Anzac Day

Tyne Cot cemetery, near Ypres, Belgium, originally uploaded by Lay Clerk.

The image is of Tyne Cot Cemetery, near Ypres in Belgium, which is a very moving place to visit, as I did three years ago when I took the photo.

Today is Anzac Day, national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand originally for members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought and died at Gallipoli in Turkey during the Great War of 1914-18, but nowadays commemorating all those who died for those countries.

I note with some sadness that three members of the New Zealand Air Force died today when their helicopter crashed near Wellington when they were enroute to an Anzac Day memorial service.  The story is on the BBC Website.

They shall grow not old as we who are left grow old.  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.  At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.

Rest Eternal grant unto them O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them.

On an unrelated matter, other than it's the same country, having left last night RE is currently in the air somewhere between the UK and New Zealand (via brief landings at Bangkok and Sydney) on her way to spend a month at home visiting her family and friends.  I know she'll have a great time, particularly after the stress leading up to an exam just three days before she flew, and the stress of less than a week ago not knowing whether flights would be at all possible from the UK and Europe after the eruption of the Volcano in the Eyjafjallajoekull glacier in Iceland.  There are some nice pictures on the BBC Website of the volcano, and Frikki, the Director of Music at St Mary's Cathedral in Glasgow who is Icelandic, has forwarded some REALLY spectacular ones from his brother who still lives there, but I don't want to post them because they aren't mine..

The great north east trip

Ahhh, what a good weekend that was.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I've recently spent a weekend up in the north east of Scotland, doing a bit of sightseeing, a bit of chilling, a bit of photography, and a bit of socialising with friends.

We set off on Saturday morning (18th July) around 8am, and travelled up to Perth and then onto the A9 northbound towards Inverness. This is a road I haven't been on for years, and I'd like to say it was very picturesque, but the heavy rain prevented us seeing much beyond the immediate surroundings for a lot of the time.

We were heading initially for Nairn, where we were due to meet a friend of RE for lunch, and because of a mixture of roadworks and weather we were over half an hour late. Bad show. On the way we were following the directions the Sat Nav gave (although we could easily have followed the signposts and read a map, but why have the technology and not use it!) and at Carrbridge it took us off the A9 and onto some local roads for a shortcut across country. As a result of not following the obvious main road through Grantown on Spey therefore we found ourselves on a really interesting, slightly twisty, very scenic (the rain was intermittent at this point) B road, which was I think the B9007 which goes left off the A938 less then two miles outside Carrbridge, and joins the A939 at Ferness about 8 miles outside Nairn. Anyway, if you're going up that way, try the B road.

We went for lunch in a place called the Classroom which is in the centre of Nairn. Classy looking decor, and excellent food. The burger I had was obviously made on the premises, and was as good a burger as I've had in years. The chips (fries to anyone from beyond the UK) were just right - crisp on the outside and fluffy on the inside. All in all good food and good company.

Leaving Nairn and saying farewell to RE's friend who was heading off to start a lateshift at work, we travelled the few miles further east along the A96 to Forres where our destination was Sueno's Stone, a monstrous 7m tall ancient standing stone which we managed to miss completely despite it turning out to be enormous, and right next to the main road we were on! A couple of u-turns and diversions later (which set the theme for the weekend) and we found it, standing proudly and protected by a huge glass case. Which we weren't, so got soaked while looking at it. Bloody rain!

So onwards to Elgin, and by this time the rain was bouncing off the ground and coming back up to hit the windscreen, or so it seemed anyway! We had a walk past the Cathedral, and then went into the town centre to find the Gordon and MacPhail shop, which has the most wonderful selection of malt whisky imaginable! Not just whisky though, they also have a great selection of other spirits, wine, and delicatessen food. We found some wine from a winery very close to RE's home town in New Zealand, and as an added bonus it was reduced in price from about £19 a bottle to about £12, so RE bought some which we later consumed in the B&B.

On the subject of the B&B, we found it via Alastair Sawday's excellent Special Places to Stay website, which lists unusual places which might be well off the beaten path, be run by very friendly people, offer locally sourced food, or be in some other way unusual or unique. The place we found was Balwarren Croft, near Cornhill (pretty much due south of Portsoy) which is a 30 acre working croft at the end of a long (and very bumpy) farm track and is run by Hazel and James Watt who were very friendly and nice people.

It only has two rooms for let, a double and a twin in a beautifully converted cow byre, and there's a sitting room for use of guests which has a wonderful wood burning stove in it. We were lucky in that the people who had booked the other room didn't turn up so we had the place to ourselves. Lucky for us, although not so good for Hazel and James because the missing guests had also booked an evening meal which I believe Hazel and James ended up eating themselves, at presumably a net financial loss. Also rather strangely the couple just didn't turn up. No telephone call of apology, just a no show, which I consider very rude indeed, although I suppose it's possible that something untoward happened to them when enroute. But I'll never know!

Anyway, if you're in that area and looking for somewhere to stay, you could certainly do a hell of a lot worse than try to book a room at Balwarren, and I have to single out the delicious breakfast as worthy of particular praise. Full traditional cooked including bacon, sausage, egg, tomato etc, and very little fat or grease (pretty well none in fact). Yum! Watch out for the farm track though, because unless you're in a 4x4 the bottom of your car will be making constant and fairly noisy (although probably harmless) contact with the grass in the middle of the track on the way in and out. Ours certainly was.

We later went out for a drive around on Saturday evening, going up to Cullen (home of the thick creamy fish soup Cullen Skink) and marvelling at the heavy seas pounding the seafront, then spent an hour travelling around looking for a fish and chip shop to get something to eat. For a part of the country which is so closely linked to the fishing industry, fish and chip shops were remarkably thin on the ground, and having set our hearts on that choice of food we roved between Cullen, Portsoy, Banff and Macduff to no avail, constantly retracing our route in case we had missed something obvious.

Eventually we spotted a tiny wee shop in Banff which turned out to be the only place open apart from a kebab/chicken/pizza place. A temporary shock when I went in and saw a handwritten notice saying "sorry for the lack of fish, please try some delicious chicken" soon disappeared when they accepted my order for haddock and chips without comment. Then down to the waterside to sit in the car with the windows tightly closed and share the food while watching the waves crash a few feet away. Having been looking forward to it, particularly knowing we were in fishing country, I have to say it was OK but certainly no better than you'd get in any average chip shop in the rest of the country. Oh well.

We then headed back to Balwarren, to make some inroads into the bottle of NZ wine before crashing out for the night, both of us being tired after a pretty long day.

Sunday dawned with bright sunshine creeping through a crack in the curtains, which was a surprise after the heavy rain we'd endured for the whole of the previous day. One delicious breakfast later (one each I mean!) and we headed out into the now visible scenery to do some sightseeing. Back again to Cullen as our starting point, where we each took a few photos of the scenery, then onwards to look at the 17th century harbour at Portsoy, and Findlater Castle and the 16th century beehive type dovecote nearby.

The ruins of the castle sit on an outcrop of rock, some 50 feet up on a cliff, and access is gained by a grassy path on a very steep descent. Left to my own devices I would have happily looked at the castle from above at the viewpoint and left it at that, but RE was having none of it (I'm glad to say)! Pausing briefly to read the sign saying that the castle was dangerous, so if you were going to go to it you'd bloody better be careful, down we went, then up onto the outcrop itself, taking lots of photos as we did so. We explored what was left of the castle (not much) and then climbed back up to the viewpoint, past the dovecote, and back to the car.

I think it's time for a brief flashback.

A bit over a year ago RE and I were on a car trip into the Scottish Borders when we stopped at the Grey Mare's Tail near Moffat. This tourist attraction is a waterfall tumbling down a steep valley, and there's a short path up to a viewpoint where you can see the water. We went up that short path, which is not much more than a stroll, and by the time we were no more than a few feet up I was having trouble breathing properly, and by the time we got to the top I thought my end had come. Unable to speak properly I could only communicate with gasps through a rasping, breathless, death rattle, leaving RE genuinely fearful that the noise she was hearing was indeed the initial death throes of a very unfit, and by now very sweaty man. It was probably 10 minutes after we made it back to the car before I could string a proper sentence together, and I felt ill for much of the rest of the day.

