Breathe in and out. Now repeat for as long as possible

The Stirling Lines on Burns Night

2012-01-26T00:12:00.000Z

Today is, as many of you even beyond the borders of Scotland will be aware, the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet, born in 1759 in the village of Alloway in Ayrshire (the county, too, of my birth). Robert Burns came to Stirlingshire (where I now live) on two occasions in August and October 1787. He appreciated the importance of Stirling in Scotland's history and reflected this in a number of songs or poems (for example, Scot Wha Hae, By Allan Stream). I'm indebted to a fine new leaflet on Robert Burns' association with Stirling, published by Stirling's Smith Museum and Art Gallery for the above details and for providing me the opportunity to post something appropriate for Burns Night:

On one of his visits to Stirling in 1787, Burns stayed at the Golden Lion Hotel (which is still in business today) where he (mischievous lad that he was) engraved a short poem (known thereafter as The Stirling Lines) on a window pane in the hotel:

Written By Somebody On The Window Of an Inn at Stirling, on seeing the Royal Palace in ruin.

Here Stuarts once in glory reigned,

And laws for Scotland's weal ordained;

But now unroof'd their palace stands,

Their sceptre's sway'd by other hands;

Fallen indeed, and to the earth

Whence groveling reptiles take their birth.

The injured Stuart line is gone,

A race outlandish fills their throne;

An idiot race, to honour lost;

Who know them best despise them most.

The Smith Museum leaflet describes the poem thus:

"These ten lines summarise the ruinous condition of the palace and castle, where the ceiling with the Stirling Heads [carved wooden heads of royalty and citizenry, restored in 2011] collapsed in 1777. The town also lost its sense of purpose after the removal of the royal court to London in 1603 and was in a sad condition at the time of Burns".

However accurate a description of the condition of Stirling was provided by this little poem, it also proved immensely unpopular with some locals, perhaps also for its criticism of the ruling regime, and Burns was forced to break the window! The controversy even dogged his path two years later while seeking government employment, when he was "question'd like a child about my matters and schooled for my inscription on a Stirling window"!

An interesting little side story bringing Burns to life with all his mischief and perhaps a little youthful lack of foresight (or lack of care) about the consequences of his actions, and interesting for us right here in Stirling and especially today, on Burns Night.

My 2011 in bikes

2012-01-20T15:53:00.000Z

"I want to ride my bicycle

I want to ride my bike

I want to ride my bicycle

I want to ride it where I like"

Queen (who else?): "Bicycle Race"

I’m a cyclist and I’m proud to be described so. I don’t really race much. I do the (very) occasional short-course triathlon and I take part in the odd organised sportive ride. But mostly, I ride largely for fun, commuting and convenience. I love my bikes and, traffic and the state of Stirling’s roads notwithstanding, I love to ride. I have a few of my own bikes, none of them very flashy or new but each with their own strengths and uses.

In addition to my normal cycling experiences, I had a few encounters with interesting, unusual or odd bikes during the past year.

Le velo de facteur:

We were in Morzine in the French Alps in March and, on our last morning, we wandered around the village before departure and came upon the Post Office. Rather fantastically, there were four old yellow French post office bicycles leaning outside with little handwritten notes stuck on each, offering them free to take away: ‘a prendre’

Eh? What? No health and safety risk assessment? No cover-your-ar*e legal statement? But some of these bikes don’t even have functional brakes? Yeah. This is France. Refreshing, isn’t it? The coolest bike in Morzine? Darn right!

These bikes were obviously custom-made for les facteurs! They have a great parcel basket on the front, and a very solid-looking bespoke front-wheel based stand with little wheels of its own. The stand folds up under the frame. The one I tried was a bit stiff but nothing that a bit of oil wouldn’t sort.

The rear end of the bikes were pretty solid too, with a very robust rack and official French post office pannier bags:

Inevitably, the girls couldn’t keep their hands off the bikes:

Take one, get one free?

and it wasn’t long until they were test-riding them:

I think if I’d been travelling with my own van, I might have brought one home. They were extremely solid and heavy machines (not one for the long climbs, I suspect) but one of these would definitely have been a unique bike for Stirling...

The recumbent tandem trike:

On our way home from helping out at our pals’ Apple Day in the South Lakes area of Cumbria in early October, we came on this recumbent tandem tricycle (not three words that you commonly see together) in a cafe car park.

From the decals, it appears to be a Greenspeed, not a manufacturer I've encountered previously. It was being ridden by a (fit-looking) couple who may have been in their 70’s and it had a Land’s End to John O’Groats sticker on it – that must have been an epic trip. It looks very stable and is probably very comfortable to ride but it is SO low down - I just can’t get over my feeling that British drivers are too uneducated in their dealings with cyclists for me to be attracted to riding a recumbent on the roads in this country.

First encounter with an electric cargo bike:

The low-carbon city project here in Stirling, Going Carbon Neutral Stirling (GCNS), has invested in a number of electric cargo bikes (trikes in reality) which it will lend out for people to use, attempting to replace some car trips in town with cycle trips. The large box at the front can carry a considerable amount, including a couple of children (a common sight in Copenhagen, where cargo bikes and trikes, electric or not, are very popular and widely used).

GCNS held a come-and-try event in the quiet residential Riverside area of Stirling on a rare warm summer evening. My wife O took one of the bikes for a spin and reported it as quite difficult to steer, especially around corners but this was her first attempt and I’ve seen the project staff riding one with relative ease on a gentle group ride around the town’s newer cycle paths. A friend, A, a massively experienced cycle racer, took one for a spin with his children in the cargo box at another open day at Stirling University and nearly turned over while cornering on a gentle downhill bend. He was probably going too fast but he did recover magnificently after cornering on two wheels. His children seemed to love it.

My wife’s old German racing bike:

My wife bought a bike in Switzerland in the 1980’s which I’d never seen as it was stored at her mother’s. When we visited this summer, we dug it out of the shed to take a look at it turned out to be this splendid old Rudi Altig roadster. Rudi Altig was a German professional racing cyclist who, as well as lending his name to a range of bicycles, also won the green (points) jersey in the Tour de France, won the Spanish equivalent to Le Tour, the Vuelta a Espana, and became World road race champion in 1966, reflected by the addition of the World Champion colour rings on the bike’s down tube. You have to agree that they add a certain caché:

Note the unusual location for the early example of indexed gear shifters on the headset:

O rode this bike all over Berne, then brought it home to Blighty and it ended up in a shed. I just pumped up the tyres and oiled the chain and, despite the bike having sat in the shed for over 20 years, everything else on the bike (gears, brakes) worked so I took it out for a spin in the really hilly vicinity. I rode it for 30 minutes before, fearing that the old chain was going to snap under the strain of hill-climbing (they were REALLY steep!), I put it back in the shed again!

And as well as encounters with weird and wonderful cycles in 2011, it was also an unusually busy year as regards making the most of the bikes I already own.

Making do and mend – revamping my winter bike and my old hybrid:

I’ve had a lot of good experiences this year dealing with the guys at Stirling Cycle Repairs. Not the least of these was their advice and then hard work to help me reclaim two of my old bikes back into more active service. For the first seven or eight months of 2011, I was thinking about and researching possible option for buying a cyclocross (CX) bicycle. It’s not that I particularly fancied having a go at cyclocross racing (though if I had one, I might have had a go at a race or two as well), but it is more that CX bikes have become the new do-it-all road bikes in the past couple of years – tough, well-equipped, often for pannier racks and mudguards, they make for great general bikes for winter riding and there are many more on the market now.

I’ve been riding a bottom-of-the-range Giant OCR3 road bike as a winter bike for five or six winters and, having washed it conscientiously after most rides, it hasn’t rusted away or seized up as winter bikes often do (they are generally effectively bought as ‘sacrificial’ machines, to allow road racers, triathletes etc to preserve their expensive lightweight racing bikes for summer riding.

My Giant OCR3 has the most lovely light blue paint job and a very comfortable frame geometry that makes for quite relaxed road riding. But most of the original components had worn out. I’d already upgraded the brakes to Shimano 105 a couple of years ago. I was contemplating replacing this (and a mountain bike I never ride) with a cyclocross bike. But, given the current financial conditions, my dislike of disposing of perfectly sound equipment, and the fact that I do love that old OCR3 frame, I decided instead to investigate a refit. As I wasn't aiming for top-end components, the cost was less than I feared and so I went for it. Craig and Grant at Stirling Cycle Repairs did a great job of refitting it with basic Shimano SORA components (the gears, cranks and shifters), and finished it off with a very fetching and matching blue bar tape:

Look at the shiny-shiny! Didn’t the guys do a great job?

The wheels were still the same old wheels that originally came with the bike though and, after a week of riding, it was obvious that they were knackered (accentuated by how well everything else was working!) so I decided to replace them with a pair of Craig and Grant’s lovely hand-built training wheels – not so expensive, maybe not the lightest but light enough for winter training, pretty bombproof and likely to be usable well beyond the life of the Giant OCR3. And they are aesthetically pleasing too, with beautiful, curvaceous, silver Ambrosia hubs with Ambrosia rims. Look!

The final touch was a new pair of Continental Grand Prix 4-season road tyres with Continental inner tubes (funky yellow dust caps) to provide a durable partner for the new training wheels, and the package was complete for about a third the price of a decent new CX bike.

Chapeau to Stirling Cycle Repairs!

The final pleasing bike experience of the year was renovating, with my brother’s expert bike mechanic skills, my old Specialised Expedition hybrid, which has been stored in my brother’s garage roof for four years.

It was initially a disappointing insurance replacement for a much loved Marin Stinson hybrid that fell off a car bike rack. The replacement bike always felt heavy and clumsy in comparison to the Marin, was fitted with fairly cheap components (I constantly had to adjust the brakes, for instance) and I could never keep the wheels in true. They kept buckling and developing wobbles. I subsequently discovered from Craig at Stirling Cycle Repairs that the spokes had been incorrectly laced up when they were built and that there was no sensible way to correct that.

Luckily, my lovely brother donated a spare pair of used but good quality Cannondale 26x1.75 wheels (thanks lovely bro!). We fitted a new Shimano 8-speed cassette (that’s the rear gear cogs), a new 8-speed chain, and Stirling Cycle Repairs replaced the rubbish brakes with some good quality Shimano v-brakes.

My Old Specialised Expedition hybrid undergoing a facelift

I stuck on a set of Shimano SPD mountain bike pedals, Continental innertubes, a pair of Schwalbe Marathon touring tyres and some funky and surprisingly cheap SKS Beavertail mudguards (which needed some amendments with a hot needle and some zip ties) and I now have a tough utility bike with a rack(which I had fitted previously) and mudguards that’s ready for most of my non-training cycling needs – unglamorous maybe but helluva useful.

Oh, and it is in British Racing Green which is, as you know, very cool (like bow ties). Resurrecting and finally making useful this old Shimano Expedition bike was a fine end to a year of unusual and satisfying bike encounters and experiences.

Enjoy your own bikes in 2012!

What the Dickens...?

2012-01-13T00:16:00.001Z

It may have escaped your notice (but probably only if you live in a cave) but 2012 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, perhaps the greatest creator of fictional characters in English literature (sorry Shakespeare). The BBC is gearing up to celebrate the Dickens bicentennial in style, with new dramas breaking out all over the place at present.

We, however, had the chance earlier tonight to enjoy a more intimate and special Dickens experience in this most Dickens-laden of years. We were privileged to see a great great grandson of Charles Dickens, the fine actor Gerald Dickens, re-create An Audience with Charles Dickens at the McRobert Theatre at Stirling University:

The New York Times described the show as: "A once in-a-lifetime brush with literary history" and so it was, at times breathtaking, moving, funny and highly entertaining. No spoilers from me but, as the information is widely available on line, I'll add that we were treated to a one-hour long version of Nicholas Nickleby which, if you know your Dickens, you'll know has a cast of 40+ characters, most of whom featured! My enjoyment was even enhanced by knowing that some strand of the great Charles Dickens' DNA was down there on the stage (there is even a family resemblance to my eye and not just down to the beards!)

I can't recommend this highly enough. It was fantastic. Enough said, go and see it if you can. Here's a list of upcoming shows.

Wild food from the Park – Look back in hunger... a review of 2011

2012-01-02T23:42:00.001Z

And so we’ve finally reached the end of our year-long attempt to find wild food from our local park, the King’s Park in Stirling, every month of the year, and to produce some edible (or drinkable!) produce from what we collected. And, if you’ve been reading my intermittent (and usually extremely late) posts on this project through 2011, you’ll know that we managed it. Furthermore, some of what came out of the efforts was surprisingly tasty and we’ll be revisiting a number again next year. There were some good “do-ers”, available throughout the year or appearing as expected, when expected, such as the ever-available jelly-ear fungus, and the ever-reliable wild sorrel, elderflower and raspberries, the latter two of which we’ve been gathering for many years from the Park.

Some of our high points were:

using 30 plant species (including 12 wild plants) in a wild spring green soufflé
discovering the nectar of the gods that is honeysuckle cordial (more please, more!)
wild garlic and walnut pesto and, for that matter, hazel and beechnut pesto too
the golden honey smell of lime blossom on one warm July morning
finding previously undiscovered wild plum, greengage and crab apple trees and bushes
making new ‘things’ like sloe and apple cheese, and Autumn’s end jelly (my own creation!)
coming home to O’s chardonnay jelly with wild raspberries, a real warm summer’s evening treat after a long day sitting about in a green room at BBC Scotland with the Heart of Scotland choir, waiting to be filmed with John Barrowman (two new experiences in one day!)

There were a couple of things we won’t be repeating – especially our meadowsweet cordial recipe – more medicinal than enjoyable – and we probably won’t be bothering trying to gather hazelnuts locally as these were more trouble than the efforts and returns merited, thanks to the Park’s highly efficient grey squirrels.

