When words fail...pictures come through!

I'm just back from an amazing and full and rich couple of weeks in Scotland. And my head is a bit blurry but absolutely buzzing! A good night's rest is the final ingredient to make sure the transition back into "Life in Morecambe" is as smooth as possible but I had a yearning to take a look through my photos so thought I'd do a bit of a gallery of some of my adventures...

So, it all started...with a traffic jam trying to cross the Forth Road Bridge. But enough of boring traffic: destination numero uno was the Monimail Tower Project, complete with historic tower, woods, various wooden buildings and shed moving (yes, that's a shed being picked up by a digger about to be relocated...):

The return of the feet - relaxing at the end of a day enjoying the evening sunshine

Welcome to Monimail!

The dome at the entrance

Looking through a new partially constructed building towards the orchard

The gateway through into the walled garden

View of the community allotments from the tower

The walled garden

Shed in transit!

Community allotments again - and a bit of the tower!

Looking across one of the wood stores and walled garden towards the main house

Another view from the top of the tower

My day off at Monimail (which I wrote about here) involved beaches, trees, sunshine, an ice house and an oil rig:

Dunes!

Not desertey - but definitely duney!

Unexpected sculptures in the undergrowth

The ice house

An oil rig on its way out to sea

From whence I was over to Tillicoultry for a lovely catch up with an old friend (who I hadn't seen for eight years! How did that happen?!), up to Forfar for a bit of teaching, across to Pitlochry to see family, a bit of time at The Hermitage as I journeyed south enjoying the amazing waterfall and then...to Laurieston Hall! Which involved more sunshine (yippee!), hanging out on the roof (well, I was just on the roof - companions got to hang from ropes on chimneys), taking photos of taking photos, and heaps of other stuff I didn't manage to take photos of (like swimming in the loch, using the sauna and amazing pond plunge pool, helping build a woodshed, working in the walled garden, digging drainage ditches, giving lots of Massage, getting a shiatsu treatment, playing Bananagrams and enjoying LOTS of great conversation and amazing food)

The weather vane - which apparently hasn't moved for decades!

Chris and Flis working on the chimney stack

The walled garden from the roof

The original "formal entrance" from the roof

The roof...from the roof!

The West Wing and tower

Photos of photographers (and my feet again)

Not a complete photographic record by a long shot, but a good start!

The Tigger Who Turns Up

Tuesday April 22nd I feel like I've been "turning up" quite a lot in the past few days - descending in to places and then setting off again on my merry way. It's an incredibly enjoyable way of doing things. There's something about an overnight stay with good friends or family that turns a visit into a very easy going occasion: catch up on arrival / talk into the evening / chat over breakfast and then depart. But as I sit here with the most wonderful cacophony of water falling over rocks as my soundscape, I am pondering how often others do this kind of dropping in. I certainly know it happens occasionally but I feel like I'm making a habit of it - mostly because these are people I would not normally get to see and yet, being "in the area" it seems only sensible to make the most of the proximity. And so I do.

Greatly assisted by motorised vehicle ownership, of course.

Virtually all of my trips with the Golden Chariot have been heading south from Lancashire and so a proper jaunt in Scottishland has been a real treat. Last night in particular (driving from Forfar to Pitlochry) took me through some gorgeous countryside, and with sunshine aplenty to accompany me it was a wonderful experience. Even this morning I've been enjoying fairly quiet roads as I potter around Perthshire and, despite it being immediately after a bank holiday weekend, I have found no congestion, no traffic jams - just sparsely populated roads and a sat nav to keep me on track. (Admittedly as I head further south and back on to dual carriageways and motorways I'm likely to get back into normal traffic levels, but having a break from them has been most enjoyable).

After such glorious sunshine for the past week or so the clouds have now joined the party and the contrast of a cooler, wetter day is presenting new challenges and opportunities. Somehow I don't particular feel like I'm in a sauna & steam kind of frame of mind but equally am not quite sure what else may take my fancy. But with trusty travel aids and books aplenty, methinks a cosy cafe may well be the sensible answer...

Wanderings

Friday April 18th Just when I thought this walk would end up not having a writing stop, the perfect spot appeared - complete with Forestry Commission bench, located slap-bang in the middle of a sunny glade, the sound of the waves on the beach and the birds on the trees my auditory backdrop.