Flashback over, so wind forward to Findlater Castle last weekend, and I happily climbed down the hill and up the slope to the castle, and then climbed back up the hill to the viewpoint, and while I wouldn't claim not to have been a bit puffed I could have a conversation all the way there and back, and my breathing returned to a normal rate within a minute or so after getting back up the hill. And I wasn't particularly sweating either. The wonders of regular exercise! My new, and frankly enjoyable, regime is doing wonders for my health, fitness, happiness, and hopefully lifespan. RE said she was very impressed, and while, being a man, I find it difficult to accept compliments so sort of shrugged it off, secretly I was so chuffed with myself, and thankful to RE for the encouragement which has led me to this point.

Onwards then and after a brief stop at the Spotty Bag Shop in Banff, which sells everything, and all at very cheap prices, we headed further east to Pennan which was one of the locations used in the 1983 Burt Lancaster film Local Hero, and the famous red phone box used in the film is still there. Or at least there is a red phone box there but the original in the film was a prop and the box was only installed later after public demand! Pennan is a single street at the bottom of a steep curving road, right on the waterfront. Go there.

From Pennan we travelled about 10 miles further east to the fishing port of Fraserburgh, largely because the fuel warning light came on in the car and I knew there'd be a petrol station there! After a brief and unsuccessful visit to the lighthouse museum, unsuccessful because we could see no tearoom and we were only there looking for a refreshment, we found a cafe next to the beach where we enjoyed delicious coffee. As an aside I have just found out, when looking for the link to the museum, that there is indeed a cafe at the lighthouse museum! D'oh! Although I guess we'd have had to pay for admission to the museum to access it. In fact I now realise that it was the Heritage Centre we looked at, which is right next to the lighthouse place.

Anyway the cafe overlooking the beach served good coffee, albeit in uninspiring surroundings reminiscent of a bus station. The view was good though, overlooking the beach which had a fair number of surfers taking advantage of what the North Sea was throwing at them.

Off then to Turriff, a market town about ten miles inland, for the barbecue hosted by a couple of friends, SC and MC, and their young son CC. I used to visit SC regularly in Turriff a number of years ago, when she was called SP, but haven't seen all that much of her in the past 10 years apart from one or two meetings when she's been in the Glasgow area. The barbecue was very good, and although the rain started again, it just meant we all adjourned indoors to play with their Wii and give me a chance to make a tit of myself and show how crap I am at such games! But despite being crap, I enjoyed trying! The hospitality was good, and so was the craic.

After the BBQ, we headed the 10 miles back to Balwarren, which is when we found out that the other folks hadn't turned up so we had the sitting room to ourselves for a second night. Hazel kindly lit the wood burning stove for us, and we connected my MP3 player to my wee set of external speakers and ruminated about how the other guests wouldn't have enjoyed listening to our choral music anyway, as RE finished off the wine from the previous night and I opened the bottle of 10 year old Aberlour malt whisky I'd bought earlier in the day and made some inroads into it. A tranquil end to a very enjoyable day.

So Monday dawned bright and sunny, and after a repeat performance of the delicious breakfast, we settled our bill, which was very reasonable, and packed the car for the trip home. But we weren't heading straight home. No, we were already in the area so felt that some more sightseeing was in order.

Our first port of call was another tiny harbour similar and near to Pennan, called Crovie (pronounced Crivvie, apparently). At Pennan there's a road which you can drive along, at Crovie there isn't! There's a carpark at one end and the rest is pedestrian access only. Well I say there's a carpark, but it's for residents only. Visitors park about half a mile before the village, before the descent down to the village, and walk. So as you may gather, it's a walk back up as well. A steep walk. A lung burstingly steep walk. But again I managed it without undue distress. Yay!

Next we headed generally south, having exhausted everything we wanted to do and see along the north coast, and we had decided on a few things beforehand we wanted to get to.

We headed first to try to find a stone circle called Loudon Wood near Mintlaw and Old Deer, but after following the signposts for it, there was no obvious way to it and the trail went cold so instead we went to the ruins of Deer Abbey, which was a real find, as we were the only people there in glorious sunshine!

Just so we could say we'd been, we then drove east to Peterhead, which has a reputation for being one of the most unlovely towns in the north of Scotland (and probably in all of Scotland) but there were some nice looking buildings there as we drove through. A quick stop at a Tesco in Ellon, and we headed to our lunch destination of Pitmedden Gardens where we'd planned to eat our sandwiches and have a relaxing look around. But no. In their wisdom the National Trust for Scotland have decided that not only will they charge you £5.50 to get into the gardens, they will charge you for parking your car, and will not let you bring your own food or drink in, trying to force you to use their tearoom. Bollocks to that, we both thought, we'll go elsewhere.

A couple of miles away, and run by the much more user friendly Historic Scotland, is Tolquhon Castle which for a fairly small series of ruined buildings manages to pack in a hell of a lot of interesting features and many almost complete rooms. And they seemed happy enough for us to eat our sandwiches at a picnic table in the grounds. I'd recommend this as a destination, without doubt.

This isn't the only example, but suffice to say that my general impression is that the National Trust for Scotland are shit, and Historic Scotland are good. An oversimplification maybe, but there is a lot of truth in it.

And so home. From there we just headed south via Aberdeen and onto the main road. At the end of it we'd travelled just under 660 miles in two and a bit very enjoyable days, and RE was more familiar with pretty much the only bit of Scotland she hadn't previously visited.

A good trip.

Fit like?

I haven't visited the north east of Scotland for a while, but a few years ago for various reasons I frequented the area A LOT, particularly the area north of Aberdeen around the town of Turriff. In fact at one point I started to make initial enquiries into the possibility of transferring my job up there and moving permanently, but things changed and that didn't happen.

I'm heading up there in about 15 minutes though, because RE and I have been invited to a barbecue by a friend and her husband. It'll be my first time in Turriff for probably 10 years and I'll be interested to see if it's changed much, although I suspect it won't. The BBQ is on Sunday, but we're making a weekend of it and visiting a friend of RE in Nairn on the way up, a more circuitous route than I used to take and one that should provide good scenery, and having lunch with her there which I'm looking forward to. Then we've found what should be very nice accommodation for tonight and tomorrow night, travelling back down on Monday which is a local holiday in the west of Scotland, well Glasgow anyway.

RE hasn't seen anything of the north east, so we have a lot of plans about things we want to visit, and hopefully some nice photos will be taken.

Oh, and I perhaps should explain the title of this post which is a phrase in the north east dialect (possibly the Doric but I'm not sure of that) often said when you meet someone and which can possibly best be translated as "how's it going?". I think. But I have a few friends who read this Blog and are originally from that area so no doubt I'll be quickly corrected if I'm wrong!

Choir Tour Tee Shirt

St Mary's Choir Tour 1990 - Tee Shirt Back Detail, originally uploaded by gordonrasmith.

I sincerely trust that gordonrasmith will not object that I've Blogged one of his photos from Flickr.

This is the detail from one of the tee-shirts from the 1990 St Mary's Cathedral Choir tour of Scotland which I wrote about recently. The printing on the tee shirts was exactly the same as on the red sweatshirts we were all wearing in the photo I posted. The black and white photo that is. So you'll just need to trust me that they were red!

In the post from a few days ago you can see one person, DW, centre row furthest left, wearing his sweatshirt back to front to show the map, which as you can see above contains times, locations and types of service in each cathedral.

Oh, and there's a cunning plan to do it all again in the 20th anniversary year. Next year that would be. A plan hatched in the pub after Evensong last Sunday.

So there's now a Facebook group as well as a Flickr group relating to the aforementioned cunning plan.

All we need to do now is organise it, so does anyone want to help ...............!

Choir tour 1990

St Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow, choir tour 1990, originally uploaded by Lay Clerk.

Just been doing some admin on Flickr, and came across this, one of my favourite photos. Favourite because this was a good time in my life. A very good time indeed!

In this choir tour of 1990, to aid the cathedral restoration fund, we visited all seven Scottish mainland Episcopal (Anglican) cathedrals in one day, and sang a full unaccompanied choral service in each with completely different music each time.

What a day!

And it all started from an idea mooted in the pub after Evensong. La Taverna it was, now called The Lansdowne, not that it matters!

It was the idea of Frkenny I seem to remember, or if it wasn't his direct idea then he was intrinsic to the whole plan. He's the one holding the teddy bear in the front row. I identify him only because in his own Blog he seems happy enough to have his photo published.

There are others in the photo who have an online presence these days, either by their Blogs, like ChickPea, or on Flickr, like gordonrasmith, or suchlike, but they, like me, choose relative anonymity so I shall not identify where they are in the photo, or indeed where I am. Several of them in the photo are also my friends on Facebook, which as an aside I have found to be a really good method of re-contacting old friends, and keeping up to date with what they're up to.

