Loch Assynt

(here endeth the holiday snaps!)

Ardvreck Castle 2

Ardvreck Castle 1

In Corrieshalloch

Kylesku

Kylesku - which surprisingly turns out not to be the name of a Romanian spy, by a village in the NW Highlands, graced by a particularly fine bridge.

The Falls of Measach

The Falls of Measach plunge into Corrieshalloch Gorge immediately underneath a little steel suspension bridge that allows walkers to watch the water seeming to disappear deep into the earth beneath them. As the gorge is only a stone's throw from the car, its easy to access this great little walk - although you will at some point be asked to sign a petition for the re-opening of the adjacent public toilets.

A film crew filming a show called "Secret Britain" were working around the falls on the day we were there. In real life Julia Bradbury actually looks a little scary.

Across Little Loch Broom

Beinn Ghoblach looks more like a water-colour than a photo as it sweats in humid air, while the next rainstorm brews.

Curious

Gruinard Bay 2

A welcome break from the rain, the sun shone, we ran to the beach!

Gruinard Bay 1

Above Little Gruinard a layby on the A832, gives access to a rough path up onto a little promontory with a wonderful view.

Hazy Assynt

Link of the Day: Eli on the day cancer came into her family

Christian blogger Eli posted a piece yesterday on the day she found out about her Mum's cancer, how it has affected them all, their faith, and the way in which she still believes in the Sovereignty of God. Moving, profound and nicely written, it's worth a read.

http://elislittlethoughts.blogspot.com/2010/07/life-now.html

Inverewe

This door in the walled garden at Inverewe, appears to have magical properties. Who would have thought that opening it would reveal a secret garden containing mountains?

Strathspey Railway

Driving near Grantown on Spey we stopped to eat lunch, and stumbled upon the re-launching ceremony for this engine. 111 years old and now back at work, steaming and gleaming!

Loch Muick

Balmoral

Nice little place The Queen's got on the banks of the River Dee. Victoria and Albert's Highland getaway looks something like I imagined Cair Paravel to look when I read the Narnia novels as a child.

Book Notes: Friends Like These by Danny Wallace

The humourist Danny Wallace was having something of a pre-emptive mid-life crisis as he approached the age of thirty! (thirty!!). It was during this time that he discovered a box of sentimental items from his childhood, which his mother had cleared from his childhood bedroom. The box contained all manner of memory-provoking items including the names of a whole gallery of long-lost friends.

This book is the story of Wallace's mad-cap adventures as he e-mail's, Google's, Facebook's, and travels to catch up with the people in his old address book - wherever they are in the world. His travels take him around the UK, and then around the world.

It's a hugely entertaining, easy-reading, ultimately pointless book - which is a bit of a laugh (which after my last two book reviews here you might be thinking is well in order!). Wallace is an amusing writer who tells a good story and he's on good form here. Much of the book isn't laugh-out-loud funny, but is full of wry amusement as his observational humour is so well directed. The book is loaded with references which all 30+ people in this country will recall, TV shows, toys, Raleigh Chopper bikes and the like. Likewise, I imagine I am not alone in having spent time wondering what various characters I have known are now up to, where they are, and how their lives turned out - or even having Googled a name or two.

Many of his friends appear to still be highly entertaining characters too, with a wealth of funny shared memories, which keep the story of his search for them bubbling along nicely. It's not deep or profound, mostly its just delightfully silly - but I did enjoy this.

Derry Cairngorm

Picnic at Derry Lodge

The road from Linn of Dee to Derry Lodge is one of the best and most popular access routes into the Cairngorms. The track begins in a large car park, climbs through fragrant pine woods, and then out into broad glens that lead to the feet of some of Scotland's greatest mountain scenery. It's a track frequented by day-trippers with little rucksacks, travelling just far enough to touch the wilderness; by long-distance trekkers with heavy loads ands woolly beards, by families, by cyclists, and all manner of people young and old.

