Usually found in the late summer and autumn, this mushroom was first recorded in the UK only in 2000*, and is mostly found in the south of England. Well, this one appeared in my garden in the Central Belt of Scotland last Friday (11 April)! It popped out in an old abandoned flower pot.

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Time for another update on the OpenReach ‘Uber Complex Chief Engineer’ fail. I have now worked out why I am not getting emails from them: their email system is not compliant with email addressing standard, as set out by RFC 5332!

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A couple of weeks ago I stumbled on a reflection on the Caorach air crash site that I wrote the day after running the Assynt Traverse nine years ago.

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Yesterday a blog by Peter Saint-Andre took me to his much older (2015) post on self-patronage that touches on the subject of an ‘artist as an entrepreneur’. This struck a chord with me.

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I have a handful of ‘current’ OS maps of Scotland, but most of my paper maps come from the ’90s, and the electronic versions I am currently using are an edition from 2016. There is lot to be said for that, as I was reminded on our walk yesterday.

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Last week I mentioned our FTTP case was now handled by OpenReach’s Uber Complex Chief Engineer – I can now report back that it’s about as much bullshit as it sounds. On Tuesday I received the following text from OpenReach:

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This is a continuation of a comments thread on the linked Alex Roddie’s post; I decided it’s too long to dump on someone else’s blog (and also too important, to burry in a comment).

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The 80mm lens arrived several days earlier than expected (these days it’s far quicker to buy second had stuff from Japan than the EU; another unsang Brexit benefit), so I had a chance to get a roll through in the house to test it and the impressions are also very good.

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As far as bullshit titles go, OpenReach’s Uber Complex Chief Engineer has to be right up there with the best of them. Not making this up, this from my most excellent ISP, A&A:

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Why am I only getting this camera now? The first impressions are very good indeed.

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For a number of years now I have been on a quest for the perfect hiking camera. There have been one or two candidates over that time that started promising but ultimately didn’t entirely meet the expectations.

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The Cape Wrath Trail has been on my ‘One Day’ list for around a decade now. Originally thinking of a self-supported run, but that isn’t going to happen; my distance running days are long over. Also, as the years pass, I am increasingly interested in being in a place, even of a place, rather than simply passing through a place; speed has lost its appeal.

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I think some progress is being made around the modern CT airport scanners, as I have not run into any problems with getting my film hand inspected on my recent trip that included passing through EDI, STN and TIA (in contrast when I flew about a year ago, EDI was still repeating the ‘safe up to ISO800’ mantra).

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Perhaps I don’t know where to look, but I am struggling to find any contemporary writing from the outdoors that would stir me, produce some sort of a meaningful emotional reaction in me. What I come across these days are gear reviews, more great reviews, some route descriptions, and accounts of pseudo-heroic deeds (that is, the artificial challenges we create for ourselves to break out of the day-today boredom and greyness). There is, of course, a place for all of this in sensible doses, but, on the basic level, heading outdoors has not really been about that for me.

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Yesterday I emptied the chest freezer in the garage, to check whether there is any 35mm film at the bottom of it; I thought there might be and turns out I was right about that. Thing is, I find myself in a bit of a bind just now. I have a mountain trip coming up later this spring, and can’t decide on what camera to take!

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‘People are utterly stupid, just look at them,’ says the oldest, as the six of them lie in the lush grass, relishing the rare winter sunshine.

‘Aye, they have this deep rooted herd mentality, following each other like zombies, questioning nothing, scared to be different. Not a hint of an independent thought in any of them’, pipes in another.

‘I used to think that was just evil talk, but FFS, you can see even from over here there is nay grass to be had there, just straw and mud’, adds the youngest.

‘You got that right, son, mind you, I find it rather entertaining, ken?’

‘Well, thank heavens I wasn’t born human.’

And so they keep chewing their cud, watching the detectorist convention in the next field. Aye, thank heavens indeed.

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