From memory, we started with Mattins in Oban at around 6am, having travelled there the night before, then an exciting (!) coach ride (with some nursing hangovers) up to Inverness for more Mattins, then Aberdeen for Eucharist, Dundee for Evensong, Perth for probably Evensong again, Edinburgh for more Evensong, and back to Glasgow for Compline at something like 10pm.

Now that I type that it doesn't seem right. The cathedrals and the order we visited them is right, but I'm not sure if the type of service I've quoted for each is correct, there seem like too many Evensongs! Perhaps someone can correct me, or reassure me that I'm right?

Update 1845hrs: Thanks to Pencefn for correcting me. Edinburgh was Compline, not Evensong.

According to AutoRoute, it's about 392 miles, and if you click the map you can see the route in a little more detail. We went clockwise.

The final Compline back at a packed St Mary's cathedral in Glasgow was very moving, and there were few of us who could actually sing the words of the hymn "The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended" through the lumps in our throats and tears in our eyes. Or was that just me? No, I suspect not!

A recording still exists, I have one, but it was never meant for public distribution, since the quality is rather erratic, because due to the time scales involved we pretty much robed on the coach as we approached each cathedral, ran off and into the building where we processed straight into the service and sang it, processed out again and climbed straight back onto the coach. This left very little time for PH, and DW who are professional, no make that VERY professional, sound engineers to rush in and set up the recording equipment as we arrived and dismantle it afterwards before rushing back onto the coach. Oh, and they sang in the choir too! And I don't mean to suggest it's only the recording which was sometimes erratic, it was sometimes the singing too!

Many of the people in the photo above remain my closest friends, although for some we don't see each other terribly often. At the time though they seemed much more than friends, we were a family. Well, that's how it felt to me anyway.

Now that I look closer in fact, I can see that in the photo are my two best friends and three others who I consider amongst my very closest friends, one ex wife (still friends), one significant ex girlfriend (still friends), the man who generously and selflessly allowed me to live rent free in his flat (which he was rarely in) when my first marriage broke up and I was going through an extremely dark period in my life, the man who first introduced me to choral singing in the mid 1970's when he persuaded my brother and me to join the local church choir and who later persuaded me along to St Mary's cathedral choir, and the two men from whom I learned what little I do know about choral singing from 1983 when I joined the cathedral choir.

As well as that, if that weren't enough, there are people with whom I've shared some of the best days of my life (so far) with, some I've shared various levels of, shall we say, kisses and cuddles with (females, that is), and some who've supported me through the worst days of my life.

Occasionally the question is raised "in your mind, what age do you feel you are?" and there are various answers to that, usually round about the 18-21 mark. My answer is always "around 27-28" and I think that's because that's when I felt really happy, felt like I was starting to achieve something and thought things would remain exactly as they were. This photo was taken in 1990. I was 28.

This photo is a microcosm of a very significant part of my life.

And that's why it's a favourite.

Review of 2008

It's that time of year again when the TV, Radio and newspapers are full of their reviews of the activity and stories of the previous 12 months. Well I'm not going to be outdone! For your delectation (well, OK, it's actually totally for me as a cathartic exercise) here is how 2008 went for me. Not everything I'm going to mention has already been Blogged about, but some has.

Looking back at the review of 2007 I posted a year ago, I can see there have been some changes to my life in the past year. Almost exclusively these have been changes for the better.

The year 2007 ended with me having rejoined Glasgow Chamber Choir, and continuing to enjoy the experience. This coincided with me coming to the end of a difficult and sometimes turbulent relationship which had been going on for a bit over a year. I pride myself on being easy going and hopefully pretty calm much of the time, but my stress levels were through the roof for a significant chunk of the latter part of 2007. I didn't really Blog about this much at the time, it wouldn't have been right, but I can say now with the clarity of hindsight that this was a relationship I shouldn't have been in, and having been in it, it shouldn't have dragged on as long as it did. It did neither of us any good. And in fact it affected my friendship with other, better, friends too. Another pride I take is that I am still on good speaking terms with everyone (there are not all that many!) with whom I have had a significant relationship, whatever form that took, but this particular relationship having finished part way through the year and changed into a tentative, or possibly even tenuous, friendship, in January something happened which caused the other person to cut off all contact with me, despite my efforts to try to remain friends. I gave it a few weeks though, and after all calls had gone unanswered, including calls being rejected, I gave up and haven't thought about contacting her again. So another dark chapter passes!

The thing that happened in January was that I started a new relationship with RE, a member of Glasgow Chamber Choir. She had joined in September 2007 on the same evening I had rejoined, and over the next weeks and months we seemed to hit it off and seemed to enjoy one another's company, albeit always in a larger group, and so we eventually started dating. And we are still doing so, I'm very glad to say! It wouldn't be right for me to describe RE, or our relationship, or how I felt, or anything like that. So I won't. But she knows, I hope, and that's what matters.

In January, sadly, my gran died after a short illness but a long life. Needless to say I miss her. It was largely for her that I started tracing my family tree a few years ago (I currently have it traced back to the late 17th century in one of the strands) and since her death I haven't put any real effort into researching anything further. I fully intend getting back into it in the new year though.

Also in January I sat and passed my Institute of Advanced Motorists Advanced Driving test, adding that qualification to the Advanced Motorcycling one I passed the previous month. Since then I haven't felt the urge to become a Qualified Car Observer, but I persevered with the motorcycling training and in September 2008 I successfully passed the written and practical tests which make me a Qualified Motorcycle Observer, able to accompany and assist associates who are undertaking training to pass their own Advanced test. The season's finished just now of course, but I'm looking forward to carrying on with helping associates next year.

In March I spent a tremendously enjoyable long weekend in Marseilles with Glasgow Chamber Choir, where we sang in a couple of concerts (pretty stress free) and ate, drank and socialised a lot. I think part of the reason I enjoyed it was that it was my first trip abroad for ages, apart from the trip to Belgium in 2007 when I was in a plaster cast, and the first time away with RE. In fact up to that point our relationship was known only to a very small handful of people, but we had to come out the closet, so to speak, for the trip away so it was nice not to have to hide it from our friends any longer!

I've made my personal peace with St Mary's Cathedral. For a while I had no intention of ever going back, but I have and I'm very happy to have done so. My absence from the choir, and from the building generally, started with my achilles tendon injury when I couldn't walk or even stand without crutches, but it then developed into a wider problem connected with the relationship I was in. I should never have let that happen, but I did, but I'm glad to say that I'm back. I'm not singing in the choir full time at the moment, because they rehearse on the same evening as Glasgow Chamber Choir does, but I am for the moment one of the "occasional extra" singers drafted in when they need tenors. The other side of that coin is that if I see anything coming up on the music list which I'd like to sing, then I just contact FW, the director of music, and he's happy for me to come and join in, even if that means the choir has a boatload of tenors that evening! And in fact the choir is well blessed for tenors at the moment, there are I think about five of them, so I'm not really needed just now. But RE and I do attend Evensong most weeks, which is very enjoyable only not quite so enjoyable as actually singing in it!

This year, and I actually can't remember when it was apart from early summer or before, St Mary's Cathedral played host to a big Evensong service for the organist emeritus, Bernard Porter, who was celebrating a significant birthday. Lots of former choir members, including me, joined the current choir and made a spectacular sound. Some travelled from as far afield as the south of England, the north of Scotland, and New York to join the singing! And the socialising, funnily enough, was great!

In the summer, together with various friends including RE, I joined the newly formed Royal School of Church Music Scottish Voices choir. The initial meeting was a residential weekend at Strathallan School in Perthshire, which seemed to go well, not least because FW, from St Mary's Cathedral, is also the conductor of RSCM Scottish Voices. I should explain that the RSCM choir is not to be confused with Scottish Voices, which is a different choir. Apparently RSCM Scottish Voices is the equivalent of the RSCM Cathedral Singers in England, but they decided not to use that name in Scotland lest it offended Presbyterians and others who have no cathedrals! Political correctness strikes again! So they chose the name RSCM Scottish Voices instead, and presumably either didn't realise there is already a choir called Scottish Voices, or didn't care. Superb!

Anyway, next year's dates have recently been circulated, and it looks like it'll be a busy and enjoyable year.

In September my little cat Ernie fell ill, and after a short illness sadly died. I Blogged about that extensively at the time and have no intentions of reliving it here, since it was an intensely painful experience. I miss him greatly, as does Elmo, his wee pal.

