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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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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