Phlegmatic

If you were a world-famous rock band...

2009-11-05T19:01:42Z

...and you were holding a concert in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, how would you make sure that only people with tickets could get in?

That's right, you'd build a big wall around the Brandenburg Gate to keep people out.

U2 and MTV.

Class.

Remember this post?

2009-11-04T21:35:14Z

http://philmophlegm.livejournal.com/117639.html

I think I have more work for my twelve squaddies-of-justice...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/south_yorkshire/8342191.stm

Fleetwood Mac, National Indoor Arena, Birmingham

2009-11-04T21:18:48Z

I went to see Fleetwood Mac in Birmingham last night.

Unfortunately, bunn couldn't come - Molly needs too much looking after at the moment to leave with elderly parents or dog-sitters. I was able to recover £20 of the ticket price by flogging it to a tout outside the NIA. The ticket was eventually bought by a nice bloke from Edinburgh.

The band was great. No album to promote for this tour, so they said they were just performing the songs they had the most fun with. Which was nice. They were mostly songs from one of the four albums to feature the classic Fleetwood / McVie / McVie / Buckingham / Nicks line-up (in order, 'Fleetwood Mac', 'Rumours', 'Mirage' and 'Tango in the Night'.). Christine McVie actually left the band a few years ago, so they only actually played a couple of songs written by her ('Say You Love Me' and 'Don't Stop' as an encore).

There's seemingly quite an overlap between the band's most famous songs and the ones they think are fun to play, so we got the usual run of 'The Chain', 'Rhiannon', 'Dreams', 'Tusk', 'Go Your Own Way' and 'Big Love'. The latter was Lindsey Buckingham's solo acoustic version (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naAWX6OsHVI) which I and most fans actually prefer to the original. The confines of the NIA meant that Tusk had to be accompanied by a synth rather than a 120 piece marching band , but you can't have everything. One minor disappointment was that they did a more regular version of 'Rhiannon', without the extra intro from 'The Dance' tour - that's my favourite version of my favourite song.

Any disappointment on Rhiannon was far outweighed by the rest of the set. Stevie gave a lovely rendition of 'Gypsy' and gave a different account of what it was about than I'd seen in previous interviews. 'Landslide' was pretty. 'I'm So Afraid' (Lindsey's song about depression http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxWtIvFATUA&feature=related) and 'Gold Dust Woman' (Stevie's song about her cocaine addiction) were sort of scary and spine-tingly. The old Peter Green classic 'Oh Well' was done...well. This was perhaps symptomatic of something I've noticed on the last two tours - Lindsey Buckingham is now the band's frontman, at least on stage. Overshadowed in the public consciousness by Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood (to be fair most performers would be overshadowed by a manic 6'7" drummer with mad eyes), Lindsey now is the most energetic performer. He seems to dictate what the band does on stage, just as he used to dictate what they did in the studio. He's a talented songwriter, a superb guitarist (with an unusual finger-picking style) and in fact multi-instrumentalist (he plays all the instruments on much of his solo work) and an innovative producer. He deserves more credit and attention. Seriously, if you see Fleetwood Mac now for the first time, you will think of him as the real star of the band.

One very nice surprise for me - they deliberately performed one obscure song that they had never done on stage before. My iTunes collection has precisely 465 songs in it, so it was great that the one they chose was one of my favourites - a Stevie Nicks song from Tusk called 'Storms' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPIopNvqezE&feature=related . Oh, and two more of my favourites - 'Stand Back' and 'World Turning'. Both of these have long been part of the standard Fleetwood Mac set list. In the old days, Mick would get up during World Turning's lengthy drum solo and continue the solo using pressure pads secreted under his waistcoat http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adLJDZXku80 . We didn't get that last night (he is in his sixties now - perhaps he prepares to sit...), but we still got the lengthy drum solo with mad eyes and this time, audience participation. It was fab.

So, a good night. I bought a 'Second Hand News' t-shirt for me and a 'Big Love' skinny t-shirt for bunn. Right now she's laying in front of the fire with those words stretched across her bosom...

Chirac corruption trial

2009-11-02T23:23:59Z

Former French president Jacques Chirac is likely to stand trial for corruption. He is accused of creating fake jobs to give to political allies and their relatives.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8333352.stm

If that sort of practice was illegal in this country, the job adverts section in The Guardian would be pretty thin...

Photo highlights of my Scottish holiday

2009-10-28T20:36:28Z

There are more on Facebook if you're interested.

Outer Hebrides wildlife

2009-10-28T18:49:06Z

Video footage of the golden eagles and otters I saw on Lewis and North Uist respectively. OK, the camerawork isn't exactly BBC Natural History department, but the footage of eagles was good enough for an RSPB guy to confirm that they were golden eagles rather than white-tailed or even just buzzards.

Things you spot when examining holiday snaps more closely

2009-10-27T22:54:23Z

On North Uist, I stopped to take a wide angle shot of a large herd of mute and whooper swans. Basically a big bunch of not especially uncommon white birds.