One of the high spots of the year undoubtedly was my visit to San Diego, Califonia to visit my brother and his family. Made even better by RE joining me for the last few days when she was enroute back to Glasgow from New Zealand and made a stopover. I've Blogged a fair bit about the holiday, but I'm conscious that I still haven't told the full story yet and I owe this Blog the final installment, so I'll try to get to that as soon as possible!

I discovered in 2008, or it might have been late 2007, that my blood pressure had climbed alarmingly. It's now down to a better level, and I'm trying to get my act together to get to my local gym regularly in an effort to keep it down, lose a bit of weight, and get fit enough to do the things I want to do, which are many and varied! I've decided against taking up badminton again though, as I don't relish the idea of fucking up my achilles tendon again! Watch this space for details of my progress, if indeed I make any progress!

As ever, I make it my rule not to Blog about work. Suffice to say I'm still enjoying being in the particular department I'm in, doing the things I do, and tempting as it is to go looking for more money elsewhere, and it IS available, I'd rather stay where I am. For the moment anyway!

So, to sum up, 2008 has been a good year for me, not only on the relationship front but also as regards St Mary's Cathedral and trips abroad to sunny places. On the extreme down side, I lost both my gran and my faithful companion Ernie, but such is the way of life.

I've just re-read all of the above and realised it's a bit more of a random stream of consciousness than usual, so apologies for that. If I could be arsed I'd edit it into some better chronological, or at least logical, order, but I can't!

Anyway, Happy Christmas and a successful 2009 to you all, and I refuse to go down the political correctness route and use weasel words detracting from Christmas. If you are offended by my wishing you a Happy Christmas rather than Happy Holidays or similar, then perhaps you're reading the wrong Blog and I invite you never to darken my URL again!

Stuff your friend

Stuff your friend, originally uploaded by Lay Clerk.

I realise that it's been a while now since I was in San Diego, and it seems almost like a distant memory, but I haven't forgotten that I still have a few days of travel log to catch up with (or should that be "up with which to catch"?). I have the bare bones of it saved as a draft post and I'll get to it as soon as I can.

In the meantime, the image above is of a small billboard in San Diego Zoo. I think it's connected with a teddy bear manufacturing retail outlet.

Or is it?

You decide!

On a slightly related note, but only slightly, earlier in the year I was in Marseilles for a very enjoyable long weekend of socialising and singing with Glasgow Chamber Choir, while we were visiting our twin choir La Maîtrise Gabriel Fauré and during the early part of the weekend we were treated to a reception by the French choir.

During the socialising I noticed a poster advertising some sort of ice lolly, for licking, obviously, which I couldn't resist photographing, and which is reproduced on the right.

I make no further comment apart from the observation that it might sell well if it were available in the UK!

Dubai

I came across the following series of photographs of Dubai a few days ago. They were all taken from pretty much the same location and looking in the same direction over a 17 year period, and they go to show the incredible growth of the Emirate. I visited Dubai in 2002, not long before the second photo was taken, and was struck by the amount of building work which was ongoing, and by all accounts it's been increasing exponentially since then.

You can see the same row of tower blocks in each photo. It's Sheikh Zayed Road, which runs all the way to Abu Dhabi, another of the United Arab Emirates.

Update 11th December: I should have mentioned when I first posted this, I didn't take these photos and I don't know the provenance of them, so if anyone can oblige with the details then I'll happily credit the photographers, or even remove this post if they wish.

The first one's from 1990


The second one's from 2003


The last one's from 2007

Car v Car v Car

Had the chance to use my "stay where you are I'm a trained First-Aider and I'll help you in any way I can" routine on the way home from work this evening.

Didn't get the chance to change into the Superman costume unfortunately, but never mind!

I was on the M8 heading west from the general area of Glasgow Airport towards the Erskine Bridge (how boring must that be for those reading this who know nothing of the geography of Scotland, and only marginally less boring for those who do!) and I reached a sudden tailback with both lanes not really moving at all, for almost a mile as it turned out. Fortunately I was on the bike, not in the car, so took full advantage by using the special "courier lane" which is always denoted by the white line dividing the lanes the cars use! I also switched repeatedly from dipped to full beam, just to make my approach a bit more visible to anyone thinking about changing lanes or opening their doors suddenly (which can happen in such tailbacks).

As I made it towards the front of the queue I saw that in the fast lane there was a car stopped with its hazard lights flashing, and as I reached it I then saw that there were in fact two other cars stopped in front of it. Very close in front of it in fact, with contact made between the rear two of the three, and various bits of debris about the carriageway.

Now normally I don't get involved, and I had no intentions of doing so until, at the last minute as I passed the RTA (Road Traffic Accident, or in fact I believe they're now known as RTC - Road Traffic Crash to take cognisance of the opinion that there's no such thing as an accident, it's always someone's fault) I pulled into the fast lane in front of the front car.

Wearing very fluorescent safety gear, and being confident and aware of what's happening around me, I had no qualms about walking around on the carriageway, since the traffic was going very slowly indeed as it filtered down into a single lane to pass the obstruction.

I approached the front vehicle which was directly behind the bike, and inside which the female driver was sitting using her mobile phone, and made sure she wasn't injured and that someone had called the police. She confirmed that she was fine, and told me that one of the three people who were standing across on the hard shoulder and who had come from the other two cars had called the police.

I carefully crossed the carriageway to the hard shoulder, making sure that I had eye contact with the driver approaching and making sure he was in no doubt I was about to walk in front of him and I was in no doubt he was going to let me!

The three females standing on the grass verge looked a hell of a lot more upset than the first, older, lady to whom I had spoken, and all three of them were very teary-eyed, and although one said she had a bit of a sore chest where the airbag had deployed and another said she was 4 months pregnant, none of the three had any actual injuries. None that they mentioned when asked anyway.

The driver of the second car, although I hadn't ask what had happened, told me that she'd no idea why the front vehicle had suddenly executed an emergency stop right in front of her and leaving her no time to stop. I made no comment at the time, but the rule is, I believe, always that the car that runs into the back of another is always at fault. You should always be able to stop within the distance you can see to be clear. Oh well, that's for the police and insurance companies to sort out.

The three females on the verge also told me when asked that the lady who was still sitting in the front car had called the police, who should be on their way, and one of the three standing there had also called a breakdown/recovery company.

Hang on. Did they say that the driver of the front car had called the police? She told me that they had called them. Oh well, better to be safe than sorry, so I called them to make sure.

A few minutes later a traffic car appeared and blocked off the fast lane, and then a well practised routine swung into action. After ensuring that no one was injured, one of the officers collected the sets of keys for the cars and, while her colleague stopped all the traffic, all three were moved to the hard shoulder, and I moved my bike there too.

I helped a bit by lifting the biggest bits of plastic bodywork off the carriageway, and the traffic was allowed to move again.

The officer asked me if I had seen anything, and when I explained that I had only stopped to make sure no one was injured, she allowed me on my way, with a "thank you for stopping".

So there you go.

My initial first aid training was a number of years ago when, in a previous life, I worked for Strathclyde Police as a Turnkey, and I am told that the level of training Strathclyde provides is the equivalent of that which Paramedics receive apart from the administration of drugs and intubation (tube down the throat) which Strathclyde rightly doesn't teach.

As a Turnkey I used my first aid skills if not on a daily basis then certainly more than once a week, dealing with all sorts of things from cuts and bruises, epileptic fits (or clonic tonic seizures as I seem to remember they are called), unconsciousness, drug overdoses, drug withdrawals, Delirium Tremens caused by alcohol withdrawal, wounds caused by knives and broken glass (the guy had been thrown through a window during a fight), chest pain, anaphylactic shock (mild, fortunately), and pretty much anything you can think of. All life was there!

Not now being a Turnkey and no longer working for Strathclyde Police, these days I don't often have cause, thankfully, to put my training to use, but it's always nice to know that the skills should still be there, lurking under the surface and ready to present themselves if necessary. So I'm glad I stopped this evening, even though it turned out that no one had been injured.

Where have I been?

The above map was originally posted on 13th March 2007 and updated on 25th April 2007 to add one wee country, Belgium. Below though is the latest version, showing France and the USA. Seems like a lot of red in north America just because I've been in one state, California!



create your own visited country map

How crap is that still? And the only reason The Netherlands are on there is because I visited Holland with secondary school in about 1975 by coach! A school trip, I ask you!

The mountains of Oman I visited on a day trip while in Dubai in 2002. And Germany - I had changeovers at Frankfurt airport enroute to and from Dubai. And I haven't been in mainland Spain, only Lanzarote but I couldn't select that on its own. Ireland I visited with Glasgow University Chapel Choir on a tour of Dublin.