I've walked to Derry Lodge, camped at Derry Lodge, cycled to it, used it as a base for exploring the Cairngorm Plateau and looked longingly for it to come into view at the end of a gruelling hill day! This time however, we were there just to have a family bike ride and picnic. The girls played on the grass, the boys played in the river - and we all stood in awe of the mountains.

And then cycled back to the car at Linn of Dee!

Glenbuchart Castle

The Falls of Glassalt

The walk around the stunningly beautiful Loch Muick to Glas Alt Sheil is one we have done many times. This part of the world is beloved of hill-walkers, cyclists, and became popular after Queen Victoria fell in love with it, and bought most of it! Apparently the Falls of the Glassalt, this delightful 150ft cascade that brings the Glas Alt tumbling down from Lochnagar towards the great loch in its vast glacial trench below, was a favourite spot of Prince Albert. It was for this reason Victoria built the holiday house below it on the lochside after his demise. The route from Spital of Glenmuick to the house can be cycled on good tracks, before walking up through the woods to the falls. It's a magical family afternoon out, the route of which is described on the Walk Highlands website here.

Book Notes: The Chartist Legacy, edited by Ashton, Fyson and Roberts

'The Chartist Legacy' is a collection of eleven essays, analysing different aspects of Chartism, the great 19th Century popular movement for social change through parliamentary reform.

Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts (known to some as Pugnose) assembled a diverse range of scholars to address different aspects of the movement - and the results are absolutely fascinating. Given that we now have a government who claim to be embarking on a massive programme of constitutional reform - when could be a more relevant time to explore those who have gone before? My A-level history teacher had a sign on the classroom wall which read, "Anyone not interested in history is like a leaf that doesn't realise that it is part of a tree". How true!

The collection is as diverse as the contributors, and the essays within it which I enjoyed most were those which had some connections with areas I had studied before. It begins (after Asa Briggs' introduction to the field) with Miles Taylor's piece entitled, "The Six Points and the Reform of Parliament." This was one of the few essays which took a general approach to understanding Chartism, rather than delving deeply into specific aspects of it. He argues that the traditional understanding of Chartism - in continuity with the radical tradition is mistaken. His reading is that Chartism is characterised as a new movement in response to the 1932 Refrom Act and its consequences, and as such stresses its discontinuities with the older tradition. While I felt that Taylor claimed more than he proved in this regard, it is a well-written piece which will be worth returning to.

Then there are a whole cluster of essays which present detailed research into particular strands of the Chartist story, personal, regional or ideological. These were on the whole really good reading, the fruits of massive research and some good writing too. These included, Joan Hugman's detailed study of the Chartist Newspaper the Northern Liberator, Owen Ashton on Chartist Oratory (really interesting), Roberts on the forgotten aspects of Feargus O'Connor's Parliamentary career, Pickering on O'Connor and the Irish Question and Timothy Randall's delightful contribution on Chartist poetry and song.

My favourite essays in the collection were however Jamie L Bronstein's exploration of the Chartist movement's interaction with America. This was undoubtedly because this linked up with so much of what I had previously studied. Of special interest here was the way in which English Chartists re-evaluated the extent to which parliamentary reform would be an engine for social justice, in the light of the American experience. The essay which lives most vividly in my memory however is Robert Fyson's biographical study of William Ellis, the transported Chartist. He records the suppression of this Chartist, his treatment at the hands of the courts, and his experience in the Australian penal colony to which he was confined - a fabulous twenty or so pages of living history.

The book then concludes with a detailed piece of literary criticism from Kelly Mays - so loaded with technical terminology and impossibly dense prose that I skipped it, and then two essays which focus on the decline and memory of Chartism from Robert G. Hall and Anthony Taylor. They explored the ways in which the movement was memorialised by participants and how it then interacted with the rising Liberal Party later in the century.

Ironically I found this book celebrating 19thC discontent and sedition, in a second hand bookshop in the shadow of Queen Victoria's Balmoral Castle. While a disappointingly rainy holiday meant that days in the hills were numbered, sitting in a holiday cottage with a coffee, and a view down a great Loch, with a book as multi-faceted and stimulating as this wasn't a bad substitute.

