I'm somewhere in Lanarkshire, a place called the Abington Hotel, which is ok. Apparently I'm going to get a call from reception... which I've just got... and now I'm back from dinner. A steak from 'just up the road', I was told. I'm going to go and have a look at the cows just up the road in the morning and check they're not all sitting round a pool, eating McDonalds and knocking back biffa-bins of Tennants. It wasn't a very nice steak. It was riddled with fat and seemed to be up for a fight.
Anyway- this morning I mentioned the view from my hotel room in Dunbar. Here it is. Quite nice, as I said, though the picture as always does it little justice.
(Christ. I've just spent 20 minutes all over google trying to figure out a way to hyperlink some text from this blog to a jpeg - which I achieved through much frowning and grumbling. Now it turns out there's a link button on the page I'm typing, which of course there would be. So I'm stupid, then.)
Here, on the other hand, is the view from the beach back to my room. If you squint you can see a lamp-post in the middle of the frame.. my room is just under the bulb. The window's open to hopefully rid the room of stale smoke. (The picture is quite low-res, as most of these will be, because I'm on a remote internet connection and uploads take months.)
And here is the thing that I thought was a bloody great bit of too-early-in-the-morning wood, ho ho, but turned out to be a step that a Scottish mason was finishing off for the house next door. When I asked if I could photograph it, which in a lot of places would have charcoaled the words 'Be careful, I'm a little odd' on my forehead, he was chuffed to bits and brushed all the dust off before stepping about as far out of frame as the location would allow, so as not to clutter my vision (of what was, obviously, something he was pleasantly surprised and pleased had been recognised for the rather satisfying to the eye and heart piece of simple art that he knew it to be, but had learnt was rarely noticed by the rest of humanity.)
People in Dunbar, it would appear, are really very nice indeed. I only met, what, 6 of them? but that's enough for me make a solid impression these days.
Here's something that vexes me. Satnavs. I don't know if they all do it, but the one I've got at the moment is beginning to upset me a little. Everytime I'm getting close to wherever it is I'm going it suddenly starts acting like the gayest barber in the world and wants to show me every angle possible of the last few hundred yards before my destination.
If you can imagine the gayest barber in the world, and you've just presented him with a request for the sort of haircut he rarely encounters but which excites him tremendously because this kind of challenge is why he became a hairdresser in the first place - that's how my satnav reacts to the imminent resolution of our journey. "Is this the right angle, or would you rather something more oblique? How about seeing the approach from 30 miles above sea-level? No? Well, how's this? Virtually sub-atomic not for you? A little too close. Ok. We could always go for a mirror-image, or perhaps a kind of split-personality feel, you know, Amish one side and Brian May the other?" And then it tells me I need to do a u-turn. Today this was on a one-way street. I need to do a return, I ejaculated, and typed in the nearest branch of Halfords.
None of this, I am aware, has the remotest connection with the marathon. But I can't think of anything to say about that.
No comments:
Post a Comment