Bridget & Art's Home Page

Description

Ours is a traditional home dating back about 200 years ago (but with all "mod cons"), with 2 double bedrooms, bathroom, dine-in kitchen, lounge, utility room, and a beautiful secluded walled-in garden. The famous author, JM Barrie (Peter Pan, etc) lived here as a boy. There is a large, open, wood-burning fireplace in the lounge and the house retains many other original features, such as shutters in all the windows upstairs and mosaic tiled floor in the front hallway. And best of all, the garden is in full bloom in Summer so we can enjoy all the roses, lupins, poppies, etc as well as cook our meals using fresh picked produce from our vegetable plots and herb garden. The garden is good sized, with a large stone patio and is very quiet and secluded as it is raised up from the street level and surrounded by a tall stone wall. The top of Castle Hill, which once was the site of King Malcolm Canmore's castle in the 11^th century and Robert the Bruce's in the 14^th century, can be seen from the patio and we're convinced that some of the large stones built into our wall originally came from the castle itself.

Limepots Cottage

The Garden - North Side

Forfar is a traditional farming town (population 13,500) with plenty of shops and a couple of big grocery stores in addition to all the local shops like ironmongers (the best shop in the world - like something out of the last century) butchers, fishmongers, bakeries, etc. There is a small loch right in the middle of town on which a sailing club has races every week and there is a really nice nature walk around the loch (3 miles) with hides to watch the waterfowl, etc. In the summer cricket matches are played at the Strathmore Cricket Club on the lochside, and admission is free.

We emigrated here from the USA in 1994 and were lucky enough to find Limepots Cottage up for sale in March, 1997 and moved to Forfar from Broughty Ferry, near Dundee.

Art is still at the School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee and stays very busy making compounds, one of which hopefully will be key to the cure of sleeping sickness some day. Bridget resigned in July 2004 after working for over 7 years at Tayside Centre for General Practice as the Postgraduate Unit Administrator, to see what else life had in store. It turned out for the best as she was able to spend what turned out to be our last summer with Arran. After 12 1/2 happy years with us as the best dog anyone could hope for, Arran got ill in November 2004 and in the end, left us on the 6th of December. We miss her terribly. Here is one of her classic ploys, trying to steal Art's beer from him on a warm summer's day in her garden, and this is how we want to remember her.

After a couple very quiet months (Bridget was going around the house telling no one in particular that she was "just going to the store" or "I'll be outside for a bit"!!) we found a new puppy, who we named Brora, after Arran's favourite camping spot up in the Highlands. Brora is part Border Terrier and part Papillion (and we think part cat - you'll see why in the photos below). It has now been more than 6 years since she has been with us, and although there are still (many) trying times, she has settled down a bit and we wouldn't be without her.

In between all this upheaval, not one to stay in one place for long (i.e. lounging in the garden), Bridget started work at our local doctor's surgery, Academy Medical Centre, first on a consultancy basis to design and set up their website (which is www.academymedicalcentre.co.uk if you want to have a look however I've now had to outsource it's maintenance as the practice doesn't have up to date web editing software) and help out with various, sometimes more complex, admin duties. This was in September 2004, and by Christmas 2004, the then Practice Manager asked her to stay on as a "real" employee. The work is okay, and she only works half-days so as to hang out with Brora every afternoon - and make Art's tea for him (ha ha!). However, in another twist to the story, when the practice website was outsourced, the company it was outsourced to offered me a job helping them to maintain the 100s of websites they cover, which of course includes the practice's. This means that the Practice Manager is paying Internet-GP to pay me to maintain the practice website - how's that for devine justice! So I now spend my afternoons updating websites, which is what I really wanted to do from the start when I quit TCGP. My bosses at Internet-GP are wonderful - even sent me a bottle of (real) champagne and truffles for Christmas.

Well that's our story up to date for the present. I also started our first blog - about our garden and growing our own fruit and veg. Here's the link: blog.artandbridget.com. Unfortunately I've been a bit lazy about keeping it up to date from last season, but perhaps if I get organised enough, I'll do better this year. What with 2 jobs though, it might be a bit ambitious of me!

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