Category: A Walk

Drive to the end of the road and turn left – 6 April 2017

Posted on by Zogman

As usual, on the first day of our stay on Skye, we drove round the top end of the island.  Up to Uig and then round to Portree.

Stopped off at Duntulm to take what is an iconic photo of the telephone box there.  After that, I walked out to the ruin of Duntulm Castle.  It’s a ruin and there’s a warning at the padlocked gate to say “We advise you not to come any closer”.  It’s a bit like the warning on iPlayer that asks you “Do you have a TV licence?”  Easy to lie, easy to ignore.  Just do it.  I’d walked for 15-20 minutes in a bitterly cold wind to reach this ridiculous sign, so I just turned around and went back to the car.  AYE RIGHT!  It’s an interesting place, really remote on this finger of land that sticks out into the Minch.  Although the castle is a ruin now, the solid walls really protect you from the worst of the wind that blows in from the sea.  Took a few photos and then went back to the warmth of the car.

We drove in to Uig, but there was nothing interesting to see, so we headed on to Portree.  Lunch was in Jan’s Vans which is, for want of a better description, a gigantic hardware store.  Scamp browsed the ‘toys off the rack’ and eventually settled on a plant for the garden, but I’m pretty sure she has a list of things that we’ll be bringing back with us.

We tried to park in Portree itself, but all the carparks were full, so we drove back to Staffin and sat and watched the waves for a while.  After that I drove Scamp back to the house and I went to take some more photos.  Initially up to the wee lochan up at Floddigarry and then back down the slip again.  Saw the wee Captain model firmly glued to a boathouse there.  Went for a walk along the rocks and when I got back it was time for dinner, and a wee dram.  A fine way to end a fine day.

Tomorrow?  Probably more of the same!

Ten hours in a … car – 5 April 2017

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Driving to Skye always makes me think of the John Mayall track, Vacation.  Not quite ten hours, but more than seven hours pounding the asphalt, travelling north-west.  Average speed, just over 42mph, but that’s because we are driving on ‘A’ roads for the most part.  In the seven hours we travelled, we could have flown to Italy, Malta or Cyprus, but we drove to Skye.  Weather – worse, scenery- no contest!!

Arrived just after 5pm after starting on time at 10am.  Just missed seeing Harry Styles for One Direction getting out of a helicopter at the Old Man of Storr.  Such a pity, even if I don’t know who Harry Styles or One Direction is!

Went for a walk to Staffin shore to relieve the aches in my legs and succeeded in doing just that.  Got some photos from the shore to bolster the pics from Loch Mealt that I took earlier.  Wish I’d brought my full size Manfrotto tripod, but the mini version worked well.

Chicken Curry for dinner tonight with a strong whisky and  a beer to finish with.

Hoping for a lazy start tomorrow and not too much driving.

The day when nothing happened – 3 April 2017

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Basically, that about sums it up. Nothing happened, but then …

Painted for an hour this morning while Scamp went to her final physio appointment.  I’d already done the groundwork and used masking fluid to protect the mountains (it’s an imaginary snow covered landscape).  I made the mistake of using some tubes of Cotman colour, that is student quality, for the sky area.  What should have been clear and transparent, turned out dull and cloudy.  What more could I do but turn it into a cloudy sky, it was meant to be a sunset!  After I took off the masking fluid, I added the rocks that show through the snow and the water below the mountains.  It looks quite good.  Try to remember all the above and I’ll attempt to post a picture of the watercolour tomorrow.

Took back my library books. Got another one out on the subject of watercolours and there’s a complete section on painting snow.  I’d forgotten how useful a library can be.

Came home and had lunch. Went in to Glasgow to look at wet weather jackets. Not heavy ones like I wear in the winter.  Just a light jacket that’s waterproof and breathable and HAS LOTS OF POCKETS!  Couldn’t find one.  The ones with lots of pockets were either too expensive or weren’t waterproof.  More investigation required.

It was too early to come home, so I took some pics down by the Luggie, and that’s what you see above.

For dinner, I made an innovative pasta Genovese with a poached egg on top.  It was good, but not great.  Needs a bit of tweaking, I think.

Went to salsa and acted as doorman there for the extent of the beginners class but quite enjoyed the advanced even if there were far too many girls and the class was quite small.  That’s what happens during school holidays.

Other than that, nothing happened.

More researching into jackets tomorrow.

The Lodger – 1 April 2017

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The back bedroom has been *my room* for a long time, and the front bedroom is the spare room with just insufficient room to swing a cat, so when the lodger appeared, we were a bit lost about where he should go, but we needn’t have worried. He had provided his own bed in his own room.

