Oh dear

Radio 4's 6.30 comedy spot doesn't get any better. A hilarious programme set in a tourist information centre, anyone?

Bookmarks

I've just purchased some big bookcases to replace various small ones that I've acquired over the years. So last night I had some anoraky fun sorting out my books. Quite a few contained abandoned bookmarks. I've never been one for using proper bookmarks, usually just grabbing any handy piece of paper, so these form a kind of demented summary of my last 20 years. In no particular order:

• Receipt for OPTIKA, 22 Stall St, Bath on 17 August 1996. Looks like I had an eye test, though I have no memory of this.
• Receipt for Napier University library, recording the borrowing of Mathematics in Western culture on 05 January 2005.
• Slip of paper torn from a A4 sheet. The header has Chapter 5 The Holos Worksheet.
• Cheap day return, Edinburgh to Dalmeny, 11 September 2004.
• Credit card receipt for Edinburgh-Glasgow monthly ticket, 30 October 2006. £250! No wonder I left that job.
  
• Receipt from Ipswich and Norwich Co-op for compost, 12 April 2003. I was served by Lynn.
• Wrapper from Terry's Waifa. Best before APR97.
• Two genuine bookmarks from Word Power books. Recent.
  
• Ditto, much creased, from Waterstones, circa 1997.
• Ditto, from John Smith and Sons, Glasgow, early 90s.
  
• Punched Fortran card. Rescued from Glasgow University Physics Dept, circa 1990.
• Ticket for the Courtauld Gallery, bearing a detail from Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere.
• Seagate Pound. A fake pound note produced as a drinks voucher for a company bash. By means of Photoshop, our company secretary's head was substituted for the queen's, and didn't she look the part. Late 90s.
• Room card from Spread Eagle Hotel, Thame. Probably 1998.
• Business card/bookmark from Tin Can Mailman, Arcata, CA. I bought from them via abebooks. December 2001.
• Nice bookmark, bought in Paris, reproducing drawing by Gustave Moreau. I wondered where that had got to.
  

Beinn Chabhair

The forecast for yesterday was excellent, so it would have felt wrong not to go up a hill somewhere.

I've pretty much been through the Southern Highlands, so picked out Beinn Chabhair, which I've not done since some time in the early 90s.

Other than the well-known waterfall that you pass on the way up, I recognised very little from my previous visit. Funny how much you forget.

I feel I'm fairly fit these days, but only managed to match the Naismith time rather than undercut it. I put this down to doing some of the northwest ridge, which the SMC guide describes as 'strenuous'. So there.

Some mist rolled over just as I got to the summit, so no panoramas from there, I'm afraid. Still, a good day out.

On the way back, I went into the Drovers for a pint. There was a time when this was a standard stopping-off point on the way back from weekends, but I've not been in for ages. It's much the same as it was, though the bar staff have less hairy chests, and whether the stuffed bear in the entrance is the same stuffed bear that I remember is hard to say.

A week ahead

My digital radio confused me this morning by changing from BST to GMT a week early. I spent some time resetting other clocks and watches, and then tut-tutted over the fact that my Mac hadn't got it right. Except that it had, of course. Clocks in the UK change next week. Is it just me, or is this information not communicated as much as it used to be? Maybe we now just expect clocks to have the computational power to reset themselves.

Day out

Last weekend's fix took place on the Moorfoot hills. Not exactly one of the greater ranges, but you have to use what you've got available. The Moorfoots form a boundary to the view when I travel to work in the mornings, filling as they do the gap between the well-known but flat Lammermuirs, and the popular and more eye-catching Pentlands. And some tiny fragments are visible from my flat. A while ago, I formed the idea of a Moorfoot traverse that joined the A7 to the A703. So that's what I did.

It was a day of wind generators, quiet backroads that you didn't need to share with much traffic, and quite a lot of dead things. As well as roadkill pheasants and a badger, I found a still-living lamb on the hill with its eyes pecked out. Enjoy the view.

That's Gladhouse reservoir with Arthur's Seat behind. There were Whooper swans on the reservoir, which (according to a passing birder) were in Iceland the day before. On the 62 bus home, an 82 year old called Irene filled me in on local gossip, how the trams were going, and what shops used to be on the site of the St James centre.

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.