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Signpost at Strathdon

Book Notes: Rough Crossings: Britain, The Slaves and The American Revolution, by Simon Schama

The story of the abolition of the British slave trade, of Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect and their life-long struggle against "the accursed trade in human souls", has been told many times. In contrast, a story which has been too often forgotten is that of the African-American slaves who fled to fight for the King in the American Wars of Independence; believing that in so-doing they would gain, "British Freedom". In almost 450 pages of riveting narrative, in 'Rough Crossings', Simon Schama has retold this important story.

He describes the way in which British and American laws and attitudes to slavery diverged, and how in George III's England, free blacks lived with the fear of kidnapping; under a legal system which was at best ambiguos as to their status. In the centre of this story is the early abolitionist Granville Sharp, and his tireless efforts to establish and defend the legal basis for liberty.

The story of the African-Americans who fought against Independence for America, is a tragic one, and Schama tells the story both of the people as a whole, as well as many of the individuals caught up in the great unfolding drama of Empires in collision. Driven by the fear of the slave-holding state that that the USA was evidently to become, and lured by the false hope of land and liberty under the rule of the English King; the African-American army of former-slaves fought hard, loyally and sustained dreadful losses. Schama quite beautifully describes their experience of war, and of the broken promises they endured as Britain pulled out of America.

Schama then describes, the disastrous attempt to form a settlement for these loyalist 'free-blacks' in Nova Scotia (Canada still being a British colony at the time). With the land-promises made to them in tatters, "British Freedom" proving to be illusory, and amidst great hardship and alarming mortality rates, the experiment was ended. What emerged from the heart-break of Nova-Scotia was the attempt to establish a free state for these former slaves in Sierra Leone.

The final part of the book details the reasons for the attempt to establish the free colony at Sierra Leone, the successes and failures of the Nova-Scotians (As the ex-slaves were known), as they sought to carve out a new life for themselves in Freetown. The inevitable parallel with the biblical-Exodus in which slaves were lead by Providence to a 'Promised Land', was clearly in the minds of the settlers. Equally inevitably we are told of the struggles, hardships, more broken promises, diseases and political squabbles that characterised the first few generations of the settlement. Schama paints a wonderful portrait of the settlement's first governor, John Clarkson - and his missionary zeal to see his people established in the land, treated equitably and provided for. He tells of how Clarkson's absolute determination to see these people flourish, led him into conflict with his masters in London, who ultimately replaced him with a governor whose priorities were those of the Sierra Leone Company, rather than the people.

Schama is a historian who writes like a novelist. As such, he supplies great detail, with remarkably few references. However it means that he writes with great feeling and pathos. He isn't the kind of writer who seeks to persuade with statistics - but rather makes the reader feel the anger of injustice, and vividly picture the great sieges and battles. The reader almost smells the inside of the ships, and then marvels at the exploits of those both black and white who struggled for liberty and hope, but is finally brought to despair as hopes are dashed, and justice delayed once again.

Whilst occasionally the abundance of poetic metaphors and flowery prose is a bit much, nevertheless this lively writing brings this history alive. This is a brilliant read about an important subject - a part of our past about which I feel I ought to have been told before. This is popular history at its best. It is riveting, accessible, moving, powerful and disturbing.

Pause

With the kids off school, and life madly hectic, it's time once again to have a rest from blogging, for a few weeks. See you soon.

Mum of Beans (Guest blog)

(Guest blog from #1 Son aka 'Boris)

Farewell, K.C.N.

This week saw us saying a final farewell to Kinnoull Church Nursery. Previous farewells had always been tempered by the knowledge that we always had a smaller child about to start the nursery. This farewell was different - as this week our youngest graduated from the nursery, and our many years of involvement with it came to a conclusion. It was a very strange feeling, knowing that a place that has been so much part of family life for so many years, suddenly isn't!

