We weren't blethering. More yapping like.

I decided to slip into the courtroom this morning while visiting Elgin. The judge was scratching his wig, so that it shifted back and forth over his forehead, finally resting over one eyebrow.

The solicitor asked the young woman on the witness stand, "If you were sitting in the back in the middle, how do you know Ms. Duncan put her right indicator on? Could you see it?"

"No, but I heard it."

"You heard it? It was that quiet in the car?"

"Aye. We weren't blethering."

"Five girls in the car and no one was blethering?"

"No.... We were more yapping like."
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This afternoon, my third cousin and I drove up to Fordyce, an official historic village (meaning, it looks just like it did when my great grandfather left it), and then to an old fishing village called Portsoy 2 1/2 miles away, where some other ancestors lived.

I made friends with an old fishing boat skipper who said he was the luckiest man in Portsoy...not because he'd met me, but because his three daughters all lived in town with their families and everyone was healthy and happy. He said the only thing he sometimes got sad about was he didn't have a son.

But then he said (and I summarize, because he spoke in a difficult dialect), "If I had a son, I'd be dead now. I'd have gone into debt to buy him a fishing boat, and that would've been right before the fishing industry collapsed. So I'd have lost all my money, my son would have had no job, and I'd be dead of a broken heart. So maybe it's just as well we never had a son."

Farm kids (in Forres, Morayshire, UK)

I couldn't tell at first whether it was an old lady or a little girl; she was running down the country road with her legs all akimbo, chasing a boy on a bicycle. As we drove closer, I saw that it was a little girl with blonde hair. She was wearing men's slippers and carrying a rifle. She looked at us wildly and then stared back at the boy pumping away on the bicycle ahead of us.

My cousin said, "That's not allowed. Kids here aren't even allowed to have plastic guns."

It was kind of odd. I've never seen a rifle that close before.