Examining the photo on the camera's own screen didn't reveal anything extraordinary. Getting the camera home and looking at the photo on a 24" monitor revealed an extra bird in the bottom-left corner... (Click on the photo to make it bigger.)

That, my friends, is a male hen harrier.

Dallas

2009-10-25T19:58:53Z

Rumours apparently of a 'Dallas: the Next Generation', all about John Ross and Christopher but with maybe JR and Sue Ellen also appearing. I'm not one to say "squee", but I wonder what the Texan equivalent is. "Squee-haw"?

Hypocrisy

2009-10-25T19:54:08Z

Ken Livingstone is very much of the opinion that Nick Griffin should not have been allowed to appear on Question Time and be allowed to share a platform with mainstream politicians since it serves to legitimise his cause.

Consider the photograph behind the cut...

That's from 1983. The handsome chap on the left is Mr Livingstone, then leader of London council. The man on the right is Sinn Fein / IRA leader Gerry Adams.

Both the BNP and Sinn Fein / IRA are explicitly racist (the latter more so than the former), nationalist parties with historical links to national socialism. Only one of them has actually killed 1,800 people.

And of course Mr Livingstone's own record on anti-semitism isn't that much nicer than Mr Griffin's.

Scottish farmers

2009-10-25T19:38:24Z

Article in Scottish newspaper this week quoting someone called Sir Alastair Horne (I'm sure he's a bannerman to Storm's End...) suggesting that it is silly that the UK is in a different time zone to central Europe, and that the only reason the clocks go back is for the benefit of Scottish farmers.

Scottish farmers and the SNP have argued the other way. The NFU said "The start of field operations would be delayed and livestock farmers would also be inconvenienced by the longer period of morning darkness."

Hang on...

Maybe I'm missing something here, but surely changing what your clock says has precisely no impact on how much darkness there is in a given day. If we did stop putting the clocks back, couldn't the Scottish farmers achieve much the same results that they used to get simply by setting their alarms to get up an hour earlier?

philmophlegm @ 2009-10-25T19:27:00

2009-10-25T19:27:08Z

View Poll: Nick Griffin on Question Time

Oban to Campbelltown to Faslane to Wrexham to Northwich to Mickle Trafford to Wrexham to Watford

2009-10-25T18:21:06Z

Saturday

Ever since I started work as a trainee accountant, I have always wanted to go to Campbeltown, at the southern end of Kintyre. You see, the firm I worked for then, Kidsons Impey, had an office there. I wondered quite what commerce there was in such an out of the way place to warrant a national firm of chartered accountants having an office there.

I still don't know.

The weather today varied from mildly tolerable to too-stormy-to-actually-take-photographs-because-there's-rain-on-the-lens-and-it's-too-blowy-to-hold-the-damn-thing-steady. The worst was driving down the A83 on the west coast of Kintyre. (From Oban, I took the A816 south, which meets the A83 at Lochgilphead, and from there the A83 goes as far as Campbeltown.) The weather was too bad to enjoy the driving to be honest. I actually went past Campbeltown to Southend and west to the Mull of Kintyre (well, almost). On this day, Mull of Kintyre wasn't so much "mist rolling in from the sea" as "rain driving in from the sea". Campbeltown is a grotty little town too. I had an ice cream at a little shop that prided itself on the quality of its home-made ice-cream, but to be honest it was flavourless mush with poor texture. Try to sell something like that in Devon, Cornwall or Parkgate and you'd be laughed at.

The drive north from Campbeltown up the B842 on the eastern side of the peninsula was more enjoyable - a more exciting road and also more sheltered from the Atlantic winds. I stopped at Skipness as the weather cleared momentarily to take photos of Arran across the sound. Then it was back up the A83, this time turning right at Lochgilphead then northeast along the shores of Loch Fyne (quite scenic) then up into the mountains of Glen Croe (not Glencoe, that's somewhere else, but Glen Croe is a very good up and down twisty road) to Arrochar where I turned right onto the A814 on the eastern shore of Loch Long and then turned right at Garelochhead onto the B833, then the unnumbered but very broad and flat road to Coulport. This is a military road built to allow easy access to the naval ammunitions dept where they store Trident missiles. And from that road I was able to see a Vanguard-class Trident missile submarine coming into port. Which was nice. Other vessels at the naval base - one Type 23 frigate and three minesweepers/minehunters.

From there, back to Garelochhead, down the A814 along the Firth of Clyde to Dumbarton (an appallingly dismal place) then into Glasgow to pick up the M8 and then the M74 south. By now it was dark and really raining heavily - not my favourite driving conditions. After a week of mostly fun driving, this was an abrupt end to my driving holiday. I ploughed on through the rain, stopping at the excellent Tebay services (why can't all motorway service stations be like this) for some food (a delicious Gloucester Old Spot pork pie from the farm shop) before heading on down the M6, the M56, the M53, the A55 and the A483 to Wrexham.

