Ahead lay the adventure

We all reminisce now and again, sometimes of when life was just that little bit better, just that little bit less complicated, just that little bit unknown.

A year ago Pauline and I had just started our great adventure cycling across the United States of America, starting out from Boston, down to Plymouth for our official start point and all the way to Seattle.

I still can't believe we did it. Most of all though I wish I was right back there, at the start, doing it all again.

At this point last year we had just said goodbye to my friend David and his family. We had spent a great few days with them after a grueling 70-mile first day out from Plymouth. On our last night at their house we noticed some strange white flecks on the carpet near my pile of kit. We couldn't figure out what it was at first, until a little later when we were going through our food supplies for the days ahead. We noticed that the sachets of milk powder we had bought were nowhere to be seen. It turned out that David's Golden Retriever, Dougal, had devoured them, foil wrapper and all. Apparently the packets reappeared a few days later on the lawn!

 This day, the 23 May, felt like the real first day. The next familiar face we would encounter was over 1000 miles away in Warren, Detroit, Pauline's uncle David. It was a very wet start to this section of our journey, as we pushed west heading for Troy, just north of Albany in New York State, which would see us join the Erie Canal trail that would take us all the way to Niagara Falls.

I remember, as we pedaled along that day through the persistent rain, I was thinking of the daunting task ahead. Almost 4,000 miles. But I was also excited. I was with my great friend Pauline, fulfilling a life's ambition, with no responsibilities save for finding food and a safe place to camp each day. We were off to discover America. We were setting out on a great life adventure and the unknown lay ahead.

Here's to life's adventures.

Life begins

Last weekend I had a great weekend away with almost all of my friends to celebrate one of their birthday, a significant birthday for my friend Sarah who recently turned 40.

I've known Sarah for 20 years now, and she has been a great friend and very supportive over the years. She is obsessed however with trying to persuade me to get a dog. It's almost become a standing joke.

A great dinner was laid on, courtesy of Peebles Hydro, in their Bannockburn room. This room featured a gigantic mural covering every wall depicting the battle of Bannockburn in 1314.

About half the people who went along to celebrate with Sarah, stayed overnight, including myself. It was nice to be able to turn up around lunchtime, check in to my room, then chill out lazing around, having coffee and cream scones whilst reading my book.

Peebles Hydro has a dress code, which simply amounts to no jeans or trainers after 6.30. The evening started with drinks in the cocktail bar, however, unbeknown to Sarah, a group of us were putting the final touches to a 20-minute series of sketches, based on Sarah's life and written and presented by her brother Andrew.

It was great as Sarah genuinely had no idea we had put this together, and after numerous in-jokes and fluffed lines by parents playing themselves, we all settled into our comfy chairs for an evening of wine, food and great conversation.

The following day kicked off with a lovely buffet-style breakfast, a wander through the grounds and a leisurely drive back to Edinburgh.

All in all it had been a great weekend, spending it with friends old and new.

Planet Earth Live

The BBC are renowned for the wildlife programmes, especially those presented by David Attenborough. Around this time of year they usually produce and screen a live show called Springwatch, however, over the past of couple of years audience numbers have plummeted, partly I suspect to the poor choice of presenters. The show was very quickly being dumbed down.

Well, this year its replacement is Planet Earth Live. Lots of build up over the past few weeks, and I for one was very excited at this first. However, talk about dumbing down. The key host for this ground breaking wildlife series is an childish presenter by the name of Richard Hammond, one of 3 presenters of a boy racer TV programme called Top Gear, alongside that imbecile Jeremy Clarkson.

Apparently Hammond has "always wanted to present wildlife programmes". Well, I've always wanted lots of money but they don't put me in charge of the Bank of England.

That aside, I was keen to stick with it due to the key word in the title . . . "live". Well, the show airs at 8pm in the UK, presented by Hammond from the Masai Mara in Africa, where it is 10pm, and yes, you guessed it, pitch black. Then there's slots from Sri Lanka, where it's the middle of the morning and the crew and presenter are in bed so this is recorded footage. Then polar bears in Antarctica. Yep, that's right, recorded footage. However, we do cut live to around midday in Minnesota to Julia Bradbury presenting a piece on black bears. However, she may be live from Minnesota but all the footage is, well, you get the idea. In the coming weeks we are to be treated to a grey whale migration . . . that happened a few weeks ago.