Note to self: Must do better at travelling!

On the upside though, I do have a very good working knowledge of the geography of much of England and most of Scotland!

The party's over: catch up #1

OK, you can now accept the date and time of this post as correct, because I'm home!

The previous post was about a week ago, just before RE arrived in San Diego, so I've a bit of catching up to do. I've decided to do the updates in several shorter boring posts rather than a huge long boring one!

Here goes with the first:

Monday 27th October

We didn't play golf. Instead, we had a look round some motorcycle shops, and then drove up to Point Loma and the Cabrillo National Monument which overlooks San Diego and the entrance to the bay. In 1542 Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo was the first European to set foot on the west coast of what is now the USA, and the view from the National Monument which honours him is bloody good, to say the least! Great view over San Diego Bay, and the military establishments there, including a nuclear submarine base.

The rest of the day was spent chilling!


Tuesday 28th October

RE was due into LAX at around 11.15am, so my brother, D, and I headed north up Interstate 5 and on the way to the airport we headed first to Long Beach and to RMS Queen Mary, or rather the Hotel Queen Mary, which was built close to my house in the John Brown shipyard on the river Clyde, sailed the high seas for a long number of years, and is now an hotel. I can't vouch for what the hotel is like inside, but the outside isn't much to look at, covered as it is by a fair amount of wooden hoardings painted grey. Not all the way up, obviously, but high enough to detract from the lines of the ship. We had 30 minutes free parking before having to pay, so we didn't hang around for all that long, and we certainly didn't spend money going onto her.

Next stop, breakfast. Needing to find a petrol, sorry, gas station, the SatNav directed us a mile or two from the Queen Mary and once that was completed we set it for the nearest Starbucks which was pretty close. So far, so normal. But other than the identical menu it was rather different from the ones we had been frequenting in San Diego. For a start it was in what looked to be a bus station, or at a major bus exchange anyway, and it smelt a bit funny. Nothing you could pinpoint, but just a bit odd.

As we were standing at the counter being served, there was a man sitting very nearby next to an electric wheelchair which was plugged into the wall being recharged. The man was sitting with what looked like a sketch book, and he suddenly, loudly, said something which appeared aimed in our general direction. I looked round and made eye contact, but nothing more was forthcoming so I looked away again. We sat down, a bit further away from him but still in line of sight, and earshot. As an aside, while we were passing I glanced at the sketchbook. It looked like a primary school pupil had drawn Mr Potato Head badly!

A middle aged, hippy-looking woman came in, laden with bags which she dumped on a table across from us, but she didn't sit down. After fussing around, huffing and puffing and muttering to no one in particular, she suddenly leaned towards the counter, which was right next to the table, and demanded "I need water". The assistant replied that they sold bottled water which was in the chiller against the wall, but the woman, raising her voice slightly, declined this and again asked for water. The assistant politely told her that it was company policy not to supply free tap water when they sold bottled. The woman, clearly becoming argumentative and therefore much louder, demanded water again. And so on for a moment or two, until she agreed to buy a bottle from the chiller but suddenly changed her mind and announced (loudly) to everyone that she had always fucking hated the fucking way fucking Starbucks fucking did their fucking business, and she would fucking go elsewhere! She gathered up her belongings and flounced out. Oh, and she may have sworn a bit too. D and I could only look and laugh.

A minute later another, younger and more respectable, woman was at the counter. Wheelchair man had by now struggled to his feet and made it back into the wheelchair. He said something to the young woman, but she didn't quite hear him, having earphones in her ears listening to an iPod, but she was aware that he was speaking to her so took them out her ears and turned to him. Wheelchair man shouted at her that she should fucking listen better, then told her to help him out the door. She said OK, but told him he didn't need to be so rude about it, and she walked to the door next to our table and held it open. He shouted even louder for her to wait a fucking minute because the wheelchair wasn't fucking unplugged yet, and she'd better fucking do that right now. She told him just to forget it and walked back to her place at the counter. Much more reserved than I'd have been, I think.

Another young male in the queue stepped forward and unplugged the chair from the wall socket, the chair sprang into life, and wheelchair man started moving towards the door, which was now being held open by the young man. As he glided across the floor, a torrent of abuse was directed at all and sundry, including D and me who were apparently motherfuckers who would get their asses kicked by wheelchair man just shortly! All we could do was laugh at him, and of course tell him to fuck off in no uncertain terms.

Now I have no problem with helping those less fortunate, and will in fact go out my way to hold open doors, or whatever is necessary, but while I don't expect those seeking my assistance to grovel, I particularly don't expect them to ask for help by shouting, swearing, and demanding assistance, and by giving foul mouthed abuse when that assistance is not immediately forthcoming in the way expected! The guy was clearly a prick, and I trust at some point someone will object to his lack of manners in a more physical way than just telling him to fuck off. It will be deserved!

So, who'd have believed we'd have seen mad people in LA!

We then quit this Starbucks, which when I think about it was maybe an homage to the bar in Star Wars, and headed to the airport to collect RE, who was looking surprisingly awake after being on the go for about 24 hours!

Heading back south down Interstate 5, we diverted to North Beach, so that RE could chill out by the Pacific Ocean for a while to try to delay the jetlag. While she and I walked a short distance along the beautiful golden sand, RE with shoes removed and splashing around happily, D sat on a rocky outcrop and enjoyed the scenery. But while he was looking at the ocean he suddenly noticed a small furry head with whiskers sticking out, popping up in front of him and looking around. D glanced away, and by the time he looked back it was gone. We couldn't figure out what it had been, but our suggestion of an effect of being out in the sun for too long was rejected by D!

The evening was spent doing more chilling around the barbecue.

In vino veritas

Ah, wine. The very lifeblood of civilisation.

Today, Sunday 26th October (ignore the "official" post date and time recorded here which is in GMT, or in fact probably BST, it's a little after 10.30pm on Sunday here in San Diego, Southern California, as I start to type this) we visited the Callaway Winery near Temecula. Took the (free) tour and heard the story of how the wine is produced, and how Ely Callaway founded the vineyard in 1969 before becoming even more famous as a maker of expensive golf bats (a good walk spoiled, some say). And sampled 6 different wines ranging from pretty good to very good!

Before hitting the winery though we stopped in the town of Temecula. Actually I think it's a city, but it didn't seem all that big so looked more like a town. Didn't stay for all that long, and didn't do much except have breakfast (crepes and coffee) and visit an antiques centre where plaster representations of Winnie the Pooh and the late Emperor Julius Caesar (or G. Cesare as the inscription says, which means Guilio Cesare we have worked out by means of research on t'InterWeb) were procured. The crepes and coffee were good, but served a bit randomly one plate at a time with a gap of a few minutes between each.

Next, and final, stop was a picnic area at Lake Wohlford, where chicken bits and tuna sandwiches were consumed, and a football (of the American version) was thrown around for a while.

This evening I had a long overdue, and very welcome Skype conversation with RE who is in New Zealand. She will be arriving in Los Angeles on Tuesday morning, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing her again and spending some touristy time together.

While in Temecula today, and on all the roads round about here, huge numbers of Harley Davidson motorcycles have been very much in evidence, and to be truthful the more of them I've seen, the more I've realised that I don't buy into the culture of that particular make of machine. I've no problem with anyone who does, and I still think they sound great (although apparently they handle like shit on anything except a straight road), but I've never had a desire to ride one in the UK and have felt pressure to hire one while here only because it's probably The Thing To Do, so over the course of today I've pretty much come to the decision that I'm not going to bother hiring one while I'm here. Sure, it's great biking weather, and if I had a BMW like my own at home (the link isn't to my actual bike, incidentally, just to the same model) then I'd happily head out there, but the San Diego BMW Motorrad dealer doesn't advertise rentals on their Website, and when I did some research before coming out here I saw some BMW's for hire at a price far above what I'd deem reasonable, so to Hell with that!

So tomorrow, we haven't quite decided what to do. Golf has been mentioned, but it remains to be seen whether my brother will put up with a non-player accompanying him and hacking his way round the course to everyone's amusement and probably irritation. Also, I don't look good wearing Pringle sweaters.

Did I mention that last night we ate at Joe's Crab Shack? Very nice too. Almost bought a tee shirt proclaiming My waitress gave me crabs, but didn't!

Hi tech stuff

It's a little after 3pm on Saturday 25th October. So what have I been up to here in still very sunny and unseasonably hot San Diego since my previous post on Wednesday afternoon?