It was my intention to spend the night in Wrexham. Unfortunately seemingly every single bed in the town's hotels, B&Bs, guest houses and travel lodges was occupied, so I had to settle for Northwich instead. I did drive through Wrexham town centre on the way to Northwich though - revealing that Wrexham now has the same mix of pounding music, cheap booze and short skirts on a Saturday night that places like Plymouth do. Actually to be fair, nobody seemed to be quite as drunk as they do in Plymouth and I couldn't see any evidence of violence, although there were proportionately more police than you see in Plymouth at night.

In the morning, I went to Mickle Trafford where Bunn and I used to live and took photos of the three houses we lived in, before driving south to Wrexham and doing the same with the two houses I grew up in and my infants, junior and secondary schools. What was St David's Comprehensive when I was there is now 'Rhosnesni High' which to me sounds like an American teenage soap set in North Wales. Then I finished off in the town centre with Wrexham's shiny new Eagles Meadow shopping centre (very new, with lots of slate and waterfalls). Probably cheaper than Plymouth's Drake Circus but a lot more stylish. I wonder where kids in Wrexham learn to drive now. (When I was younger, Eagles Meadow was the Asda car park and also the site of a weekly market, but when Asda was closed and the market wasn't on, it was useful as a vast open expanse of tarmac that wasn't a public road, so most children in Wrexham (including me) had their first driving 'lessons' there long before they were legally allowed to drive.

After Wrexham, southeast along the A525 before picking up the A41, then the M54, the M6 and then the M1 to Watford, which is where I am now. I stopped at a motorway services on the M1 which was full of NFL fans heading to Wembley for tonight's New England / Tampa Bay game. I'm in Watford because I have an IFRS course tomorrow. Which will be dull.

Oh well, holiday over.

Sligachan to Applecross to Oban

2009-10-25T17:31:06Z

Friday

My father had told me that the Old Man of Storr, a rock pinnacle in north east Skye was worth seeing. That would also take me past Portree, where there is an RSPB exhibition about white-tailed eagles. If I wasn't going to see any (and believe me, I kept my eyes open and my roof down today), at least I could find an expert to identify which species I had filmed.

The exhibition is quite good. I was the only one there, and it took the RSPB man a while to get the projector working, but the films showing both white-tailed eagles taking fish from the sea and a helicopter ride through the Cuillin Hills were just about worth the £4.50 admission. I bought a bird book but resisted his attempts to get me to sign up for membership. When I showed him my photos and videos, he was able to confirm that what I had seen were golden eagles. That was what I had thought, but before I had a pro say this, there had always been a niggling doubt at the back of my mind that they were just common buzzards.

The Old Man of Storr is ok if you like that sort of thing. To be honest, I thought the views in the other direction - across to Raasay and beyond to the Applecross Peninsula on the mainland were more striking. Once again, the weather was bright and sunny. Actually the best scenery on Skye is the Cuillin Hills. They are fantastically crinkly, and very distinctive from most of the Hebrides.

Then back down the A87 and over the bridge to Kyle of Lochalsh, turning north onto the A890 then left onto the A896 to Loch Carron and Kishorn. At Lochcarron I passed another S2000 coming in the opposite direction. We waved at each other. He had a broad grin on his face that instantly made me realise where he had just taken his car. The A890 and A896 are good driving roads, but only an appetiser for the 'Pass of the Cattle' across the Applecross Peninsula to Applecross. This is regarded as one of the most challenging roads on a bike, motorbike or car in the country. Indeed, there is a sign at the entrance to the pass that warns that the road is "not suitable for learner drivers". I would add that it isn't suitable for drivers or passengers of a nervous disposition, especially those who suffer from vertigo.

Unlike most passes, the Pass of the Cattle does not attempt to find a way around the hills. Instead it goes steeply up (several first gear 180 degree 1 in 4 hairpins) and just goes over the top before coming back down again on the other side. It is a truly spectacular road. It is also quiet enough that you can still get a decent speed, although there are certainly places where discretion and caution win over exhilaration.

I was tempted to turn around in Applecross and do the Pass again but decided instead to take the coast road around the north of the peninsula. This was a good move, since this was an exciting driving road in its own right. Then it was south onto the A896, the A890 again then east onto the A87 past some big mountains (unfortunately hidden by clouds), turning right onto the A82 along Loch Oich, Loch Lochy, through Fort William and past Ben Nevis, along Loch Linnhe and on to Oban. This is very much 'tourist Scotland'. The A82 is a dull road, there was low cloud obscuring the view and I (and about 40 other vehicles) were stuck behind a coach trip from Morecambe for about an hour. (Despite the long queue, he was never tempted to pull over into a lay-by). By clever overtaking, I had advanced up the queue so that I was immediately behind the coach ready for the next overtaking opportunity when it started pissing it down, and I had to pull over to put my roof up, putting my right at the back of the queue again. Not fun.

