Category: Friends

A day at the fair – 23 November 2022

Posted on by Zogman

Got the train in to Glasgow to celebrate the fact that they weren’t on strike today!

Spoke to Hazy this morning and we heard all about the joys of being a house owner. Also found out that although Neil’s nose is a lot better and healing nicely after his op, although it hasn’t affected his snoring ability! We discussed Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City books and his appearance on The Big Scottish Book Club.

Scamp didn’t need the car today, so I drove down to the station and got the train in to Glasgow to meet my brother. As usual, we went for a coffee and discussed what to do and where to go. I’d hoped to go and photograph the lights at the Christmas market in St Enoch’s Square or just get some street shots. We agreed that the Christmas market would be good with a few fairground attractions thrown in for good measure.

First, Alex wanted to photograph the inside of Princes Square and wasn’t sure if we were allowed to take photos. It appeared that almost everyone was taking photos inside, although we were the odd ones out because we were using ‘real’ cameras. Everyone else had phone cameras. We got the photos, then bumped into Mirka and Artur who used to go to salsa class in Glasgow. It appeared that Mirka was trying hard to get Artur to go to a new class in Motherwell, but he’s still resisting!

Photos taken and goodbyes said, we went to lunch in Il Pavone in the basement of the department store. We both had pizzas, but I struggled to finish mine and in the end had to give up. Too much veg and far too much cheese.

Once we’d been fed we walked down to the Christmas market which wasn’t quite as busy as I’d hoped. Fewer rides too, but the did have an enormous spinning wheel called The Booster. It looked scary. I tried my best to get some decent shots of it and although I got a few, most of the pics went in the bin when I got home. We both prowled around trying to find something to capture our interest. My favourite place was a Pick ’n’ Mix stall that seemed to attract all sorts of folk. That’s where PoD came from.

Eventually we’d had enough and headed back. I went to Queen Street and Alex went to the bus station. We agreed to do it again, but actually we will be doing something like it again when we’re going to lunch tomorrow with Alex and Carol.

I did have a wee space for dinner when I got home because Scamp had made Veggie Chilli with brown lentils. Totally different from mine. Very nice, but maybe needed some more chilli. Poor Scamp had been working all day tidying up and hoovering while my brother and I had been out on the town!

Tomorrow, like I said, Alex and Carol, Scamp and I are hoping to have lunch down Clydeside. The teachers across Scotland are all on strike tomorrow for the first time in almost 40 years. That will mean thousands of weans will be having a free holiday! Hope they don’t go where we’re going.

The rain came back – 15 November 2022

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We had two days of glorious sunshine. It was inevitable the rain would return.

It was a “chucking it down” kind of rain. Straight down, no messing rain that wasn’t going off any time soon. In fact it stayed with us until about 4 o’clock.

Scamp was out for coffee with Annette this morning. I was staying in, not just because it was raining, but also because Mr Bezos was sending me a shiny new SSD, yes, another one. This one will be a swapping drive to allow me to make a running copy of my Big Sur operating system, built using the latest method. It looks and feels faster than the first build I made. Also it was half price as Amazon have now extended Black Friday to November. I’d been sent an email to say that it would be delivered today before 9pm. Not a very exact time slot, but Mr Bezos is a busy man! It arrived just after 6pm.

Left to my own devices, I decided it was time to pick all the remaining chilli peppers and prune the plant back a bit. ‘Experts’ opinions vary on how fierce that prune should be. Some say cut about 25% from the bush. Others say cut it right back to the ground, it will regrow next year. I chose the middle ground and cut off about 50% of the green stuff after I’d removed all the ‘fruit’. I was being careful to work around the nettle that has taken root in the pot. The sting I got from it the last time I was removing chillies took a couple of days to go away. It’s done now and I think it looks a lot healthier after its trim. We’ll wait and see if it needs another chop.

The next thing to do was to phone the plumber to come and fix the kitchen tap. He’s promised to come on Friday morning. We’ll wait and hope that he’ll know how to fix it, or just replace it, whichever is easiest … and cheapest!

