A glorious — and three-day — weekend continues with the chance to spend a Monday relaxing with our friends in Aberdour and exploring its stellar beaches: this one, known (erroneously) as Black Sands is particularly fine. This weekend has reminded me why I should come to Scotland more often.
We didn’t just visit Scotland for a melancholy afternoon at Raith Rovers. On the second day of three, we drove both ways across this fine transportation architecture. The new Forth Bridge was built after the old one started pinging apart a few years ago. Like the other two monumental bridges — now, one rail, two road, and one from each of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries — it is an elegant structure, worth crossing just for the hell of it.
The football season comes to its many and diverse ends, each club finishing in different ways with different emotions. Raith Rovers of Scottish League One have managed to blow their hopes out in the last three games, promotion hopes have disappeared and at the final whistle today all was over. It was a very melancholy place all round — club, and town (Kirkcaldy in Fife). Maybe this picture captures something of that.
It’s been a very busy week. But one reason for this is that it’s been the last week of teaching; I do not have to stand up in front of students and sound intelligent again until about the 28th September. I need some head-space, so this is a good thing. But then again I do miss them when they’re not around. Here we line up for our ceremonial end-of-term photograph; this little clump is about a fifth of the whole, this time round.
Didn’t a creature looking like this once erupt out of John Hurt’s stomach? The end may be nigh.
Although the photos don’t reflect this I have spent all the working week in Manchester thus far. Today’s fun was one of those events which someone else decided was terribly important. No offence to John, this speaker, who did a good job (and here makes his BIG point) but the detached look on the faces of one or two of my colleagues probably reflected my own, all things considered.
Just hanging out. I sometimes feel it would be nice to spend a pleasant morning, as it was today, just chilling out in a sunny spot.
OK, maybe I didn’t take the picture on May Day. But that’s when I’m posting it, so it still seems appropriate. Let’s hope spring is here to stay now.
Went with other family members for my first ever ‘Escape Room’ experience. We weren’t allowed to take photos inside, which is fair enough, but here are the preliminaries… To oil rusty brains on a Sunday morning, we were given some toys and puzzles to play with. Not that it helped us escape in the 1-hour time limit. Another fifteen minutes, perhaps.
I guess by now the Rubik’s Cube is a very familiar icon. I did solve it once, you know. At school; I have witnesses. Only once, though. (I knew how to do two-thirds of it; one time, the remaining third just magically fell into place.)
The football season is nearly over. Competitions are being resolved, trophies awarded. I forewent the possible pleasures of a hike today to go and see someone actually win something, in this case the Westmorland Senior Cup (competition 34 of my season), and congratulations to Appleby for taking the trophy with a 3-1 win over Kendal County. Their three dozen rather drunk but enjoyably boisterous travelling fans enjoyed the win just as much as the players did. At this level of football almost every game is a local rivalry: one reason why they’re worth supporting.
Being 42 