At South Ballachulish, I turned onto the A828 and then the A85 and Oban. I stayed the night in a guest house overlooking the harbour. The wallpaper in my room was crimson and gold. These were Lannister colours, which prompted me to listen to my audiobook of 'A Storm of Swords'.

North Uist, Grimsay, Benbecula, South Uist, Eriskay and Skye

2009-10-25T16:50:51Z

Thursday

Still darkish when I got up, although it wasn't painfully early by any means. The man in the hotel tipped me off that there were definitely a pair of white-tailed eagles in the north-east of the island. Weather and visibility were both excellent, so that's where I went.

Most of North Uist appears to be water, either lochs, inlets or marshy ground. I stopped at the end of a tiny road that went to the island's most northeasterly point and stopped for a look around. Didn't see any eagles, but I did see a diver of some sort (maybe red-throated or black-throated) and a family of three otters diving and surfacing repeatedly very close to where I was. Got some good video footage of them.

Then I drove around the north of the island to the RSPB reserve at Balranald. Pleasant walk to a deserted beach facing the Atlantic. Quite a few different bird species (although I'm not good enough to identify many different ones) and what I hope was a hen harrier. I got a couple of long range photos, but I'm not totally convinced it wasn't a buzzard. Also a huge mixed eyrar* or herd* of mute and whooper swans.

Then I drove south along the A865 across the causeway to Grimsay, then another causeway to Benbecula, another causeway to South Uist (passing a sign to 'Stoneybridge' **). Just before the final causeway to Eriskay, I stopped at a small harbour to take some photos and surprised a curlew. At Eriskay I had just enough time to look south across to Barra, before turning around and dashing north to Lochmaddy again. In the end, I overestimated how long it would take me to return to Lochmaddy, and got there 30 minutes before I needed to to catch the 16.00 ferry back to Uig on Skye. That gave me time to wander around the coast a bit, spot a single, shy seal across the bay and take some nice photos of the ferry as it arrived.

The ferry took 1 hour and 45 minutes to get to Uig, so it was getting dark by the time I got off. I hadn't booked any accommodation, but had previously noticed that Skye was full of B&Bs, guest houses and hotels. I took the A87 south to Borve, then the A850 to Dunvegan and then the A863 to Struan and then Sligachan. I stopped at the Sligachan Hotel. When I mentioned this to my parents when I spoke to them that evening, they pointed out that directly opposite the hotel is an old bridge featured in a print they have hanging in their living room. Which is quite a coincidence really. I hadn't noticed it in the dark.

* Apparently the two collective nouns for swans.

** The existence of a village called 'Stoneybridge' will be amusing only to those people who remember the Scottish sketch show 'Absolutely'. I've been watching the DVD boxed set intermittently on this trip. Absolutely was a Channel 4 programme in the late 80s / early 90s. Most of the team vanished into obscurity, but you still see Morwenna Banks occasionally (in Steve Coogan's excellent 'Saxondale' for example) and Gordon Kennedy went on to play Little John in the BBC's Robin Hood series. 'Stoneybridge Town Council' was a long-running series of sketches.

Harris and Lewis

2009-10-25T16:15:37Z

No, not a comedy double act, but the northern part of the Outer Hebrides.

Wednesday

Today was a good day.

It was grey and drizzly when I left Tarbert. Harris and Lewis are actually the same island, despite often being referred to as the "Isle of Harris" and the "Isle of Lewis").I headed north up the A859 (ggod road with stunning views) and pleasingly the weather cleared up. This was a vital development because it meant I could put the roof down.

At Leurbost, I turned left onto the A858 and then left onto the B8011, a minor road leading to string of small villages on the Atlantic shore. I went this way because a bit of web research had identified it as a good place to see both white-tailed eagles and golden eagles. And this is why being able to put the roof down was so vital - because I saw eagles.

There were two of them. I spotted them some way off in the distance, soaring above a cliff and then one at a time they turned and flew towards me before disappearing over a ridge. I got a good view with binoculars, but didn't get the chance to make a more permanent record. My eagle knowledge at this point was not good enough to distinguish between the two species. I drove on to Timsgarry and Ard Uig and Brenish before coming back the way I came.

And then at exactly the same point I had seen the two eagles, there were more - three this time. I don't know whether two of them were the same ones I saw before, but this time I was able to take some long range photos and even some shaky video footage with the camcorder. Very chuffed.

Back onto the A858, then left and stops at the very impressive Callanish stone circle and Dun Carloway Broch. This was a rather more complete broch than the one in Sutherland. You can go in and poke around in the space between the inner and outer walls. If you look up 'broch' on wikipedia, you can see a photo of Dun Carloway.

After Dun Carloway, I headed for Stornoway, but rather than take the main road, I took the unnumbered road across the peat bog. Very empty space and very quiet. Apart from scattered sheep, a buzzard and a few hooded crows*, very little animal life here at all.

