Oh dear, here we are in November and never a post for months!  The season always seems to get away with us as it trundles on and suddenly we're coming up to Christmas and New Year;  but a super November for once has meant that more brave people than usual have ventured down and overall we've had a great season.

In our jewellery workshop next to the cottages we have surprised everyone by deciding to shut our shop,  Not to retire, as some suggest, but because we are just so busy with the manufacturing side of the business.  So a mammoth sale has been going on for the last two weeks with lots of very happy people getting terrific value Christmas presents. Mike especially will miss the chat and the shop, but he'll always have you poor people in the cottages to pass the time of day with.  Be warned!

The chicks that hatched in the summer are now whizzing around in a very bossy manner and we STILL can't decide if they're hens or cocks. But being softies we'll just go on letting them potter around the garden. 

We have put up the prices only very slightly for next year.  Yes, we KNOW that there is virtually no inflation, but we always put up wages every year and that accounts for quite a lot of our outlay.  And we do try and maintain the cottages well - new curtains, new settees, and a bit of decorating have all been on the agenda. We have also had to upgrade the Wifi as we find that with so many gadgets arriving at the cottages these days it has been getting quite overloaded.  Hopefully the problem is now solved.  Mike and I are spectacularly bad at understanding these things, but we have the wonderful Sandy to hand who loves grovelling in the attic and sorting things out.  

Well, time to go and welcome a poor couple who seem to have taken about 7 hours to get here - facing the back road in the dark for the first time is a bit of an ordeal. (although with the help of the electricity project at Crossaig the back road is considerably imroved with many more lay bys) . More of that anon as they haul huge undersea cables from Kintyre to Hunterston.  Could be exciting!