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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It’s been an odd year, to say the least. A year that brought out a pinch of community spirit in all of us, and alongside it a large doze of selfishness.

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COVID has, so I hear, brought new levels of antisocial behaviour into the Outdoors: stories about irresponsible campers seem to appear daily in the news, and a petition asking for curbing of rights to camp has been lodged with the Scottish Parliament.

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How many phone calls does it take to organise a COVID-19 test for a ninety+ year old who needs an emergency admission to a care home?

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… expect a circus.’

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There has been much hoohaa in recent days over people breaking the recommendation not to travel further than five miles for their recreation. But while the images of weekend scenes at Balmaha and Arrochar are quite ridiculous, the politicians need to get of their high horses and lose that self righteous indignation, for the real problem is not with us people.

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… did nothing wrong. Of course not. They never do, do they? No matter the vandalism, the destruction in their wake, the trail of buckie shards left behind, someone else is to blame.

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Take a comfortable lockdown seat, stick some popcorn into the microwave and watch: Remember the overweight BoJo stuck on a zip wire waving the Union Jack? You’ve seen nothing yet, England and her Tories are about to find out the true cost of putting an inept clown in charge.

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At the top of this week’s Netflix ‘for you’ list came the star studded 1995 classic Outbreak. I cringed a bit, but watched it in the end, being the lockdown and all that, and I am glad I did, for I finally understand where the UK Government got its COVID-19 strategy from! This Hollywood disaster cliche has it all: the politicians’ cavalier attitude to loss of life, the war imagery, the pseudoscience, the vaccine produced in days, the triumphal ending.

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This week’s attempt of the Scottish Government to start a grown up conversation on how we deal with the ongoing COVID-19 crisis is most welcome, to the extent to which it goes, which is not far enough.

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With BoJo out of critical care, and yesterday’s UK COVID-19 deaths just shy of a 1000, the highest ever recorded in Europe, it’s time to ask the PM ‘how’s the herd immunity working for ya?’ For as Marina Hyde noted, the people dying today were most likely infected in that critical time when BoJo and co. were telling us this was nothing serious to worry about.

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Seems the lockdown rules don’t apply to Dr Calderwood, Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer. This is incredibly serious and there is only one credible way in which Nicola Sturgeon can handle the situation and that is to sack the CMO.

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I don’t know how you, but I have reached a point where I can’t take the daily No. 10 briefings. There is no end to the half-truths, omissions and outright lies; it’s the £350m red bus all over again.

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Which of our politicians is going to come up with the worst COVID-19 joke today, I wonder? All bets are off on this one, of fools we have no shortage. <– more –>

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