Lunch today was soup. It’s a long lasting soup that one, and there’s even a splash or two left for tomorrow. With that done I took a walk over to the butcher’s in Condorrat in the rain and on the way back got today’s PoD. It probably looks faked, but the only fakery in it is the removal of a couple of street lights that were spoiling the view. That misty spray from the cars on the motorway and the colour are just as it came out of the camera. It’s the low sun pushing its way through the clouds that colours the spray to the sepia hue. That’s why they call it the hour just before sunset, ‘The Golden Hour’.

I got another couple of photos in St Mo’s, because the clouds lifted, the rain stopped and the sun shone for about half an hour before it dipped back into the clouds again.

We heard from Neil that his check-up today went well with nothing untoward to report. Photo looks good Neil. They haven’t spoiled your good looks with the ’Nose Job!’ 😉. Nurse Hazy must be working hard.

Tomorrow looks like the best day of the week, but we’ll be staying at home waiting for Scamp’s new dance trainers. Hope they come before 9pm!

Dancin’ and Singin’ – 12 November 2022

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As usual on a Saturday we were off to Brookfield for dance class.

Very small class today only four couples and one single woman. Apart from the single woman, they all have nicknames, none of them particularly complementary and none of them will be used here!

First dance was a Melody Foxtrot which did have a musical Melody attached, but no discernible Foxtrot steps. Some knew it, some didn’t, some did ‘kind of’ know it. I’m talking about individual members of the pairs here. I was in the ‘kind of’ category while Scamp was in the ‘know it’ one. It took us all about half an hour of staggering around the hall to get more or less adept at this fairly simple sequence dance.

Next was the main lesson, The Cameron Quickstep which, although danced as a sequence because it finished at a point where the dance could start again. We’d danced it for the first time last week at Perth and it looked and felt just like a normal quickstep. We’ve not had much chance to dance quickstep and this looked like a great introduction. We’d practised it a bit at home, but a living room is not anything like a dance floor. Today gave us a much better chance to work on the dance and of course we had expert help at hand. Unfortunately the teachers are off watching rugby next Saturday, so we’ll have to wait a fortnight before we get to have a real practise, although there is the chance of a tea dance later this coming week. A couple of sequence dances rounded off the day and we were back on the road home.

I did actually get out this afternoon to take some photos in the sunshine that had lasted all day. PoD went to a view through the trees to the setting sun. Nice to get an outside photo without too much fakery, or post-processing as photogs call it.

We drove over to Larky later. Me to have a jam session with Crawford and Scamp to go with Nancy and Jacquelyn to a concert in Strathaven. I wasn’t really looking forward to jamming with Crawford. I don’t practise playing guitar, relying on what I did way back in the late ’60s, but my fingers were far more supple then and could reach all those hard to fret strings. However we did cover some weel kent songs and had settled down to a blether by the time the girls returned. Another cup of white tea for Scamp and some arrangements for a return visit to us in December and we headed home and actually found a parking place just after 11pm.

Watched a confusing Brazilian GP with Kevin Magnussen in first place and Mick Schumacher in last place. Both drivers from the Haas team! Unfortunately Magnussen couldn’t hold on to that lead after the sprint race.

Tomorrow the weather looks good again. Two days in a row, is that too much to ask? I’m hoping to tell you tomorrow.

Coffee – 7 November 2022

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Well, not really coffee because this was a Costa hot milk drink to paraphrase an american lady I heard once in Dubrovnik.

I joked three weeks ago about Crunchy Nut Cornflakes breaking my tooth. That’s exactly what happened this morning.  A crunch and the filling came out in two pieces. It was due to be replaced this week anyway. It will have to be now and I will have to apologise to the dentist for breaking a second filling.  Having said that, it couldn’t have bonded properly to the tooth in the first place, so not all My or the Crunch Nut’s fault!

