Whisky

The Scot's Parliament recess is just over. Not as you might think a holiday for Members of Parliament - if only! Rather an opportunity to catch up with things you don’t get time for when you’re stuck in Edinburgh three or four days a week.

So it was a very great pleasure to visit Macduff Distillery. I hadn’t realised that the Deveron brand is one of Scotland’s top export malts. And yet, apart from Duff House in Banff, we can’t buy it in local shops!

The power of the supermarkets has long been a concern of mine and of many local businesses. Our fine products struggle to get shelf space while bland food trains a new generation of palates to accept the mediocre and cheap. And it’s not just whisky I worry about.

But at least some Scottish residents taste Macduff Distillery’s products. The waste from the brewing process goes to make animal and farm fish food. The latter appeals to me greatly as it displaces fish meal in farmed salmon diets.

And much current fish meal is produced from industrial fishing in the North Sea. Many of our fishermen tell me that the, mainly Danish, industrial fishing industry is fast removing the food upon which white fish depend. So our distillery is doing its bit for cod stocks as well as generating vast sums of excise duty for the London Exchequer.

Flooding

The weather in recent weeks has been ‘weet’. And my various trips up onto the roof of my house in Whitehills seem to be paying off. No further ingress of water - so far!

A long-running issue of flooding in Cruden Bay also seems - fingers crossed - to be moving to a conclusion. A culvert there has failed to take sufficient water away and flooding of a new housing estate has been the result. When I was there over the summer I had to hold a street surgery with the two dozen or so folk who turned up to see me. Our caravan just wasn’t big enough. Thank goodness it was a warm sunny day.

A complicating factor in getting this problem solved has been a recent change in the regulations. Previously culverts had to carry away water and fail only once every 50 years. But global warming is catching up with us and the standard has been uprated.

Funny how we all know that we’ll pay in winter for a warm summer. But it’s taken more than a few phone calls from me to get this one moving so maybe the obvious isn't always to everyone.