When my outdoor adventures began back in the mid seventies, it was all about being in nature. The meagre equipment needed for that was mostly repurposed, often second hand, and always secondary. But somehow in the fifty years since it’s all come to be turned on its head:

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Pumped hydro makes sense in a grid where a steady supply needs small rebalancing around peak times; it makes absolutely no sense as a storage for an all-renewables grid, and least of all, one predominately dependent on wind.

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I made most of the short calm after the storm this morning to pick up the apples the wind knocked off. They pretty much exactly filled a 37 litre box, and got turned into 6 litres of apple juice by lunch time.

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BrewDog out, another lot in … the level of cognitive dissonance required to disassociate rewilding practice in Scotland from this sort of abusive land ownership reality is very high. Not much progress since the days of the Seven Men of Knoydart.

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In my mind Butcher is perhaps the greatest living B&W landscape photographer, and in this short interview he spills the big secret of his photography, among other things.

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The CNPA got the nod from the Scottish Government to ban campfires and barbecues in the Cairngorms National Park from next year; a step in the right direction, for sure. There will be outrage over this in some outdoor circles, and I will resist the urge to pre-empt that with a two word response, but my views on this have not change since I wrote Assynt Ashes eight years ago.

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I can’t draw, and I really mean can’t. When I first started school, my teacher was so concerned with my inability to draw, and to form letters in a neat enough fashion, that she summoned my parents to school to warn them that they should consider getting me some extra tuition if they didn’t want me to end up in a special needs school.

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Luong is one of the great living large format photographers, so him speaking about what still remains a taboo subject in some circles is most encouraging: link.

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On Friday I drove up to Kingussie to go to the opening of the Analogue 11 exhibition at the Eleven41 gallery; it is a fair way, but I am glad I went, for if anything, the event exceeded my expectations.

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This deadly poisonous mushroom, ubiquitous in Scotland’s spruce plantations, seems to be having a particularly good year — during a couple of hours of foraging this morning I saw hundreds of specimen in different stages of maturity.

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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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