Tag Archives: Scotland

Jul 01 2017
Leave a comment
Daily Post, Interior, Transport

Catching the London flight

Friday 30th June 2017, 4.25pm (day 2,136)

Aberdeen airport, 30/6/17

I have been excessively mobile during June. The trips to and from Siberia and Norway had already taken 11 flights and eight different airports, and on the last day of June I added one more flight and two airports — Aberdeen to London City. Too much… I need to reconnect with home over the next seven weeks (the next major trip being the last two weeks of August to the USA). How is Aberdeen airport? Same as other airports, except that it doesn’t seem to have been refurbished since about 1980.

Tagged , , , , , , , ,
Jun 30 2017
Leave a comment
Daily Post, Urban scene

Granite City steps

Thursday 29th June 2017, 6.05pm (day 2,135)

Bridge Street steps, 29/6/17

Aberdeen is known as the Granite City and for good reason, as almost every building in the centre seems to be made of this mid-grey stone. It’s not unattractive, but on a day of foul weather like today was the effect can be to swamp you in grey. This picture was a matter of being in the right place at the right time, but yes, I could perhaps have been six inches to the right for perfect symmetry.

Tagged , , , , , , ,
Jun 27 2017
Leave a comment
Art and architecture, Daily Post, Interior

Library, University of Aberdeen

Tuesday 27th June 2017, 6.25pm (day 2,133)

Duncan Rice library, 27/6/17

It’s conference season… I got up at 5am this morning and spent seven hours on a train to come north to Aberdeen, where I was two years ago at this time of year, for the same conference (i3, at the Robert Gordon University). We had our opening reception in the Sir Duncan Rice library of the University of Aberdeen, and that was an extremely impressive building, with this eight-storey high twisted atrium running up through the centre.

Tagged , , , , , , ,
Dec 03 2016
Leave a comment
Daily Post, Sport

Hampden Park, before kick-off

Saturday 3rd December 2016, 2.50pm (day 1,927)

Hampden Park, 3/8/16

After we visited Hampden Park last year I decided that at some point I wanted to see a match there. Football tourism, why not. Something different to do other than hang around at home on a Saturday. It is one of the world’s great football stadia and I’d never before seen a Scottish league game in my 47 years on this planet. Hampden is home to Queen’s Park FC, the oldest club in Scotland (150 years old in 2017), and the last remaining bastion of amateurism in senior British football. The crowd for their game with Brechin City was a few hundred strong, swelled by Joe and myself, and we saw the home team win 2-0 (despite Virgin Trains’ best efforts to screw up our day trip).

Tagged , , , , , , , ,
Mar 11 2016
Leave a comment
Daily Post, Sport, Urban scene

Celtic Park

Friday 11th March 2016, 9.15am (day 1,660)

Celtic Park, 11/3/16

Thought I’d better do a photo of Glasgow today even though I saw nothing of it except the hotel, the room where we did the viva examination, and a restaurant for lunch. Still, the view from the second of these, being up on the 11th floor of a building at the University of Strathclyde, was a damn fine one and included this monumental structure (in both senses of the word). Celtic Park (aka Parkhead), home of Celtic FC, one of the best-supported football clubs in the world, towers above its surroundings and seems colossal even from two miles away. The ‘mist’ is, rather, steam from chimneys between it and where I stood.

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
Aug 22 2015
1 Comment
Daily Post, Interior

Old dressing room, Hampden Park

Saturday 22nd August 2015, 12.10pm (day 1,458)

Old dressing room, 22/8/15

Hampden Park is Scotland’s national football stadium and also home of Queen’s Park FC, currently in the fourth tier of Scottish football, a bizarre but strangely endearing arrangement surely not replicated elsewhere in world football. The stadium has been on this site since 1903 and when it was substantially rebuilt in the 1990s this old version of one dressing room was preserved as part of the Scottish Football Museum. In this room, more or less, Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt prepared before the 1960 European Cup Final, often cited as one of the best games of football ever played (7-3 to Real).

Tagged , , , , , , , ,
Aug 21 2015
Leave a comment
Daily Post, Urban scene

Clydeside, Glasgow

Friday 21st August 2015, 10.05am (day 1,457)

Clydeside, 21/8/15

Two faces of Glasgow. Yesterday, the pre-industrial, Victorian, under moody clouds thing. Today, definitely post-industrial, attempts to modernise the remnants of late 20th-century industrial landscapes (the modernistic building ahead being the Glasgow science park, opened in 2001; and the tower is the tallest building in Scotland, apparently). But still, the moody clouds thing.

Tagged , , , , , , ,
Aug 20 2015
Leave a comment
Daily Post, Urban scene

Necropolis

Thursday 20th August 2015, 3.55pm (day 1,456)

Necropolis, 20/8/15

So I find myself in Glasgow for a couple of days, meaning the four biggest cities in Scotland (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee) have all made it onto the blog in less than four months. I don’t know the place well but at least this afternoon proved that it does give good cemetery.

Tagged , , , , , , ,
Jun 26 2015
4 Comments
Daily Post, Transport

Tay Bridge

Friday 26th June 2015, 2.25pm (day 1,401)

Tay Bridge, 26/6/15

And so home again, a 7-hour train journey from Aberdeen to Hebden Bridge. My second return trip up the east coast of Scotland in the last few weeks, so a chance to revisit a theme hit not so long ago, the crossing of the River Tay. The stumps are those of the first Tay bridge which collapsed (due to crappy construction) in a storm shortly after it was built.

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
Jun 26 2015
1 Comment
Daily Post, Interior

Ceilidh

Thursday 25th June 2015, 10.20pm (day 1,400)

Ceilidh, 25/6/15

i3 (Information, Interactions and Impact) has been a good conference, and though Aberdeen, and particularly the Robert Gordon University campus, has done its bit to help, conferences are in the end about the people. So here are some of them, giving it a right old Scottish knees-up at the conference dinner.

Tagged , , , , , , , ,
← Older posts
Newer posts →