I've been trying to get hold of my friend in Glasgow for a while now. As I'm going up to Scotland for the summer and I haven't seen her for a while it would be nice to catch up. Also I was hoping to be able to leave my car with her when I walk the Great Glen Way. I could leave it in Fort William or Inverness but as I'll have a lot of gear in it I'd rather it was somewhere more secure. After several wrong numbers I finally got hold of her this evening.
I wanted to walk the GGW first and then nip back to Glasgow to pick my car up before driving to Aberdeen to catch the ferry to Lerwick. However, because of her shifts it's actually better to do it the other way round as I'll get to see a bit more of her if I stay with her later in August rather than this weekend. So tomorrow I have ring Northlink to try to get booked on to the Monday night ferry. It's usually a 14.5 hr journey but because the Monday night ferries don't call into Orkney it's slightly shorter.
It's not so bad doing the trip this way round as I can do lots of walking in Shetland to get myself trained a bit more ready for my long walk. It also gives me more time to organise things like getting a key for the toilets at the locks along the way. I'll try giving them a call tomorrow as well and see how much it is to rent/buy the key and how I actually collect it.
I had been planning to leave tomorrow but as I still have lots to do before I'll be ready to leave I've decided to put it off until Sunday. Which is my birthday. And I like going on holiday on my birthday.
Friday, 22 July 2011
Thursday, 21 July 2011
Country Tracks Exmoor
I've just watched a Country Tracks programme on iplayer. I downloaded it ages ago and thought it was about time I got round to watching it before it expired. It's the first time I've watched Country Tracks and I was only interested in this particular one because it was about Exmoor where I spent half term. It was an interesting programme though, so I may have to look out for others.
I learnt various things from it such as the Lynmouth flood may have been caused by the government and military experimenting with technology to make it rain. Also, that it's thought that Exmoor ponies originally came from Alaska thousands of years ago and would have roamed around with sabre toothed tigers. I was quite happy to see ponies when I was walking - don't think I'd have felt quite the same way if I'd run into a sabre toothed tiger though!
I learnt various things from it such as the Lynmouth flood may have been caused by the government and military experimenting with technology to make it rain. Also, that it's thought that Exmoor ponies originally came from Alaska thousands of years ago and would have roamed around with sabre toothed tigers. I was quite happy to see ponies when I was walking - don't think I'd have felt quite the same way if I'd run into a sabre toothed tiger though!
Sunday, 17 July 2011
A Quote
Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof, but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dew and perfumes ... What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps in a field. All night long he can hear nature breathing deeply and freely.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Wednesday, 13 July 2011
Last night at Web Design
Last night was the last night of my web design course. I don't think I've done as well on the intermediate course as I did on the beginner's, but I do have the beginnings of a web site. I really need time to concentrate and play around with it, but time is something I have very little of. I won't do any more on it over the summer, but hopefully in the autumn I can start getting back into it and get a bit further on my way to having my own website.
Sunday, 10 July 2011
Thinking about reading
It's not long now until I head up to Scotland for my summer holiday. I'll spend the first week walking the Great Glen Way and then catch the ferry from Aberdeen to Shetland and spend the next 3 weeks there. I'm so busy at the moment trying to get everything at school organised for next year, plus completing my web design course and trying to work on the post grad course, and sorting out umpteen things that keep going wrong in my house and with my car, that I've barely had time to think about the summer and plan for my holiday. Luckily, I've been to Shetland before so I don't have to do too much planning for that, but I do still have some things to think about. One of which is deciding what books to take with me.
I'll be in my car, so for most of time I can carry a good selection. When I'm walking the Great Glen Way though, I want to keep my weight down as much as possible and get rid of things as I go, so I'll probably just take a selection of magazines and as I read them I can rip out the pages and throw them away.
But what books to take ...
Usually I like to read books either by authors from the place where I am or else set in or about the place. Last year I read a lot of books with a Shetland theme, so I don't have that many left to read. So I have to decide whether to read books -
Maybe I'll just take a few from each category and then I can decide what I feel like when I'm there.
I'll be in my car, so for most of time I can carry a good selection. When I'm walking the Great Glen Way though, I want to keep my weight down as much as possible and get rid of things as I go, so I'll probably just take a selection of magazines and as I read them I can rip out the pages and throw them away.
But what books to take ...
Usually I like to read books either by authors from the place where I am or else set in or about the place. Last year I read a lot of books with a Shetland theme, so I don't have that many left to read. So I have to decide whether to read books -
- about Scotland in general
- about wildlife
- that I've started in the past and never got round to finishing
- from the BBC Big Read list
- to do with my studies
- that I think I should have read but haven't yet.
Maybe I'll just take a few from each category and then I can decide what I feel like when I'm there.
Tuesday, 5 July 2011
Coast
Last night I watched an episode of the BBC programme Coast on iplayer. I'd downloaded this one particularly because part of the programme followed the Caledonian Canal and Great Glen Way. The aerial shots were great as I was able to see the paths that I'll be walking along in a few weeks time. Although I didn't really learn anything new, it did remind me of a few facts:
I'm sure there was more, but I don't remember.
- The Canal was built by hand and was as much a job creation scheme for dispossesed Highlanders as it was to be of benefit to shipping.
- It went way over budget.
- By the time it was built ships had got bigger and couldn't fit along it. So it turned out to be a bit of a white elephant.
- Loch Ness is deep enough to hold 3 times the world's population. (Though I don't know if this was worked out based on the current population or if this is an out of date fact).