Up in Scotland on my hols I was invited to take today as my day off from WWOOFing and take it I did! The Mon-Fri work ethic is so deeply ingrained in my mind that I often seem to find myself arriving and leaving on "working days" and not necessarily taking the "rest days" I have accrued. Which, although well and good on one level, on another (the level where I'm having a holiday and enjoying the locality I've turned up in) is a bit of a shame. So this mid-stay opportunity was perfect.

From the Monimail Tower Project where I'm volunteering I set off into the great (by me) unexplored lands of Fife, first stop the Hill of Tarvit. Although the house and tearooms didn't open until lunchtime my main desire was to drink in the gardens - and the sunshine. This was verily achieved with several hours on a very comfortable spot of grass in the formal gardens, by a beautiful dark-pinkish flowering rhododendron. The book I'd started this morning was devoured and in between bits of pondering and jotting occurred.

Onwards I found myself heading North to explore the woods just south of Tayport. I ended up on a merry magical mystery tour finding a convenient spot to park and then my aimless-amble began. It's a very unique experience wandering without a map, without a plan, without a deadline and without any expectations. Very soon I de-shoed and spent the best part of the next two hours following the coastline around, enjoying the different textures underfoot and the different temperatures on my skin (in the sun: really quite warm, in the shade: a bit nippy!)

As my amble crossed into the Tentsmuir Nature Reserve I started seeing an ice house marked on the maps. An ice house? In the woods, by a bunch of dunes? What's that all about? Well, it turns out it's a relic of an entirely non-vegan occupation: salmon fishing. The catches would be brought to this really quite sizeable ice house for storage before being transported south for further processing (and, presumably, eating). And this is where I find myself now.

Sunshine. Barefoot walking. The sea. An ice house. Without paying particular attention but just heading off to what felt like a good place to go (and was only one of several options suggested by my hosts) I've ended up on a pretty much Tigger-perfect adventure. Huzzah.

Addendum
On my walk back I realised that the tall towers I had (wrongly) assumed were part of a bridge were actually an oil platform being towed out to sea. Not something I expected to see! But it reminded me of a throw away comment from one of the room guides at the Hill of Tarvit - "Beautiful view - and no wind turbines!" A brief exchange ensued with me expressing support of wind turbines as an alternative to fossil fuel use (and CO2 production) and him countering with "Well, we're breathing out CO2 all the time!" True, yes - but not quite on the same magnitude as power producing combustion. Which brought to mind two of my current "thought projects":

1) the difficulty of doing "the right thing" while living in a very complex and interlinked world where impacts and subsequent repercussions are often entirely unintended and / or imagineable. Climate change and the energy debate is one such area - particularly given the scope of the challenge (and is a prospective future blog area when my thoughts have coalesced sufficiently!)

2) the importance of the Next Step. Humans are faced with an incredible array of challenges, choices and options - both practically and morally / philosophically. There is rarely a definitive right / wrong answer (especially when the whole human is taken into account - a wide range of crimes can probably be agreed upon as wrong, but the approach to dealing with a human who's committed such a crime - now there's a book in itself). But the simple truth is that the lifestyles being lived in "developed" countries at present isn't sustainable - which is where the next step comes in.

For example, I may* have decided that the answer to this non-sustainable lifestyle problem is for the population to live in housing communities, grow their own food and generally travel no further than 20-30 miles on a regular basis. However, presenting this to someone who has lived a life during which they have travelled extensively, generally purchased prepared food from supermarkets and lived only with immediate family is unlikely to have much of an impact other than for them to think of me as an idealistic nutter who should be ignored, regardless of what I say.

Learning more about where they are, what makes them tick and what would feel like a next step (rather than an intergalactic leap) for them as a discussion and exploration is much more likely to produce a long term positive impact.

All fairly sensible and possibly pretty obvious, but just my own exploration of how the world ticks and what I may be able to do to grease the cogs here and there.

*As much as I would love to have decided upon an answer to the question of how to live sustainably I can say with certainty that I haven't! I am really enjoying exploring community living and growing as what can be a very positive alternative to "mainstream living" but very much in the context of continuing to grapple with the reality of what the achievable "next steps" more broadly may be.

Long live parks and open spaces!