Scamp was meeting Isobel and I was meeting Val at Costa. I’d forgotten that Val was using two walking sticks now. We talked for a long time about his plans for their new bathroom and possible remodelling of their kitchen. Of course we talked about tech too. Val’s Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of memory, but after that he lost me in the tech. Also, Val is an experimenter who loves making things that look like a box of wires, but act just like a desktop computer does. I like the idea of that, but will it run Lightroom? Will it turn on every time I want it to? Great fun to play with, but it’s not a fully fledged computer yet, at least not for me, besides, it runs on Linux which is like black magic to me. But the Raspberry Pi  is very, very clever and so is he!

We discussed my experimentation with running MacOS 11.7 from an SSD and the next stage I want to take it to once I get the actual process settled in my head. We even talked about changing the washer inside our kitchen mixer tap. Sometimes you just have to come down to the basics! When we were done talking Val left to meet his wife and I went to find mine. We’d agreed that we’d try to get everyone together for a coffee before Christmas.

Scamp and I drove to Tesco and bought a trolley full of messages, plus a couple of bottles of wine. After lunch I took a camera out to St Mo’s. Just one camera and one lens. Not a lot of light and I’d no idea what I was going to photograph. In the middle of winter I like to rest a camera on the ice and photograph the weeds poking through the ice with a macro lens. I tried the same thing today but without actually resting the camera on the surface of the water! I got a similar effect and after running it through noise reduction software it looked perfectly clean and tidy. That was PoD.

Pasta Carbonara looked and tasted more like scrambled eggs tonight.  Over cooked the sauce, not for the first time.  Must try harder.

No plans, and no meetings set for tomorrow. We’ll see what transpires.

 

An invitation – 24 October 2022

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Scamp and I were watching the US F1 GP this morning when my phone rang and I got an invitation.

Fred was heading to Tesco in half an hour and did I fancy meeting him for coffee. Of course I did! Got myself organised with the books I’d borrowed from him and hadn’t got round to returning then drove over to Tesco where I was also instructed to bring back a loaf, pancakes and a bottle of milk.

I met Fred in the car park and after I dumped my bag of books in the boot of his car, we went to the cafe. He was buying and I had a cappuccino which I realised too late was coming from what looked like a Costa machine. That meant it was more of a Babyccino than a Cappuccino. Next time I’ll get a flat white. I let him peruse my Inktober sketch book that I’d brought with me and for once he was less than critical. It must have been good, because he usually finds something to criticise. But that’s good. He’s always fair with his crits. Eventually, now that it had been all but confirmed that Sunak was to be the new PM, he turned the conversation to politics, that and the gormless council being his two pet subjects. He’s really suffering with his leg now, especially his knee and is having a hard time of it trying to keep moving. It’s worrying that of the six of us that are left from the Auld Guys. Three of us need walking sticks just to get around. We are an ageing group now.

After we’d drunk our warm milk and set the world to rights, we went to do our shopping, vowing to meet up again soon. I managed to get the three items that were on my list and added in a packet of doughnuts just for the fun of it.

Lunch for Scamp and I was Just Soup, then we needed to get ready to go and visit Margie. I dropped Scamp off at the entrance to Monklands and then went to park the car. I gave up on the car park after about fifteen minutes of driving round and round and round. The galling part about it was that I’d driven past a space and ignored it. Of course, it was long gone when I went back for a look. I remembered parking at the roadside down a quiet cul-de-sac. Maybe I’d be lucky again. I was. A space just the right size for the wee blue car. Perfect.

Walking back to the hospital, I saw today’s PoD lighting up in front of me and grabbed a few shots with my phone camera, not having a ‘real’ camera with me. I could never have achieved that quality with my old phone camera. Sat and talked to Margie and showed her my sketches so far in Inktober. Again, Margie is quite a critical sketcher and doesn’t give praise lightly. I’m so glad she liked my efforts.

Drove home through the awkward road junctions in Airdrie and found there were no spaces in our car park either. I did find a space further on. Dinner tonight was a rather good Pasta Carbonara. Finally got round to writing to Alex and asking where we were going this week for a photo walk.

