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I can’t say I have ever heard of Sally Rooney before yesterday (and at first thought she was the WAG of the Wagatha Christie fame) but I just bought a whole bunch of her books. In paper form naturally, so that when they are added to Cooper’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, I can flog them at a tidy profit (lest there is any doubt that my motives are anything other than the highest virtue of market refined pure greed).

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So I finally got that wild camp I have been after since June. It nearly didn’t happen (again), due a debilitating, hard to shift, neck pain earlier in the week, but by Friday it eased off enough to ignore it and MTFU. My destination Beinn Dubhchraigh, though I had no particular objectives for the weekend.

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TL;DR: The most coherent treatment of the environmental and associated crises, and the fallout from them, that I have come across; a must read.

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Carbon monoxide emissions from camping stoves is not something that is much talked about (beyond the manufacturers’ leaflets saying ‘do not use inside a tent’, which is like a car manual saying ‘do not drive when raining’). But earlier today I got a poignant reminder, this is, in fact, a real issue.

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So, two days ago, the Uber Complex Chief Engineer, that mythical OpenReach beast I have started to doubt existed, turned up on my doorstep: ‘I gather, from the 5000 notes on this job, you are having a spot of bother?’

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The forest floor around here is very dry just now, in spite of the heavy rain we have had in the days before the brief heat wave. Nevertheless, I am beginning to see the occasional mushroom popping up again, like this deer shield growing from a crevice on a birch tree.

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A tidal turbine in the Pentland Firth has been in operation for over six years – tidal is a part of the utopian technological solution package for the environmental crisis, so let’s cut through this piece of commerical PR for a bit of a reality check:

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Scotland’s Rewilder in Chief is offering some new holiday lets at Aldourie (Loch Ness), starting at £470 per night. To quote from the (paywalled) Times piece:

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Parks Watch Scotland has an update post on the ministerial recall of the Flamingo Land planning application; if you haven’t read it, you should.

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Time for another update on our quest for FTTP – in 9 days it will be a five month anniversary of the start of this saga, and no light at the end of this tunnel. Here is what has happened since my last post in May.

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To say I dislike Gore-Tex lined boots is an understatement; I loath those things. It is a product forced upon us as a solution to a problem that didn’t exist, resulting in boots with a significantly reduced service life, yet sold at a premium price. And I strongly suspect the manufacturing costs are actually lower compared to a good quality leather boot. All in all, what you might call an outdoor equipment brand’s wet dream.

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This is an excerpt from (the appendix of) a longer piece I have been working on for a while, but which I am unlikely to finish any time soon. But having touched on the rewilding subject briefly a couple of times in recent months, a more complete write up of my current perspective on the subject is, I think, desirable.

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It’s good to be printing again, it’s been a while, not least because I haven’t produced anything worth printing for some months. But that changed in May, and I managed to carve out some time in the last two weeks to work on three 16x12 prints from our Lewis trip — just finished this morning with some spotting that one of the prints required. 🙂

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Produced by the Gorkovsky Avtomobilny Zavod, the K is a small car for the masses; the K designator (which stands for Kamchatka) marks its all around Siberian readiness (S was already taken).

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