Is it just me or am I missing the "live" element of this programme? Don't get me wrong, in typical BBC high standards the stories and footage are world class, but the only live element of this wildlife programme is Hammond in a tent in Africa. Unless at one point he's going to be game for a lion then that would be worth sticking to this series for.

So I have no complaint about the content, but I think it's a little misleading to have built it up as this live wildlife show. I know it's pretty much impossible to have wildlife act on queue, and I accept that, so why bill it as live?

Very disappointing. Not as disappointing though as having a petrol head present it.

Is there a conflict there or is it just me?

If it's not broken, don't fix it!

Are you like me that when something that was perfectly good just the way it was some bright spark decides to change it!?

I've been writing a regular blog now for almost 3 years, and on average it attracts about 800 to 1000 hits per month, which is great and makes it all worth while. Well, Blogger, part of the behemoth that is Google, decided to change the way we bloggers create posts. The old way was perfectly good, and very user friendly. In advance of these changes Google informed us that the new look would be both easier to use and more user friendly.

It isn't.

In fact it's a right royal pain in the behind. Tasks that took one click to achieve now take several, and certain aspects of it don't work at all. Placing a photograph exactly where you want it for example is almost impossible and very frustrating.

But it seems this is the way of things in our modern society. I'm not a regular Facebook user but I hear constant moans about Facebook making continual changes, and the change is never better I'm reliably told.

And banks. Just today I had to call my bank. It's very close by, less than a 10 minute walk from my house. I dialled the local number only for it to be answered by a recorded message with "you now have 5 options". Turns out that despite the local number all calls are now routed to a call handling centre. A person eventually answered and when I asked to speak to the person in the bank they had no idea who it was! I was asked what his position was in the bank, and why was I phoning him, and so it went on. Then I was asked for my account number, sort code and address. Finally she asked me to hold while she transferred me. I waited. Waited some more. Then she came back to tell me sorry, but the number is engaged and could I call back later.

Aaaaaargh!!!!


I would have been quicker walking along!

What was wrong with the old way? Phone the bank, someone answers, I tell them what I need. Job done in a tenth of the time.

Supermarkets are at it as well. Locally we have a small one which this week has decided to close for 2 days while it moves everything around so that none of it's regular customers will be able to find anything anymore.

Just leave it alone!

Wish I'd never started

Ever had what you think is a good idea, only to later regret it?

For some time now the entrance door to the communal stair that my apartment is contained within has been in need of a fresh lick of paint. So, a few days ago I set about doing just that. By the time I'd scraped, sanded, filled, sanded again and primed, I was pretty fed up. So much so it has remained a work in progress for the past couple of weeks.

You'd think the frustration with this project would stick in my head. However . . .

Also for some time now, in fact I would say for the past few years, various parts of the apartment have been looking tired and need of a remodel. It was my good friend Pauline, currently pedaling furiously north through Italy, who had drawn my attention to this fact before she left in 2010. Over time when you live with something for a while you tend not to see the bits and pieces that need attention, but when I returned from the USA last October it was glaringly obvious.

So it was with hammer and chisel in hand, and a rough plan, that I set about removing an old pipe box. On doing so I damaged the ceiling. So, down came the ceiling. In doing that I managed to break one of the light fitting assemblies! Now the kitchen is covered in a constant layer of fine dust and the task ahead is daunting. Not only am I going to have reinstate the ceiling with new, but now also the lighting.

Then I had a bright idea to create a feature on one wall.

The good news is I can shut the door and ignore it. Maybe by the time Pauline cycles back into Edinburgh in two months time I might have finished it.

But then again . . .

Moments worth remembering

You must have been hiding away in a dark cave somewhere remote not to know that last weekend was the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, on 15 April 1912.

I couldn't help feeling a little cynical. I don't mean that I don't think it was a tragedy. I do. But I couldn't help feel that blockbuster-movie-studios and TV networks all jumped on the bandwagon, flooding (pardon the pun) our theatres and TV screens with their unique take and explanation on those tragic events. That said, I was sucked in.

A series of events came together on that night to claim the lives of 1514 people. It was all very sad. The Titanic represented the dreams of many and its passing robbed them and their loved ones of those dreams. It does shock me, no matter which movie version I watch, be that A Night To Remember or James Cameron's Leonardo D'icaprio and Kate Winslet offering, just as I am equally shocked when I see repeats of the twin towers collapsing.

Hollywood regularly makes disaster movies. It took almost 50 years after the event for Hollywood to make a film of the Titanic loss, but barely 5 years passed before a plethora of movies appeared about the 2996 lives lost during the 911 terrorist attacks.

