The marching season

Two years ago I completed the rebuilding of my family home. On the day we moved in, I took my little son up to the top of Cnoc Si (the Fairy Mountain), which overlooks us and which, as Percy French once wrote, sweeps down to the sea like a long leather skirt on a short fat lady (OK, I added that last bit myself). There I sat down and wrote letters to both my parents, who have been dead for over ten years. I told them what I had done, how happy and fulfilled I felt that …