Stornoway is a proper town with shops and petrol stations. I booked my ferry tickets for today and tomorrow and drove south on the A859 towards Leverburgh at the southern end of Harris. On the way, another good bird spot - a peregrine getting mobbed by two hooded crows. It flew away.

I got to Leverburgh (Lever, as in Lever Bros - Viscount Leverhulme once owned Lewis apparently) in time for the 17.05 ferry across to Berneray, the island at the northern-most end of the southern part of the Outer Hebrides. The two ports are only about six miles apart, yet because of the number of rocks in between that the ferry has to avoid, the journey takes an hour. Still, the weather was lovely, and the voyage was mostly westward just as the sun was setting.

Berneray is joined to the much larger North Uist by a causeway. I turned onto the A865 and found a hotel in Lochmaddy in which to stay the night.

* The crows out here are the hooded variety - black heads, leggings and tail, but silver body. I think they're rather attractive, but locally they seem to be regarded as something of a pest.

Bettyhill to Ullapool to Uig to Tarbert

2009-10-25T15:36:45Z

Tuesday: Gorgeous weather as I set off early(ish) from the faded Bettyhill Hotel.

West along the A836 - a scenic and pleasingly twisty road. In fact, with little other traffic, a genuinely great driving road. If I had had more time, I would have wanted to spend more time in northwest Sutherland (the very top-left of Scotland) which has a great combination of scenery and driving roads. However I decided to come off the main road and head up into the mountains on the unnumbered road that goes from Loch Hope to Altnaharra. This is too narrow a road to call it a great driving road, but the scenery is good. At least it was today, with good weather. I imagine if the clouds are low, you wouldn't get to see much of Ben Hope. Three good sights on this road - a couple of female red deer, a mountain-climber eschewing conventional mountain-climbing geer in favour of a kilt and Dun Dornaigil Broch. This was my first broch and was about 50% surviving.

At Altnaharra, I turned right onto the A836, heading south, a fast but single track road. Then right onto the A838, northwest along the shores of Loch Shin then Loch Merkland, Loch More and Loch Stack to Laxford Bridge. Very windy all along this road. Left onto the A894 along the west coast, then shortly after Unapool, I turned right onto the B869. This is a narrow single track road around a peninsula with a lot of vertical variation and hairpins. Good fun.

At the other end, I turn onto the A837 and fill up with (95 RON) petrol in Lochinver. Past Lochinver, the A road suddenly becomes an unnumbered single track road. On the atlas, it looks like it might be scenic, so I decide to follow it rather than turning back towards the main road. It is scenic, but it's also slow (more on that in a moment). Also slowing me up was the red deer stag (with two hinds in tow) who stood right in the middle of the road and tried to stare me down before disappearing up the hillside.

I got to Ullapool on the A835 and stopped to make my ferry booking. I had formulated a plan based on the local ferry company timetable that would see me in the Outer Hebrides tonight and booked on the 18.00 ferry from Uig at the far end of Skye to Tarbert on the Isle of Harris. Unfortunately I now realised that I didn't have that much time to get to Uig in time for the 17.30 check-in.

I made it, and can report that the A835 from Ullapool to Gorstan, the A832 from Gorstan to Achnasheen, the A890 from Achnasheen to Auchtertyre and the A87 from Auchtertyre to Uig via Kyle of Lochalsh and the Skye Bridge is a route that if you have the right car, the right conditions and the skill, you can drive very quickly along. The scenery was probably very beautiful, but it went past at something of a blur.

The ferry journey from Skye to Harris takes about 100 minutes. Interestingly, the mobile reception in The Little Minch (the stretch of water between Skye and Harris) is excellent, so I took the opportunity to book accommodation in Harris. The Hebrides Hotel is directly opposite the ferry terminal at Tarbert and although the room was tiny, it was nicely furnished.

Watford to Newcastle to 'The Roman Wall' to Edinburgh to Inverness to Bettyhill

2009-10-20T00:10:48Z

I'm on holiday at the moment - a solo driving holiday around the more distant bits of Scotland. Bunn isn't with me on account of her having considerably less holiday allowance than me this year and not fancying a week of pretty much nothing but driving.

I've wanted to do a proper driving holiday for a while now. By 'proper driving holiday', I mean a holiday where the main activity is fun driving. Scotland is great for that because of a lower density of traffic on the roads, good quality road surface (unlike say Iceland or Ireland), unstraightness of roads, sensible speed limits (mostly 60mph) and absence of hedges. Devon and Cornwall really fall down on the last two - most of Dartmoor for instance is now 40mph except for the main roads, and except on the moors, most roads are sunk between high hedges, so you can't see round corners. And if you can't see round corners, you can't use the full width of the road.

Now was also a good time to do it. I'll be changing the car next year probably, so this is a good swan song. The government's threat to lower the national speed limit to 40mph hasn't materialised yet. And 'enjoying driving fast' isn't yet a criminal activity.