But in terms of human loss these pale compared to some since the Titanic sank to her watery grave. In 1932 a famine in Russia claimed an astonishing 5 million people, and the grandaddy of them all, the Spanish flu pandemic, claimed over 50 million worldwide in 1918.

Yet we don't, maybe thankfully, see movies of these events hitting our screens. What we get instead are films about the Hindenburg for example, where a small amount of human life was lost in comparison.

Why is this? Why the fascination with these smaller events. Is it more manageable for our minds to cope with and imagine? How long will it be before we see movies about losing 7 astronauts in the Challenger and Columbia shuttle events? There have certainly been a number of documentaries on more recent natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and most recently, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, which has claimed almost 20,000 lives, and counting.

So is it which stories studios feel would be in better taste than others to make? Or is Hollywood simply out of original stories of its own? It's certainly got something to do with our human morbid curiosity. It certainly doesn't rely on a passage of any significant length of time these days.

I actually think it's the romantically tragic side of the most well known stories that drives their appeal. Ironic that something so terrible, and largely preventable, could be romanticised a century later. But they epitomise the loss of dreams, the forced changes in our lives and the loss of close loved ones. Hollywood tries to make it more personable and hence they become immortalised in our memories, even though we weren't actually there at the time in most cases. I wonder if we would be marking the sinking of the Titanic if Cameron had not made his film in 1997.

Whatever it is, James Cameron feels that it's time to experience more of the reality and has released Titanic in 3D.

What next? I hate to think.

In the shadow of the Grey Corries

The last time I camped out in the highlands of Scotland was in Knoydart, and I had just returned from Spain cycling the Camino with my friend Pauline.

That was October 2010!!!

So it was long overdue that I packed my rucksack and headed out into the wilds. Just a few weeks ago I had trekked the short but fabulous wildcat trail with my friend Andrew, and it was with his great company again that we ventured out for a 2-day overnight adventure.

Our start point was the remote highland rail station of Corrour. A number of miles before Corrour the train passed by Bridge of Orchy and we sat in silence staring out of the window at several inches of fresh snow. We hadn't planned for this!

However, though Corrour is much higher than Bridge of Orchy, the snow cover was confined to the tops of the surrounding mountains.

From Corrour we headed north to Loch Trieg through very changeable weather and resigned ourselves to walking in our waterproofs for the rest of the day.

The surrounding mountains were glorious and looked all the more impressive as their craggy slopes were picked out in snow. After less than an hour we had reached Loch Trieg and had set this as our lunch stop. As we unpacked the Baby Bel cheese and trail mix we met David, the owner of a North Face tent pitched nearby.

As we chatted away it slowly came out that David, probably in his mid to late 50s, had given up what we call normal life and had lived in his tent in the highlands of Scotland for, wait for it, the past 4 years! Now, last year I lived in a tent for 150 days but that was in glorious dry weather mostly in the USA, and my friend Pauline is still out in the wider world in her tent, clocking up 20 months so far, but Scotland for 4 years!? I couldn't see me managing that. To cap it all David has a heart condition, a serious one at that.

We were impressed to say the least. I asked him if he missed anything after all this time, and he said he didn't, but it was clear as time went on he was trying to keep the conversation going as long as possible. We had a few hours walking still ahead of us before our camp for the night so unfortunately we had to leave. He's still out there right now. I hope he is well.

By late afternoon and under heavy skies, we reached a small bothy in a valley called Larig Leacach, in the shadow of the mighty Grey Corries. The pointed peak of Stob Ban was clearly visible in the late evening sunset.

The following morning we woke early to glorious blue skies, peppered with white cloud. After breakfast we struck our tents and planned our route up nearby Stob Ban. However, by now the weather was once again changeable, and squalls of rain and snow kept sweeping through at regular intervals. We decided that there was too much snow on Stob Ban for us to reach the summit, so instead we left our packs in the bothy and walked to the summit of its shoulder.

There were spectacular views from there to the snow capped ridges of the Mammores and further south to Glencoe.

It was a real pity that the snow cover looked too unpredictable and the weather too changeable that it prevented us from reaching the ridge of the Grey Corries. It has been well over a decade since I trekked its impressive ridge with Pauline.

Lunch over back down at the bothy we set off north along good landrover track to catch our train home from Spean Bridge. Mother nature hadn't quite finished with us yet though, as a loud and impressive thunderstorm came through when we were only half way out.

As for the Grey Corries. They will have to wait until another day.