I’ve over the last months admitted to and even riffed upon elegiac moments as house viewing’s spasmodically occurred with all their ritualised preening and presentation. To have thought that this hard land, house and scattered people would not be our daily outlook dressed in the dying colours of autumn had an unbearable and yet decorated sadness.

The closing in of the definitive sale is more visceral and brutal than I had imagined. Yes, in the balance of things, in our own rationale, I think we are right in what we are doing. But the sense of uprooting and somehow betrayal, along with the slogistics of moving all our gear across post-Brexit borders and migratory distances is at times hallucinatory.

There was a recent Lidl middle class comedie in the Brit broadsheets: middle aisle man buying the kit at cut prices that he hoped would reflect the man he would be than was.

Here, somehow, in this world of massive land abandonment, where the terra (earth/soil) was always too bassa (low/terraced/poor/backbreaking) our tiny efforts at reclamation and honouring those who sharecropped this angular, unforgiving land before us earned me the local monicker of ‘il contadino scozzese’.

That literally would be ‘the Scottish peasant’ of which I am neither ( although within terms of reference would be happy to be both.). But rather than a buffoonish condemnation or condescension I like to think it is a mark of respect in this rapidly changing world where at least, here, the old ways still echo, ache and hold some attention.

How much harder must it be for the tenant farmer to quit land or be pushed out. We are leaving under our recognisance for pastures new.

Ceteris paribus, as they used to say in ‘A’ level Economics, (all being equal) we will be gone by the end of February. How weird is that?