It's not that I think that little 'Doris' should be cosseted in the nursery environment for another year, and shielded from the big bad world outside. In fact she is more than ready to go to school, although she's quiet she is socially confident and academically just starting to want to learn letters, numbers and so forth. In fact the twinge of sadness we sense as we say farewell to K.C.N. is because it has been such a brilliant place for our kids to go to. We had previously used other nurseries in the town, all of which provided a safe environment for children. Kinnoull was in another league however when it came to being a friendly, personal, family-like, stimulating environment for them. Saying farewell to previous nurseries was very matter-of-fact; whereas saying goodbye to Kinnoull feels like a major life-milestone.

I think the qualitative difference between the nurseries we experienced was that other nurseries cared in a very professional manner; whereas the staff at Kinnoull cared because they cared! The far smaller scale of this nursery meant that each child was looked after as an individual, rather than as a box to tick on a council form. This was especially the case when #2 son 'Norris' was deaf and exhibiting challenging behaviour! The other significant difference was the involvement of various parts of the community with the nursery - parents, church, the committee that ran it and so forth. This added a huge amount to the whole experience, making things like end-of-year concerts, carol services and the like into great community events.

So, farewell KCN, and thanks!

The Boat that Rocked - and the film that didn't

The premise is a good one; take a writer from the historical satire Blackadder, assemble a cast of first-rate comedy actors, and produce a well-funded madcap historical comedy set in the 1960s - as battle commences between Pirate Radio, and the establishment. It sounds like a formula too good to get wrong; and yet this film just never seems to get going, to convince or capture the imagination. This film is excessively long too - and that doesn't seem to be because the plot demands it; but rather it is the lack of a compelling central plot that makes the sub-plots and asides expand uncontrollably into the vacuum.

It would be all too easy to critique the historical niceties of the film, especially in regards to social attitudes and ethics; but that would be to miss the point. Writer Richard Curtis deliberately caricatures the boat crew as representing the 60s and their wild totally unrestrained artistic, sexual and chemical hedonism, in total contrast to the establishment caricatures who are cringingly square, repressed and repressive. While in reality things were far more complex - and neither side was quite so appalling; Curtis seeks to harness the popular myth of the 60s as a comedy device.

The problem with this comedy isn't the crude retelling of history - its just that such a darn good cast, are allowed to fizzle and fade; without a compelling narrative to get to grips with. The film comes across like a series of sketches as if it were the box-set of a sit-com series; rather than as a complete film. What's worse is that as a comedy - it lacked any genuinely laugh-out-loud moments. It finally comes to an end, with a whimper - and leaves the viewer with a prolonged feeling that despite the likes of Philip Seymour-Hoffman, Kenneth Branagh, and Bill Nighy doing their thing so well; this is a movie which sounds great in theory but fails to to live up to any of its potential. The boat may have rocked - the film certainly didn't!

Drums and Pipes

My already thunderous headache is being made worse by the incessant drumming coming from a massive Orange Order parade - just across the river. Could anyone nip out and explain to them that Christendom has been abolished and so making all that racket to define and control it, is probably about a century too late. If they really like drumming though - any chance they could leave it until my headache clears up?

A Local Shop!

The phrase, "this is a local shop" surprisingly featured in the top 5 comedy catchphrases of all time. The ghastly premise of the comedy was that the grotesques who manned the shop used it as a front for all manner of degradations and murders.