When I got up to make breakfast this morning I was amazed to see a wren sitting, no, not sitting, dancing on the clothes rope in the back garden. Singing his heart out, he was obviously full of the joys of spring and eager to entice Jenny, or any other lady wren to dance along to his tune. After I’d grabbed the nearest camera and taken a few shots, then grabbed a more suitable camera / lens combination and repeated the exercise, I noticed him fly down to the back door. At first I couldn’t see where he had gone, then I realised. Scamp has a plant pot hanging by the back door. It’s called a Wanderella and is conical in shape with the wide part of the cone at the top. It’s almost full of peat and has holes about 2cm diameter all down its length. I’ll try to get a photo tomorrow. I guessed that Mr Wren was using one of these holes as an impromptu nest. It was actually a good ploy as Scamp had upended a bowl on the open end of the wanderella to keep the peat from getting waterlogged during the winter.
Later in the morning when Mr Wren was out carousing outside the garden we risked lifting the bowl and there was a beautiful hollow ball of moss with two entrance holes, just the right size for a wren. The nest was empty, so we put it back in place as carefully as we could. It wasn’t until much later in the afternoon that I noticed that he had returned. I hope we didn’t disturb things too much because a lot of work had gone into that green moss ball.

We drove through torrential rain today to go to Vecchia Bologna for lunch. Mine was one of the worst pizzas I’ve ever eaten, but Scamp said her veggie penne was lovely. I know I should have complained, but this is the first time I’ve had a poor meal in the restaurant. That’s one of their lives gone. Two strikes and you’re out. These days there is far too much competition for food to be sloppy about cooking and presentation.

Waitrose, then home. It looks like Crazy Water Fish tomorrow. Something we learned to cook in Sorrento at a one day cook school. It’s a long time since we’ve made it, but Scamp thinks she still has the recipe.

Fought with iTunes in the afternoon and eventually managed to get it to give up the forty tracks it insists on leaving on my iPhone every time I try to clean it out. I’m a great Dylan fan, but if I hear Abandoned Love one more time I think I’ll risk the six points on my license just to throw the phone out the window. Anyway, with the help of the Interweb, I finally ditched the forty songs. I also managed to get rid of the ‘greyed out’ tracks on iTunes. It’s amazing the little tips you pick up on the iTunes forums. I’m a firm believer that Bill Gates wrote the code for iTunes. It’s clumsy, it’s bloatware and it never works properly. Typical Windoze crap. I rest my case.

Had a quick walk around St Mo’s just before the sun completely disappeared, but only got a few almost usable shots of a coot sitting on its nest. Not great, but not too bad either.

Tomorrow we may be going to the (F)Art Galleries to hear a choir. Scamp will probably listen to the choir and hopefully, I’ll sketch. No Sunday Social until the arm is healed 🙁

So, that was March – 31 March 2017

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Fred requested a coffee meeting today.  Scamp and I had already planned to go out for lunch, but she convinced me to go and meet Fred instead, too readily for my liking.  She then declared that she was going shopping for some clothes and that was why she was foregoing lunch, we could always do lunch tomorrow.

While she was out I layered on some washes on a sketch I’d done last night.  It looked reasonable and I managed, what for me was a decent graduated sky.  It seemed no time until she was back and it was time for me to go meet Fred.

His real reason for meeting was because I had offered him a loan of a book on perspective, his new pet project.  Not easy perspective either, but the awkward Curvilinear Perspective as loved by M. C. Escher, although my own efforts are much more grounded in mundane reality than his were.  We sat and talked a while although he seemed a lot more politically motivated than usual.  He did however give me a quick tutorial on drawing noses. He’s really good at sketching faces, especially good at quick sketches and getting a decent likeness too.  I’ve just finished putting his ideas into practice and they seem to work.

After putting the Tories and Labour firmly in their place and decrying the traitors among the Greens we went our separate ways.  Him to Tesco for shopping, me to Lidl for shopping (and beer).  On the way back, I stopped at The Boathouse at Auchinstarry to go for a walk along the south bank of the canal out in the direction of Falkirk.  The path didn’t go anywhere near Falkirk, but turned off after a hundred yards and headed up towards Croy to an area called Nethercroy, through some old tall trees swaying in a strong wind.  I followed the path until I came to a gate where the notice warned that cattle would be grazing on the hill from the beginning of April.  I didn’t fancy meeting early arrivals and anyway, I wasn’t really dressed for hillwalking, so I turned round and went in search of interesting photos.

I’d already taken some pics as information for preparatory sketches with the aim of developing a larger piece.  It might work, it might not.  Saw some moss growing on some old stonework and got a few shots of that and caught some nice light with the 20mm lens on the M5 too.

