Sick Leave

01/19/2007

I have been laid low for the past few days with some chesty lurggie. Dearest Dottie has insisted on additional layers of clothes and scarves whilst administering regular medicaments both modern and traditional. Carefully conserved log piles have been recklessly plundered to keep fires blazing day and night. I am certain that the worst is behind me, and although it has been frustrating to lose a few days of desperately needed outdoor work, my enforced incarceration has led to a drastic reduction in the piles of bumf covering the library. Small areas of hand-tooled leather that I have not seen for years have started to appear on the surface of my desk and I have received several startled phone calls in response to curt correspondence, which the guilty recipients must have gratefully assumed to be slowly composting in the splendour of the Tower of Glen Trollaigh. The dogs have been cooped up more than they are used to and through boredom have started to play up, insisting on coiling themselves around my legs as I toil away, generally being a bally nuisance. It is all very well to pat a mutt from time to time; however I prefer the gruff command and the sharp response rather than lap dog antics, although I suppose I must have planted a few whiskery kisses on the odd bitch’s head over the years.

Some of my sick leave has been spent idly surfing websites to see what lies beyond the borders of ancient Glen Trollaigh. I was brought up short by a MySpace site displaying the works of an aspiring photographer of popular musicians, Jonny K Jnr. A large portion of the gallery has been given over to snaps of a person well known to me under his own name, however here he masquerades as a Scandinavian pop idol, Nils Oslen or somesuch. If there is one thing that gets my goat, it is flagrant misrepresentation by a blatant impostor. Yours aye, Archie, The Baron Trollaigh.