I started from Watford rather than Cornwall, on account of presenting a course there on Thursday and Friday. Managed to scarper early too, so I left the office at 3.30pm rather than 5.30. A long, dull dash up pretty much the length of the M1, then the A1 / A1(M) to Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the home of kargicq and neuromancer. Arrived at about 10.00pm, and before kargicq, who was out boozing. Met both kargmancerlings, both up past their bedtimes.

Saturday - me, kargicq, neuromancer and kargmancerlings visited two Roman sites at or near the wall - Corbridge and Housesteads Fort. Both pleasingly the right degree of ruinedness. Pleased that eldest kargmancerling was particularly impressed by the car, so as it was sunny when it was time for me to say goodbye, I let her press the Engine Start button and put the roof down and up and down again before I set off west and they headed back east.

Saturday route: A69 west to Brampton (fast, mostly straightish single carriageway), A6071 northwest before picking up the A7 at Longtown. Then A7 north through Langholm, Hawick, Selkirk (stopped for some 97 RON), Galashiels before turning west onto the A720 Edinburgh bypass. A7 - lovely road to ease my way into the harder stuff that was to come. Nice scenery, reasonably twisty with some traffic, but plenty of overtaking opportunities. Still light by the time I reached Edinburgh, but took easy option and stopped at a Travelodge / Little Chef combination. Classy...

Sunday - up early (well 9.00ish at any rate). Northwest and across the Forth Road Bridge. Got out to take photos of the more famous bridge next to it. Then north for about half a mile of the M90 before coming off into Dunfermline(last motorway for almost a week). Somehow took wrong turning in Dunfermline (no satnav in my car, so relying on dodgy sense of direction, poor knowledge of Scottish geography and a good road atlas), but realised it pretty quickly and found the right road - the A823 north past the Knockhill racetrack.

Entertaining drive up A823 through nice but not-yet-awesome scenery to Crieff, then north up the A822. Getting into proper Highlands now. Turn off the main road at Amulree onto the (unnumbered) Glen Quaich road. Fantastic single track road with great visibility, 1 in 10 climbs, 1 in 10 descents, hairpins and fantastic views. This is where the driving fun really started. Turned right at Loch Tay, onto the A827 before turning left in Aberfeldy onto the B846. Another good, challenging road - a lot less straight than it looks in the road atlas. Vaguely aware that the mountain Schiehallion was towering over me to the left, but clouds were low enough that all the mountains looked the same height. I had the roof down about 50% of the time this day. Turned right at Tummel Bridge (where I once went on holiday as a child) onto the B8019. Did the tourist thing and got out at Queen's View to have lunch and look at the view. Very good view. Then turned around and headed back west along Loch Tummel, then a dash along the B846 on the northern shore of Loch Rannoch to Rannoch Station. Saw a red squirrel on the way. I've been to Rannoch Station before (an unmanned railway station in the middle of Rannoch Moor), but it wasn't as desolate as I remembered it.

Turned back east, but took the unnumbered road along the southern shore of the loch. Better road than the northern one - the sort of road where 60mph is often achievable, but you rarely get out of third gear. All the way east again to Pitlochry - an opportunity to get some more super unleaded. Avoid the obvious A9 route to Inverness and instead take the A924 to Bridge of Cally and then the A93 north.

The A93 is a phenomenal road. The best yet in fact. Wide, but twisty and with some steep bits - and steep, twisty bits. It climbs up into the Grampian Mountains past ski stations (currently snowless and deserted). I rarely had to slow down for anything other than a sharp bend. Past Spittal of Glenshee (great placename), Braemar and Balmoral. Then left onto the A939. Another classic driving road through the mountains. If anything more twisty than the A93 - certainly narrower (single track in places) and with more vertical variation. Plenty of opportunity for dropping into second for a sharp corner then coming out of the corner and accelerating steeply uphill in second and third.

By now, it's starting to get dark, and I don't have any accommodation sorted. I come down out of the mountains, turn left onto the A95 just before Grantown-on-Spey and then turn off onto the A938 headed for Inverness. I figure that there should be B&Bs in Inverness, but in fact I come across a few with vacancies in Carrbridge and stay in one of them overnight.

Monday - up early again. I even have a cooked breakfast. This is almost unheard of for me, but then I didn't have an evening meal on Sunday. For me, someone who always eats dinner and never normally eats breakfast, the B&B concept has a fundamental flaw - they never serve dinner, and charge you for breakfast whether you eat it or not. Get quickly onto the A9 and head north for Inverness. Weather is constant, heavy drizzle - going to be roof up all day I'm afraid.