So, how did the year pan out in terms of the use of different wild foods in each month? The following table shows how the availability of different food sources changed as the year rolled on. Red boxes show where we collected and ate something, and blue boxes where we found, but didn’t collect (e.g. for reasons of time that month, or to avoid repeating experiences from previous months - variety is the spice of life, whether eating wild food or blogging about it!). Clicking on the table should open a larger version:

It’s an interesting pattern, showing that there’s real variation of opportunity. The weather also had a significant effect on this. In January, for example, everything was frozen solid during the most extreme winter for decades, including the jelly ear fungus that was our only successful find that month. By April, lots of fresh greens were available, but by July, many had disappeared or matured into poorly-edible fibrous toughness; edible blossoms had appeared by summer though, and Autumn was full of nuts, berries, hips and haws. The extremely wet Autumn greatly shortened the season for, and the crop of, blackberries – many went mildewy or rotted quickly.

The absence of edible fungal species in the Park is a big disappointment, with the honourable exception of jelly ear fungus on dead elder wood. There are many oak, beech and birch trees in the Park, all of which can and should host edible fungi that we would trust ourselves to identify. I think we may need to go a bit deeper into some of the denser areas of woodland next year to see if there’s more safely edible fungi available than we know of.

There were a couple of opportunities for which we ran out of time– the first, I’ve tried before and which is a little underwhelming, would have been acorn coffee. I still have some left from last year, and it is a bit like a malt drink with most of the flavour removed. The other failed opportunity was to try to make the drink, dandelion and burdock, made from the long roots of both plants in autumn after a summer of storing energy and flavour. Maybe next year!

One thought that struck me often throughout the year, and one which drove me back to read Ray Mears and Gordon Hillman's BBC book: ‘Wild Food’, was how difficult it would be to have a properly balanced diet from what we found to be available – protein was in relatively short supply for most of the year, although mycoprotein was available every month from the fungi. But I don’t know how much of a healthy diet’s protein is available from fungal sources. Of course, a true ‘hunter-gatherer’ diet would have included birds and their eggs, fish, shellfish and mammals. In the case of the Park, this latter option could have included roe deer, rabbits and grey squirrels – indeed, the King’s Park is a remnant of the much larger original deer park (forest) where the high and mighty residents from the Royal Household and Court in Stirling Castle would, in medieval times, have hunted for roe deer and, maybe, wild boar. But we weren’t hunting (it’s almost certainly banned in the Park, even for rabbits) and most of the birds are now protected by law, along with their eggs! Hazelnuts would have provided a good and readily storable protein source if they hadn’t been taken by the grey squirrels first.

Perhaps even more difficult to identify than protein sources, however, are obvious large-scale sources of complex carbohydrates, such as starch. Ray Mears and Gordon Hillman do, however, describe how many wild grass species (after all, the wild ancestors of our few domesticated grain crop species) were collected, processed and eaten by the early pre-agricultural peoples of Britain. A number of the grass species they describe can be found in the Park, for example the tufter hair-grass Deschampsia cespitosa . There are also plants with complex carbohydrate storage ‘organs’, such as the pignut, distributed widely in the Park and which we’ve previously collected there and eaten. We just ran out of time during the late-Spring season for pignut, and didn’t really think about the grasses until it was a bit too late. Also, I suspect the grasses might be a lot of work for a poor return. At least the berries, wild plums and greengages would provide fruit sugars in a form that could be dried and stored as dried fruit, and blossoms provide some light, fresh, sugar-rich food during their season. Also, our ancestors would have braved wild honey bee hives for the honey – but I’m not going there!

But despite all the missed opportunities, the nutritional gaps that total dependence on the Park would have created, and the time and effort involved (although most collecting was actually done on dog walking excursions, much to Ella’s impatient disgust), I hope it was obvious from the blog posts that we had a lot of fun with this. We made some really interesting discoveries, both in recipes and wild food sources in the Park, and we have picked up some new culinary experiences and cookery skills. We’ll definitely be carrying on with an expanded range of wild food that we collect and eat, though I won’t necessarily be blogging about it in quite as much detail as I have this year!

Wild food from the park – December

2012-01-02T22:59:00.001Z

Aha! Finally, it’s December and we only had to find one more wild food source this month to complete our year-long project. This December’s weather is somewhat different to last year’s. On the 22nd of December, I checked with the Twitter blogger ‘Stirling Weather’ who posts tweets on, well, you work it out. They confirmed that the temperature that day in 2011 was a full 20 degrees Celsius warmer than the same date in 2010. Thos extreme winter temperatures in December 2010 were maintained into January 2011, making our wild food searches somewhat problematic. As I reported though, we did manage to find jelly ear fungus that saved the project foundering before it had barely begun. And so, as we reached December, jelly ear fungi once again proved to be a reliable source of winter wild food. We cooked them with some ordinary white field (supermarket) mushrooms and included them in a pasta dish:

A final use for jelly-ear fungus– with commercial white mushrooms in a pasta dish

As we only had a couple of days of frost in December (it was actually remarkably mild), wild sorrel remained available, as did the wall plant ivy-leaved toadflax which we’ve eaten before and which is edible but uninteresting. We included leaves from both plants in a vegetable soup in late December, to bring our year-long wild food project to a successful if reasonably unspectacular finish:

Wild sorrel and ivy-leaved toadflax in vegetable soup

I’ll shortly post a review and discussion of the whole year’s ‘Wild Food from the Park’ experiences.

Wild food from the park – November

2012-01-02T22:37:00.003Z

So, with November, we were nearly there for a full year of wild food from the Park. If you’d asked me in January if November was likely to yield much wild food, I suspect that I would not have been hopeful of finding much beyond some meagre greenery and a few jelly ear fungi. But, as you’ll see, a long extended tail of a mild Autumn left us with a relative cornucopia of delights in November... which does make for a more interesting blog!

In a previous attempt to use the wild food in our park, we tried to make some hawthorn jelly sweets using a recipe in Roger Phillips’ ‘Wild Food’ book. On that occasion, the haws (collected late in the season) were rather sparse and quite dry and the resultant sweets were a bit of a disappointment. This year, we were able to pick them a bit earlier, so the moisture content was higher. But there was, again, quite a poor hawthorn harvest in King’s Park’s. So, we supplemented these with hawthorn berries, or haws, from East Lothian, where the hawthorn bushes were so red this year with big, plump haws that they looked more like cherry trees. On a visit to see family, I collected a couple of kilogrammes of hawthorn berries from the Longniddry-to-Haddington railway walk, which is lined for much of its length with hawthorns and which, in October this year, was distinguished by dense, bright red drifts of haws. This photo is a bit out of focus but it shows the lovely, fat, red hawthorn berries:

The recipe calls for the boiling of the haws with water, straining the resultant mash, then boiling the resultant liquid with sugar until it thickens. It is then poured into moulds or onto a flat tray to set – a bit like a fruit leather, I guess. The resultant sweets are then rolled/coated in icing sugar to stop them sticking and the final result is not unlike Turkish Delight! And did I mention, surprisingly tasty?

We did a bit of both – here are some hawthorn jellies produced in silicon moulds:

and here’s the process of forming it into a sheet and cutting it up (free tip: kitchen scissors proved more effective than a knife):

Just as with the start of this project in January and February, when we were able to harvest jelly ear (or Jew’s ear) fungus, even in the coldest weather (when everything else in the Park was frozen solid between -10° and -20° C for weeks), as the rest of the wild food harvest began to dwindle in November as winter approached, so we were able to collect many large, freshly-emerged jelly ear fungi from dead elder trees or broken-off branches. We used them with some of the wild chanterelles we collected earlier (not from the Park) in a potato and wild mushroom ‘au gratin’ dish from Roger Phillips’ ‘Wild Food’ book. Finely-sliced potatoes are layered with wild mushrooms and garlic in a casserole dish, cream poured over the top, parmesan grated on top and the lot is baked in a hot oven:

The jelly ear fungi, although quite tasty, have a tendency to rubbery chewiness when cooked (we normally cut them up very small), but prepared this way, they were quite tender.

One of my favourite discoveries this year has been a large area of wild garlic in a relatively inaccessible corner of the Park, and the riotously-tasty wild garlic pesto we made from some of it in April (here). I’ll definitely be making more (much more) in 2012, now that I know we have such a large local supply of wild garlic. That experience made me keen to explore other possible pesto ingredients from the Park. One of the key ingredients of ‘true’ pesto is pine nuts. Obviously, that’s a difficult wild food ingredient to source locally but I couldn’t help thinking that the few beech nuts (or ‘mast’) that we started to find in the Park from late September were very like pine nuts in look, texture and even to some extent in taste. Now, as I wrote about in the September wild food post, most of the beech mast cases we looked at were empty or contained hollow beechnut cases but a few had little beech nuts and we began to collect them, along with the few hazelnuts we could find that hadn’t been snaffled by the darned grey squirrels. Comments on Twitter by TV gardening broadcaster Toby Buckland and in the Guardian newspaper’s nature diary suggested that 2011 was, at least in the south of Britain, looking like a classic ‘beech mast year’, with a prodigious crop of beech nuts. I had high hopes, therefore, of a great opportunity to make lots of beech nut pesto but, by late November, our local crop proved to be thin pickings, it was obvious that we weren’t going to find any more and we had to make do with a small dish of local beech and hazel nuts supplemented by some shop-bought hazelnuts (boo – the best-laid plans and all that):

Our meagre catch of local hazel and beech nuts

But, with the addition of the more usual oil, parmesan, basil, etc ingredients, we made a more-than-passable pesto:

Beech and hazel nut pesto certainly looks the part...

And it was pretty tasty on cracked-back-pepper oatcakes. Next stop, some pasta.

We managed to gather a few remaining sloes from the Park but, on my East Lothian visit, I also found a blackthorn bush that yielded nearly two pounds of sloes (and that was only a small part of the crop). Then, at the eleventh hour as far as this particular harvesting opportunity is concerned, I discovered a little crab apple tree out in the middle of the Park’s golf course. All but three of its crab apples had fallen and been removed (actually only the day before!) when the greenkeepers sucked up all the leaves along the edge of the fairway with their leaf and (crab apple) sucking machine. But I picked those remaining three (and watch out next year!), and with some of the few apples our garden’s apple trees managed to produce, we used the sloes to make a sloe and apple cheese using another recipe from Roger Phillips’ ‘Wild Food’ book:

Amazing sticky red sloe and apple cheese goo!

...transformed into preserved ‘product’ and awaiting consumption on a cheese board!

Happy New Year!

2012-01-02T00:21:00.001Z

Thank you continuing to read my blog or, if you've only just arrived, then welcome! Whatever your visiting status, today seems as good a day as, or even a better one than any other, to wish you and your loved ones a Happy New Year. In comparison to last New Year, this one is remarkably mild, concluding one of the mildest and wettest years in the UK since records began (which for very reliable observations was the year 1910, I think).

The past Autumn was extremely mild. Here in Stirling, we've only had two or three mornings with frost and December temperatures reached double figures Celsius on a few occasions. There have been numerous media and social media comments about ongoing flowering from this year or the early emergence of next Spring's flowers. We have just spent Christmas with family in West Wales where we saw cow parsley in the hedgerows either still flowering or flowering early. Red campion was also extensively still in flower, as this post's only photo shows.

And it isn't just the flowers - the birds and bees are doing what they ought not to be too. I saw a Twitter comment this morning about queen bumblebees in southern Britain being active today (unfortunate, as they won't survive any sudden temperature drop such as is forecast for the next couple of days). When I was walking the dog in the park this morning, the woods were alive with wood pigeons giving their courting calls and I saw collared doves displaying in flight yesterday.

We're all doomed, I tell you, doomed!

Wild food from the park – October

2011-12-31T23:38:00.001Z

We were really into the swing of things by October in our ‘Wild Food from the Park’ mission, finding interesting ways of using what wild food was still around (well, interesting to us at any rate). We managed to gather a few late brambles, just as the rose hips and sloes began to appear and, with a cup of the remaining honeysuckle blossom, boiled that lot up, strained it, added sugar, boiled it again until the setting point was reached, and made a few jars of a very dark red ‘Autumn’s end’ jelly. Truth be told, I slightly overdid it, and boiled it a bit long, so let’s call it a very firm jelly. It’s easily meltable though, so it won’t be wasted, as a glaze, a hot cordial, a syrup for ice cream, etc.

Autumn’s end jelly ingredients – brambles, rose hips, sloes and honeysuckle

And I almost forgot that we also produced a batch of rowan jelly, a real staple of Autumn wild harvesting, and a great compliment to venison (and to loads of things really – we’ve also eaten it with roasted vegetables and with beef curry before). We tend to use it quite sparingly and only just finished the last jar of rowan jelly from 2007 (which was the last time we had made it). The huge bunches of bright red rowan berries are one of the first and most visible signs of approaching Autumn and this year, in our local park, King’s Park, which is rich with rowan trees, most of the rowan trees had HUGE crops of berries.

King’s Park rowan berries

A large bowlful of rowan berries, cleaned of stalks, leaves and with the occasional beautiful shield bug liberated out of the kitchen window,

....and ready for cooking up:

The final product – 2011 King’s Park rowan jelly – but all those berries to make only five wee jars once the boiled pulp is strained then boiled with sugar!

October also provided us with some local wild mushrooms, although not from the King’s Park (where we could have harvested, but didn’t, some more jelly ear fungus). A nearby wood where we have been collecting chanterelles for 20 years is slowly being felled – it is a commercial conifer plantation – and the felled edge is now only about 25 metres away from our lovely productive chanterelle site. We managed to pick half a kilo of chanterelles for what I fear may be the last time, as I think this wood will be gone one a few months time (if it hasn’t already gone ). In that same wood, we also found some fine hedgehog mushrooms – these all found their way into various pasta dishes in October.

Wild food from the park – September

2011-12-30T23:42:00.000Z

Well, we reached September in our little local wild food project with 8 months of interesting discoveries, experiments and food and drink already behind us and documented on this blog. And, with September being more or less the peak of the natural produce ‘harvest’, we had a reasonable expectation of more good wild food opportunities.

Our opportunity to make the most of these was a bit truncated, however, as we spent two weeks away in our campervan in the first two weeks of the month. While we were away, unfortunately, the crop of blackberries on the bramble bushes peaked (and were picked – by others) and had largely vanished by the time we came home in mid-September. We managed to find a small number of ripe blackberries that hadn’t begun to rot. Plus, a hopeful sight, there were also quite a few green, unripe blackberries that, with a relatively dry, mid spell of weather might ripen (and they did indeed, by the end of October). More later on how we used the blackberries.

