Doors Open Day

DOD continues to surprise me, usually in relation to things I thought I knew.

I saw inside the City Chambers for the first time: the 10 storey staircase, the view over Princes Street, the gaudy gifts presented by visitors and twinned towns. They have a great statue outside, of Alexander and Bucephalus, which is public, but I don't usually have a reason to pause there.Of course, the subject is reason winning over animal passions (the horse was afraid of its own shadow). No chance of a moral lesson will be passed up.

Best interior of the day was the Royal College of Physicians. Their main hall contains columns that are masterpieces of the decorator's art, made to resemble Sienna marble, and so good that they are probably worth more than the real thing. Two beautiful libraries too, filled with leather-bound volumes with titles that I could spend all day browsing through (The Atlas of Skin Diseases, anyone?).

Old job, new job

My current job is the sort where you can be very busy for a bit, then have nothing to do. For the last couple of weeks, things have been very thin, and I've been writing some training documents. As an ex-tech writer, this should be right up my street of course. To be honest though, the experience has made me glad that I (mostly) do something else now. Although I got some vague satisfaction from tracking down that comma splice, or systematically eliminating all passive verbs, my main feeling was of boredom. I mean, who's going to read this stuff anyway?

And today, I got to do some programming, which felt like a delight.

Dragonfly

Seen during my lunchtime walk on Friday. And just for once, I had a camera with me. And just for once, it settled on a tree trunk to have its picture taken. It seems to be a male common aeshna (Aeshna juncea). The female have dull green spots instead of blue.

xkcd hits the mark again

This is so true.

Weasels, painting, walking

I'm currently enjoying The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, which manages to get some reasonably serious musings on our globalised world and why people work in it. I was thinking about Alain de B's photo essay on tuna fish and the interconnectedness of our world while drinking weasel coffee at work. Myself and two colleagues chipped in to buy it. So, in short, small Vietnamese mammals vomitted so that some statisticians in Midlothian could muck about and avoid finishing that analysis plan.

I actually bought the book for quite another reason, as I know the painter profiled in it. It seems a fair write up, and it's good to see an intelligent commentary on painting.

And rather oddly I know somebody else who has a book out. Step forward Craig, whose book The Weekend Fix is being published by Sandstone Press. It's based on his hillwalking experiences. I don't figure by name apparently, but I may be some kind of presiding spirit.

I know, it's been ages

Since my last post, I've moved house, waited for BT to connect my phone, called them to ask why they didn't do it, waited again for the second order to be filled, contacted my ISP to transfer to the new number, and phoned them again to ask why they hadn't done anything. I'm hoping that I will have home internet in a few days.

I am enjoying the view from my new flat though.

Why not?

I'm quite a fan of RSS feeds these days. They are great for getting rid of some of the more "creative" (i.e. hideous and useless) features of web pages. I was just looking at some cinema sites to see what's on and none of them have an RRS feed for this. It seems such an obvious thing to do.

Warmer

Another fun weekend, but of a different sort. Rog can't visit Scotland without a high pressure system getting lonely and following him north, so we had wall-to-wall sunshine. We packed quite a lot of different things in, but one of my best pictures was taken on Calton Hill while we waited for the marathon to start.
I do need reminded sometimes that I live somewhere nice. We didn't envy the runners in Sunday's heat.

Wet but worthwhile

I thought I might manage to get a walk in last weekend, but it turned into a proper staying-overnight-and-getting-wet trip to the West Highlands.

Saturday started with a heroic attempt to avoid activity by dossing around Fort William in the rain. At one point, we were even procrastinating about whether we were procrastinating. The rest of the weekend could easily have vanished in a hedonistic frenzy of tea drinking, laughing at souvenir shops, and leafing through climbing guides in Nevisport. Yet somehow the afternoon saw us climbing a hill in the rain. There was no view to speak of, but once we came down the weather was clearing a little. The best part of the day was walking in to a bothy in evening sunlight, with a view of Eigg in the distance.

It's a while since I had a dose of bothy atmosphere, so this was very welcome.

And the situation is lovely:
The canoes weren't ours, but they make a nice picture.

Goodbye Paddy

I feel very sad about the demise of Paddy's Market. It always felt like a bit of the middle ages that had been forgotten about. And now it is no more, to be replaced by 'craft stalls', for fuck's sake.

Maybe I should just be grateful that I experienced something as visceral and unconsumerist in my lifetime.

Day out

I think this is wild thyme. Wild mountain thyme, in fact. It was near the summit of Ben Bhuidhe, which I climbed on Sunday. The man who makes Fyne Ales gave me a lift up the glen a bit, which makes him a nice man and you should buy his beer.

