My local Golf Club

[Glesgalass]

Re: My local Golf Club

It hasn't stopped raining for 48 hours here. Sandy, you don't really get rain like this very often in Scotland. It's just a steady downpour which occasionally eases off a little bit. You should see the parrots on my verandah at the moment. They think they live here when it's raining. They're all lined up on the verandah rail drookit. It looks funny because they look so sad as if to say, let me inside :-)

Elda

[Euan]

Re: My local Golf Club

Ranald, this poem comes to mind during these times.

My Country

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!

A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die -
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back threefold -
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land -
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand -
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

Dorothea Mackellar

[Ranald]

Re: My local Golf Club

Euan, that seems to sum things up ......

As I used to say to visitors who were commenting on the weather....'If you don't like the weather in Scotland.... wait a minute' !!

Ranald