When I looked at the photos back home in Lightroom, the moss shots were all disappointing.  Very unsharp and blurry.  The common factor in them all was an aperture of f7.1 which is pretty wide at the long end <Ignore this, everyone, it’s for my own benefit, so I don’t do it again!> I usually set f9 minimum for the 45-200 lens and that would have sharpened up the images so much better than f7.  Moral of the story, check your settings BEFORE taking the shot.  The M5 shots were fine.  Prime 20mm lens at f10 can’t fail!

Came home and found that Scamp had been very busy preparing an Un-Birthday dinner.  Portobello mushrooms with spinach and cheese topped with Parma ham, roasted under the grill.  Gammon steak with potatoes, cauliflower, cabbage and roast parsnips.  Same for Scamp, but without the gammon steak (obviously).  Pineapple snow with chilli sauce for pudding!  Absolutely perfect.  Now I know why she was so happy for me to go and meet Fred.

Tomorrow we may go and have the lunch we missed today.

A day out with the boys – 29 March 2017

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Today five auld guys had their first meeting of the year.  In fact, it might be the first meeting since August last year!  How we drift apart.  After a couple of beers in the Horseshoe Bar in Drury Street, we moved across to Paesano in Miller Street for a pizza.  Five pizzas later ( five total, that is!) three of us headed back to the bar for another beer before we split up and went our separate ways.  Thankfully, Scamp came to pick me up from the train station because it had started to rain.  It was good to get back in touch with everyone and we must do it again, but not leave it almost half a year next time.

Earlier, in fact quite early, I went for a walk in the woods at St Mo’s and found that a group of little ‘Hobbit Houses’ had arrived.  I’m guessing that this is the work of one of the local secondary schools.  Behind each door was the picture of an animal.  A lovely idea.  I think I got photos of all the little doors.  After that Scamp ran me to the train station where I met Fred.  We went for a walk through the ’Toon’ before we headed to the pub to meet the others.  The walk involved a quick trip to Cass Art of course.  Bought myself a mapping pen and some nibs.  Old school drawing, but I like the effect you get with indian ink and it wrecks fountain pens, but doesn’t damage the old fashioned dipper pens.  I was looking for a bottle of granulation medium, but that’s too unusual for them to carry, so it looks like I’ll need to go to Millers later in the week.  How I miss the Art Store now.

No sign of the weather improving tomorrow, or Friday.

The end of summer – 28 March 2017

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Like they say, “What a difference a day makes”.  Gone were the blue skies, gone was the sun, and with it the warmth.  At least it was dry, but the forecast for tomorrow is for wall to wall rain.  That being so, I rest my case m’lud.  The end of summer.

Up and out early to take the Megane to the garage for new front brake disks and pads and a new trackrod .  Spoken like someone who knows exactly what they are.  I know what brake disks are and what the pads do.  I’ve also got a basic knowledge of what a trackrod does and the fact that it’s got an end, probably a beginning too.  What I can say for certain is that, combined, they cost pennies short of £300 which was duly paid around lunchtime when I went to collect the car.  A car that will now stop when you tell it to, and one that will go round corners properly.

Earlier, partly to take my mind off the fact that the Megane was under the knife, and partly because we needed ‘messages’, Scamp drove me to Asda at Robroyston with the inevitable coffee at Costa afterwards.  It was there we saw a *STAR*.  ’Shellsuit Bob’ from River City, no less!  Looking much the same as he does on TV.  Our lives will not be the same from now on, knowing that ’Shellsuit Bob’ is a real person.  We watched River City tonight knowing that we had been sitting within feet of a *STAR*.

After lunch and having picked up the car, the sky lightened a bit and I went out to see what I could see (and photograph) over in St Mo’s.  Took my new favourite lens with me, hoping for some macro shots.  It’s amazing what you see when you’re looking for close-ups.  Most of todays pics were taken with the D7000 and Sigma 105mm combo.  Obviously the deer shot was taken with the 300mm end of the Tamron, and it looked quite good.

Hopefully off for beer and pizza with the Auld Guys tomorrow … in the rain.

British Summer Time – 26 March 2017

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None of your Daylight Saving Time.  This is British Summer Time.  Two sunny days in a row means it’s Summer and we are in Britain, at least until Nick the Chick gets her Second Referendum, then her Third, then her Fourth until the people give her the result she craves, because it his her job to protect Scotland! Cue the fanfare and  the cheering crowds.  But I digress.  We don’t save daylight here.  Sometimes I wish we could.  I wish we could bottle it up and bring it out on cold December days when the starlings are making their tuneless twittering noises in the skeleton trees and it’s dull, grey and just miserable.  If we had a bottle of Daylight, we could open it up and everything would be lovely.  Unfortunately, it’s not like that, so we make the most of two days of sunshine back to back, like we did today.