I, for one, wouldn't normally associate a visit to London with being outside - and yet this weekend that's exactly what has happened. With my car safely parked for the weekend (a multi-purpose trip, of course) I began my adventures by...going pretty much to the other end of the Piccadilly line. I don't think I ever really understood just how long the Piccadilly line is, but having spent a large portion of this weekend on it I can say with authority: It. Is. Long.

Anyway, the length of tube lines has little to do with parks and open spaces - other than the fact that London's best parks and open spaces seem to be at the extreme ends of these lines. Friday's delight was Grovelands Park in Southgate (which isn't South in the slightest - other than in relation to, say, Morecambe). I'd walked past it on Thursday evening and thought to myself "My, that looks like a rather delightful park" and indeed it was. I was treated to a proper little wood, replete with old but still serviceable bench, daffodils, the vivid green of new tree leaves and a woodland play area just far enough away not to be intrusive but close enough to know there were other young souls enjoying themselves.

 

After a lovely chunk of time in the woodland shade I moved on to soak up the sunshine on one of the large expanses of grass. Proper, thick, luscious grass which is a delightful mattress to enjoy. I get a real sense of longevity in these parks - not ancient longevity, but having been designed and developed usually at least a hundred or so years ago they are living still and providing such fabulous outside spaces for us mere humans to enjoy. Deeeeeeeeeeelightful.

When the time was right I then found myself meandering through central London, somewhat aiming for St James's Park but actually ending up in a delightful little square (St James's Square, no less) having stumbled across Saville Row quite by accident. St James's Square offered blossom, vivid tulips in reds and purples (it was the purples that really did it) and more marvellous grass to lie on as the heat of the day was beginning to fade. From thence it was on to Trafalgar Square and the noise and crowds of a plethora of street entertainers. But also: more sunshine. Oh, sunshine sunshine sunshine - what a glory you are! A free recital by a London chamber choir took me inside for about an hour and emphasised how much I was yearning to be outside again - so supper was had al fresco on the Southbank.

Saturday's open space was somewhat different - a friend is developing a growing project at a hostel in Peckham and I was able to join him (along with some other friends) for a Day of Doing. Although long term the hope is to get some of the hostel residents involved in the project it's very much in its infancy at the  moment and so my friend (and his band of merry volunteers) is getting things growing with a view to enhancing the environment if nothing else. Slow and steady is the name of the game and they've already made a noticeable difference with raised beds and benches - and with the growing season now upon us it's all about getting seeds (and the plants that are being grown on window ledges and rooftops) into the soil and letting them do their stuff.

Saturday was also the only bit of outside time I really didn't enjoy: London has many attributes but for me its South London butcheries are not one - and Peckham has a number! The beautiful sunshine and warmth I've enjoyed this weekend didn't help matters but it was but a moment of meh during a weekend of gentle enjoyment.

This morning saw me dropped off at Alexandra Palace, a place I have heard of often but never before visited. I didn't have a plan for the day, other than to make it back to Heathrow (from whence I'm typing) and yet found myself ensconced in yet another glorious parkland and, by great good fortune I managed to get on a tour of the site, provided by local volunteers. My interest and the fact that one of the tour guides took a shine to me meant I was squeezed on to the 11am tour. Huzzah! My curiosity to learn more about Alexandra Palace and, indeed, many of the other Victorian era buildings and parks in London, has now definitely been piqued, as has a desire to hunt down some guides to walks along disused railway lines. Plenty to keep me busy.

And then it was back to the sunshine and the grass (this time immediately in front of the back of Alexandra Palace (the south side of the building, which now could be considered the front, was originally the back - the original palace train station and main entrance being on the north side) to finish a fascinating biography of Edith Cavell. The daughter of a vicar, Cavell trained as a nurse and founded a nursing training institute in Belgium in the years leading up to the First World War. She stayed in Belgium at the outbreak of the war and was involved in helping Allied soldiers and Belgians of conscription age out of the occupied territories - for which she was executed by the Germans. The story of this remarkable woman who had truly devoted her life to the service of others was compelling reading - and somehow reading it in London added another dimension to the experience (London being much more evocative of the Wars for me, somehow).

It's been a glorious weekend on so many levels but the joy of the outdoors has been a true highlight - and has awakened a new interest in finding more of Outside London to explore on my next visits.