On Thursday my brother, D, took me for a whistlestop tour of the place he works, Solar Turbines, in the centre of San Diego right next to the airport. What struck me most in the assembly area was, considering this is engineering on a big scale, it was really really clean. I'm not an engineer myself, and my previous limited experience of it was a week of work experience in my last years at school, probably around 1978, which I spent at the Terex earth moving equipment manufacturer near my hometown, and various short visits to collect my dad from his work when that was at a steelworks. All very noisy, dirty environments. But not Solar, it was all very clean, very hi-tech, pretty quiet, and very impressive.

Thursday evening saw us eating at the Fish Market at Del Mar/Solano Beach. An interesting if unsurprisingly fishy menu full of things of which I'd never heard before, let alone tried! And some beer too. Wouldn't necessarily recommend you try it, but it was OK.

On Friday we set off slightly north of the city, and finding the beach near Carlsbad we followed the coast south again, largely on the historic Route 101, aka the Pacific Highway, seeing groups of surfers on the way. Through a mixture of towns like Encinitas, Solana Beach, Del Mar and La Jolla (pronounced Hoya apparently), which varied from what looked like not much more than beach huts perhaps occupied by people who moved to California in the 1960's and never left (the area or the 60's for that matter!) and huge multi million dollar properties, probably occupied for a small percentage of the year by film stars and other such celebs.

We'll go back to that area next week though, to explore a bit more when RE gets here. On Friday we were headed somewhere specific, not just Pacific. Our destination was the rather large and exceptionally impressive USS Midway, a decommissioned aircraft carrier berthed in San Diego Bay just along from the Maritime Museum we visited earlier in the week. When she was launched in 1945 and for the following ten years, Midway was the largest ship in the world, and she is big! Lots to see, and one refreshing thing was that many of the aircraft on the flight deck have bits sticking out of them at body or head height (edges of wings and suchlike) yet there are very few roped off or protected areas so it would be easy to walk into something slightly painful. The authorities who run the ship as a museum have obviously trusted the intelligence of their visitors enough not to have felt the need to over protect them. I genuinely thought that was a nice touch, and perhaps all the more surprising in the notoriously litigious USA.

After leaving the Midway, we visited Beverages and More, which if it were in Glasgow would be a very regular haunt for me. I got some Gordons Gin and some Pastis, and D got various Belgian and UK beers and some wine. Great store!

So that was us all set for Tapas type starters followed by Jambalaya, sitting outside in the still warm evening, with large glasses of Pastis for me, and red wine for everyone else (except my niece J, who had Sprite!). A good evening, yet again, of good food and drink and company.

This morning, Saturday, and my sister in law and niece, C and J, available to join us since it's the weekend, we all set off to San Diego Wild Animal Park, a few miles north of San Diego. Something like 1800 acres of wilderness tamed and filled with a variety of exotic animals and boutiques selling the usual touristy tat. It's part of San Diego Zoo, which is in Balboa Park in the city and which we'll visit next week, and by all accounts it isn't quite as good as the zoo itself.

Now it's chill out time, because it's too hot to wander about outside, so I've copied all the photos I've taken so far from my camera onto a flash drive pen, just in case. I'd post more of the images here, but I've got the camera settings such that my images are roughly 3Mb each, and while if I was at home I'd use the Microsoft PowerToys image resizer to easily and quickly make small copies with just a right click of the mouse, D's laptop runs Windows Vista and the resizer only works with XP, so I don't want to upload too many big images. I'll upload smaller ones to my Flickr account after I return home, and provide a link to them from this Blog, in the unlikely event anyone wants to see them.

Happy birthday

One hundred years ago today, on 18th October 1908, the man in the photos was born.

William Yuill Young was my grandfather, and he was a sergeant in the 1st Battalion of the Scots Guards.

Having traced my family tree a bit, I have an idea of what his own ancestry was, but strangely, considering this and the fact that he died in 1972 so I do actually remember him, I don't really know that much about the man behind the photos.

I remember he was tall, tall anyway for our family at around six feet, and I remember he had tattoos on his hands of birds. Bluebirds I think. And I believe that's a traditional military thing of that era.

I understand that the photo of him on the motorcycle was taken in Pirbright camp in Surrey, probably some time during the second world war. Still haven't worked out what sort of bike it is!

Anyway, this would have been his 100th birthday. Happy birthday papa.


Unrelatedly, it's currently half past three in the morning and I can't sleep.

I'm off to San Diego today, and my flight from Glasgow to London is in four hours, then from London to Los Angeles four hours after that. It's going to be a long day, because I arrive in California just before 3pm local time and I guess I'll be awake for a while after that!

Rip off

I was in Edinburgh yesterday, the great whore of the east, on a training course learning all about GIS mapping systems. Or at least learning about a specific type of software which is a GIS mapping system. I'll be there again today, and tomorrow too.

The return rail fare to Edinburgh is £21.90 from my local station. I would have to catch the 0740hrs train to Glasgow Queen Street, then change onto the Edinburgh train to get to Waverley station in time to walk (10 minutes) to the course venue for 0930hrs, and finishing the course at 1730hrs I would not get home again, or to my local station anyway, until 1930hrs. Total travelling time, about 3 hours.

The journey is 55 miles each way and I could probably do it in a little over an hour on the bike, at a cost of about £10 for the return journey. Total travelling time, about two and a bit hours. Total cost, about half that of the rail journey.

Can't think why I don't use public transport more!

Marseilles 1

TW3.

For the uninitiated, TW3 stands for That Was The Week That Was, a satirical UK TV programme from a long time ago.

OK, so it wasn't quite a week, but I've recently spent five days in the sunny, and I mean very sunny, south of France. In Marseilles in fact. What a city. What fun. What a (nearly) week!

The occasion was the Glasgow Chamber Choir trip, when we visited our twin choir, La Maîtrise Gabriel Fauré, who are from the city of Glasgow's twin city, Marseilles. Or one of Glasgow's twin cities anyway, the others being Turin (Italy), Nuremberg (Germany), Rostov-on-Don (Russia), Dalian (China), Havana (Cuba), Bethlehem (Jerusalem) and Lahore (Pakistan). Perhaps a few of them hark back to Glasgow's traditional left leaning political tendencies, but they're valid connections nonetheless. I have to confess that with the possible exception of Turin, which I've never visited, I can't imagine any of the other cities will be as beautiful or welcoming as Marseilles, the oldest city in France, and the second largest. But I'm prepared to give them a try if anyone wants to fund (and organise) future choir trips!

I started to create this posting on Wednesday 7th May 2008, knowing that it was going to take me a while to finish it because I've got a lot to say on this occasion. It's taken me so long to get round to typing what I've done so far, that I suspect that if I don't start publishing it in smaller chunks I'll never publish any of it! I have in fact two full pages in a notebook of bullet points relating to things I saw, experienced, felt, smelt, touched, heard, and thought on the trip, and quite how I'm going to take them from the notebook, pad them out, change their order, and turn them into something which might be of some interest to anyone except me (in an online diary sort of way) remains to be seen!

Last year, before I rejoined Glasgow Chamber Choir (to which I will refer as GCC from now on), the choir somehow managed to be twinned with La Maîtrise Gabriel Fauré, who are an all female choir based in Marseilles, and to which I will hereafter refer as MGF. I don't know for sure, but I think MGF were looking to exploit the twinning arrangement of their city with Glasgow and make a trip, which I believe they do regularly, so they contacted GCC and the rest is history.

Anyway, last year MGF visited Glasgow and by all accounts the visit was a great success and enjoyed by members of both choirs. Time this year then to return the compliment, and after enormous work by our choir administrator KK, who is stepping down from that position at the end of this season, the trip was arranged and almost 20 choir members committed themselves to going.

Several of us from the start had independently thought that if we were going to travel that far then it'd be a shame just to go for the two nights on which we had concerts planned so had planned on extending the trip a day or two either side. So the outcome was that me, RE, AD, FCC, JG, JB, PH and AD all piled onto a Ryanair flight which left Prestwick at the rather ungodly hour of 0830hrs last Thursday morning, and after a completely straightforward journey lasting less than two and a half hours which left and arrived on time with all baggage intact, we were in the south of France. The photo is from the aircraft (as if that wasn't obvious) on the approach to Marseilles.

PH and AD had booked their rooms earlier and therefore separately from the rest of us, so having arrived at the Gare de St Charles by coach from the airport, we split into two groups and went our respective ways to our respective hotels.