Honeysuckle (Latin name: Lonicera periclymum) is a widespread and common plant species of woodlands, growing as an entwining climber up into the trees. Richard Mabey’s ‘Flora Britannica’ describes honeysuckle as having: “one of the sweetest and best-loved scents of all British wild flowers.” He reports that children (and, I can confirm, some adults!) still pick the flowers to suck nectar from the base (although I doubt if Stirling children do this these days, at least not as far as I have spotted). Tess Darwin’s book: ‘The Scots Herbal. The plant lore of Scotland’ says that, as well as having been used for a number of medicinal purposes, honeysuckle flowers can also be made into tea and wine. Honeysuckle is widespread in the wooded areas of our park and we collected blossoms for yet another purpose:

We were really keen, knowing that the flowers are edible, to use them in some way that would make the most of that wonderful fragrance. The other ‘fragrant’ product that we make regularly is elderflower cordial, so we decided we’d have a go at making honeysuckle cordial. A quick search on t’Internet confirmed that people have done this successfully before so we just substituted honeysuckle blossoms for the elderflowers in our usual elderflower cordial recipe and made the cordial by our usual method. Honeysuckle blossoms in the park occur as either pink or yellow and we harvested blossoms of both colours:

The resulting cordial is the most fetching light pink colour and may be the most wonderful drink we have ever produced. It is delicate tasting and fragrant and we will make much more next year! It gets a gold star from me and has been my personal high point in this year-long wild food experience so far:

The pink delight that is honeysuckle cordial

From the Park, we managed to gather together enough brambles, some of the wild plums I wrote about in August, a very few wild greengages that had been growing unnoticed next to the plums, and a few elderberries, all cooked together and strained, the juice then being made into a very dark and well-setting hedgerow jelly:

Some remnant blackberries, with wild plums and greengages.
With elderberries, these became a hedgerow jelly.

Hedgerow jelly in preparation

We harvested a few more hazelnuts that had escaped the attentions of the local grey squirrels, but many of the nuts proved to be hollow:

We also began to find, right at the end of September, that some of the beech trees were producing beech mast (the hard green cases that hold the beech tree’s seeds in the form of beech nuts). Most beech mast cases were empty or contained hollow beechnut cases but a few had little beech nuts, covered in a fine brick-red fuzz (which is quite bitter, in my experience, and should probably be scraped off, if you can be bothered). We began to collect these in dribs and drabs as a little wild food plan had begun to germinate which would deliver much later in the Autumn.

We had other wild food opportunities in September as a result of our holiday travels. On the way north, we stopped at Coylumbridge on the edge of the Rothiemurchus Forest near Aviemore and took a walk up the bottom two miles of the Lairig Ghru footpath (it cuts through the Lairig Ghru pass, connecting Aviemore with Braemar or, if you take a wrong turning, Blair Atholl!), to stretch our legs, and tire out the dog. The Aviemore end of the path lies within the great Scots Pine forest of Rothiemurchus and there we picked a couple of pounds of chanterelles, at a site we had visited and picked them at maybe five years ago. We ate those as part of several breakfasts during the following week of our holiday:

Rothiemurchus chanterelles plus a birch bolete

Then, the final day of our fortnight’s campervan holiday was spent in the glorious Culbin Forest and Sands on the north-east coast of Scotland, the Moray coast, near Findhorn. Long-established Scots Pine forests provide a habitat for many species of fungi – mushrooms and toadstools, including a number of edible (and much sought after) species. In Culbin, we picked some chanterelles, some (very) large orange birch boletes and, a brave first for us, a dark brown hedgehog mushroom we’d never seen before and which is restricted to northern Scots Pine forests. We ate these in a big mushroom risotto once we were back at home.

A Merry Christmas to all our readers!

2011-12-25T09:09:00.001Z

I hope you and yours stay well and have a lovely day today. I've been busy writing and will be posting some more scribblings after the next couple of days of eating, drinking and making merry!

I'm just off to check if the sea is in a swimmable state for a Christmas Day dip! Whatver you are doing today, enjoy!

Signs I Like #28

2011-12-06T13:18:00.002Z

Well, looky-here! Edinburgh Zoo took delivery this week of a pair of Giant Pandas from the People's Republic of China (it can't have escaped your notice on the news, if you live in the UK. While I will post something more detailed about this later, I wanted to share this sign which I found today outside the zoo. You can sense a quiet pride in their acquisition, in stark contrast to the extreme marketing in the zoo shop! Of which, more later...

Signs of the times: Autumn #15

2011-11-01T23:43:00.000Z

More comparisons between the British countryside of today and that from 1959-1961 in the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird "What to look for..." series of books.

"Hogs, in eating acorns, chew them very small, & reject all the husks. The plenty of acorns this year avails the hogs of poor men & brings them forward without corn."

Rev. Gilbert White "The Natural History of Selborne", entry from November 3 1781 (230 years ago the day after tomorrow! Which is pretty cool!)

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)

Autumn Picture 15

Back to my series of blog posts about the wonderful art of Charles Tunnicliffe and the story his paintings told about the state of Britain's wildlife and countryside some 50 years ago when the Ladybird "What to look for in... Spring/Summer/Autumn and Winter" books were first published.

Another romantic painting of a lovely Autumnal rural idyll. A herd of pigs and a flock of wood pigeons are rooting about under an old oak tree, feeding on its fallen acorns. In the background, a traditional-looking wooden barn is backed by poplar trees and some nearby silver birches are turning yellow and gold. In the foreground there is a fairy-ring of little toadstools. The aging oak tree has bracket fungi growing from a cleft in the trunk, showing that, as the book’s text says, “there is rotten wood inside”. Indeed!

Pigs were traditionally a useful domestic animal for turning the bounty of acorns into a useful source of meat, something that cattle cannot do as, apparently, the “sharp little spikes at the crown [of the acorn] accumulate in a cow’s stomach, sometimes with fatal results”. As pigeons can also digest acorns, using their strong-muscled gizzard, they could also be regarded as another traditional mechanism for transforming acorns into something more palatable for people to eat! I discussed the trajectory of the wood pigeon population of the UK in the first post from the Ladybird Autumn book, here, so I won’t add more now on that story.

We also saw a large female pig, with her piglets, in a picture from the Ladybird Summer book, here, but I didn’t look at pigs in any detail then. Pigs had a traditional role in woodland management in Britain or, looked at differently, pigs were an excellent means of producing edible protein from inedible acorns (well, acorns that are inedible to humans at any rate), a traditional form of foraging/ feeding known as ‘pannage’. In his book ‘People and Woods in Scotland. A History’, eminent Scottish environmental historian Professor Chris Smout notes that a visitor to Scottish woodlands in the past would be impressed by how populated they were by, amongst others, swineherds in the Middle Ages running their pigs among the acorns.

The form of extremely extensive pig meat production shown in the picture couldn’t be further from the means of production by which the bulk of pig meats have been produced in Scotland over the last 50 years, in indoor rearing units. It looks more like the mode of life of wild pigs. The wild pigs native to Europe, and once native here, were forest-dwellers, as are many of the other wild pig species in the world. It seems that, as a result of escapes from farms and collections and, possibly, as a result of illegal deliberate releases, wild pigs, the wild boars of the media’s vivid reporting (here’s a great example ) are once again living wild in Scotland and elsewhere in Britain. In fact, BBC Radio4 (all hail – we’re not worthy) broadcast a documentary a couple of weeks ago about the very subject, which claimed that there are now records of wild boar living free in nearly every county in the country (although whether that was England or Britain, it wasn’t clear). There’s a lot more interesting information about Britain’s wild boars on this site here.

The fairy ring of toadstools and the bracket fungi could be any of many possible species (it's impossible to tell which from the painting) and I’ve written previously about how little we know about the long-term trends in most of our native fungi species. So, I’m yet again sorry that I can’t comment properly on how well these species are doing compared to 50 years ago!

Nice to be back on the Ladybird seasonal trail again!

Wild food from the park – catch-up #2: August

2011-10-18T23:46:00.000+01:00

Summer, such as it was in August, continued to bring us fresh opportunities to eat (and drink) out of the Park. Earlier in the (so-called) summer, we spotted a short section of hedgerow in a discreet corner of the Park that had wild plums growing – the identification is uncertain – they might be cherry plums (particularly as the ripe fruits are bright red!). At that stage, they were small, hard, green fruit, a long way from being ripe. By August, the first of the plums were definitely ready for harvesting:

Don't these look great! Sweet and juicy.

It is maybe no surprise that our identification of this fruiting bush is a bit indeterminate - Richard Mabey, in ‘Flora Britannica’, discusses the “lineage of Byzantine complexity” of wild plums in Britain, then describes feral plums as one of the best wild foods, many being edible straight off the tree (unlike sloes). We decided to use our wild plum harvest, with sugar and vodka, to make a wild plum vodka:

First, you add the sugar


Then, you add the vodka. Then you wait...

This has already started taking on a red colour from the fruit and will be ready in a few weeks, or at least in time for Christmas.

Ray Mears and Professor Gordon Hillman, in their (BBC) book ‘Wild Food’, write very interestingly on the importance of hazel nuts in the diets of our prehistoric ancestors in Britain. The sophistication of our Mesolithic ancestors’ understanding of how to prepare hazelnuts to improve their palatability and storage potential was impressive. Archaeological sites across Britain have revealed many remains of shallow roasting pits and hazelnut shell middens (waste piles). We have had high hopes for a huge harvest of hazelnuts, which would provide us with lots of recipe options. All summer, we’ve watched as hazelnuts developed in profusion on most of the many hazel bushes and trees in King’s Park.

Then we went on holiday to Pembrokeshire for a week and when we returned, maybe 90% of the nuts had vanished! It turns out that the fiendish grey squirrels are capable of stripping hazelnuts from hazel bushes once they reach a sufficiently palatable stage (which presumably occurred when we were away).

My friend Martin, who is developing a forest garden on the Black Isle using the principles pioneered by the horticulturalist Robert Hart, advises me that where grey squirrels have colonised, as here in Stirling, it may be a waste of time trying to grow hazelnuts as a crop (or, it seems, to look for wild hazels as a reliable source of food) as they'll have the lot. Nevertheless, we persisted and collected a small stock of hazelnuts while they were still green and left them to go brown on a south-facing window sill (I have no idea if it is OK to eat them green).

Hazelnuts, at the stage that we were still hopeful that they might feed us proportionately to the effort it took to collect them

But when we cracked them all in September, 90% were either empty or undeveloped – a poor return for our efforts! How we made use of the meagre harvest, I’ll tell you in a later wild food post.

Wild sorrel (new young leaves only) and wood sorrel continued to be available in the Park and we used them to garnish a wild watercress and bean soup (we picked the watercress in a wee stream at Manorbier in Pembrokeshire just before we came home to Scotland):

Wild watercress ready for cooking

Watercress and bean soup, with wild sorrell and wood sorrell

We also continued to use our harvested raspberries from the freezer on yogurt with honey for pudding or, as here for example, in a (rare) gin and tonic as a fruity garnish:

An additional wild food bonanza landed in our laps on holiday in August in Pembrokeshire, when we found a thicket of densely fruiting damsons growing on the Pembrokeshire Coastal Path and collected a big bag. We used these for damson muffins:

and for damson gin:


One for later in the Winter. Cleaned us out of cheap gin too! Still needs a bit of stirring though, to dissolve all of that sugar...

Wild food from the park – catch-up time #1: July

2011-10-18T21:32:00.001+01:00

July? JULY? I realise I haven’t blogged for nearly two months. But time, as ever, rolls on. We have been continuing with our attempts to find different things to eat from the seasonal wild food popping up each month in our local park, the King's Park in Stirling and then writing about it for you - and there’s lots to be written about and, hopefully, read about and so - on on!

July brought some new items to the King’s Park wild food menu, plus more of some we’ve already had. The raspberry canes continued to produce a great crop of juicy sweet berries and we continued to pick them and eat them off the bush or with yoghurt, or freeze them. By the end of July, we did manage to gather and freeze a total of 6kg of berries, which will last us the rest of the year in various uses.

Fine wild raspberries in their prime at the peak of the season

In early July, I spent the weekend (Wimbledon Finals weekend, I think) involved in making this TV show (yes, I'm somewhere in the choir!) and returned home on a warm and beautiful summer evening to find that O had constructed this delight:

They look great, don't they?

It is a chardonnay jelly with wild raspberries (based on a recipe from Nigella Lawson) and was pretty special eaten cold from the fridge, in the garden on a (rare) warm July evening!

We also used the raspberries in a jug of Pimms (posh, what?) with some mint leaves from the garden, shown here with some garlic bread made using the wild garlic pesto we made in April:

Another highly seasonal appearance for a few weeks in July, and a very welcome and exciting one for a wild food project, is the emergence of the flowers of the lime tree.

Lime tree flowers

I wrote about lime trees previously here. Lime blossom is surely one of the most fragrant of any of our native plants and ranks up at the top of my favourite native flower scents, along with honeysuckle. It is also, after air-drying for a few days, the ingredient for the traditional linden blomen tea.

Air drying lime flowers on the window ledge. A few in a teapot or a couple in a mug with boiling water makes a great drink.

In his mighty 'Flora Britannica', Richard Mabey says of lime trees: “All groups of lime trees, of whatever species, are wonderfully fragrant when in full blossom in July. They are also the noisiest of trees at this time, and the roar of bees in them can often be heard 50 yards away. The blossom makes a rich tea, tilleul, which was recommended as a mild sedative during the last war.”

Roger Phillips, in his 'Wild Food' book, proffers the following information: “The flowers are used to make linden tea which is famous for its delicious taste and soothing effect on the digestive and nervous system. Honey from lime flowers is regarded as the best flavoured and most valuable in the world and is used extensively in medicine and liqueurs.”