Through Inverness, sticking for the moment to the dull A9. Across the Moray Firth, then the Cromarty Firth before coming off the main road to head for Invergordon and a better view of the oil rigs being serviced and sheltering in the Cromarty Firth. Half a tank of petrol left - will start to look out for petrol stations. Back onto A9 briefly before coming off onto the B9165 for Balintore and a good view of the Moray Firth. I had heard that there was a major international naval exercise taking place here this week, and I had hoped to spot the odd warship, but I guess they must all have been further out. Back onto the A9. I pass a petrol station, but it's sold out of super unleaded. Starting to get a little concerned - enough to come off the A9 and look for petrol in Tain. None of the stations there sell 97 RON. I decide against going to Dornoch and decide to stick to the main A9. Surely if there is a major petrol station selling proper petrol, it'll be on the main road...

The A9 north of Dornoch is a dull driving road, but as it sticks to the coast is quite scenic. It would be more scenic if the weather was bright and sunny rather than grey and drizzly. Oh well. Of course this is Caithness now. On the recommendation of bunn (plus lady_of_astolat, and kargicq is a fan too), I'm reading Dorothy Dunnett's 'King Hereafter', a novel about Thorfinn, Earl of Orkney and Caithness and the historical Macbeth. It's nice to recognise some of the placenames.

At Latheron I stop to make a decision. First of all I arrange accommodation for the night by ringing ahead to a hotel on the north coast. Kargicq had advised that there is precious little accommodation on the north coast, so I thought better of my previous approach of seeing what I pass when it starts to get dark. The decision I had to make was whether to go north on the A9 to Thurso or stick to the coast, and the A99 to Wick and then John O'Groats. Petrol is becoming a concern now. Wick looks bigger, so I decide my chances of super unleaded are better in Wick. Wick has two petrol stations (neither sells super unleaded). I drive around a bit and find a giant Tesco. It has a shiny petrol station with 12 pumps, payment at the pump, four attendants, shop, everything. Except for super unleaded. If there's no proper petrol here, there's not going to be anywhere in Caithness or Sutherland. This is it I think, and reluctantly fill up with 95 RON pigswill.

I've never put 95 RON (I refuse to call it 'premium' - surely 'premium' means at least 'better than average') in my car before. The sticker on the inside of the filler cap warns that only 98 RON should be used, but since Shell stopped selling Optimax (97.8 RON), 97 RON was the best I could do. But I've never had to resort to 95 RON before now. I apprehensively press the starter button and the engine starts (so far so good). The engine note sounds a little different, but I put that down to being oversensitive.

Nothing to see in Wick, so north again and John O'Groats. I pass a cyclist with a vest that says 'Land's End to John O'Groats'. To be honest, John O'Groats didn't have anything that made me think it was worth driving there from Wick, let alone cycling from the far end of Cornwall. It's full of souvenir shops (all but one closed, despite the car park being half full), you have to pay to use the toilet and there is an angrily-worded sign warning you not to take your own pictures of the famous signpost that shows the distance to Land's End and other places. You're supposed to pay the on-duty photographer to do it for a sky high fee (something like £16). I avoid the tourist tat and take a brief walk along the shore in the vague hope of seeing dolphins or similar. By now the weather has improved enormously. Visibility is easily good enough to see Stroma and the nearer Orkneys.

I get back in the car and head west along the A836, past the Castle of Mey, then a brief diversion up the B855 to the peninsula of Dunnet Head. Good cliffs, but by now it's got cold and wet again. I don't stay long, especially as the cliffs seem devoid of seabirds. Back to the A836, and suddenly it's sunny again and I'm overlooking the most beautiful beach I've ever seen. This is Dunnet Bay, a vast expanse of perfect white sand sheltered by Dunnet Head. I share the beach with some gulls, some oystercatchers and a single rider on a large piebald horse galloping along the water's edge. Brief extra-vehicular excursion over, I head west to Thurso. I notice with a little annoyance that Thurso has two petrol stations selling super unleaded, but the car seems to be coping well with its vulgar fuel. Then the final stretch of the day, right along the north coast into Sutherland, past the Dounreay nuclear power station to Bettyhill where my hotel (the 'Bettyhill Hotel') is.

Kargick warned me that this hotel was somewhat "faded". He's not wrong. It's cheap (and serves dinner!) but you have to question the design thinking that went "Our hotel directly faces the North Atlantic, so single-glazed sash windows will be more than adequate and we don't need to worry about heating the guest rooms". (To be fair, I do have a small portable electric heater in the room, but it doesn't seem to work very well.) Kargicq also muttered something about King Haakon VII of Norway staying here when in exile during WW2. I'll say this about it though - free wi-fi, and fast enough for me to watch Sunday night's hugely unexpected Raider victory over Philadelphia. And write this of course.

April Fools' Day

2009-10-09T16:32:41Z

Current headlines on the BBC News website:

Amy Winehouse is working on a new album

Rugby is going to be an Olympic sport

Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize

I checked the date on my computer, but it said "9th October".

Seriously, Obama? After what - nine months? Jeez, they'll be giving Al Gore an award next. (Oh, hang on...) Maybe it'll have to be David Cameron in 2010.

