also provided electricity for the grid after a few years. What's significant, though, is that the power provided was a useful spin off from the manufacture of plutonium, rather than vice versa.