On the warm July morning when I gathered the lime blossom above, the avenue of lime trees in the Park was bathed in a wonderful honey-like scent from the lime blossom and bees were busy, noisily gathering nectar and pollen in the trees. A few of the dried lime flowers above, in a mug with boiling water, makes a scented slightly sweet infusion. Kept in an airtight jar, we’ve found that dried lime flowers will retain this potential for many months, well over a year in fact.

We also made a couple of major batches of elderflower cordial in July although, rather foresightedly, I published a photo of the summer’s whole production in the post on June’s wild food experiences, here – which was written in July. Here’s a photo of the July cordial anyway, just for completeness!

But that wasn’t the end of the cordial developments in July. Despite the general lack of wetlands in the King’s Park (partly down to the major drainage work for the golf course over a large proportion of the park), there are a few wee wet corners and, in one of them in July, we found lots of the large native wetland plant meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria). I wrote previously about meadowsweet in one of my posts of the Ladybird seasons books, here, and mentioned it as the original source of aspirin and that’s an issue for its use to produce cordial.

The recipe we used, from the wild food book 'Seafood andeat it' by Xa Milne and Fiona Houston, points out that people who are allergic to aspirin should avoid it. A better reason for avoiding it would be that it is pretty harsh. The recipe had too much lemon for my tastes and I found the aspirin flavour to be a bit off-putting. Still, I've made a couple of litres and I ought to drink it:

Meadowsweet cordial

and it is more palatable with some apple juice added so all is not yet lost!

That’s all from the Park for that month but a July wild food addendum was our first chanterelles of the year. We visited our good friend Kathy in deepest Aberdeenshire and her local wood had a few good quality chanterelles which we enjoyed for breakfast:

Hello hello...coming out to play?

2011-10-18T20:32:00.000+01:00

Hello again. I've just had nearly two months off from blogging (Lord, I've missed you lot!). It wasn't really planned but we had a couple of weeks away camping in September which broke my blogging routine (and separated me from all my books!). I have also been spending a lot of time on a PC at work for a big environmental website project that I'll be telling you all about in a few weeks and I couldn't really face spending the evening on the PC at home as well. So, it's been quite nice really but I've missed it and ... I see there's a few new folk following so a hearty welcome and I hope you enjoy the new stuff. Please feel free to comment. I've also been getting in to Twitter over the last couple of months (@scot_nature_boy. If you're on Twitter, come and play!) so hopefully that might attract a few more views and comments from the Twitterati now that I can promote posts over there too.

Anyway, lots of posts bubbling up, and my fingers are twitching at the prospect of writing and so time to press on. There's only really one classy way to return after a long break, and that's the in the manner of Paul Newman's Fast Eddie Felson from the movie 'The Color of Money'...

Signs I like number 20-something

2011-08-21T17:11:00.001+01:00

Seen off the Royal Mile today at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe... I think we can all agree that this looks like a genuine bargain!

Between the wars... a prize find.

2011-08-02T23:43:00.003+01:00

"Theirs is a land of hope and glory
Mine is the green field and the factory floor
Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers
And mine is the peace we knew
Between the wars"

Billy Bragg (from "Between the wars")

We stayed at Carcant, a sheep farm and hill estate in the Moorfoot Hills near Heriot in the Scottish Borders, a couple of weekends ago. There, we came upon this wonderful old collection above the door of an old barn, now a workshop and tool store for the residents. At first, I thought these were prize certificates for their sheep dog trial prowess (as they are indeed champion sheep dog triallers!) but closer inspection revealed these to be a set of prize certificates from the Selkirk and Galashiels Agricultural Society from the 1920s. I couldn't help but imagine the old farmer and his wife, maybe their children, returning home with another collection of certificates from another successful showing of their cattle or sheep at the local show and proudly pinning them above the door. Maybe glances at these through the year inspired them in their early morning animal feeding and mucking out chores with competitive thoughts of the coming show season.

It was a wonderful wee corner of nostalgic memorabilia for a Scottish agricultural way of life that is long, long gone although, fortunately, the agricultural shows remain, as does the culture of sheep dog trialling (but that's something for another time). And, another somewhat poignant thought that it raised was that I now now longer have any near relatives left who were alive when this set of small personal triumphs was being accumulated. It marks a time, at least 85 years ago, that is now some two or nearly three generations old and its survival in a working barn is all the more remarkable for that. I felt privileged to be able to observe it and record it.

Carcant's wonder wall...

A close up of some certificates, ranging between 1920 and 1926.

Here's what this unexpected find made me think of, one of my favourite songs by Billy Bragg:

Food from the Park: June

2011-08-02T22:15:00.001+01:00

Flaming June? Not for most of the month, it wasn't, in Stirling at least. But we still managed to eat from the Park again in June. And, in wild food terms, it might seem a logical conclusion that the availability of edible species would continue to increase in June as it does in the run of months from March to May. But our experience is that while some new options for a wild food diet do indeed appear, other options become less palatable. Nettles, ground elder, common hogweed and cleavers in the Park, which provided the bulk of vegetable mass for meals in the previous months, have all grown up and become tough, coarse and/or incredibly fibrous. Hawthorn leaves, so soft and nutty-tasting when they first appeared, and lovely in salads in that state, have also toughened up and dropped off our menu. By June, the leaves of wild garlic were also beginning to die back.

But, fortunately for the wild food gastronaut, there are new kids on the block in June. From mid-June in Stirling, the creamy-white, fragrant umbrellas of flowers, or umbals, of the elder can be found in profusion on elder bushes all around the edge of the Park (see below). As I've written previously, the elder is an important source of ingredients for wild food - in winter, we picked the jelly ear or Jew's ear fungus from dead elder trees. In autumn, I have no doubt that we'll find ways to incorporate elder berries into a meal. And in summer, well, best of all is elder blossom. Every summer, we make a big batch of elderflower cordial. We drink it usually with sparkling water but sometimes just with tap water, and often with ice cubes, frozen raspberries and the blue flowers of borage from the garden thrown in. It's a bit special.

We started making this year's cordial about in early June and we finished the last bottle of last year's stock three weeks later, so 12 litres must be about right, since we don't stint on its use during the year! We use the recipe in the book "Sensational Preserves" by Hilaire Walden, which includes the addition of citric acid to prevent fermentation. Actually, we made about 14 litres last year but two bottles fermented, probably as we didn't have quite enough citric acid left for the recipe by the end of the season - so 12 litres survived.

Elderflowers - raw material for one of summer's true wild food delights!

Here's a picture of our final elderflower cordial "product" for 2011, labelled up as a bit of fun.

Our 2011 elderflower cordial collection

The other special wild food that appeared in June was wild raspberries, which are usually abundant in our Park and which few people bother to collect. We usually harvest about 6 kg of these over the several-week long season and these are mostly frozen for use through the year, in porridge and in puddings (and, once, to make a framboise liqueur).

Wild raspberries in King's Park.

Our raspberry season usually begins with us simply eating the first ripe berries off the bush for a couple of weeks in early-mid June when we are out walking the dog, until there are enough ripe berries to make it worthwhile doing some organised picking. The 6 kg total usually arrives in about half-to-one kg batches, which is what we can pick in about 30 minutes with both of us picking. That's generally because 30 minutes is about the limit of my patience with the nettles and bramble thorns that interweave the Park's raspberry patches. Unless we are planning to cook them down for something, in which case, they can be frozen in a lump, we normally freeze them laid out in a single layer on baking trays in the freezer and then bag up the already-frozen berries.

The 2011 raspberry season began worryingly slowly and it looked like last winter's extremely extended and severe cold spell had killed off the majority of the raspberry canes (wild raspberries produce the current year's fruit on the previous year's new growth). That had indeed happened and there were large areas normally dense with raspberry canes which were almost devoid this year, but the remaining survivors seemed to have benefitted hugely from the very warm dry spell of weather in April, resulting in a great pollination and a huge crop on the remaining bushes. We picked steadily through late June and all of July such that, with the final picking session in our raspberry season, we managed to bring our total to just over 6 kg again this year (by the very end of July, when I wrote this catch-up note).

Incidentally, we also managed to include some Salicornia or glasswort in our diet in June, a salt marsh pioneer plant that has been eaten in Britain for thousands of years. Highly nutritious but if eaten too regularly, it might wear away your teeth due to its high silicon content (it is called glasswort after all!). I seem to recall reading that people from some prehistoric coastal populations in Britain were found, by archaeologists examining their remains from graves, to have wear patterns on their teeth consistent with a high consumption of glasswort. We didn't pick this ourselves - O bought it from the Loch Fyne Oyster Bar shop. It must have been harvested wild (no one grows it commercially here - or anywhere?), and probably locally to Loch Fyne.

[Addendum, 4th August: Excitingly (admittedly I don't get out much), I was on a bus in Portobello yesterday and saw Salicornia for sale in the window of a traditional fishmonger's - the one with the window constantly washed by a curtain of running water; if you are local, you may know it. Maybe it is becoming more popular. I'd love to know where they source it from].

We ate it (the green stuff above) as an accompaniment to a breakfast of smoked salmon scrambled eggs, made with Loch Fyne smoked salmon and eggs from our Stirling friend Judy's chickens. Slightly salty and you have to pull the edible vegetable portion off with your teeth and leave the central slightly woody stalk. A slightly odd breakfast item but pretty tasty nevertheless.

The benefits of a bike (courtesy of Cycle Stirling)

2011-07-31T13:25:00.001+01:00

Join the cycle revolution - Cycle Stirling!

Signs I Like #26 (puerile humour warning...)

2011-07-13T15:19:00.001+01:00

Hmm. I wonder which part of the animals they specialise in treating here...?

Signs I like #25

2011-07-07T19:27:00.001+01:00

"I come from the land Down Under..." (spotted at University of Stirling)

Wild food from the Park: May

2011-06-30T22:31:00.000+01:00

Just catching up with posts about our wild food project, in which we are trying to generate food and drink every month from wild ingredients collected in our local park, King's Park in Stirling. Having had something of a culinary success in April with my first ever souffle, a wild Spring greens souffle, I thought I'd try it again, but using the wider range of plants available in May.

And it got a bit out of hand...

In a 30 minute foraging session in the park, I picked twelve wild plants: young nettles and white dead nettles, young, tender ground elder leaves and stems, comfrey, yarrow and dandelion leaves, chickweed, young plants of cleavers ('sticky willy'), the softer, youngest leaves of hawthorn, wild sorrel, the slenderest, most tender of common hogweed stems and wild garlic leaves. Back at home, we realised that our garden's herb bed was quite well advanced, so we added in little pinches or a few leaves of 18 different herbs: wild rocket, sorrell and red sorrell, four different varieties of thyme, sage, woodruffe, garden mace, tarragon (very sparingly - it has a very powerful taste!), chives, lavender, chervil, curry plant, savory winter, carroway and curly-leaf parsley.

So, a 30 plant souffle - a bit over the top, but it serves to demonstrate quite well the wide range of edible species that are out there. The preparation was otherwise as described for the April dish and, again, it turned out both well and delicious:

The final dish, garnished with fresh parsley from the garden

And we enjoyed some ancillary wild food action in May with ingredients collected elsewhere - namely the leaves of a succulent coastal plant, one of the Atriplex or goosefoot family, which is widespread around our coasts and a close relative of the edible garden weeds and wild food staples, Fat Hen and Good King Hal, effectively inland versions of the same family. Very nutritious and quite tasty. We harvested ours at the top of the sandy shore down at Tyninghame in East Lothian:

We added the leaves to a bean and vegetable soup, made with some home-made chicken stock. No photo I'm afraid but, needless to say, it was delicious... Looking forward to telling you shortly about June, when some of our favourite local wild food ingredients become available.

Nature wins again... Plankton 1: Nuclear Power 0

2011-06-30T18:30:00.001+01:00

Occasionally, just occasionally, this nature boy blog has the chance to be reasonably topical. I have a blog post in preparation about a wonderful coastal walk we did last week in East Lothian, from which I have extracted one small element to post early. One thing we noticed was that the high tide line of every sandy beach along which we walked was thick with stranded dead or dying jellyfish. They were mostly moon jellies, the very common jellyfish Aurelia aurita. It typically looks like this when stranded:

Stranded Aurelia aurita (moon jellyfish), Gullane beach, 26 June2011

Huge shoals or swarms of these jellyfish are very common in our coastal waters in some summers and mass strandings of this species or other jellyfish species are not uncommon.

Here are a couple of photos of stranded jellyfish en masse at Gullane beach in East Lothian last Sunday (26th June):

Like other jellyfish, this species does have a fringe of stinging tentacles but, in this species, they are not capable of delivering a sting to humans. When the wind is blowing onshore for long enough, these moon jellies, which are very poor swimmers in a current and are thus effectively a part of the zooplankton (albeit very large zooplankton), are forced into the shore and dropped by the falling tide. So what, I hear you ask?

Well, you might have picked up the news today (BBC, Reuters, all the main newspaper websites) that Torness Nuclear Power Station, about 15 miles along the coast from where we were walking, had to shut down both of its Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors on Tuesday afternoon as a swarm of moon jellyfish was clogging the filters of the cooling system's seawater intakes.

According to the BBC's website coverage, the filters: "are designed to prevent seaweed and marine animals entering the cooling system. If these screens become clogged, the reactors are shut down to comply with safety procedures." The Beeb also reported that the "East Lothian plant's operator, EDF Energy, said the shutdown was a precautionary measure and there was never any danger to the public."

It was not a radiological incident... Phew - no need for "Marine Plankton generated this generation-spanning nuclear contamination says nuclear generator" headlines...

But this mass plankton invasion has probably closed one of Scotland's few remaining operational nuclear power stations for a week! Like I said, Plankton 1: Nuclear Power 0...

Incidentally, the BBC coverage also reported, somewhat stupidly, "It is not known why there are so many jellyfish in the area". Duh, it's summer (recent weather notwithstanding) and jellyfish swarms often happen on the East Lothian coast in summer. My Dad recorded numerous incidents over more than 20 years of working on that coastline. And I have no doubt that EDF know that it is a likely occurrence in summer and hence have their contingency shutdown plans. Best not let the obvious facts get in the way of a good mystery for the news though...

Incidentally, my wee brother also picked up on the mass strandings during one of his coast rides on his fabulous Pugsley sand/snow bike, and posted about them here on his Coastkid blog.

