Shinty

I went to see a game of shinty on Saturday. In London.

Yes, after living in Inverness for three and a half years I never made it to a single game, despite telling myself I really should go and see the “national sport” of the highlands. But when I read that London was hosting its first game for eighty years I thought it might be nice and ironic if that one were to be my first, several hundreds of miles south of where both I and shinty came from.

It turned out to be a lot of fun, with London Camanachd scraping a 1-0 win over the Highlanders army regiment in front of a crowd of about 50 or so. From what I could make out from overheard accents and conversations, the London team was made up of a curious mix of Scots expats, English folk who had played at university in Scotland, and Irish converts from hurling. It will be interesting to see whether the newly-resurrected club grows at all.

Oh, and it peed it down with rain for the first half, which was not only welcome after the scorching heat of the last few days, but also highly appropriate for a Scottish sporting fixture. Ken Livingstone should introduce more Scottish cultural events during London’s summer droughts - it’s the only sure way to get the heavens to open.

Things are cooling down now though thankfully - I have escaped London, and after a couple of relaxing days seeing friends in Winchester, I am now in Aberdeen overnight. It’s still really hot, but in a nice Aberdeen summer’s day kind of way, rather than London’s black snot kind of way.

Scorchio!

Greetings from London, where I am really struggling in the heatwave. The sun is unrelenting and the only breeze is the occasional warm blast that makes you feel like you’re in a fan oven.

That said, I’ve had fun catching up with friends and being a happy tourist in London, and I had a successful time in Suffolk hunting mullets.

Here are a couple of photos I’ve taken. The first is me with John, the resident of one of the Mullett’s Farms, and the other is Tower Bridge in London.

Me on the radio (again)

I’m visiting my next two mullets in Suffolk on Thursday. I’m very excited, as you can imagine.

I’m going to be talking about my experiences on BBC Radio Suffolk’s breakfast show on Friday morning, which should be a lot of fun. Do feel free to listen. I think it will be some time between 8am and 9am but if I can I will post a message on here to confirm.

Besides that, the main thing on my mind is the heat. It was unbearably hot in Glasgow today, but tomorrow, when I go to London, it will be around 36 degrees. The Faroes can’t come soon enough…

Holiday plans

I’m off for two weeks on Wednesday, and have spent a day off (today is the local holiday for the Glasgow Fair) doing some final planning.  The highlight of my trip will be mullet-bagging in Suffolk - more on that soon - and I will also be catching up with friends and family at both ends of the UK.

It’s all a bit whistle-stop - London, Ipswich, London again, Winchester, Aberdeen, Inverness, Skye, Inverness again, and back to Glasgow.  If it wasn’t for staying in London twice with the same friend, I’d be in different places for seven consecutive nights.  That would beat my previous record of five nights in different beds, which was a trip for my old work a couple of years ago.  On that journey, I slept in Perth, on the overnight ferry to Shetland, Lerwick in Shetland, Kirkwall in Orkney, and finally Thurso before arriving home in Inverness somewhat bleary-eyed and weather-beaten.

Good job I’ve got two clear days back in Glasgow at the end of it all before I have to go back to work.

Going north. No, really north

I have spent this weekend in a beautifully warm and sunny Aberdeen. It’s such a lovely city in the sunshine, with the bold, dramatic granite buildings standing crisp and clear against the rare phenomenon of cloudless skies. My main purpose for heading north was to go to a friend’s wedding reception, but it also allowed me to do a bit of planning for my next overseas adventure: the Faroe Islands.

My autumn trip was provisionally going to be Canada, to hunt mullets, but next week’s journey to two Mullett’s Farms in Suffolk (more about that later) has meant I can satisfy myself that I’ll get some mullets this year, and will leave Canada for a later trip, perhaps at the same time that I visit the USA. So to replace Canada with another overseas trip, I figured it would be nice to visit our near neighbour to the north for no other reason that it might be a fun and different. A number of friends fancy coming along, so I was able to meet with Justin, Niall, Mark, and Mark’s girlfriend Claire yesterday to figure out when and how we would do the trip.