Today’s prompt was ‘Fairy’. This happy wee fairy lives in our bedroom. She’s always smiling and wears a pretty pink dress with matching bright red boots. I do believe she enjoyed being a model for a day.

Well, Sunak did get the PM job. A poisoned chalice if ever there was one. I hope he’s better than the last two inhabitants of No10. I just wonder what Larry the Cat thinks about all the comings and goings in his house!

We’re waiting to see what the weather is going to do tomorrow before we make any rash decisions. Maybe East, maybe West. Who knows.

Entertained by Margie – 28 September 2022

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This afternoon we went to visit Margie.

Margie is one of Scamps friends. She is a ray of sunshine on a dull day, and today was a dull day. As usual our conversation ranged over may subjects, taking in, on the way: The difference between a Carry-out and a Take-away, what a Boogie is and how you’d draw one and the horrors of hospital food, especially Gravel Hotpot. No, not Gravy, Gravel, apparently that’s what it looked like! Three hours gone in a flash. What an entertainer. She’d have made an excellent stand-up comedian when she was younger.

We drove home and we should have stopped at the shops to get some spinach to add body to the pesto I was going to make for dinner. If we had, I might have remembered to get some pine nuts, because there were none in the cupboard. But we didn’t and the pesto tasted fine with the spaghetti without the spinach and the pine nuts.

I spent most of the evening wrestling with, and swearing at, the Samsung website. Badly written and riddled with error codes. I eventually gave up when it crashed just as I was about to buy my new Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus phone after struggling, and failing to get the 0% finance deal for some undisclosed reason. Your code worked perfectly, Jamie, as did trading in Scamp’s old unused Huawei phone for a healthy discount. I tried talking to ‘helpers’ on Chat, but they were as useless as the website. I think it might have been an omen. Keep the phone you’ve got. You don’t need a new one.

Today’s PoD was a grab shot of some carnations sitting on the kitchen window ledge. It was dull and gloomy by the time I was taking the photos and the final result was a grainy as a sand dune, but thankfully ON1 came to the rescue and removed all the digital noise without altering the flowers too much. At least something worked today.

Off in to Glasgow tomorrow to meet Alex, hopefully and talk some technospeak with him.

The Heron and the Holey Man – 14 September 2022

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Today went out to lunch.

John had told us about a restaurant they’d been to. It was called The Heron and was between Strathaven and Darvel and since he said the food was good, we just had to try it out.

It was indeed in the badlands between Strathaven and Darvel, in the middle of nowhere, up a long hill on a single track road with passing places. It wasn’t a real ’Skye’ single track, just a narrow road. There were plenty of tables, although some of them were in the ‘Dog Friendly’ area. Since neither of us is dog friendly, we chose a different table in a different area. There wasn’t much variety in the menu, but that didn’t bother Scamp. She went straight for the Mac ’n’ Cheese. I was more adventurous with Steak with Chimichurri dressing in a Bagel from the specials. Not my usual lunch choice, but it looked like it was that or a sandwich. Food came fairly quickly and Scamp’s M&C looked really good served in an old style enamel Ashet dish. Mine looked good. A bagel with minute steak and some green dressing, presumably the Chimichurri. Unfortunately it was barely warm and the dressing had almost no taste. Scamp asked for peppermint tea, but unfortunately they didn’t have any, so she settled for her speciality ‘white tea’, ie hot water. They were obviously rationing the coffee too judging from the slightly brown water in my cup. It wasn’t expensive, but it wasn’t very good either. Still, it was doing a roaring trade with a constant stream of folk coming through the door. Maybe we were just unlucky, or maybe not!

We did go for a walk round the ‘shop’. It was overpriced. A 50g box of Assam tea was £5.50. My Assam from The Bean Shop in Perth costs £6.50 for 200g. Lot’s of interesting beers at reasonable prices, but the gin and vodka was just silly money. I described the place as ’Style over Substance’. I doubt if we’ll rush back.