Micro Men

2009-10-08T16:20:38Z

Comedy dramatisation of the Acorn / Sinclair feud, BBC4, tonight 9.00pm. Alexander Armstrong as Clive and Martin Freeman the Acorn guy. Thought it looked like fun and that other people might be interested.

Champions League success in Football Manager

2009-10-07T22:37:58Z

Tonight my Manchester United team managed to repeat last year's Champions' League victory and once again defeated Manchester City in the final. City scored first and dominated the first half, but my Argentinean centre forward Federico Laurito (a fitness doubt before the game) got the equaliser. Then in the 86th minute, City's Togolese striker Emmanuel Adebayor got himself a straight red for a bad foul on Patrice Evra. Two minutes later Spanish fullback Miguel Torres crossed hard from the right and my young Italian midfielder Mascio volleyed in the winner.

Then, barely a week later, we beat Middlesbrough 1-0 to win the FA Cup too. Laurito scored the winner from the penalty spot.

Stargate Universe

2009-10-06T21:09:37Z

First impressions behind cut.

Robert Carlyle very good and his character is interesting.
The gamer character (Eli) is also good fun.
Everyone else is pretty dull, except for the black criminal soldier with the chip on his soldier who has the sort of face (and attitude) that makes me want to kick it.
Seems very similar to what has gone before.
Premise is a sort of SG: Atlantis meets ST: Voyager.
Macgyver ("Urrrrrr...MacGYVER...!") looks old.

I doubt I'll stick with it.

And once again, how many episodes of Stargate will we get up to now? And how many episodes of Firefly were there? No justice.

Dragons of Autumn Twilight

2009-10-02T16:10:29Z

You may remember that I asked you all whether I should read this a while ago:
http://philmophlegm.livejournal.com/108316.html

Well, I read it.

Now I'm no literary snob. Hell, I like both Lord of the Rings and The Da Vinci Code. I am prepared to give books that have been panned by the critics a chance and make up my own mind.

It's pretty crap to be honest. Clarienne, I think if you did go back to it, you probably wouldn't like it as much as you did when you were 13.

I didn't actually hate it; in fact I actually quite enjoyed it. There is a plot (something which so many books seem to treat as an optional extra) and it moves along pretty well. The D&D-ness of it sort of appeals to a D&D player (although I think they could have made it a bit less obvious - the first page actually lists the main characters' character classes).

It is very obviously a write up of an AD&D campaign and while this wouldn't bother me on its own, the problem is that it seems to be a write-up of a pretty mediocre AD&D campaign.

And authors, fanfic writers etc, if you're writing up your campaign in an epic fantasy style, then please remember that you don't have to reflect exactly what happened in every single dice roll. There are several occasions where characters end up doing something silly in a dramatic situation, and you can just imagine that the player rolled a '1' at this point and fumbled. If Tolkien had taken the same approach, I doubt LotR would have come out so well.

Oh, and something that really annoys me whenever I hear it on bad American television shows. "Wegoddagedouddahere!" or "Letsgeddouddahere!" always sounds stupid in stuff like MacGyver and Hanna-Barbera cartoons. In epic fantasy literature it's just out of place. Here though, one of the two phrases crops up about once every other chapter.

I did go and buy the second book. It's on the to-be-read shelf in the library, but I doubt I'll be getting around to it anytime soon.

The garage door needs painting...

2009-10-02T15:20:37Z

...but maybe this would be a cooler alternative:

http://www.style-your-garage.com/#

Carbon footprint

2009-10-02T15:15:43Z

There are plenty of websites out there that will tell you, after asking you lots of questions about your house, the stuff in it, your car, your holidays etc, what your 'carbon footprint' is.

Having a smaller 'carbon footprint' is 'better' because scientific evidence tends to suggest a link between man-made CO2 emissions and global warming.

Thing is though, as a rational environmental consumer, that isn't enough. What I need to know is what actual difference it would make to future global temperatures if I* changed my lifestyle from current lifestyle A to say alternative lifestyle B or alternative lifestyle C. If I knew that difference, then I could compare it to the personal real cost to me (in monetary and non-monetary terms) of adopting the new lifestyle and decide whether it was worthwhile. What if B and C had similar personal costs but while B the largest effect on global temperature, it was an insignificant effect in the global scheme of things while C produced more direct environmental benefits?

Are there any such websites out there? Ones capable of telling me that if I change my lifestyle from A to B, then the global temperature in 2050 will be x degrees cooler?

* Not 'everyone', since I can't control the actions of 'everyone'.

And more...

2009-10-02T14:34:19Z

7. More vital duties for our overstretched armed forces.

Far be it for me to ask soldiers who have returned from service in Afghanistan to perform more violent work when they get home, but I think Afghanistan veterans might be just the people to deal with this problem. Matthew Weston, a sapper in 33 Engineer Regiment who lost both legs and an arm in the war, has been taunted by local yobs about his disabilities. My solution involves about twelve squaddies and the same number of (rusty) bayonets.