I'm hungry now

About a year ago, there were various reports in the media of a report from the World Cancer Research Fund that claimed cooked meats raised your risk of bowel cancer. On reading this, of course, my cynicism circuits kicked in and I started searching for the flaw that is usually present in such reports. But I couldn't find one. So maybe I should give up Lorne sausage; a depressing thought. However, David Coloquon has excelled himself with an article about randomised controlled trials, and why dead pig wrapped in bread probably won't kill you.

Teaching the Professor

I think most of us have books that we turn to for some dependable entertainment, no matter how many times we've read them. One of mine bears the unlikely title of More Humorous Tales From 'Blackwood'. Blackwoods was a well-known magazine, that was published in Edinburgh between 1817 and 1980. Known colloquially as Maga, it flourished particularly in the era when the British Empire was still a political fact. I bought the book in a second hand book shop in York for 50p in (I think) 1978, and learned an enormous amount from it.

Despite being a fairly precocious ten-year-old reader, I did find it heavy going in places. Some of the lighter pieces went down easily enough (building a house in Barbados; tales of 'My Uncle' -- an eccentric inventor), but despite the humorous theme, some others defeated me. Take Two-Blocked, from 1953, a bewilderingly dull (to my 10 year old self) account of a naval exercise. Returning to the book years later, I realised that it was by Geoffrey Willans (author of Molesworth), and was a rather well-written piece that had a lot to say about post-war Britain trying to thrash out a new relationship with America (the exercise was a joint RN-USN one). Indeed many of the tales (and they are Tales, please note) speak, more or less directly, about the war and about Britain's transition to ex-empire.

Over the years, the collection has stayed fresh, with some over-familiar friends dying away, and previously ignored tales gaining new life. Teaching the Professor is one such. This seemingly slight account of a drive across north Africa in 1943 is one of my favorites. The narrator of the story and the Professor of the title are army officers who need to be in Cairo, but are in Algiers. They make the journey in a thirty-cwt truck, which they christen 'Pinafore'. The Professor really was a professor before the war, and is ferociously erudite, but has trouble with things like making tea, and coping with those who do not match his own high levels of ability. To alleviate the boredom of a fortnight's drive, they agree that whichever of them is not driving should educate the other. It's easy for the Prof., who holds forth about classical history, art, and literature, and can even use the territory of Carthage as an illustration when they pass through it. The narrator has more trouble thinking of a theme, until he discovers that the Professor cannot ride, and so instructs him on hunting, horses, managing hounds and other buccolic English pursuits as they traverse battlefields and amphitheatres.

Over the years, I have often wondered who the Professor really was. Only today did it occur to me to search for him on the internet. Within a minute, I had discovered that he was Enoch Powell. Teaching the Professor was written by Michael Strachan, whose obituary is here.

Ballardian

I heard about the death of J.G. Ballard when my radio alarm came on this morning. As it wasn't a school day, I lay for a while and drifted in and out of sleep, not really sure what had happened. I think he might have liked that.

The Borders

I've never quite understood the romance and mystique surrounding the Scottish Borders. Recently though, I may have been beginning to see the point.

Today was an Edinburgh local holiday and in a fairly random way, I decide to go to Dryburgh Abbey. So it's on to the bus and down the A68 to St Boswell. I walk down to the Tweed and follow it upstream for a mile or so. It's a stupidly pretty spring day. The sun is out, but it's early enough in the year not to be too stuffy. The woods are full of wild garlic, which I can smell if I step on any of the leaves. Small birds are twittering, a swan is being graceful on the river, fishermen are wading, and it wouldn't surprise me if I started singing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.

On getting to the little foot bridge where I cross the river, there is an Arcadian style temple on the hillock on the other side.

Somebody's been doing odd things to the landscape: I love this kind of stuff. It's a Temple of the Muses, to the memory of the poet James Thomson, erected by the Earl of Buchan, who was keen on making this area a kind of open-air monument to Scotland's past. In fact, a Temple of Caledonian Fame. The Earl was also keen to preserve (and perhaps to "improve") Dryburgh Abbey itself, which is where I go next.

Dryburgh is a ruin, but a really interesting one. It has some of the best preserved medieval paintwork in Britain (don't get excited, it's just smudgy marks really), and has wonderful trees round it (some of them thanks to the earl again). Also there are the burial places of Walter Scott and Douglas Haig. Haig's gravestone is of the standard World War 1 design.

I have a nice lunch, during which I eavesdrop on a couple sitting next to me. What are they up to? The woman gets jumpy when she thinks she recognises somebody else coming in. It's tempting to stay and see what their assignation is about, but I head off for another part of the yer man's hall of fame. It's a 10m high statue of William Wallace, looking across at the Eildon hills.