With all that said, it had a lovely outlook over the hills and farmland and the weather couldn’t have been better.. We drove back down that narrow road and turned right to try to find Loudoun Hill which was my destination today for photos. It’s not hard to find. It’s a volcanic plug, apparently. It looks like a big lump of granite or some such mineral, dumped in a field. You just can’t miss it. I missed the turning for the car park, though. A mile or so down the road we found a place to turn and with Scamp giving directions, we found the path to the car park.

I’d brought my rucksack with both cameras in it, but forgot my walking boots. I had no intentions of climbing the hill anyway. I just wanted to make sure I got the image I had in my head for today and it was there in front of me. The Spirit of Scotland monument by artist Richard Price was erected in 2004. It stands on a pathway which runs through the Irvine Valley near Drumclog. The monument, made from steel stands over 5 metres tall. It’s one of the ugliest monuments I’ve seen, but one of the first I’d seen with the shape burned out of the steel slab. It commemorates the Battle of Loudoun Hill between Aymer de Valence and Robert the Bruce in 1307. It was a return grudge match which Bruce won, despite being vastly outnumbered. Loudoun Hill stands in the background. It might be ugly, but it gave a foreground for the scenery in the background. PoD captured.

Another short dance practise when we got home, because I don’t want another day like last Saturday. I want to be able to crack not just the Jet Lag Waltz, but also the New Foxtrot. I’m getting there, and there are a few more days to go to get it even better.

Tomorrow, Scamp is meeting June, Ian and Isobel for coffee in the morning.

 

A beer in the Toon – 13 September 2022

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Today the Auld Guys, or at least, three of them went in to Glasgow for lunch.

We all met up sporadically in and around George Square. We were going to Doppio Malto, an Italian restaurant and beer shop in the centre of Glasgow. Ray arrived first and got things organised while I met John in the square (not a masonic keyword!) and we went looking for Val. Eventually we went back in to the restaurant to see if the wily Italian had sneaked in behind us and that was when we found Ray with the table all sorted. You can always expect Ray to get things done properly. So I left John with Ray and went looking for Val again. Found him and brought him back to the fold. The lunch could commence.

Pizza for Ray, Val and me, but John went for Carbonara, just to be different. Beer for me, IPA in fact, “Sexy IPA” to be more exact. John went for boring lager and Val had Guinness, Italian Guinness! Who knew there was such a thing? Ray was driving when he got home, so he was drinking orange juice. The pizzas were a bit of a disappointment. A bit tough and to use the Scots word, “Cheugh”. John said his carbonara was fine, but the sauce looked a bit thin. Maybe it’s just the focaccia that they can make well. We may go somewhere else next time.

Val seemed to enjoy chatting with the waitress in Italian. No, he didn’t tell me what they said! I just enjoyed being out with folk other than family again. Just sitting for an afternoon with pals, blethering, telling jokes and tall tales. What we ate and what we drank didn’t matter, but I did have another beer, if only to hear the waitress say “Your Sexy Sir”, while Val and John had Sambuca, but “Your Sambuca” doesn’t have the same ring to it!

All too soon we had to go our separate ways, vowing to do it again, hopefully some time in November. Before the Xmas rush.

Managed to get a train back and Scamp picked me up at the station. Her lunch had been the same as ours. Wetherspoons where they’d chosen had no fish, so fish ’n’ chips was off the menu. I’ve never heard of a restaurant having no fish. Macaroni cheese is fairly easy to make from scratch, but Wetherspoons seemed to be serving a microwaved box of it. There will be excuses reasons, I’m sure, but it’s sorry state for the hospitality sector to be in.

PoD was an ultra-wide shot of the new Queen Street Station in Glasgow.

Tomorrow we’re intending to go somewhere for a proper lunch. No ‘ping’ food accepted.

Going for the messages – 12 September 2022

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Just the run of the mill shopping run.