Scamp wanted to do a bit of gardening with the scary gardening gloves Hazy sent.  I wanted to get the bike out and go cycling just because I could.  I even put a pair of shorts on!  I didn’t go far, just a few miles, because this is only the second time I’ve been out this year on Dewdrop.  Got a photo of a zombie frog and a blue vent cover the birds have been crapping on and a strip of silver birch bark the sun was shining through, turning the silver to gold.  Best of all, I got a bit lost coming home and came upon the branch of cherry blossom.  Imagine, I’ve been living in the place for around thirty years and I still manage to get lost!

Came home and watched a really boring F1 GP.  Really, the cars look like they did back in the 1950s with big triangular fins and wide tyres. Also, what’s with the multitude of spoilers and wings?  They look like boy-racer specials.  Despite all the changes and supposed improvements, the excitement just wasn’t there.

Dinner was a beautiful piece of haddock with sautéed potatoes.  Quite delicious.

Tomorrow may be warm and a bit sunny, but low pressure is ensuring that the weather is on a downward path again.  I knew it couldn’t last.

Happy Birthday Scamp – 24 March 2017

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Today is Scamp’s birthday.  She had chosen to go to see the live sized portrait of Graham Norton by Gareth Reid in Cass Art and then go for lunch at Vecchia Bologna, so we set off on the round trip after parcels and cards had been opened.  Also after we had a Skype call with Hazy.

As well as visiting the portrait artist’s exhibition, Scamp did a bit of shopping and we had a coffee before returning along the M80 to Bridge of Allan to Vecchia.  Unfortunately, when we arrived the usual waiter came to meet us and tell us that the kitchen had closed early and they were not taking any more diners.  Oh well, there was nothing for it but to head back along the M80 again because Scamp had chosen Milano as her second choice of lunch venue.  Almost as good as Vecchia, but not quite.

When we got home, I helped her out of her massive crepe bandage and got her settled and headed off to St Mo’s while she was on the phone to Jackie.  Got a few macro shots of larch flowers, looking like miniature pineapples.  Also took a four shot vertorama ( vertical panorama ) which I later merged together in Autopano.

Tonight being Red Nose Day, we chose a film from Netflix, only to find that the internet connection was flaky and we had to give up on it.  Ended up watching Steve Jobs from DVD instead.

Overall, not a bad day.  Not as good as it could be, but sometimes life is like that.

Flooers – 22 March 2017

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You know as well as I do that when a flooer or even worse a bunch of flooers is the subject, then it’s been a lean day for photography.

Today was a particularly dour and cold day from the time we got up until the time we came home from salsa tonight.  As with all such days, there were bright periods.  Sometimes in the weather and sometimes in the day.  One such was going for a swim this morning.  We had both agreed that it was a sensible place to spend some time.  In the warmth of the pool, the steam room and the jacuzzi.  Not the sauna.  Apparently the sauna was broke.  Not broken, just broke.  I don’t know what was wrong with it this time, but it looks like it needs some *essential Maintenance*.

I like the *Enclosing Asterisks* because I just found out about it recently.  It’s called “Escaping the Asterisk” (notice I didn’t do it there – you can have too much of a good thing, you know) and there is a trick to doing it.  Because I write this blog in a language called Markdown where you can include symbols in the text to perform actions for you, there has to be a get-out for when you want to show the symbol without it performing an action – are we clear on that so far?  I didn’t hear any dissenting voices, so I will continue.  Right, the symbol for italics is the asterisk.  I typed the word asterisk there enclosed by two asterisks.  The problem appears when you want to show the asterisk.  To do that, you have to place a backslash (\) before the asterisk.  Still with me?  MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) hasn’t set in yet? This tells the Markdown code to show the asterisk and not use it as as a modifier for the text.  Now the next problem is:
What if I wanted to show the backslash and the asterisk?  How would I do that?  Answers on a postcard please.

Anyway, to get back to the day.  We drove home and had some lovely chicken soup for lunch, then Scamp went out to source a pair of jeans while I messed around with a bit of painting.  I was just getting ready to go out myself when she returned without the jeans.  I drove down to the garage and booked the car in for brake and steering repair next week.  Tried to get some photos, of the snow covered Campsie Fells, but there was nowhere I was happy with the view, so I came home and photographed some flooers.  For dinner I made chicken and mushroom risotto and accidentally used too much butter.  Not healthy, just lovely.

Salsa was busy … with followers.  Only three leaders to start with so Scamp became a leader.  Thankfully more men arrived throughout the night and we ended up almost even. Setenta Tresario Dos and Malecon got us tied up in knots tonight.  Good fun as usual.

Busy day tomorrow with improving weather predicted.