The whole incident put me in mind of a wonderful character, Plankton Boy, created for a one-off cartoon strip in an issue of Chris Donald's Viz comic back in 1990 (lovely Google identified it as Viz Comic No: 40 Dated February / March 1990, but sadly no picture was available online). Plankton Boy was "raised by innumerable tiny sea creatures" and had special superhero powers based around plankton. Maybe one was corralling jellyfish towards cooling water intakes... as my brother said earlier "Nature wins again!"

Scotland's countryside comes to town - Royal Highland Show 2011

2011-06-30T09:16:00.001+01:00

Personal reflections on the Scottish Royal Highland Show 2011

Last Friday (24^th June), I spent almost 12 hours wandering around Scotland's Royal Highland Show at the Ingliston Showground west of Edinburgh, next to Edinburgh Airport. This is an annual four-day celebration of Scotland's rural and agricultural cultures, organised since 1822 by the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland. According to Wikipedia, the event attracts over 1,000 exhibitors, 4,500 head of livestock, and an annual 200,000 visitors - making it Scotland's most popular summer event and the premier fixture in Scotland's farming calendar. It generates over £200 million in business. Exhibitors compete for the prestige of winning not only prize tickets, but also for prize money and trophies worth over £1 million. It is also the UK's largest agricultural event.

I love it.

Early morning entrants heading for the horse judging.

I love the spectacle, the vast area of marquees, the displays of agricultural equipment, the skills and expertise on display (dry stone walling, fly casting, dog handling displays, falconry, etc).

I love the opportunity to see so much livestock all in one place, including the rare breeds and old varieties.

I love the chance to meet so many colleagues from such a wide range or rural and environmental organisations all in one place. Many of them are working hard in engaging with the public and with rural and agricultural clients but it doesn't feel so much like work. In fact it feels like a bit of a carnival event. It is a great social event for many rural folk in Scotland, with many participants staying on or near the site for the week.

Last-minute attention to detail before the judging ring

But more than any of that, I love the sheer feeling of energy and enthusiasm that percolates the event. I often reflect on all the millions of individual actions that are required to bring together an event like the Royal Highland Show each year at the end of June for four (hopefully) glorious days. Not just by the organisers and the guys (pun intended) putting up the marquees, hammering in signs, designing and printing programmes, cutting the grass in the car parking fields, and so on. But all the work by all the individuals and families breeding their livestock, caring for their animals, preparing them for the show, transporting them and looking after them for the period of the show, then packing them up and taking them home, with or without the reward of a prize certificate. And all the judges, their preparation and homework, building on all their years of experience. And all the companies preparing their displays, building them up, printing their leaflets or packing their food or drink samples. Even all the efforts to move all those acres of pristine farm machinery in and then out again. And then all the individuals and families who decide to come for the day and all the activity and preparation which that involves.

One of my friend Elaine's four prize tickets for her Commercial Sheep competition entries -well done Elaine!

At the Show, all of that is combined together in a heady mix of (restrained rural) enthusiasm, judging rings full of hopeful owners and their washed, brushed, polished and sometimes powdered animal charges, increasingly noisy beer tents full of ruddy faced young and not-so-young men, and posh country women in expensive designer knitwear, long waxed stock coats or jodhpurs, hopeful retailers with their "special price for the show" market-stall banter. And troops of primary school children with their fretting watchful teachers, snaking hand-in-hand through the crowded avenues looking for some rural agency tent with lots of colouring-in opportunities to keep the wee darling busy and quiet for 15 minutes. Sometimes the sun shines and it is lovely. Sometimes it rains and it can be very muddy (think Glastonbury with sheep and cows). This year, the sun shone and it was lovely!

My favourite element of the Show is always the Heavy Horses, more on which later. Here is a selection of photos from the Show to give a flavour of my day.


And they were crossing - everywhere you looked...


Some of the most fun livestock to go looking for, surely!

And yes, it IS a Goat Coat! Either that or it's run off with the bathroom curtain...


Kids, eh? Always climbing over everything...

Rabbit or sheep - you decide!

Some of Elaine's prize-winning Commercial Sheep - that middle one is definitely pure Beltex. What do you think?

A big coo - definitely a very big coo! And a Highland coo at that.

Great to see people working hard to preserve and promote traditional and rare breeds.

Some Luing cattle...

A real mixed herd of Scottish breeds! May the best coo win...

A bonny, well-looked after Hampshire Down sheep from near Stirling (and a prize ticket for their efforts! Well done Jane and Roy)

Important work! Please support them!

Some of the fine Scottish produce on offer -in this case, smoked haddock ('smokies') produced by Spink's of Arbroath. The fish are being smoked over smouldering wood in the covered barrel (which is sunken into the ground) - these are unbelievably tasty...

Some of the rural crafts on display - some beautiful clarsachs (Scottish harps) built by Graham Muir of Ardival Harps from Strathpeffer in northern Scotland

The busy blacksmith's forge, where a competition to shoe all four hooves of a horse in an hour was well underway. The noise and smells were interesting!

Showjumping was one of the final events of the day in the main ring. I'm quite pleased with this shot from a camera phone!


HM The Queen's Highland cow and (above) her 4th place Prize Certificate

And so, on to the heavy horses, my favourite element of the Royal Highland Show. In 2010, the RHS managed to have representatives of all of Britain's heavy horses. This year, it was mostly Clydesdales, although there was a "four" of another breed I didn't recognise.

I think I fell in love with a horse.

This lovely beast was very quiet and appreciative of having her head rubbed. I watched an old man, walking around the heavy horse stalls on his own, stop and place his head against the side of her face and he just stood there for a minute. Maybe he was whispering, maybe not but it brought a lump to my throat and water to the eye. Maybe an old ploughman reliving past memories? Maybe someone who worked with horses in his early life before the tractor took over. I spent a few minutes rubbing her face and neck and talking quietly to her. It reminded me of standing next to the quiet but clearly latent power of an elephant which I've done a couple of times in Asia. For hundreds of years, heavy horses would easily have been the largest animals ever encountered by most people in Britain.

One of the joys of a show like this is the chance to see the enthusiasm and complete loving care and attention being lavished on these show horses by their owners, in preparation for showing. When I walked around the stalls, the place was buzzing with preparations to ensure that the horses were all in tip-top form for their moment in the ring later in the afternoon.

Whitening the feathers!

Waiting patiently for their turn...

Just look at this horse. What a beauty!

Nearly ready! gleaming chestnut with white feathery feet!

Exciting entry of the heavy horse fours and their wagons into the ring. The ground shook...

Beautifully presented animals!

Off goes another four, around the ring for the judges attention

And finally, here is a photo of maybe the largest horse you are likely to see - a 19-hand Clydesdale called Bud, owned by Hugh Ramsay of Millisle Clydesdales. One horse guy who knew about Bud reckoned he weighs a ton and a quarter. And so quiet and calm. The heavy horse hall is the perfect antidote to the noise and business of the show world outside...

Bud

Twelve hours at the Show and I didn't manage to see a half of what I wanted to! Next year!

Signs I like #24

2011-06-24T21:03:00.001+01:00

Seen at Scotland's Royal Highland Show in Edinburgh today

Signs of the times: Autumn #14

2011-06-17T23:24:00.001+01:00

More comparisons between the British countryside of today and that from 1959-1961 in the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird "What to look for..." series of books.

'The pheasant cries

As if it just noticed

The mountain'

Kobayashi Issa (1763 – 1827) ('The pheasant cries' – translated by Robert Haas)

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)

Autumn Picture 14

A lovely Autumnal painting of pheasants and fungi. There are two brightly coloured cock pheasants perched up on a tree stump, with two more camouflaged, brown-coloured hen pheasants on the ground in the background. A clump of fungal fruiting bodies (toadstools) have emerged from the tree stump and, to the top-right of the picture, we can see the delicate pink and orange seed capsules of a spindle tree opening their valves to reveal a single seed in each one. The bracken at the base of the stump has turned a wonderful Autumnal golden-brown. I looked at bracken previously, here, when it first appeared in the Spring pictures.

The pheasant, or Common pheasant (Latin name: Phasianus colchicus) is not a native species in the UK. In fact, looking closely at the cock pheasants, the picture shows two sub-species of pheasant, from the black-necked and the white-ringed neck races. I have a new information source for the remainder of the Ladybird book blog posts, a new set of two books, a glorious new publication, 'The Birds of Scotland', produced by the Scottish Ornithologists’ Club. I’ll review the books properly soon but I’m happy to say already that they are damned good and are going to be extremely useful! And from this source, I can confirm that the common pheasant is a common and very widespread introduced resident to Scotland, particularly in the lowlands of the south and east.

The Romans introduced the pheasant to Britain sometime between 55 AD and 400 AD and, according to the Ladybird book’s accompanying text, this was the black-necked version shown as the left-hand cock pheasant in the picture, with the Chinese white ring-necked version being introduced later in this period of introduction. Although the species has been in Britain since that time, 'The Birds of Scotland' (See? Already useful!) suggests that it did not reach Scotland until the 16th Century, having become well established a century earlier in England. Its population expanded in Scotland through the 1970s and 1980s, but captive-reared pheasants are also released in MASSIVE numbers almost EVERYWHERE to supplement local populations for shooting. Reared pheasants are thought to be quite sedentary, probably moving no more than 5 km from their release point. In Scotland, the pheasant population was estimated in 2000 to be 348,000 to 367,000, about one-fifth of the UK population of 1.8 to 1.9 million but, with the releasing of all those game birds, it is difficult to know how many there really are. The trend in Scotland is probably for a slightly declining wild population.

Those fungi on the stump? They could be any of many possible species but are clearly a species that grows in and on rotting wood (a “saprophyte”). Many other fungi live commensally with trees and other plants, assisting with nutrient transfer to the higher plant while being provided with a habitat on their roots. Saprophyte fungi are essential elements of the nutrient cycles that liberate nitrogen, carbon and other substances from dead wood. Otherwise, we’d be waist-deep in twigs, bark and branches!

The spindle tree (Euonymus europaeus) is a shrub or small tree of hedgerows, scrub and deciduous woodland. With a preference for calcareous soils, it is native to England, Wales and Ireland, but only to the very southern part of Scotland, although it has been planted as an introduced species in other parts of Scotland. The New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora indicates that there has been a considerable increase in the records of this species in Britain in the past 50 years, since the 1962 Atlas was published. This might, however, be due to better recording rather than an increase in its range or populations.

I’ve recently found a very interesting website, for the organisation Plants For A Future , which promotes the conservation of plants for human use, whether for food, medicine or other uses (my interpretation of their “About us” text). It turns out that the spindle tree is resplendent with uses, including as a source of yellow dye from the seeds, and the bark is an “alterive, cholagogue, hepatic, laxative, stimulant and tonic”, and I only know what some of those words mean... and the fresh leaves and dried fruit and seeds are used “externally to treat scabies, lice, ticks and other skin parasites”. Wow... It doesn’t end there. The whole plant produces a volatile oil used in soap-making and the wood is used for “spindles, skewers, knitting needles, toothpicks, carving” and for artists’ high quality charcoal. Actually, I’m not quite sure why somebody isn’t farming this stuff!

A ukulele, Stephen Fry and a probably-unrequited love

2011-06-14T23:40:00.001+01:00

Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States is clearly a wonderful academic institution. It is also the oldest higher education institution in the USA and has had many significant figures through its educational doors, including George W and Barack Obama. That great musical genius, Tom Lehrer, is another alumnus of the University (see here for an example).

But perhaps the greatest thing ever to come out of Harvard is this short performance, combining, as it does, two of my favourite subjects - the ukulele and the living wonder that is Stephen Fry. Let's just say that the marvelous Mr Fry, attending Harvard to receive a, no doubt, very well-deserved award (the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University - chosen by a group of students for his endeavours in the arts), also received some rather unexpected attention in the nicest and most flattering way from a lovely and very talented young woman armed with a ukulele, a song and a heart-felt and well-thought through proposal.

My thanks to my friend Murray for making me aware of it and to the young woman concerned, Molly Lewis - bless you for a wonderful performance, and for trying!

Signs of the times: Autumn #13

2011-06-09T18:50:00.000+01:00

More comparisons between the British countryside of today and that from 1959-1961 in the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird "What to look for..." series of books.

"Then the sudden rush

Of the rain, and the riot

Of the shrieking, tearing gale

Breaks loose in the night,

With a fusillade of hail!

Hear the forest fight,

With its tossing arms that crack and clash

In the thunder's cannonade,

While the lightning's forked flash

Brings the old hero-trees to the ground with a crash!

Hear the breakers' deepening roar,

Driven like a herd of cattle

In the wild stampede of battle,

Trampling, trampling, trampling, to overwhelm the shore!"

Henry Van Dyke (from: "Storm-Music")

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)

Autumn Picture 13

Well, when I started this set of blog posts on these Ladybird books, I had rather hoped to be able to keep pace with the four seasons as I progressed through the four books, starting with Spring. Clearly, although I managed this for Spring and largely for the Summer book, the timetable went out of the window when I was busy in the Autumn. So, here we are, in June and I’m writing about Autumn. Never mind, I hope you are still enjoying these posts regardless of what it looks like outside your window. I will be satisfied if I finish the series in the 50 year time window since the books were published, which was 2009-2011. That means I have the rest of the year to finish the second half of the autumn book and the Winter volume. On, on...

Here’s a wild picture. Until last month’s unprecedented extreme weather conditions in Scotland, I would have said it seems a bit odd to be writing about wild Autumn weather in June but hey ho... Here, a herd of young cows are sheltering behind a high hedge from a gale and lashing rain. Some starlings and magpies are sheltering as best they can behind the cattle. Growing under a fallen, broken tree, there are some puffballs. The only part of this scene that you couldn’t have found here last week was the puffballs – it’s a bit early for those in June! But hey, this is supposed to be a picture from Autumn. In fact, as far as the theme of these posts goes, comparing our natural history today with that displayed in paintings from 50 years ago, I don’t have much to say for this one. I’ve already covered starlings here and magpies here and, as I’ve said elsewhere in these Autumn posts, we actually don’t have good information on the changes in the distribution of many of our native fungi over time, even the relatively large ones like puffballs.