Scamp accepts that Tesco deliveries are a lifesaver at times, but prefers to see what she’s buying, and I have to agree with her. We did a fairly big shop and while we were going round I bumped into Fred and had a wee blether with him. He gave his apologies for not being able to get to the “Beer in the Toon” tomorrow and I understand the pressures he’s facing with his and his wife’s health. Hopefully some day soon we’ll be able to have that beer.

After we’d got through the tills and paid for the messages we trundled them to the car and found that there was nowhere to put them in the back seat because the bag of bottles we took for a trip to Tesco last week were still there taking up space. After a few grumps from me followed by an icy silence, Scamp drove straight to the council skips and we dumped the bottles into the overflowing plastic skips. One job done.

Back home lunch was a roll filled with cheese for me and one filled with Dairylea for Scamp. Honestly I didn’t think they made those Dairylea triangles any more, but it looks like they do. A second roll filled with jam became the lunchtime dessert.

After that we just lounged about for a while doing nothing in particular. Then I took the camera out for a walk in St Mo’s and got today’s PoD which was a little furry hoverfly sitting on a Scabious flower. Nice bit of sunshine on the background created some lovely patterns from the leaves of the bushes. While I was out, Scamp was picking the remainder of the James Grieve apples and beginning to prune the tree into a better shape. I had one of those home grown apples after dinner and it was a bit sharp, but perfectly edible.

Dinner tonight was Carbonara made the proper Italian way without cream, but with an extra egg yolk instead. It worked well.

That was about it for a cool day that was beginning to look like autumn was just around the corner.

Tomorrow I’m intending to head in to Glasgow and Samp is out to lunch with Mags.

Jammin’ – 9 September 2022

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We were going out to Larky tonight for dinner at Crawford and Nancy’s

The bag was wrapped up and put into a bigger bag ready for tonight’s visit. It was only once the wrapping and packing was done that Scamp noticed the protective bag was still lying on the table. It seemed a shame to undo all that good wrapping just for what was a superfluous protective plastic bag, so she decided to leave it out.

Other than that, we did very little. I browsed the reviews of different phones and came to no conclusion. Eventually Scamp decided we should get rid of the bag of bottles we’d collected during the bin strike. So we loaded the bag into the wee Red car and she drove us up to Tesco because there was a bottle bank there. “Was” is the key word in that sentence, past tense. Boxes with code pads on them, presumably where you can pick up or drop off Amazon deliveries and some sort of similar thing for Tesco pick ups, but no bottle bank. It’s not as if they don’t have the space, because the entire car parking space was empty. We drove a circuit of the area and then went home. I said that we could drive to the council tip and smash the bottles into the big metal skips, but the suggestion was met with a stony silence. We drove home. I’ll probably take the bottles to the skips during the week. I’m not proud (and I like the crashing, smashing noise they make when they shatter!) I once worked with a bloke who said that it’s inbuilt in a man’s brain to throw things into the sea, stones and shells and such. A man will also throw things into a bonfire, wood, paper and anything he finds lying around. Maybe it’s the same with glass bottles and a skip!

Later in the afternoon I went for a walk in St Mo’s. Not a lot of interest, photographically, but a Garden Cross spider repairing a well worn web got PoD.

By then it was time to get ready to drive to Larky and a night with Crawford and Nancy. We drove to Larky and Scamp handed Nancy the bag with the bag inside and she was delighted with her yellow handbag. Crawford also seemed pleased with his bottle of Bowmore whisky. After dinner, Crawford asked me “Did you bring your guitar?” and I replied “Of course!”. Once the table was cleared, we went through his song book. He played ukulele and I played acoustic guitar. We could only have been playing for about half an hour when Scamp told me it was time to go home. I looked at my watch and it was just after 11.30pm! Where had the night gone? I was sure we’d been playing for about half an hour when it was closer to an hour and a half at least.

We drove home in the dark, which is a strange feeling when you’re not used to it. No time to write and post the blog because we needed to be up and out by 10.15am to drive to Brookfield for the dance class.

Of course, this is a catch-up blog … again. But it’s traditional to say at the end what we’re going to do the next day. We are hoping to go dancing.