November 2008

Out for a pint at the Three Judges in Partick with my old pal Stewart, and as his long-lived mongrel Clio had just passed away, we decided to toast her memory in a pint of this. Afterwards, I was feeling just a bit…ruff!

We went there because we were in a hurry, Papingo was full and Atrio wasn’t. Mistake. Cullen Skink? I think not. I had a superb Cullen Skink at the Ceilidh Place in Ullapool last Tuesday night, made to the classic recipe: chunks of tattie, smoked haddock, cream, onion. Atrio provided something of a contrast. Five…

Sounds boring, but Road Equivalent Tariff (RET) is a system aimed at encouraging tourism and business in the Scottish islands. Basically, you charge for ferry trips what the equivalent would be if you drove the same distance. Roughly. All is explained here. The pilot project has just started (I’ve only just realised)on the various mainland-Outer…

To Tolsta this morning, with Dave Halliday and his Harley Sportster 1200, photographer John Maclean and the trusty, very far from home Citroen C4 (why are so many Citroen C4 four-doors metallic maroon? I saw ANOTHER one today). It was freezing, but spectacular. Again, that amazing Lewis phenomenon of bleakness suddenly giving way to astonishing…

I kept seeing place names that were familiar from Shetland: Mangersta, Mealista, Kirkibost (same as Kirkibister); the photographer I’m working with, John Maclean, told me that most Lewis place names are Norse in origin, though many have been Gaelicised. Much of Lewis even looks like Shetland, in its bleak bogland. But it’s a lot more…

I took a last-minute decision this morning to take the westerly route from Glasgow to Inverness, by Loch Lomond, Glencoe, Fort William and Loch Ness. It’s four hours, as opposed to three and a bit, but what a wonderful drive. All of the Highlands’ autumnal glories were on display, and by the time I hit…

…you’d bury the dagger/in your silhouette window light go… Ah, there’s nothing like a bit of Tom Waits’s Tom Traubert’s Blues (that’s Waits Mark One, when he had proper tunes), especially in the vicinity of Bushmills itself, which is a real village, with a pub called The Distiller’s Arms. Sandy, Elaine and I had the…

Arrived at George Best Belfast City Airport yesterday courtesy of FlyBe, on time and in good shape, and then got comprehensively lost trying to get the hire car (petrol, not diesel, so I kept stalling it)out of Belfast and onto the Cookstown road. Not helped by the SaNav, which refused to recognise the existence of…