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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A rather pretty sight, the velvet shank is one of the mushrooms that fruit in the winter and is most commonly found on dead elm trees (it can also be found in a supermarket, under the Japanese name ‘Enoki’, though the commercially grown specimen look nothing like the ‘real thing’ due to being grown in darkness and in bottles). The English name comes from the dense, velvet-like, hair covering the stem; it turns dark as the mushroom ages, in a lovely contrast to the orange cap.

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This rather pretty, straw coloured, brittle gill found under beech trees is easily identified by its distinct, geranium-like, smell. It’s faint at first, but if you bring it into the house for further examination you will soon know it’s there.

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It’s a hard life, being a selfie double, but otherwise a braw day in the hills.

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I see (via walkhighlands) that Mountaineering Scotland has issued a guidance on the use of microspikes. I guess better late than never, but I’d hoped for something more than this. As I have pointed out years ago (Regarding Microspikes), the big problem with microspikes is not their limitations, but the manner of their failure.

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to fly the aircraft we fly now, would require us to divert one half of the world’s entire agricultural production to aviation fuel … if we’re prepared to sacrifice the entire population of both India and China, we can continue to fly. But if we’re not, aviation biofuel — ‘green’ aviation fuel — is a cynical lie, founded on a preparedness to sacrifice half of the world’s population to starvation on the altar of fast travel for the rich few.

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Today was the first decent day in ages, so I went for a walk up through the farms near our home, and I came back with a bag full of oyster mushrooms. I would have walked right by them too, was it not for a large old clump of them lying on the ground, made me look for where it came from. They are commonaly found on beeches, or oaks, but there were three large clumps of them on a dead part of a large sycamore. We recently discovered an excellent mushroom stew recipe in the Hairy Bikers Vegeterian cookbook, this lot will be enough for three meals for four.

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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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