It's a pity that somebody has tried to colour in the shield in that rather half-hearted way. Somebody should do a study of bad art inspired by Wallace.

So there we are, a day out full of quirky stuff in the Borders. I'll have to go again.

Mental

I'm enjoying Matter at the moment. Banksie has revisited ship naming, of which he is a master. I particularly liked the Ned-speak Pure Big Mad Boat Man.

Fife coastal walk: 6

This stage doesn't start out as much of a coastal walk, thanks to RAF Leuchars. The first task is to walk past the neatly fenced military quarters, bringing you up in front of St Athernase Church. That's genuine Norman blind arcading, that is.


If I'd known I'd have lingered longer, but I was itching to stretch my legs. After some slightly confusing signposting, I found myself walking across country rather like Suffolk, where I lived for some years. I say this because it was flat heathland with pine trees and sand dunes in the distance. And it was sunnier than Scotland in March usually is.

After walking past more perimeter fence of RAF Leuchars, I finally got on to Tentsmuir beach, and very fine it is too. There is a sense of space here that is utterly different from anything else on this already very varied walk round Fife. The military theme was never very far away though, as I could hear gunfire and occasional explosion during most of the walk. This came from the firing range at Buddon Ness, which is only a few miles away to the North across the Tay.


I settled into a steady pace, and headed North, passing the odd figure on the huge expanse of sand. After a bit, there was a somewhat greater concentration of people, clustered around the one access road that leads to the sea. I found this relative crowd quite heartening: it all seemed very British in its determination to enjoy the North Sea in March.

I thought the beach section would be the slow part of the day, but it passed fairly easily (I'm talking subjective time here--you know how some bits walk themselves and others drag). It wasn't long before I was watching some seals lazing around on Abertay Sands. There's an awful lot of sand in this corner of Fife. In fact, this section of coast is growing at a healthy rate. I cut across the dunes and came across more tank traps. It turns out these were constructed on the high tide line by Polish forces in 1941. The sea is to the left in the photo below.


By this time I had turned my final corner. As at Fife Ness, the vista swings round and we're on the Tay. All that walking on sand had taken it out of me though, and the section round to Tayport felt like a real task. Also, my idea of cutting across the mudflats was not a very good one. But there we are, all the best walks should have an ill-considered section.

Let's end with more bridges.


From Newport-on-Tay I caught a bus into Dundee and refreshed myself with Irn Bru, then caught a train home. I realized that, oddly, I'd never been on the Tay Bridge before. From the train, you can see the piers of the original bridge (the one that memorably blew down in 1879) poking out of the water.

Fife coastal walk: 5

Partly because of the amount of golf on this stage of the walk, and partly because of the indifferent weather, I didn't take many pictures of landscape. So I thought that this time we'd do some nature study instead of a travelogue.

I've always loved lichens. That sounds a bit sinister, but they are odd things: not-quite-plants that change and soften the appearance of a lot of objects in the landscape. I've no idea what species these ones are, but they form a fantasy landscape of their own.

I can't remember ever seeing fungi like this before. If anybody knows what kind it is, let me know.

I do know that these are winter aconites, and very pretty they look too.

The Buddo rock looks incongrous and Dali-esque. Lapsed climbers like me will enjoy doing a bit of back and foot to reach the top via the cleft that runs through the rock. Pity it's full of bird shit.
All the pictures were taken between Kingsbarns and St Andrews. Next time, Tentsmuir Forest.

Signs and portents

This morning a heron flew past our office with a frog in its beak. The frog didn't seem happy with how things were going, and the heron couldn't seem to find anywhere to settle down and eat the frog.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I don't normally do this, mind, but last night I went to see a film based on a comic book. The fact that the work in question is Watchmen made the decison much easier. It's pretty good. Zac Snyder (he of the visually interesting but silly 300) has put in a good effort and has managed to translate a lot of the long and complex original to the screen. In fact, over-faithfulness may be the main failing here. Many shots follow the original virtually frame by frame, which may please obsessive fan boys, but one suspects it may not get to the nub of what the whole piece is about. There is a lot to like though, including a brilliant opening montage sequence which covers forty or so years of alternative history, Kennedy assassination, moon landing and all. A small blow for male nudity on screen is struck by the inclusion of Dr Manhattan's cock (blue and glowing, of course). Perhaps inevitably, there are too many Hollywood conventions, including slow motion fight sequences, which tend to glamourise the protagonists too much. They are meant to be morally ambiguous misfits and losers, remember?

But don't listen to me. Check out what young Jimmy Critic says!