I have been doing a bit of mushroom microscopy in recent months, and this generally requires the use a 100x magnification oil immersion lens (the spores and related bits have sizes in the order of single micro meters, so 1000x overall magnification is needed to see them well enough and measure them). And getting most of the oil immersion lens requires keeping it clean, which I imagine is taught somewhere in the Microscopy 101 course, so nobody really talks about, and it took me a while to find a way that works reliably well. So in case this saves some other budding microscopist time …

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I have, over the years, become quite well attuned to the distress calls of birds in our garden, and in particular to the ‘watch out for the cat call’, which demands an immediate action on my behalf: for I do not tolerate cats in the garden. But the other day the ruckus had nothing to do with a cat.

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Given the forecast I could not just sit at home today. So I took the day off and headed into the Ochils. Over the years I have spent huge amounts of time walking, running, cycling and skiing in these rolling hills at the back of Stirling, but it’s been a while since my last visit.

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The State has no moral claim on a person’s life. Our lives are our own, no one else’s. The State has no right to decide who lives and who dies, and that cuts both ways. A law that criminalises suicide, as we have in the UK, is a feudal overreach, the ultimate codification of serfdom. That is the bottom line. The current ‘debate’ around assisted dying is little more than FUD, driven by religious self-righteousness that is neither capable of genuine compassion nor of the critical self-reflection necessary to understand the depth of its own immorality. Death, and hence suicide, is never a good thing, but no one can answer the question whether it is the worst thing on behalf of an another.

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I won’t be buying an EV anytime soon. I care deeply about the current state of the environment, and I am greatly frustrated by the way things are going, but I have come to the conclusion that most things that are happening in the name of Climate Change on any sort of an industrial scale are mostly greenwashing, and EVs are no exception.

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The sky was bright, 
    the sea was calm, the land was in sight, 
    and the man was happy,
rowing his little boat. 

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I have been on a look out for new backpack for use with a 4x5 camera for a while, and particularly since a strap on my trusted Ortlieb snapped while last year on St Kilda — while I repaired it once back home, it made it clear to me that particular bag was simply not meant for that such heavy loads. Plus, it’s too small for use in the winter, or for multi-day backpacking trips.

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I have been very fond of trees since being a wee laddie, and over the years have amassed lot of photographs of them. So I decided to do something with them: For the Love of Trees, a collection of B&W photographs of trees; it’s free to download, distributed under a Creative Commons license.

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Sauerkraut is an essential part of Czech cuisine, and one that’s nigh impossible to substitute for. It’s a pro-biotic, but perhaps more important historically, very rich in vitamin C, and it keeps for very long time without refrigeration. I had a first go a making sauerkraut some 25 years ago in my early days in Scotland, without understanding the process (and before one could readily find information on the internet), and it didn’t work. I have had another go last September, and we have eaten over 40kg of the stuff since. Turns out, it’s really simple to make if you know how.

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My father was a bibliophile. His passion for books started in his childhood, and I recall some of the early books he kept on his bookshelf: nearly complete works of Julius Verne, books by Jack London. Each of them neatly wrapped in either cream or blue packing paper, a handwritten label on the front, positioned with a millimetre precision, and inside an ex libris stamp in the shape of a pocket watch. The love of books remained with him all of his life, indeed during one of the last lucid conversations I had with him he was complaining about all the new books he acquired but didn’t have time to read yet.

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Let’s be clear on one thing: in the good old USSR decent people didn’t rise through the Communist Party ranks to the Politburo, they were sent to the Siberian gulags. The Politburo was the cesspit of the Soviet system — this is the basic lens through which the Gorbachev legacy must be viewed. To remove it, as the various UK commentators are invariably doing just now, is to engage in gross revisionism of history.

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I see that Chris Packham and others are making waves about the amount of Sitka being planted in Scotland. Funny that. There is nothing new here. I have raised this issue years back when the Scottish Government first published its Draft Climate Change Plan (2016?), and various environmental groups and outdoor influencers were praising its tree planting objectives without bothering to scrutinise the numbers (simply putting the tree planting numbers along the timber production targets in a different section of the DCCP made it clear that most of the new trees were going to be Sitka). At the time I got some fairly condescending responses to those concerns from some who should have known better.

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The Beeb has a photographic piece on cycling the NC500. Unfortunately, these serene images, featuring four cyclists riding quiet scenic roads, are completely misleading as to the reality of cycling on the NC500.

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The year has began splendidly: the sun is shinning, the sky is blue, the hills around caped in snow, the reservoir part frozen, and under my wheels the satisfying crunch of hard ice. I turn onto the minor single track road that takes me over the hills. Here in the shade of the frost decorated evergreens it’s noticeably colder. I leave behind a stuck 4x4, pedalling out of the trees into the sun, grinning. At this moment there is nowhere else I’d rather be, nothing else I’d rather be doing.

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This piece in the Atlantic is well worth a read, cutting right through the cosy myth of the 19th century conservationism. There are lessons there for the present here in Scotland today for sure.

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I rarely enter photographic competitions, but the Scottish Landscape Photographer of the Year is an important point in my photographic calendar: Scottish landscape is my primary photographic interest and it’s always worthwhile to be able to place my own work in the wider context of other people’s imagery.

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