On my way to Mass at West Linton this morning. The view of the town taken from the Moor Road. The lambs are all pretty well out now - most have numbers painted in red dye on their sides. I told one visitor last year that the numbers represented the optimal oven temperature for lamb done medium rare.

There is no West Linton newspaper. There's the Peebleshire - a regional paper - which will give you the local bumpff a week or so late. You'll find a News Agent in the village, however, and it's in the shop itself where you will hear everything: Who's divorcing whom, who has died, who has had twins. Who's been shagging about? Probably not. You might hear that up at the Gordon Arms if you eavesdropped on the sotto voce conversation going on beside you.

Most of the phone calls I get announcing that somebody has died or fallen sick begin with the words 'I was in the News Agent this morning and......'

My fiancee lives in West Linton. We've engaged a 'man with a van' for Friday afternoon to begin the slow process of moving her worldly belongings and those of her son up to the Rectory in Penicuik. Penicuik is not a village - it's a town - which has it's up sides and it's down sides.

In West Linton you don't need to lock your doors or your cars. If you do lock your door it's because the dog knows how to push down the handle. If you forget to lock the door and the dog bolts during the day the neighbour will send her children over to bring the dog home, the children already know where you keep the key and they'll fish it out from under the mat, put the dog in the house, lock up and replace the key. You'll find out about all of this a week later when somebody mentions it to somebody else in the News Agent.