Having lived in the Stirling area for 22 years, I’ve seen many little puffballs around here, but never a giant puffball, the edible (in fact, gourmet) giant puffball beloved of gourmands, and delicious when sliced and fried; until last Autumn that is, when O and I were walking near Dunblane and found the shattered and largely decomposed remains of a giant puffball, but which was still capable of producing clouds of spores. So we took some pieces and scattered them along the edge of the field we found it in and, from late summer, we will start checking for signs of growth, just in case!

Signs I like #23 (and a special Titanic memory from Stirling)

2011-06-01T21:34:00.004+01:00

You might have heard on the news that yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the launch of RMS Titanic from the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. As we all know, the Titanic's maiden voyage ended in disaster and tragedy following a collision with an iceberg in the North Atlantic on 12th April 1912, resulting in 1517 deaths among the passengers and crew, and leaving 1517 families on both sides of the Atlantic to contemplate their own personal tragedies.

If you look at the Wikipedia entry for the Titanic, you will find that it lists all the passengers and crew, identifying those who lived and those who died. One of the engineering crew who died was a Mr William Y. Moyes, Senior Sixth Engineer. He is listed in the record as being from "Stirling, Scotland" and lived, in fact, in the street next to the one in which we live, where this featured sign is fixed to the fence of the house in which he once dwelt.

Apologies that image isn't great but the light was very poor. The plaque has a picture of the Titanic at the top. Below it, the wording says:

"Here lived
WILLIAM YOUNG MOYES
Senior Sixth Engineer
on
RMS TITANIC
who lost his life when the liner sank
on
APRIL 14th 1912
with the loss of 1635 lives",

just one of the many moving stories from that terrible day. Note the discrepancy in the number of deaths (1635 vs 1715). The higher figure is the official death toll, I think.

Lovely to see the flowers that someone tied up there for the anniversary. We'll raise a glass to his memory (and all those who died) next April 12th, 100 years to the day.

Signs I like #22

2011-05-30T19:10:00.001+01:00

I found this graffito on the seaward side of a seawall at North Berwick today and found it strangely moving. I read it and thought: "Me too...". I grew up in East Lothian with a view of the sea, but I no longer live by the sea and miss it every day. So, this struck a loud chord today! Sometimes I go to the sea too... but not often enough!

What a Rush!

2011-05-28T23:55:00.000+01:00

I think it was probably 1978, round at Pete's house one schoolday lunchtime. He had just received a delivery, maybe his first, from one of those mail-order record clubs. In the delivery was Rainbow's 1976 album "Rainbow Rising" which, alone, was enough to blow young minds freshly arrived in the world of rock. But for me, a seminal and slightly life-changing encounter that day was with another 12 inch diameter piece of black vinyl that had arrived in the box - Rush's "Farewell to Kings" album:

What was this? Who was that guy with the high voice and what on earth were they singing about? Three Canadians with songs about Spaceships, black holes, Kings, philosophers and ploughmen, and some sublime musicianship. To a teenage mind rapidly absorbing as much science fiction as I could lay my hands on and with a burgeoning taste in rock music, especially on the more melodic wing (and maybe even then in the progressive vein), this was heady stuff indeed! After a bit more rooting about in record shops (this was pre-internet of course), I came to realise that this was Rush's fifth studio album and I remember thinking at the time "Ah well, I guess I've missed their most productive period", as that was the usual pattern, wasn't it? A lifetime of preparing for the first album, spillover of that good material into the second and then a steady decline! I could never have guessed that I would still be listening to fresh new music appearing from Rush 33 years later, and still eagerly anticipating new albums from a band that had been recording for 37 years!

Anyone who knows me really well will know that the music of Rush has been one of the great musical loves of my life. I can't count the thousands of hours of activity that have been accompanied by Rush on vinlyl or tape, then on CD and now on mp3 or iPod. I'm a Rush fan or a fanboy or a geek or a nerd. Accordingly, I was delighted and excited to hear of another tour, the Time Machine tour, which they were to bring to the UK in May 2011. And so, accompanied by the same Pete who had inadvertently introduced me to Rush in the first place, and who has been to at least two other Rush gigs with me before, I went to see them in the Glasgow SECC (Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre) two weeks ago tonight, some 30 years since I first saw them.

The big excitement of the Time Machine tour for UK fans was that the band was going to play in its entirety, for the first time in the UK, their 1981 "Moving Pictures" album, one of my favourites and their biggest selling album in the U.S., and which remains the band's most popular and commercially successful studio recording to date. Here's a picture of the cover of my programme for the 1981 tour for "Moving Pictures" (in which shows, ironically, they didn't play the whole album). That was my first Rush gig (and Pete's) (at the Ingliston Showground in Edinburgh) and generated a splendid piece of rock memorabilia for both of us (see below).

My old programme from the Rush 1981 "Moving Pictures" tour

My much-treasured autographed page from the Moving Pictures tour programme, from the days when the band used to wheel themselves out to meet fans after the gig - and all three of the guys, not just Geddy and Alex who do most of the meet and greet (and interview) stuff these days. In fact, Pete and I were waiting for our lift home (Pete's Dad maybe?) outside the Ingliston venue. Most of the crowd had gone home, when suddenly a roadie sauntered over and said that the band were just coming out to a table and three chairs behind us to sign autographs. Blimey, talk about the right place and right time... I don't think I washed the hand that shook the hands for about a week! Hey, I was 16 - this was an important event! It has to be said, they don't look much like this anymore, but I've changed in 30 years too...

With the advent of camera phones, there is now a much greater opportunity to capture some great personal memories of gigs, so here is a selection of my photos from the Glasgow show on May 14th. No real spoilers here from me for anyone still to see the tour elsewhere on the planet. If you want a detailed set list or a review, look elsewhere!

Successful rock bands on tour need big trucks - here, Rush are using Stage Truck (did you notice what they did with that name there? Very clever!)

But a big show like the one that Rush puts on needs a lot more than one truck - ten, in fact, which needed a stitched-together panorama to capture then all!

A selection of the signs in the SECC that night - strobe lighting, smoke and pyrotechnics? I damn well hope so - that's what I paid my money for!

The guys from the band (as they were in 1976 at least) - this was a mini-highlight of the night for me - these three uber-fans must have had a couple of hundred photos taken - they were in the front block of the stalls - I hope they had a great night and I do hope the band spotted them!

Here's the original look from the 2112 album in 1976 - at least we now know from where George Lucas pinched the costume ideas for Luke Skywalker...

The audiences at Rush gigs these days feature a lot of heads like mine...

An eight-armed lighting rig, each arm multiply jointed and able to move independently, and each arm covered in lights - very impressive!

And a great video screen put to great, often split-image, effect. In this case, a little Geddy Lee and a big Geddy Lee!

During "Working Them Angels" from "Snakes and Arrows"

Little Geddy Lee and big Alex Lifeson with a mandolin close-up, again during "Working Them Angels"

The guys in the band...

The Professor, Neil Peart during his drum solo - the great overhead camera shows his three different drum kits on a rotating base, includin th electronic kit he's added in recent years. And was that a wee bit of film of Gene Krupa that I saw during the video show for the drum solo?

We're jammin'...

A bit of "2112" - what else could it be?

A great night - probably the best show I've seen Rush put on over the 30 years I've been going to see them! If you have the chance, go and catch the Time Machine tour - you won't regret it...

Signs I like #21 ( or Signs that made me smirk #1)

2011-05-28T13:00:00.001+01:00

So, what I want to know is, can I have a discount, please, on account of your terrible spelling? Thanks.

Signs I like #20

2011-05-25T11:32:00.001+01:00

Spotted in Longniddry at 20 miles in the Edinburgh marathon on Sunday. Eclectic and maybe profound, but I'm not sure...

Stormy Scotland: addendum

2011-05-25T11:15:00.002+01:00

Yet more damage in Stirling from Monday's storm, including uprooted and snapped trees on King's Park golf course, and a significant incident involving a mature lime tree uprooted and falling on a house in the King's Park area. A lovely original Victorian cast iron railing bent like it was plastic, its wall demolished, a bay window smashed and guttering torn off, but it could have been worse...

Stormy Scotland

2011-05-24T01:35:00.000+01:00

Today saw relatively unprecedented weather conditions for Scotland in May. Usually a month of increasing temperatures, sunny weather and generally altogether pleasant conditions, May 2011 has seen unsettled, wet weather, despite a glorious and hot few weeks in April. Today, as forecast by the Met Office, Scotland has been subject to an intense area of low pressure, bringing howling, raging south-westerly winds and torrential driving rain. The Met Office ‘s amber-rated Weather warning predicted winds gusting up to 80 miles per hour. In fact, In Glen Ogle, 25 miles or so north-west of Stirling, on the road to Crianlarich and Oban, a gust speed of 100 mph was recorded. Such high winds in late Spring or Summer are bad news as regards damage to trees and gardens. Deciduous trees are carrying their full complement of new leaves by this time of year, increasing the resistance to high winds and greatly increasing, therefore, the strain placed on branches. And so, not surprisingly, there were many examples of broken branches and even uprooted trees here in Stirling today. I was on holiday and took a walk around this afternoon recording the scene.

Everywhere was littered with small branches, leaves, even some major tree branches. Many trees were also pushed over by extreme gusts.

This poplar tree fell over behind me with a soft crash while I was sheltering from an extreme gust, waiting until I judged it safe to walk under a big lime tree that had already lost some big branches.

Our lime trees are, in one way, a bit like Australia’s “drop gums”, a species of eucalyptus, the River redgum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) – this drops branches or even falls over when under stress (and kills and injures the unwary!). Lime trees are not as unstable as this but are prone to dropping fairly large limbs in high winds. I was very wary walking into town today down an avenue of mature lime trees, for obvious reasons, given the size of the logs that were raining down! Thrashing violently, the lime trees looked more like whomping willows in the extreme winds today...

Up on King’s Park Golf Course, trees were yanked out of the ground all over the place:

I like the way the root plate, the outline of the branches and Stirling Castle in the background mirror each other’s shape in this case.

Our garden didn’t escape the damage either – here are the sad remains of half of our 150 year-old pear tree which snapped clean off in the wind.

And our neighbour’s old (50 years old?), highly prolific bramley apple tree was simply pushed right over. So, no more free bramleys for us.

As the evening wears on, the wind is dropping (thankfully!) - I'm up late completing this and it is now almost silent outside (0130 hours). I’d like to round of this wee report with one of my favourite poems, the highly appropriate “Wind” by Ted Hughes. My High School English teacher, Brian Christopher, left me with an abiding love of Ted Hughes’ poetry, particularly his nature poems (surprise surprise), for which I’ll always be grateful. The images conjured by this poem would be familiar to many today in Scotland (and Northern Ireland, I gather):

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,

Winds stampeding the fields under the window

Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky

The hills had new places, and wind wielded

Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,

Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as

The coal-house door. Once I looked up -

Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes

The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,

At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;

The wind flung a magpie away and a black-

Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note

That any second would shatter it. Now deep

In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip

Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,

And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,

Seeing the window tremble to come in,

Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Ted Hughes

Wild food from the Park: April

2011-05-23T23:00:00.002+01:00

Oh, lovely May is a horrible month for a blogger – so much life to live and so little time free to write about it! Here I am half way through May and still writing about April’s wild food experience. I’ve been busy though, accumulating topics and stories to write about!

So, April brought our fourth “wild food from the park” opportunity. March had offered us an improvement in the diversity of our “park-based” diet, with the appearance of nettles, but April, oh April was a joy – buds burst, leaves unfurled, flowers flowered and the sun, the weeks of wonderful hot sunshine warmed up the vegetation and made it smell all green! We were stuck for choice about what to make from all the newly-appeared edible plants, so we made it all! And, joy of joys, in April, following a hunch about the likely location of some suitable habitat, we tracked down a big patch of ramsons or wild garlic growing in a secret, secluded and difficult-to-reach corner of the Park.

First up, in early May, we made some nettle and potato soup. We based it on Roger Phillip’s recipe from his “Wild Food” book. Here are our raw ingredients:

People keep asking me if I’m worried about eating wild leaves that “dogs could have peed on” – as if the vegetables they buy in supermarkets don’t grow in fields, exposed to the unobserved attentions of wildlife. So, here, for the benefit of those folk, is a picture of the nettles being washed – yes, we do wash everything first!

The onions were chopped and fried in Scottish Borders rapeseed oil, the potatoes chopped and added, then the nettles with home-made chicken stock, all simmered gently:

then liquidised:

We served the soup with some wild garlic bread, i.e. garlic bread made with a wild garlic butter

Wild garlic butter

– a handful of wild garlic leaves in the food processor with a pack of butter and blended until completely mixed. Garlic bread was then made in the usual manner, but with this butter mix. Delicious!

A week or so later, yet more edible plant species had popped up in the Park. Our first really ambitious attempt of the year was a wild Spring greens soufflé, based on a recipe in the book “Seaweed and eat it” by Fiona Houston and Xa Milne. This was also the first soufflé I have ever made (real men do eat soufflé, you know!). We picked a range of edible plants: nettles, white dead nettles (Lamium album), cleavers, ground elder, dandelion and chickweed. From the following photo, you can see that the nettles and ground elder formed the bulk of the veggies.

The leaves were washed, steamed until tender, fried with onion, and then mixed in with beaten egg yolks, before folding in stiff, whipped egg whites. All of that was poured into a greased casserole dish, parmesan grated on top and then the lot was baked in the oven. Coached by the lovely O, I resisted the urge to open the oven to see the souffle rise. And so it rose. We also picked some wild sorrel and sliced that up, along with wild garlic, to add to a chicken and rice salad, which we garnished with some edible, vinegary, clover-type leaves of wood sorrel. We served the two together, rice salad and soufflé.

Wild Spring Greens souffle preparation

Chicken, rice and wild leaf salad, with wood sorrell garnish

Another delicious wild food combo! The soufflé was dense, very green and actually tasted like it was based around interesting-tasting spinach.

