As the English name implies, found under birch; this one is from the Assynt area last September. The cap is brownish / orange, somewhat ridged around edges. The milk is white. Flesh is whitish-cream. Gills lighter tone of the cap. Spore print is pale cream, spores sub-globous, warted, with only a few thin connections (see below).

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Touptek microscope cameras come with a surprisingly decent piece of software called ToupView. For me the best feature is the effortless focus stacking (EDF in the app parlance): all I need to do is to slowly turn the fine focus knob on the microscope, and the app assembles the focus-stacked image in real time from the live video feed. The app also comes with a decent set of measuring tools, but nothing out of the box for measuring spores. However, this can be addressed using a custom measuring tool (which happens to be easy enough, except it is undocumented).

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That, for sure it wasn’t. We are used to windy weather in Scotland, and storms hitting 60-70mph are normal this time of the year, but Éowyn was something else. I have never experienced anything of this sort, and at the hight of it thought more than once my office window was going to get blown in by the prolonged gusts. And the windchill took me by complete surprise, we were struggling to keep the house warm, inspite of it being 5C or so outside.

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Woke up at 6:11am, listening to the wind beginning to pick up when I remembered that while getting our garden ready for the storm yesterday I forgot all about the Wellbrook! I have had it go through a few storms by now, but I doubt it can withstand the 90mph forecast for today. It’s not a big job to take it down, but it means getting out the ladder and a head torch. All done now, just in time for the first of the rain.

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Yesterday was the first time I was back on the bike in (iirc) about eight months (I could check the bike computer to be precise, but who cares, really). The first part of my usual Gravelfoyle loop was exhilarating, I was thinking how much I missed it. The mid section was OK. And the final third? That was a proper ‘are we back yet’ sort of a fun.

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The beech milkcap is a common mushroom under beech trees in Scotland, this one is from last September in the Assynt area. The cap is greyish (but quite variable in colour), and very slimy when wet, as seen in the cover image. The milk is white, drying light grey. Flesh is white. Spore print is light cream, spores sub-globous, with a network of loosely connected ridges.

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Thursday was a rather nice, sunny, yet crisp, blue sky day, and so I decided to make most of it, pack the ghillie kettle and pop out for a lunch into my local post-industrial woodland. The recent weather has been doing my head in, and this was just what I needed. And as I am walking back along the canal towpath, nearly home (my mood much improved), I do a double take: for in the distance I see a cygnet, that typical grey coat of a young swan, clumsily wobbling toward me from the opposite direction, as if out for a stroll.

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So just now a (foreign owned) electricity generator is charging the UK grid £5000/MWh (about 20x the consumer price) to spin up their gas power station to take up the shortage due to the lack of wind power. This is the direct consequence of the UK not making the necessary investment into nuclear energy for decades. These periods of settled weather happen quite regularly, both summer and winter; in the summer they are coupled with an increased demand on AC and reduced efficiency of PV solar panels, and in winter with extra heating demands. Anyone who imagines we can address this by more windmills and batteries is at best delusional, at worst deliberately pushing anti-environmental agenda (Big Oil are not the only ones who don’t give a shit).

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Back in the Ochils today. The expected icy roads didn’t materialise, but incredibly poor visibility in the Hillfoots due to thick fog, at places no more than twenty yards — had I not known the road well, I might have at one point driven right through one of the bigger roundabouts with a statue in the centre of it!

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I have stumbled on a backup dump of my blog from my ‘Tumblr years’. It brought back quite a few memories from those, and yet earlier days, having first started blogging sometime in 2004.

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Yet everywhere I look I see villages being hollowed out, changed into retreats for urban people who are seeking an escape. From what I can only guess. Are they reaching out for some form of community they feel they can’t find in the city? Do they just want some peace and quiet? Do they yearn for a ‘simpler life’ in the countryside?

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On a train, going to meet up with friends we have’t seen for just shy of thirty years, last time the other side of the globe. (Also, trying to recall the last time I have been in Auld Reekie … six, seven years?) Once upon a time, a postgrad student then, this was my regular commute; that too is a quarter of a century ago, almost as in a different life.

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While out for a walk on Saturday, I spotted a rather nice clump of oyster mushrooms on a still living beech tree. They were quite high up; standing on tiptoes I only just managed to get at the bottom one with the tip of my knife — it made me a delicious breakfast yesterday. The other four or five I could see above it I had to leave behind.

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This summer marked 30 years of me and the Internet. It started all with a 2400 bps modem and an account at the University of British Columbia; my very first email (and a password issued to me, which I still remember). Those were exciting times when the public Information Superhighway was in its infancy, and the future was bright. We have come a long way since then! (Well, at least in terms of modem speeds, but in others we have actually moved backwards.)

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I was lucky enough to have grown up in an environment that valued nature. Much of my childhood and teenage years were spent outdoors, and the experiences and friendships that came with it profoundly shaped my outlook on life (and I think for the better). With it came a perspective on nature as ‘Nature’: an ideal state of existence, a network of self-balancing relationships that would be found everywhere if only it wasn’t for human interference (this outlook might be familiar, for it is a perspective that permeates the contemporary outdoor culture, as well as much of environmentalism, historical and contemporary). But in recent years I have found it necessary to move beyond this world view, for on a close examination I increasingly found it incongruous and unhelpful.

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The traditional Czech Christmas dinner consists of a slow-fried breaded carp filets and potato salad. But it’s been a great many years since I had a carp on Christmas Eve. Our circumstances have made it impossible to spend Christmas with my parents back in the old country for some time now, and here in Scotland carp is not to be found in the fish van (my ‘new’ country has an odd attitude to freshwater fish; it’s a shame, for in my humble opinion, the carp is, culinary speaking, the finest fish of them all). But not being able to lay my hands on a carp, Christmas Eve means matching the potato salad with a slow-fried breaded haddock (haddock is a fine fish in its own right, and one of my firm favourites, but carp it isny; we have tried a number of options over the years, but none of them come close).

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