To be honest, I don’t know much about the Faroes, other than that they’re into whaling; and that the postmen, schoolteachers and fishermen in their plucky national football team punch significantly above their weight, as Scotland know to their peril. Moreover, the weather in autumn is likely to be less than tropical and there might not be a huge amount of sunlight. And from the little research I was able to do over the weekend, travel might be tricky beyond October, with the few flights and ferries beginning to thin out as winter sets in.

Should be an interesting trip then.

Exploring the deep south

This weekend was the first time I have left Glasgow to explore just beyond the city, rather than getting right away, for example back to Inverness or Aberdeen.

On Saturday it was a church barbeque at Mugdock Park. The walk from Milngavie train station to the park was actually quite enjoyable, with green fields, blue skies and no less than two castles. Then yesterday I went with a couple of church folk for a lovely hike round Loch Chon, in the Trossachs (above, and more on my pictures page).

I have been amused by comments from many new friends down here that “one of the great things about Glasgow is that you’re only half an hour’s drive from the countryside” (which ignores the fact that Inverness is only five minutes away, and half an hour is probably further away from the countryside than any other point in Scotland). And I must confess in my highland ignorance I thought all the bandit country around Glasgow was just post-industrial ghost towns that had lost their coalmining and steelworks to Australia, and their Glasgow daytrippers to Lanzarote.

Instead, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s quite pretty.

The obligatory post-World Cup blog

So that’s the end of the World Cup.

It’s been something of a disappointment, with some really exciting games in the group stages giving way to defensive and unimaginative football later on.

And something needs to be done about penalty shoot-outs.  They make for good drama but are simply games of nerves and don’t really feel like proper football.  Games are being decided by what are effectively lotteries where teams can win despite not really deserving to.

It’s time they were abolished and replaced with something else.  One idea I’ve heard is to get the mascots on for ten minutes each way to see if they can do better at scoring.  My more serious preference would be is counting yellow and red cards, so that teams can be rewarded for discipline and are encouraged to battle on if, for example, it’s still a draw but they are behind on disciplinary points.

Any other suggestions?  The sublime and the ridiculous are both welcome.

Aberdeen monopoly

I’ve been highly amused by the news that the new Aberdeen version of Monopoly has “Dundee” instead of “jail”. The BBC news website contains some discussions on whether this is fair or not, and I laughed out loud at one Dundonian’s comment:

“How realistic will the game be? Will all the playing pieces be sheep? Will the houses and hotels be grey? When you open the board will it stink of fish?”

Ah, the witty banter between the two ends of the A90!

Flagging

England are out, then - that spares us another forty years of jingoism.  Though as many English people have commented, they’re still putting up with our seven hundred year old remembrance of Bannockburn.  Alex Salmond’s observation that independence would turn Scotland from a surly lodger into a good neighbour rings true as ever.

But enough of that, suffice to say that I was quite amused by this article on BBC News, about what to do with all those leftover England flags.

United 93

I went to the cinema last night, and saw United 93 - the film about the fourth hijacked plane on September 11th, which was believed to have been headed to the White House or Congress before it crash-landed.

“9/11″ is one of those days where everyone will remember where they were. I was in Slovenia, travelling through Eastern Europe with Niall. We were in a campsite just north of Ljubjana, the capital, and we heard the news unfold on the BBC World Service on the radio. Some days later when we moved to another campsite, we finally saw the TV pictures which had gripped the world since a few days before.

The film itself portrayed the emerging crisis as seen by the military and air traffic control authorities that morning, plus the hijack on the plane itself and the passengers fighting back.

It seems that quite a lot was known about what happened on board, through phonecalls made by passengers and the sounds air traffic control were able to pick up on, so perhaps this was as realistic a description of events as there could be. Indeed, according to the credits at the end, many of the military and air traffic control people were played by themselves.

Today, all hell continues to break loose in the war on terror which “9/11″ unleashed, with warped religious fervour on all sides, and lives being destroyed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine, all in the name of “God”, “freedom” and various other terms that no perpetrator has ever accurately defined.

A little reassuring to think, then, that on that fateful day when the passengers of the fourth plane conspired to fight back against the hijackers, and perhaps came close to succeeding, that the very best of human nature - love, courage and togetherness - could come out of a group of very ordinary people thrust into a situation they didn’t expect or understand.

A far cry from the characters pedalling this war, whether bearded rich men hiding in Afghan caves or half-brained megalomaniacs in Washington DC.