Ground elder, a key element of the soufflé, is an under-rated food plant, despised by gardeners as an über-invasive weed in gardens that is incredibly difficult to eradicate. It was, however, apparently introduced into Britain by the Romans (what did the Romans ever do for us, eh?) and is really quite tasty and nutritious if eaten while young and tender and treated like spinach.

The final wild food delight of the month was a wild garlic and walnut pesto, prepared by bunging a large handful of King’s Park wild garlic leaves into the food processor with a handful of walnuts, a big glug of extra virgin olive oil and some grated parmesan, all whizzed to a fine blend and with some salt and black pepper to taste:

We’ve eaten it a couple of time on pasta and it is much more interesting than boring old shop-bought basil pesto. It is preserved in the fridge, submerged under olive oil in its jar.

Signs I like #19

2011-05-21T19:41:00.001+01:00

Runners take precedence over cars. The New World Order, at least for a few hours... Good luck to everyone running the Edinburgh Marathon tomorrow!

Hello Emperor Haile Selassie, I'm pleased to meet you (kind of)!

2011-05-04T22:40:00.000+01:00

Ever since I first came across the idea of small-world networks, I've been fascinated by them and how they relate to our everyday life. If you've heard of small world networks, it's almost certainly in the context of the "six degrees of separation" hypothesis, the the idea that everyone is on average approximately six connections away from any other person on the planet. There's an excellent wikipedia article about it if you want to learn more.

Six degrees of separation

It seems implausible and perhaps counter to common sense but, on testing through various social networks, researchers have found that, so long as reference is to the average number of connections, something between 5 and 7 is quite normal (the average separation for all users of Facebook, for example, is 5.73 degrees, with a maximum chain length of 12).

Another example that was popular (in a geeky kind of way anyway) back when t'internet was young, was what Nature magazine quaintly described as a "collaboration graph of film actors", but which the rest of the world heard of as the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, in which (presumably movie-savvy) players try to connect any individual actor to Kevin Bacon as quickly as possible and in as few links as possible. Again, it is well-described elsewhere.

Small world network ideas have been adopted quite widely as a means of describing and exploring systems in physics, neurobiology, geology and for technological networks. But it is connections between people through social networks and billions of individual relationships that I find most interesting. Even exploring Facebook friends' lists of their friends can identify some surprisingly short chains of connections. Through two friends lists, I was able to identify with only two or at most three degrees of separation almost all of the most well-known BBC News presenters and foreign correspondents. Now, through them, presumably is a 3 or 4 degree chain to most of our leading politicians and many of those in other countries. Fascinating stuff!

I thought I'd try a wee experiment for which an opportunity presented itself recently. One of my dog-walking friends makes frequent extended business trips to various parts of Africa and was to make his first visit to Ethiopia. I challenged him to find and shake hands with someone who had shaken hands with the Emperor Haile Selassie, "Ethiopia's regent from 1916 to 1930 and Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. The heir to a dynasty that traced its origins to the 13th century, and from there by tradition back to King Solomon and Queen Makeda, Empress of Axum, known in the Abrahamic tradition as the Queen of Sheba". This was quite a challenge as Selassie died in 1975 and so, presumably, the number of surviving people who have met him shrinks, if not daily, then at least annually. In fact, it would be an interesting exercise to try in Britain, where Haile Selassie was in exile (in Bath) between 1936 and 1941, while Ethiopia was occupied by Italian forces. He also made at least one state visit (in 1954) and apparently travelled widely, meeting many British citizens. There was an interesting run of articles on the late John Peel's much-missed Saturday morning Radio4 show, "Home Truths", where people recounted their tales of encountering the Emperor!

I met my friend this morning, recently returned from Ethiopia. He shook my hand, having tracked down and shaken the hand of an Ethiopian man in his 70s who was the warden/custodian of an Imperial palace built by an earlier (presumably then Abyssinian) Emperor and who claimed to have shaken the hand of Emperor Haile Selassie. From me to Emperor Haile Selassie with three degrees of separation. Hello, Emperor Haile Selassie, I'm pleased to meet you (kind of)!

Emperor Haile Selassie

Ellavision: Ella vs. the devilish Swingball

2011-04-30T19:50:00.000+01:00

This blog's by-line does promise to include Ella the Wonder Dog and I haven't really done that before, so here's a little taster from the Ellavision channel...

Our finest getting to grips, quite quickly really, with pendulums and circular motion... and a tennis ball of course. That's what tennis balls are for - getting to grips with.

Signs I like #18

2011-04-30T11:54:00.001+01:00

I've been looking at this old sign on the end of a row of houses and shops for years of visits to York (it's near the Monk Bar entrance to the old city). Imagine having a giant advert for laxatives painted on the outside wall of your house. Puts the rest of the world into some perspective...

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Is this the most spurious attempt to gain a commercial advantage from the Royal Wedding? Probably...

2011-04-29T12:31:00.000+01:00

The title of the post says it all...

Reflections on Royal Wedding day in York

2011-04-29T12:09:00.000+01:00

It.s not often my blog has the chance to cover something topical! We took a wee stroll through central York early this morning and looked for signs of preparation for England's celebration for that wedding in London today. Back in Scotland, enthusiasm for the royal wedding has been at strongest muted and, at worst, invisible (no street party licences applied for in Glasgow, the "second city of the empire", for example). Coming to York, we expected perhaps some signs of a greater enthusiasm. So, by way of ethnographic recording (my only interest here is to document, not to judge nor to celebrate!) , here are our observations from early morning York today.

A cul-de-sac awaiting a party later today

A cheap and cheerful display in a travel agent's

"One likes the royal corgi in the window of White Stuff!"

A fine range of second-hand royal event mugs in a charity shop window. They must live for these opportunities to shift stockpiled royal stock in charity shops...

My favourite image from this morning - somehow the addition of flag bunting looks cheery!

Even (or pehaps especially) the wonderful
Betty's of York is in on the act today!

Union Jack bunting being disentangled and hung for a party in this central York square later on. Get yourself down to the Three Cranes for a knees-up later on?

Signs I like #17

2011-04-29T10:37:00.001+01:00

Imagine having this as your address! It would also be a good description for some of the places I've worked...

Happy birthday, Mr Audubon

2011-04-26T12:10:00.000+01:00

John James Audubon (April 26, 1785 – January 27, 1851) was a French-American ornithologist, naturalist, hunter and, most famously nowadays, a painter of birds. He painted, catalogued, and described the birds of North America in a manner far superior to any artist before him. Wikipedia provides a short and interesting summary of his life here.

To celebrate his 226th birthday (not a particularly notable or special anniversary, is it?), Google has produced a Google doodle for its home page today, based on his wonderful paintings (a well done to Google - a gold star for effort and good taste!):

Not sure of the copyright of this - the compilation may be (C) Google,

but may be out of copyright as his paintings are well outside of copyright age!

I used one of Audobon's paintings of the now-extinct North American Passenger Pigeon to illustrate an earlier post, here. I grew up very aware of his special talent and wonderful body of work, as Dad had and still has some modern reproductions of some of Audubon's gorgeous bird paintings. Much of Audubon's work can be viewed and explored online now, as U.S. museums and collections progressively put their collections (or images from them) onto online systems. For example, the Houghton Library at Harvard University has a John James Audubon Collection which can be seen online. An introduction to the collection is provided here, and the details and a view of each painting or drawing can be seen here.

Here's a lovely painting of North American blue jays to whet your appetite (Jono - keep your eyes open for these in Canada!):

Or go and google for images by Audubon and enjoy the feast of visual riches...

Signs of the times: Autumn #12

2011-04-17T23:33:00.000+01:00

More comparisons between the British countryside of today and that from 1959-1961 in the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird "What to look for..." series of books.

“That day was their first use

in the whole time since

his father’s death, eleven years

before; the mute swan

and the whooper, avocet

and teal, tufted duck and lapwing,

the pochard and redshank;

pushed the eyepieces closer

and apart, that occluded,

needed to be refocused;

shoveller duck and egret,

marsh harrier, bunting.”

Ian Pople, “His Father’s Binoculars”

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)

Autumn Picture 12
We have a busy waterside scene here, with a flock of the tiny duck, teal, “dibbling in the mud” in the foreground on a lake shore, with some shoveler ducks hunkered down between them and a roosting flock of lapwings or peewits. A single goldeneye drake (described in the book’s text as a “she” – wrong! Female goldeneyes are brown and white) is swimming close to shore in the top left, near some swimming black-headed gulls. A heron stands on one leg, overlooking the scene.

We’ve looked at a couple of these species previously, the heron in some detail here, and the peewit similarly here! Of the others in the picture, one that I was fascinated by as a child was definitely the shoveler duck (Latin name: Anas clypeata), one of our more unusual looking bird species. As my old AA Book of British Birds says: “The enormous heavy bill that gives the shoveler its name is specially adapted for feeding on the surface of lakes and ponds”. Paddling through the shallows, it dabbles in the water or thin mud, sieving out small plants and animals, hence its membership of the group of duck species known as “dabbling ducks”.

I am not a regular bird-watcher these days (other than daily naked-eye ornithology every day when dog walking), although I was a bit obsessed as a child, and haven’t seen a shoveler for years, and it is not a numerous species in Britain, especially in Scotland; but I remember vividly the first one I saw, at Aberlady Bay Nature Reserve. I must have been eight or nine years old and I was thrilled! The British Trust for Ornithology doesn’t maintain an entry for this duck in the Species Trends information that has been my main source of up-to-date information on the status and long-term success of bird species for this series of seasonal posts (come on BTO guys, what's a blogger supposed to do?). Its BirdFacts information does, however, give its status in the UK as a migrant breeding bird, and a passage/ winter visitor. It is unable to provide a population trend, although a summer population of 1000 to 1500 pairs is cited, along with a winter population of some 15,000 individuals. In “The Birds of the Western Palearctic”, it is suggested that, although there might have been some contraction of the range in Britain, there might actually be a slowly increasing British population.

The little flock of teal (Anas crecca) in the foreground represent a typical group of this, Britain’s smallest native duck, and another dabbling duck species. The teal is also one of the most aerobatic of our duck species, small flocks performing dramatic and rapid manoeuvres in flight outwith the breeding season. The explosive, near-vertical rising of a group of disturbed teal also leads to the collective name for the species, namely “a spring of teal”. In clay pigeon shooting (which I’ve never tried), I believe that there is a challenging dispersal of vertically-fired clay pigeons called “rising teal”, supposed to simulate this behaviour. Teal typically inhabit small pools, ponds, lagoons, slow-flowing rivers an streams, and complexes of wetland habitats. They prefer habitats where there is some form of dense vegetation cover, and they will sometimes nest away from water in gorse or bracken. The male teal is a strikingly beautiful bird, with a vivid metallic green eye patch on a chestnut coloured head, and both male and female bids have a green patch on the upper wing. In this Autumn picture, however, the birds are in “partial plumage” having moulted after their breeding season, and so they look a little more plain than normal.

Again, the BTO doesn’t maintain a Bird Trends page for this species on its website, so I must rely on other sources for information of the status and trend of the British teal population. “Birds of the Wester Palearctic” cites a marked contraction in the range of teal in Britain and Ireland, with a conservative estimate of a 20% decline in population over the 20 years preceding the book’s publication (1998), although no causes are suggested for this. A British breeding population of 1500-2600 pairs was estimated between 1988 and 1991, although huge numbers of teal pour into Britain in winter from mainland Europe and Iceland (the BTO quotes a winter population of 192,000 in the period 1994-1990!), to over winter here in our (usually!) milder winter conditions.

The other species of duck in the picture is a diving duck species, the goldeneye (Bucephala clangula), represented by a single male swimming, its white cheek clearly visible (it actually does have quite a bright golden eye but it is too far away to see this clearly. Practically all the goldeneye seen in Britain are here as winter visitors between September and April. While the summer population of (presumably) breeding birds here is around 200 pairs, the wintering population between 1994 and 1999 is around 25,000 individuals. Seen on lakes, lochs and rivers in winter, they are also seen on the coast when migrating. Here in Stirling, I see goldeneye every winter on the tidal river Forth, effectively the upper estuary of the Forth although it is largely freshwater moving up and down as it piles up against the rising tide further downstream. Generally, they are solitary males, easily identifiable from a long way off on account of the white eye patch and bright eye. They are tremendously good divers, and can travel quite a long way underwater.

The first reliable record of goldeneye breeding in Britain was in Inverness-shire in 1970 (BTO). Its status as a breeding species in Scotland has been enhanced by their colonisation of nestboxes for ducks installed as part of conservation programme in Strathspey. So, the summer population of this species has certainly increased in the 50 years since these books were published (partly as a result of human intervention), and “The Birds of the Western Palearctic” indicates that most populations in Europe are stable or increasing. A good point on which to end for now!

Melrose Abbey

2011-04-17T22:52:00.001+01:00

We stayed overnight for a birthday party a couple of weekends ago in the little town of Melrose in the Scottish Borders. I lived in the area many years ago for 16 months for my first proper job after University, but as a callow and shallow young man obsessed with hill running and finding, and then keeping, a girlfriend, I never really got to know the area properly. Shame really, as it is a wonderful area, steeped in history and natural wonders, not least of which is the mighty River Tweed which flows through Melrose. And not far from the Tweed lies the ancient Melrose Abbey. we were up early after the party and, on a beautiful sunny Sunday morning, took the opportunity to be among the first visitors of the day to the Abbey.

Managed and maintained from further degradation by Historic Scotland, the Abbey remains one of the most impressive mediaeval religious buildings in Scotland, one of several mediaeval Abbeys in the eastern Borders area. I don't intend to provide a full commentary on the place (you can find that yourselves online or, better, by visiting the Abbey in person, which I heartily recommend) and I'm sure my blogging chum Al has either done it already over at his blog crivens jings and help ma boab (which I also heartily recommend) or, if not, would do a much better job than me anyway. So, all I wanted to do was share a couple of panoramic views taken on a fabulously sunny morning and stitched together on my Dell net book using MS Live Picture Gallery's simple photo stitching tool. I'm quite pleased with these, especially the second one, considering that I took them on my phone's camera.

PS Click on the photos for a better, expanded look.

Myriad celebrations! 10,000 hits and rising...