My experience in Perth over the last few years has been that the opprobrium heaped upon 'the local shop' by that comedy is ill-deserved and worthy of reconsideration. While it is true that some marginal savings can be made by shopping online and trawling for bargain prices, I have found that multi-nationals and faceless .coms provide poor service, lousy aftercare, and ultimately bad value of for money. A few 'local' examples will demonstrate the point (and just so that you know - I'm not getting commission here, these are just personal recommends)

The Beanshop in Perth roasts and sells their own coffee. It's completely fantastic. We've tried various other coffee's, we've used supermarket coffee's and we've sourced cheaper ones too. There are several things that draw us back to the Beanshop though. For a start, the quality of the coffee is the best, then there's the option to have it as beans, ground - and if ground, done so to suit your machine, then there's the whole range of fairly-traded coffees they offer. If you want to drink fair-trade espresso-ground coffee - no-one else will supply that combination for you. Then there's the advice, on coffee making, equipment, contacts for machine servicing, and that's before you come to the fact that visiting the store is worth it to chat to the staff, over a free sample of their coffee of the month. The Bean Shop

I recently bought a second-hand drum-kit for my son. When setting it up, we realised that one of the ratchets on the cymbal stand was completely broken. I took it back into the shop, and without questioning it at all, the owner handed me a brand new boom-stand, which was set up again within an hour. I was very glad I hadn't spent £50 less and got the kit on ebay, from some anonymous seller, who may or may not have co-operated, who may-or-may not have tried to blame the courier, or who may have just said, 'it was fine when I sent it out'. RWJ Drumstore

The customer service we received from the huge chain store Comet, and what we got from local company d3 Audio Visual, couldn't be more different. Comet were a complete disgrace, when the DVD recorder they sold me packed up, their level of customer service was so appalling that I blogged about it here. When d3 installed a surround-sound system for our TV, they gave us a pretty good deal on an ex-demo amp, and installed it for us. When my kids wrecked the install by pressing random buttons on the remote, botching up the lovely sound that d3 had created, they cheerfully came and did it again. Local companies value their reputation, and go the extra mile to protect it. Some companies have such a control of market share, that the individual customer is of no consequence. I haven't set foot in Comet since that experience. I'd go back to d3 in a flash though. d3 Audio Visual

We made a big mistake when we bought a bike last year from Tesco's. It was £30 cheaper than the bikes on offer in the independent bike shop in the town. In retrospect it would have been far, far better to save up the extra £30 and go to a shop who understand bikes. The Tesco bike wouldn't stay in gear. Several bike rides proved very irritating for our son, as the gears clicked, jumped, and constantly slipped. On hills when the gears are under strain, it was unusable. The problem? It's cheaper to use brake cable than gear-changing cable on bikes. The Tesco bike had brake-cabling on the gears. The designed springy-ness of brake cable wrecks the performance of gears. We ended up paying the local shop to bring the Tesco bike up to standard, and that's where all future bikes will come from - even if we have to save a little longer to get them. We bought a bike-rack for the car this Spring. The owner of the bike-shop came out and helped us get it all fitted onto the car for the first time, safely. You don't get that kind of service online! J.M. Richards Cycles.

When we go out for a coffee, we have the choice of the delightful unique French cafe in town or the overpriced, drably impersonal Costa. I find 'chain' cafe's useful in a town I don't know well, as you can walk in, knowing exactly what you can expect. Conversely, what's the point in going to a new town, if every High Street looks exactly the same? No, we'll give Costa a miss and go and enjoy freshly baked croissants instead at Cafe Breazh.

If we need a snack-on-the run in town, we have the choice between The Tower Bakery, who make all their produce within a mile of the town centre - or the halogen-lit garish plasticity of Gregg's, whose wares are driven countless miles around the country. In my opinion there is something rather satisfying in sinking ones teeth into a Tower Bakery Fudge Doughnut, letting the fudge delight the tongue and the custard squirt around the gums like something from a Roald Dahl book! It's even better to add to the sheer indulgence of the experience, the thought that local jobs are protected, and local businesses helped to thrive as I do so. Tower Bakery.

The up-front discounts offered by the multi's, and the .com's can be very alluring - and I have taken advantage of them from time to time. I'm sure I will again, if they are prepared to offer massive discounts. On the other hand - more often than not, their discounts prove to illusory, and what local businesses offer in terms of advice, help, follow-up, customer-service, and friendliness is usually worth a lot more than the marginal savings available online.

Have you had similar experiences? Or are there any local businesses near you that you'd recommend?