In the case of the 6 of us who had booked kind of at the same time, and who therefore stuck mostly together for the trip, we quickly became the usual suspects who at home tend to often be the ones, sometimes the only ones, socialising. Well, OK, drinking. So the gang of 6 headed to the local Ibis hotel, pretty well next door to the station, and checked into our rooms. Another pain free operation. This whole thing was going far too well!

We met downstairs in the foyer shortly after and set out into the big bad streets of Marseilles, and I had in the back of my mind the undeniable fact that it has been 30 years, yes, count them, 30, since I studied French at school, and it's not entirely inaccurate to say I've not really said a word of it since. In fact I studied O Grade (Ordinary Grade) French (the exam for which I scraped through) in about 1977, and then in 1978 I decided to go on to study it at Higher Grade.

Now I'm going to let you into a little secret here. The way the Scottish exams worked at that time, and it may be the same now but I don't know, is that if you sat a Higher Grade exam but didn't hit the mark then you could be awarded a "comp O" Grade, which although I don't remember exactly what this stood for (perhaps compensatory?) meant that they'd mark it as if it were an O Grade rather than the more difficult Higher Grade. I didn't get a mention when the results were published. In other words, my Higher Grade French wasn't even O Grade standard! Soon after leaving school I had occasion to attend at school show, and as I walked into the venue I saw my French teacher, so being a smartass I said to her "Bonjour Madame Hamilton", at which point she fixed me with a slightly withering look and replied "Bonsoir!". Merde!

Roll on 30 years and yours truly is for the first time in the country of France, walking into the streets of Marseilles, and wondering not whether I'd be embarrassed by my lack of linguistic skills, but just how deeply and how often I was about to be embarrassed! And embarrassed not only by my lack of French, but by the firm grasp of English I was sure would be held by the French themselves. Typical Brit, I am, just speak English slowly and loudly and you'll get by.

Or that's kind of what I was thinking as I walked into the midday sunshine with the rest of the gang of 6.

The reality is that despite the cruel passage of time I had remembered enough of the basics to get me by with an occasional and wholly unintentional mix of languages known colloquially as Franglais, as popularised by the late and lamented Miles Kington in Punch magazine. That said, I understood more than I could speak and the main difficulty was usually the construction of sentences. But I was very happy with the way it all went, linguistically speaking, and by the Monday at the official reception I even managed to tell Jeanine Imbert, Conseillère Municipale Déléguée au Conservatoire National De Région Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts et Festival de Musique Sacrée, that her English was better than my French, by constructing the sentence in French as I went along (i.e. without planning in advance exactly what I was going to say) just like one does when one actually speaks the language. OK, I know it's not brilliant, but it made me happy!

To be continued .........

Catch up

I've again fallen behind on Blogging, despite my best intentions and aims. Oh well. Maybe time for a catch up post then.

I've now had two Wednesdays of being talked to by an IAM senior observer about how to go about observing another motorcyclist and offering them advice on how to improve their riding skills towards passing the IAM advanced test. Then I've had one week where, accompanied by a senior observer, I was let loose with an associate who had no idea it was my first time (and I think I got away with it!).

Initially a bit worried about whether I would be able to spot things to talk about and verbalise what I saw in such a way that it would be constructive, I managed to cover all the pre ride points: introducing myself; checking out the condition of the bike and suitability of the rider's clothing; finding out what experience the rider had both in terms of overall riding and specifically how often he'd been to IAM evenings; ascertaining what things he felt he needed to work on; looking at his progress sheet to see how previous observers had seen him; explaining where we were going, the route we were going to take, and the practicalities of how I was going to follow him; and the very important disclaimer that is a version of

"at all times when we are on the road you are responsible for the control of your own motorcycle and responsible for your own conduct, and you should ride at all times safely and in accordance with the law. If by interpreting my words, actions or signals you believe that I'm asking you to do anything with which you're not happy, then don't do it."

In other words, if it all goes horribly wrong, it isn't the responsibility of the IAM or more importantly of me personally!

So having looked at his bike, a nice looking Honda CBR600 sports bike which I believe does about 160mph (about 40mph more than my comfy big BMW R1100RT Tourer) and gets from 0-60mph in about 3.8 seconds (the BMW does it in about 4.5 seconds) and briefly wondered to myself if I was about to embarrass myself by being left trailing behind him, unable to keep up on the twisty country roads (while of course both sticking to the speed limit), we chatted and identified what the things were that he himself felt he had to work on, which was borne out by the markings on his progress sheet by the previous two observers, this being only the rider's third time out with the IAM.

As an aside, the photo was taken at the recent Easter Egg run and shows my hefty BMW coincidentally parked next to a svelte CBR600 in the car park at the SECC as we were gathering for the run.

So we set off, with the rider leading and mostly taking the correct road position, which is towards the right hand side of the lane, and, other traffic permitting, fairly near the centre white line (on a single carriageway road), and me behind him basically riding in the gutter! Yes, the best position for an observer following a rider is over to the nearside of the road, as this gives the best view of what the rider is doing, and doesn't obstruct the rider's rear view, allowing him to ride as he would normally do. It felt a bit strange at first, but not too bad, and I got used to it quickly. The senior observer followed me, watching what I was doing as I watched what the associate was doing.

As a general rule I have no intention of Blogging in any great detail about IAM associates and their riding (whether good or bad) while being observed by me, because I think that would be creeping towards being overly intrusive into their privacy, so I won't detail anything about the ride that followed, apart from mentioning one instance going round a left hand bend on a country road within the national speed limit (60mph) when the rider correctly stayed out to the right hand side of his lane, near the centre white line, giving the best view as far round the corner as possible so as to see hazards early, but he didn't move to the left, to a safer position, when he saw a transit van coming towards us, and I swear there must have been only a few inches between him and the van's mirror as they passed each other at a combined speed of probably 100mph (we were doing about 50mph and so was the van I'd guess). I took a very big sharp intake of breath as I saw the van approach and pass, although due to the tightness of the bend and the hedges on either side obstructing the view it appeared and disappeared again very quickly and it was all over in a flash. The senior observer, who was riding behind me, summed it up later when he simply said "I shit myself when I saw that". The rider himself knew that this had been a narrow escape, and I suspect and hope it was a valuable lesson on the learning curve! Sacrifice positioning for safety every time!

Twisty road wise I needn't have worried about trying to keep up with the sports bike. The BMW is a big heavy tourer designed for long trips in comfort down relatively straight motorways and autobahns, and sports bikes are light and designed to be flicked round corners easily, with massive acceleration. But when you factor in the 60mph speed limit, and the ability of an advanced rider to ride smoothly round bends without having to use the brakes very often, then the playing field was levelled somewhat and I had no problems keeping up and being in more or less the right viewing position for most of the time.

All in all an enjoyable evening, and I didn't have any problems thinking of things to say and suggest.

That was two Wednesdays ago, and the following Saturday, last Saturday in fact, the bike went to a mechanic for its 6000 mile service. Suffice to say that it was never going to go smoothly, and the £80 I was expecting to pay for the oil change etc has become over £400 due to the wee oil leak which I had noticed over the past few months happening very occasionally and usually only first thing on cold mornings and only a few drips lasting a minute before stopping. This is the fault of the oil cooler, apparently. The BMW is an oil cooled machine, and the little radiator type thing in the front is where the oil from the engine goes to be cooled as it circulates.

The recommendation by the mechanic was not to ride the bike until it was fixed, since he has seen the results when the cooler gives out completely (as it could do at any time apparently), dropping all the oil from the bike in one go over the front wheel onto the road just in time for the back wheel to go over it. If that happens at any sort of speed, leaving aside the fact that the engine is likely to seize causing cripplingly expensive damage, then the combination of tyres, road and oil doesn't exactly enhance grip, and you would be likely to fall off very painfully, perhaps even terminally! So I took his advice and the bike has been lying with him for a week.

So a new one of them costs £167, and there are two hoses connecting it to the system, one of which needs replaced, but to be honest what's the point of only replacing one hose when the other might go soon too, it being the same age. About £35 each hose. And the extra labour involved in removing all of the fairing (or Tupperware as I believe it's sometimes jokingly called) and replacing it again. An extra £100 of labour in fact.

I sourced the parts for the bike from Motorworks, although I couldn't find the oil cooler on their excellent website so had to telephone them and Yvonne in sales proved to be very friendly, helpful and knowledgeable, directing me to another website which they use to identify parts because it contains exploded diagrams of bikes. So having ordered the bits on Monday the box arrived at work on Wednesday, and I duly delivered it to the mechanic who will be putting the bike back together again today, I hope! I'm currently waiting on a phone call from him to say it's ready, and then I'll try to arrange a lift the 25 miles to where he has been working on it.