2011-04-17T18:18:00.004+01:00

Sometime around 1pm British Summer Time today, the Flag Counter on this blog registered the 10,000th viewing of the blog. I was working in the garden and missed the actual moment but managed to take a screenshot shortly afterwards:

Thank you to whoever that mystery reader was, but thanks also to everyone who has taken the time to read, comment or follow my blog since I started in early 2010. It is very gratifying for me when people read and enjoy what I write. Apologies if it has been a bit quiet through April as I have been very busy at home and at work.

So, 10,000! A big number. I'd never looked up a number on Wikipedia before, but I did for 10,000... and what a wealth of wonderful trivia there is there for the number 10,000. The word "myriad" in the title of this post comes from the Greek numerical prefix "myria", meaning ten thousand.

A myriagon is a polygon with 10,000 sides. I imagine that, to the naked eye, a myriagon the size of a tennis ball would be virtually indistinguishable from a perfect sphere as each of the 10,000 sides must be tiny. In fact, I did a quick calculation and I think that each face would on average be about 4x4 mm in size [Addendum: actually, I recalculated that and the dimples would be even smaller, at about 1.1 - 1.2 mm across], although what the actual shape would be I have no idea), so it would probably look like a sphere with tiny (itny!) dimples. That might be the first and last time you ever read a blog post about a myriagon.

Other good things about 10,000? In anatomy, each neuron in the human brain is estimated to connect to 10,000 others.

The ancient Greek general Xenophon led an army of 10,000 mercenaries against the Persians in 401 B.C., immortalised in his book Anabasis ("The Expedition" or "The March Up Country"), his account of the whole expedition against the Persians and his journey home.

In language, the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese phrase "live for ten thousand years" was used to bless emperors in East Asia.

(I like this one) In literature, Man'yōshū (万葉集 Man'yōshū, Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves) is the oldest existing, and most highly revered, collection of Japanese poetry.

In athletics, 10,000 metres, 10 kilometres, 10 km, or 10K (6.2 miles) is the final standard track event in a long-distance track event. My own personal best time for a 10 km race road race is 35 minutes and 8 seconds, a time I will almost certainly never run again!

And finally, to round off a celebration of 10,000, here's a video from 10,000 Maniacs, for whose singer Natalie Merchant, I used to have a bit of a soft spot in my youth. As I haven't listened to them for years, I wanted to post this and convince myself that it has aged well:

Here's looking forward to 20,000 hits!

Signs I like #16 (and a medal to boot!)

2011-04-17T09:52:00.003+01:00

I loved the enthusiasm of this advert for free swimming provision in Glasgow for the over 60s and the very young. This was in Glasgow's fantastic Tollcross pool where I swam 5 kilometres yesterday for the Swimathon 2011. I managed 1 hour 36 minutes, a big personal best and managed to raise a wee bit of money for Marie Cure Cancer Care who organise the Swimathon every year. We were each even given a wonderful chunky medal.

Stirling Triathlon Club provided most of the participants and had a lovely supportive squad at the end our lane when my swimming pal Tracey L and I finished our 200th length. So, I was already smiling and full of endorphins (happy chemicals) from my swim when I walked out and saw this sign. If that was a political party manifesto, I'd vote for it!

Wild food from the Park - March

2011-03-30T22:19:00.001+01:00

Our wild food project proceeds into its third month, as March saw generally rising temperatures and lengthening hours of daylight encouraging the first green shoots of growth of plants that will form future meals. This month, though, most of those are still too small to be worth harvesting. Young nettles, however, are a wild foodie's Spring delight! And they abound in some areas of Stirling's King's Park, especially in patches enriched by the rotting down of regular disposal of grass cuttings from the golf course's greens or tees.

Much loved by the caterpillars of red admiral butterflies, young nettle tops are also a bit of a seasonal delicacy for us, but must be used before the nettles grow too big as they toughen and roughen as they age. So, wearing gloves, we picked a couple of ounces of young nettles (they still sting, even when newly grown!), rinsed them and then made a nettle rissoto, with Italian arborio rice and some home-made stock from a free-range turkey. The nettles break up gradually as the stock is stirred in a ladle-full at a time, so the green colour escapes a little and the nettles end up as little fragments (they don't sting once cooked!). We added, at the end, some cooked frozen peas, a generous grating of parmesan and some ground black pepper.

I'm sure nettles will feature again in the next couple of months, while they remain edible.

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Signs of the times: Autumn #11

2011-03-29T23:26:00.002+01:00

More comparisons between the British countryside of today and that from 1959-1961 in the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird "What to look for..." series of books.

“We’re for the laird’s wuid,

Geordie speels the tree,

Shakes aa the conkers
Doun on me.”

J. K. Annand (1908-1993) (from: "Conkers", in Bairn Rhymes, Mercat Press, 1999)

(Copyright:Ladybird Books)

Autumn Picture 11
Wow – what a festival of chestnut colours on show here – conkers from the horse-chestnut, with a beautiful little chestnut-coloured weasel, And still more autumnal fungi, with some purple-coloured wood blewit mushrooms (yet another delicious edible species).

The horse-chestnut is not a native tree in Britain, but is widespread and naturalised. We’ve looked at it previously here and now we reach the fruiting stage, with the basis for the world’s finest nut-based children’s gladiatorial game, conkers, scattered all over the ground! Just in case you've never played... look here! This is what I spent a considerable percentage of my childhood Autumns doing, collecting for and preparing conkers for. I was never any good though but I still remember the excitement at finding a big conker - would this be THE ONE? The one that is unbreakable, unbeatable and can be retired a champion of many smashed conkers? I suspect officialdom's risk aversion masquerading as supposed health and safety concerns will have stolen the joy of conker fights from many of our playgrounds. But happy to be proved wrong about that!

Wood blewits (Lepista nuda) can be found in woodlands, hedgerows and gardens. They are up there among the best of our edible mushrooms. As with previous pictures showing fungi, I’m unable to comment on how well this species has done in the past few decades, as we have no reliable long-term data on trends in populations of fungi like the wood blewit.There is more interest now, though, in understanding what is happening to our fungi and you can pick up a flavour (no pun intended) of the enthusiasm for fungal recording, conservation and gastronomy on this newish fungi site for Scotland, Scottish Fungi. I recommend that you take a look!

The weasel (Mustela nivalis) is Britain’s smallest member of the mustelid family of carnivorous mammals (otters, badgers, polecats, martins, stoats, etc). Small but fierce! Like other members of the mustelid family, weasels are highly active hunters, with sharp teeth and keen senses of sight, hearing and smell, even seeing well in the dark. Weasels will live anywhere that there is suitable cover and prey, from coastal dunes to woods and uplands. Most of their diet consists of voles and mice and weasels eat prey equivalent to about a third of their body weight EACH DAY! They will also take over and live in the burrow of a prey item, lining it with the fur of their prey.

In terms of the status of weasels in Britain over the past 50 or so years, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee’s review of British mammals indicates a possible British population of about 450,000, of which around 106,000 are in Scotland. At the start of the 20th century, weasels were extremely common In England, Scotland and Wales. The outbreak of myxomatosis in rabbits in the early 1950s led to increased vegetation growth and a great abundance of small rodents in 1957-1958. This led to a record catch of weasels on game estates (I refer you here back to my rant about the downer we seem to have on predatory mammals in Britian - see the second half of that post). There has been a progressive decline in the number of weasels killed since 1961, most marked in East Anglia and the East Midlands but barely noticeable in the south-west and Scotland. The gradual recovery of the stoat from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s was accompanied by a substantial decline in the number of weasels, perhaps due to competition. Since the mid-1970s, however, the number of stoats killed by gamekeepers has declined again, but there has been no apparent increase in the number of weasels killed.

Signs of the times: Autumn #10

2011-03-22T23:04:00.001Z

More comparisons between the British countryside of today and that from 1959-1961 in the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird "What to look for..." series of books.

"Wha saw the tattie howkers?

Wha saw them ga'an awa'?

Wha saw the tattie howkers,

Comin' ower the Barrow Raw?

Some o' them had bits an' stockins'

Some o' them had nane of aw

Some o' them had a wee bit whisky

Just to keep the cald awa.'"

Traditional Kilwinning song, to the tune of The 42nd

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)

Autumn Picture 10
This another picture that shows me how much some things have changed in 50 years. It shows a fairly manual harvesting process for a potato crop, with a little grey Massey Ferguson tractor with a rotary “spinner” which unearths the potatoes so that they can be lifted by hand by pickers with baskets (women in headscarves and, again, men in flat caps!), a back-breaking task. At the top of the picture, a larch tree is covered in golden cones. To the right, a hawthorn hedge has a vine of black bryony, with its bright red berries, entwined through it, and a flock of lapwings (peewits) is circling in the far distance.

I looked at hawthorn previously, here, and the larch tree here. Lapwings or peewits have also featured in a couple of posts previously, here, and in this picture we see them exhibiting their winter flocking behaviour, something I saw often when growing up in East Lothian. The long-term decline in the lapwing population has probably resulted in fewer people seeing this wonderful sight in the 50 years since these books were published.

The black bryony (Tamus communis) is a native vine species, found in southern and central England, and in most of Wales. The New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora says that is found: “mostly on neutral to calcareous, well-drained soils, particularly those overlying chalk and limestone, but also on clay. It can be luxuriant in hedgerows, woodland edges and along paths and in waste land”. It grows from a large tuber and the text in the book speculates on how good the tuber may be to eat! Richard Mabey, in Flora Britannica, however, points out that it is actually the only member of the yam family to grow in Britain, and is a poisonous irritant (so not a good candidate for our wild food project!). The New Atlas indicates that there has been no change in the overall distribution of black bryony since the previous Atlas was published in 1962.

The image of the potato harvesters reminds me of the itinerant Irish workers, in the early 1970’s, who came to our village in East Lothian each Autumn to work in the potato harvest. Backbreaking work indeed, not helped by the squalid little “bothy” they lived in on the edge of the village (On the Mair road) for the duration of the harvest, which sat empty for the rest of the year. It must have been damp and I am certain it didn’t have running water or plumbed toilets. On the farm we lived on, potato harvesters would occasionally come to the door asking us to fill a large water bottle. We used to collect leftover tatties from the fields too, once the harvest was over, something we’ve done more recently around Stirling (shame to let them rot on the ground...). Even in the 1970’s, however, the potato harvesting equipment employed around us was much more advanced than the relatively primitive mechanised digger shown here!

Signs of the times: Autumn #9

2011-03-22T22:10:00.000Z

More comparisons between the British countryside of today and that from 1959-1961 in the paintings of Charles Tunnicliffe in the Ladybird "What to look for..." series of books.

“Their mass rotted off them flake by flake

Till the thick stalk stuck like a murderer's stake,

Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high

Infecting the winds that wander by.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (Cancelled stanza from: “The Sensitive Plant”. Omitted by Mary Shelley from all editions from 1839 onwards, and thought to refer to the shaggy ink cap mushroom)

(Copyright: Ladybird Books)

Autumn Picture 9
This picture illustrates yet again that Autumn is the best time of year for finding the fruiting bodies of fungi, i.e. mushrooms and toadstools. Here, we see a mouse, specifically a long-tailed field mouse (as it is called in the accompanying text) now known more commonly as a wood mouse, running past some shaggy ink cap mushrooms, towards a clump of Autumn crocuses, or meadow saffron. At the top of the picture, we also see some fallen sycamore leaves dotted with the black spots of tar spot fungus (more fungi!).

The wood mouse (Latin name: Apodemus sylvatica) is a native, and very common, rodent species widespread on mainland Britain and some of the islands (although usually accidentally introduced to those). I have some living behind my compost bin in the garden. Sometimes, when I lift the lid to pour the next load of green waste in, there is a panicked flurry of activity as one or two wood mice flee up and over the edge of the bin to safety. According to the Joint Nature Conservation Committee’s Review of British Mammals, this mouse species is “highly adaptable and inhabit[s] most habitats if they are no too wet, including woodland, arable land, ungrazed grassland, heather, blanket bog, sand dunes, rocky mountain summits and vegetated parts of urban areas”. The JNCC reports a possible UK population of about 38 million wood mice, of which maybe 15 million live in Scotland, and the UK population is thought to be quite stable (other than for significant and normal annual peaks and troughs related to reproduction, predation on young, as well as the effects of the grain harvest on populations in arable areas, and mortality from extreme winters). The JNNC also reports from one study that: “A reduction in the use of herbicides, e.g. to produce 'conservation headlands' around the edges of arable fields, leads to an increase in the abundance of both floral and invertebrate food supplies and hence to increased populations of wood mice”, so the development of agri-environment schemes through such means are good for wood mice, as well as all the species of birds and mammals that feed upon them.

The shaggy ink cap or Lawyer’s Wig mushroom (Coprinus comatus), which grows in grassland, verges and rubbish tips, is described in the book in the following terms: “no living things, except maggots and insects, are rash enough to eat the ink-cap toadstool”. Which is a bit odd really, as it is a perfectly edible mushroom , so long as you eat it when the gills are still white. In fact, in that state, my Mushroom Guide (Roger Phillips) describes it as good to eat. As it ages, however, the gills go black and begin to drip inky black liquid. That process can happen very quickly, over the course of a few hours.

The Autumn crocus (Crocus nudiflorus), also described in the picture’s accompanying text as “meadow saffron”, is not a native species in the UK. The New Atlas of the British and Irish Flora describes it as “naturalised in meadows, pastures, amenity grasslands and on roadsides. It spreads vegetatively by means of rhizomes.” It was introduced in the Middle Ages apparently, and in his Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey collates information that suggests that the present scattered shotgun pattern of its distribution is strongly linked to its introduction by certain orders of monks and by Knights Templar, who all grew it to provide themselves with a cheap form of saffron. In Scotland, it is only recorded from a couple of unconnected locations so this picture could, just conceivably, be Scottish as everything else in it can also be found here!

Steampunk stylee comes to Stirling

2011-03-22T20:23:00.001Z

Spotted in The Junk Rooms in Stirling (a new cafe), this rather Steampunk-style menu holder. I think it would fit rather nicely in the Matt Smith Dr Who-era TARDIS.

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