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The snow round the house is knee deep and the icicles in some of the windows now join top to bottom. It feels as though the whole house would be encased in a fortnight if this were to carry on. I have put some pictures on our flickr page. Conditions on the mountain are the best anyone can remember, with 33 runs open, deep fresh snow and blue skies (yesterday at any rate) and as yet none of that horrible noise I remember from my childhood of skis graunching on refrozen pistebasher tracks. It’s making it very difficult to get on with admin and invoicing and tax returns when the hill is so tempting.

If anyone fancies a last minute holiday and doesn’t mind having to leave their car at the bottom of the drive (50 yards away) or the possibility that (at minus 22 last night) some of the pipes might stop working, Inshriach is available between the 25th January and the 5th February. There is a solid week of skiing in there but I would recommend avoiding the weekends when the hill becomes something of a madhouse.

Has anyone seen a piece in this month’s Conde Nast Traveller? I haven’t found a copy in Aviemore but I’m pretty sure we are in it somewhere.

To everyone who made it to Aviemore this festive season and especially to those who joined us both for a fabulous week in the house and for an almighty party in the barn. Aviemore has been heaving all week, with musical evenings in both Ord Ban and the Old Bridge Inn, from whence the John Langan band first footed us and took us through to the small hours. The hill has been packed with skiers, the snow conditions are the best for years and the forecast predicts little change over the next few weeks.

There have been the predictable repercussions of life below zero. It hit minus 18 last night and hardly scraped above minus 5 during the day, the sledging here has been brilliant, not all the bathrooms have worked all of the time, the farm flat burst some pipes and flooded the garage and every day has included time spent digging and towing out cars. With our next booking 10 days away there are still 9 folk who say that its safer to stay on than to try the roads and who I suspect will remain cautious as long as the food and whisky keep flowing.

The article from last weeks Sunday Telegraph is now available to view online here complete with snowy wintery picture. It looks like this again today after a decent dump of snow last night.

The brilliant Kirsty came up from Glasgow and rattled off a dozen haircuts at Inshriach in time for the Old Bridge Inn launch party last night. Alasdair Roberts, The French Wives and Washington Irving played followed by a fireside jam between Roberts, Ali Caplin and some whisky chasers. May this be the first of many musical evenings at the Bridge.

We have a few dates for next year. The National Park are supporting a spoon carving workshop here the last weekend of February, no doubt the skills required for coppicing and carving birch and burr to make spoons can be transferred to other objects. The next Yurt course is the 8th March and we are looking again at rolling out some really beautifully appointed yurts in scenic corners of the estate over the course of next year.

There is another oddity nestling in the landscape at Inshriach. Whipped up from bits of discarded house and other assorted salvage, this stile now crosses the fence by the march pool, joining the japanese bridge to nowhere, the stage in the woods and the medieval spiky stile to the squash court in the list of (I think) artfully formed and quirkily over engineered objects performing tasks that could be accomplished much more simply.

For those of you that know the March pool you can see the rise in water level behind the stile. Compared with Cockermouth we get off lightly but this week our fields are flooded, the livestock moved to high ground and for the third time this year the Spey is powering through a good 5 feet above its normal level. Snow is starting to settle on top of the Cairngorms, there is talk of the hill opening at the start of December and we are buckling down for winter, draining, burying and lagging pipes and stocking up on wood and heating oil.

We have a few weeks between bookings so have implemented some improvements. The first and most obvious is ditching the third sink in the kitchen in favour of this beautiful cooker, good for rentals, good for the destination dining club we have planned and I can’t wait to see the merry dance of Aga and Kenwood in the hands of Big Al (the chef).

There is also now a shower in Mrs. Black’s bathroom. We are gradually ticking off the list of trappings you traded in Sally Shalam’s Guardian review.