Singing wise, Glasgow Chamber Choir are about to travel to the south of France, to Marseilles, to perform a couple of concerts, one secular and one sacred.

The concerts are on Saturday and Sunday, but a crowd of us are taking full advantage by travelling out on Thursday and staying until Tuesday. Should be fun, and doubtless will generate one or two posts here in due course! The cats are booked into their regular holiday home from home.

Having taken an extended time out of the choir of St Mary's Cathedral (remember, the reason for this Blog's name!) which has lasted about a year so far, I recently sang there again to help out since they were very short of tenors for an Evensong. I enjoyed it greatly, and although I am not in a position to rejoin full time since they rehearse on the same evening as Glasgow Chamber Choir, I will be happy to help out as an occasional singer which seems to suit all round just now.

It seemed strange putting on a cassock after such a long time away, but it now seems inevitable that it was going to happen at some point, although I can now reveal that for almost all of the past year I have had no intentions of ever returning to St Mary's or to church generally, for reasons I won't go into. I also know that there is someone who, if they knew I was again at St Mary's, would be deeply hurt, and I'm truly sorry about that and genuinely hope that person is doing OK and getting on well with life. I'm sorry I don't know for certain that they are doing well, but I tried to keep in touch but was rebuffed, or my calls were ignored anyway. We all have to make decisions in our lives about what to do, and sometimes the right course of action for one person is absolutely the wrong one for another, and sometimes decisions we make for ourselves hurt other people's feelings. I don't mean to hurt anyone, it's not in my nature, but I need to do what's right for me, and not live my life worried about what others may think. Sorry.

Anyway, moving on.

I've been using Facebook for a while now, and although I'm clearly not in their target age range (!) I'm enjoying it and I think it's a good way of keeping in touch with current friends, and making contact with old friends. I've already added two secondary school contemporaries of mine as friends, and it's great to see how people are doing. I don't use my real name on here, and don't tend to use other people's real names either, instead sticking to their initials, but in the unlikely event that you read this Blog and want to become my Facebook friend (and God help you if you do, there must be something missing in your life!) then if you send me your email address and name I'll go searching for you on Facebook with a view to adding you as a friend. I think I can find you as long as I search for the email address you have registered with them.

I've been looking at Blogger and there doesn't seem to be any way to contact me privately via this Blog (although I do receive an email whenever a comment is posted), and I'm not going to publish my email address and neither do I expect anyone to publish their email address and name on a comment for all to see, so the best I can come up with to avoid nasty people obtaining private data, is that if you go to my Website, and to the My Choirs page, there's a link there at the top right hand side to contact me regarding choirs. It goes to a Webmaster email address which I monitor. That is a bit of a roundabout way of doing it, but it's the only way I can think of that avoids publishing email addresses for every bastard spammer in the world to see!

And in case you're wondering, this "be my friend on Facebook" thing is neither a sad plea for friends nor an attempt to harvest email addresses for nefarious purposes, it's just a wee extension of the Blog, sort of, and is aimed at any regular readers. I will not use your email address for anything other than searching for you on Facebook with a view to adding you as a friend. Promise.

Don't care in the community

Down to the Scottish borders in the car at the weekend, just for a bit of a drive with RE who hasn't toured the borders too much. It was very snowy, or at least lots of the fields were white, which means the roads were actually fine. Very picturesque run from Glasgow via Carluke, Peebles, Galashiels and Selkirk then down the A708 past the Grey Mare's Tail waterfall to Moffat and a quick'ish blast back up the M74 to Glasgow.

Peebles was an eye opener. Freezing wind and overcast when we parked the car, and less than an hour later wonderful clear blue skies and no wind at all! We had a bite to eat in a cafe in the main street, and I suspect a local mental hospital was closed for the afternoon, because several of the cafe customers (and one of the staff members) surely must reside there normally. I am quite easy going when it comes to being near subjects of care in the community, but usually there isn't such a concentration in one place! Or maybe that's normal for Peebles. Not scary, not offensive, just unusual.

The great find in Peebles was the large Presbyterian church at the end of the main street. We had a bit of a wander round it, and it's well worth a visit if you're there.

The Grey Mare's Tail is a 200 foot hanging valley waterfall, with a viewpoint at the bottom (which we missed until we came back down) and footpaths up either side of it. We walked up the smaller of the two paths (i.e. not the one which goes all the way to the top) and frankly it felt like it was killing me! I really should have an inhaler in my pocket, or at least in the car. D'oh! It was worth doing though, and despite maybe coming across to RE as though I hated it (for which I'm truly sorry!) I didn't really, and I must do more things like that in an effort to get fit and by so doing put back the date of my death a little bit!

A year later

It's pretty well a whole year since I completely snapped my Achilles Tendon while playing badminton, on Sunday 18th March 2007.

A couple of months of being in a non-weight-bearing plaster cast, 3 months off work, lots of months of physiotherapy, and a year down the line my left calf is still noticeably smaller than my right one due to muscle wastage when the cast was on, and I still have to concentrate on not limping.

Relatively recently I realised that the reason I keep getting cramp and aches in my left calf is because without having noticed it I now tend to walk with the muscles of my left leg tensed. When I manage to relax it I can walk a lot better and without limping, but I have to think about it as it doesn't come naturally yet. It'll come though, I hope.

So, since my previous post what has happened? I made a fairly rare purchase from Amazon. Rare these days anyway, although I used to buy a lot more from the site. A couple of posts ago I mentioned a few books which had been recommended to me, so that's me bought all three. Additionally I chucked both the Long Way Round and Long Way Down DVDs onto the order because although I've seen various individual episodes I haven't seen either series in its entirety. I really shouldn't place orders online after returning home from the pub, because I also added something off my Amazon Wish List, namely a digital photo frame.

In the flat I rented for a while before buying this house I had my PC in the living room, and quite enjoyed the experience of watching the screen saver of my photos randomly displayed (or rather, displayed in a random order). Since moving however, the PC is in a separate room and I've been missing seeing the photos. No one really ever looks through their photos and I found the screen saver to be a good way of looking at them with no effort involved. So anyway, I have been looking for a digital photo frame for a while, but haven't seen any, apart from pretty expensive ones, that I fancied.

So, I bought an expensive one. On the bright side I saved over £100 on the list price, but it was still well over £100! And it's a 10" one rather than the more usual 7"-8", so although size isn't everything (!) it means I can see it from the other side of the room quite easily.

And it's Wi-Fi enabled so I can just connect to my home network and display all the photos on my PC without having to transfer them to the frame. In theory anyway. I'm having a few teething problems and although I have connected it to the network, it keeps rebooting randomly every so often, so this week I'll have a proper look at it to see if there's something in the settings I need to change. Otherwise it'll go back to Amazon to be replaced.

On Saturday evening a friend, RE, and I were invited to a whisky tasting evening at G&G's house. Could have been messy, but it was actually damned civilised! When we were told about it, in the pub last week, there was some discussion about what the dress code would be, and "dress posh" seemed to be the order of the day, but in the event it didn't end up like that. However in the meanwhile I had decided that this was probably just the right time to splash out on some new accessories for my kilt. I've had the kilt for a number of years, but generally when I wear it it's worn casually with a big jumper and some heavy boots, and when I need the formal look I've always hired the smart jacket and brogues etc.

As an aside, my kilt is the Scottish Rugby Union (SRU) tartan which is rather nice I think (see image).

So I went to Slaters Menswear and bought an Argyll jacket in a lovely charcoal grey colour and with bone buttons rather than silver so it's kind of semi formal, ghillie brogues, black socks, black sock flashes, and a new kiltpin. All for the bargain price of about £200.

As I say, the whisky tasting turned out not to be a posh dress event, but I wore the kilt anyway, and I'm very pleased to have at last got round to buying the stuff I have spent a fortune hiring over the past years! And a good time was had by all while tasting the whisky.

Next weekend will see this year's Motorcycle Action Group Easter Egg Run from the SECC to Yorkhill Children's Hospital in Glasgow, with 3000+ bikers bearing donations and Easter Eggs, and RE has agreed to accompany me by riding pillion on the bike. This morning then was a small scale trial run when we made sure she was OK riding pillion and I was OK with her on the back. Went well, exceptionally well, and we both enjoyed the experience, made better by having a decent intercom so we could speak to each other as we went along. So next Sunday, Easter Day, should be fun. I will, of course, report on it in due course.