Moving on

A pretty cold miserable day and raining until very late afternoon when it eventually cleared. So today I'm just going with a shot purely for the record. We moved here about 17 years ago and our immediate neighbour, as in "just the other side of the wall" was an old lady, a widow, who had had a very interesting life overseas. On one occassion she invited us round for sherry. You can tell I'm an old codger because I actually like sherry - though not the sickly sweet varieties. Although the conversation covered a lot of ground it transpired that what she really wanted to know was: had we seen/heard/sensed the ghost. She said that when she was sitting in the room we were in she often sensed, rather than saw, the presence of a spirit walking through the corridor behind her into our part of the house - now completely separate. But all one house when built around 1840. The area was called "The Camp" and after the Battle of Culloden there had been a camp for the government soldiers and a steading. We are obviously a pretty insensitive couple and had to say we had never sensed it. The old lady died a few years later and about the same time we were at a meal with several other people when a youngish lady, finding out where we lived, asked if we had seen the ghost. It turned out she was a friend of the daughter of the previous occupants of our house and had sometimes stayed the night. And she had seen the ghost - a soldier. Anyway after the old lady died her flat was lived in by a couple who have been our neighbours for several years. They have a small daughter and will soon have another child. So today they are moving to a bigger eco-house. The van is packed although the two people in the picture are with the van and not our neighbours. They're off to a new life. And tomorrow we will have new neighbours.