I'm sure there was more, but I don't remember.
Saturday, 2 July 2011
The one I've aleady done
When I started this blog I had one task on my list that I've already ticked off. I did wonder whether to keep it on or if I should free up the space for a different task. But as I'd actually put together my list about a year before I started to blog I didn't really want to change it. So it stayed.
I've been a vegetarian since I was eighteen. It was actually at my 18th birthday meal that I last ate meat (it was turkey, one of the few meats I actually liked). I tried to be a vegetarian before that, but it was always difficult when my mum was in charge of cooking and she wanted me to eat meat. I never really liked it and used to feed it to the dog under the table when she wasn't looking. When I was 14 the dog died. I tried to feed my meat to the cat instead, but she ate too slow and couldn't eat that much. So I became a part-time veggie, forcing meat down at home so that I would be allowed to leave the table, but rarely eating it outside of home.
About a week after my birthday meal I realised that I'd not eaten meat at all since that meal. If I could do it for a week, I could do it forever. I wasn't eating so much at home any more and not long afterwards I moved out. I didn't tell my mum, I just let her figure it out over time.
I always enjoyed cooking and my new life as an official veggie gave me lots of reasons to research and try out new recipes. Veggies weren't much catered for in restaurants then, and there certainly wasn't the choice of veggie products in the supermarkets that there are now, so it was much more challenging. Through my reading and research I came across the Vegetarian Society and found out that it's based in Altrincham (not very far away) and has a cookery school. Although the courses aren't particularly expensive, they were always well out of my affordability range. So it became one of those things that I kept saying I'd do one day but never getting round to. Last summer I'd been a vegetarian for 25 years and as I'm living back in Manchester and just down the road from the Vegetarian Society I thought that this would be a good year to finally do a course with them.
I chose the 'Food for Free' course because it also involved walking and learning about plants. The course took place on a Sunday and started off in the Vegetarian Society lounge where the dozen participants were served coffee before being introduced to Patrick Harding, wild food expert and our tutor for the day. After a talk and a slide show we were on to the practical side of the course where we headed out into the countryside looking for food. We didn't walk very far, though it took a couple of hours because we kept stopping to pick wild flowers and leaves and listen to Patrick talk about them. Once back at base we were served a big, late afternoon, buffet lunch using all the ingredients we'd picked. So that we wouldn't have to wait around too long for lunch we were actually served with food made from ingredients that had been collected earlier than our walk, but they were the same things.
Although we didn't get to cook the food ourselves, which is something that I would have liked to have done, we did get to eat plenty of it and were given the recipes to take home. If we'd cooked ourselves it would have been an evening meal by the time it was ready, so I can understand why we didn't get to participate in the actual cooking.
I really enjoyed the course and it was definitely worth waiting 25 years for. Now I'm tempted to do another one.
http://www.cordonvert.co.uk/cv08/cv.aspx?page=16
I've been a vegetarian since I was eighteen. It was actually at my 18th birthday meal that I last ate meat (it was turkey, one of the few meats I actually liked). I tried to be a vegetarian before that, but it was always difficult when my mum was in charge of cooking and she wanted me to eat meat. I never really liked it and used to feed it to the dog under the table when she wasn't looking. When I was 14 the dog died. I tried to feed my meat to the cat instead, but she ate too slow and couldn't eat that much. So I became a part-time veggie, forcing meat down at home so that I would be allowed to leave the table, but rarely eating it outside of home.
About a week after my birthday meal I realised that I'd not eaten meat at all since that meal. If I could do it for a week, I could do it forever. I wasn't eating so much at home any more and not long afterwards I moved out. I didn't tell my mum, I just let her figure it out over time.
I always enjoyed cooking and my new life as an official veggie gave me lots of reasons to research and try out new recipes. Veggies weren't much catered for in restaurants then, and there certainly wasn't the choice of veggie products in the supermarkets that there are now, so it was much more challenging. Through my reading and research I came across the Vegetarian Society and found out that it's based in Altrincham (not very far away) and has a cookery school. Although the courses aren't particularly expensive, they were always well out of my affordability range. So it became one of those things that I kept saying I'd do one day but never getting round to. Last summer I'd been a vegetarian for 25 years and as I'm living back in Manchester and just down the road from the Vegetarian Society I thought that this would be a good year to finally do a course with them.
I chose the 'Food for Free' course because it also involved walking and learning about plants. The course took place on a Sunday and started off in the Vegetarian Society lounge where the dozen participants were served coffee before being introduced to Patrick Harding, wild food expert and our tutor for the day. After a talk and a slide show we were on to the practical side of the course where we headed out into the countryside looking for food. We didn't walk very far, though it took a couple of hours because we kept stopping to pick wild flowers and leaves and listen to Patrick talk about them. Once back at base we were served a big, late afternoon, buffet lunch using all the ingredients we'd picked. So that we wouldn't have to wait around too long for lunch we were actually served with food made from ingredients that had been collected earlier than our walk, but they were the same things.
Although we didn't get to cook the food ourselves, which is something that I would have liked to have done, we did get to eat plenty of it and were given the recipes to take home. If we'd cooked ourselves it would have been an evening meal by the time it was ready, so I can understand why we didn't get to participate in the actual cooking.
I really enjoyed the course and it was definitely worth waiting 25 years for. Now I'm tempted to do another one.
http://www.cordonvert.co.uk/cv08/cv.aspx?page=16
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