Icelandic sagas, new bike (maybe) and dramatic sky

While out cycling last week, I listened to an In Our Time podcast about Icelandic Sagas and it proved to be a very interesting and educational programme. The panel discussed the various types of sagas, including family sagas and adventure sagas. the sagas  cover events in Iceland in the 10th and 11th centuries and were written in the 13th and 14th centuries. It’s probable – but there’s no definitive proof, that the written sagas were based on stories handed down in the oral tradition. If you want to read some of the sagas, then the Icelandic Saga Database is an excellent source. An added interest for me is that my former colleague at Charles Sturt University John Kennedy is an expert on the sagas. His book on translating the sagas is recognised as an authoritative work.

My existing bike – a 10 year old Giant OCR and while it is still a comfortable ride, it needs a new back wheel at some point. As I was walking to Belhaven Bikes my local bikeshop in Dunbar to collect my bike after another repair, I started thinking “New wheel? Mmm – how about new bike?”. I now have some catalogues for new bikes and I am particularly interested in the Forme Longcliffe 1.0 which has been very well reviewed. Now, given that I am a pretty average cyclist, it probably doesn’t matter whether I choose this bike or a similar one, but I’ve been doing my homework online and the Forme is very well reviewed. One aspect of reading reviews of bikes is that the reviews can often get very technical and pass my understanding of bike technology but I can usually get enough pertinent information. Watch this space.

May has been mainly cold, windy and sunless in this part of the world so far, so it was encouraging to have one sunny day on Friday, when we took our son, daughter in law and two grandchildren, who are visiting from Dubai, to Belhaven beach. There followed a dramatic and colourful sky in the evening. So I went out to the back of the house and took the photos below. The tide was going out and the sky was reflected in the sea at some points. I particularly like the mix of blues, pinks and reds.

Evening sky looking towards Dunbar harbour

 

Evening sky looking towards Dunbar harbour

 

Evening sky looking towards Dunbar harbour

Tim Wootton, country diary and Librivox

A new exhibition at the splendid SOC gallery in Aberlady features the work of wild life artist Tim Wootton. The exhibition shows a real craftsman at work, with the larger paintings providing a detailed view of birds in particular, and Tim’s depiction of the colours of the birds are excellent. The environment in which the birds live is always shown in detail and provide the viewer with another range of colours and shapes. If you can’t get to the exhibition, then check out Tim’s website. I contacted Tim and he very kindly sent me the two photos below. The first one of the eider ducks really appeals to me as  I watch eider through my scope at home. Note the great contrast in colour between the show-off males and the more reserved (in colour) females. The second photo shows a completely different landscape and I particularly like the representation of the tree with its curving limbs and branches.

Staying on a wildlife theme, I am a regular reader of the Guardian which appears in my letter box Monday to Saturday. Having the Guardian there each morning is one of the ways in which I judge that the world is a) civilised and b) in reasonable shape. On the few occasions that the paper is late or has gone astray (e.g. new paper boy/girl), I know for a fact that the world is not right. One excellent feature of the Guardian is its Country Diary which features observations by a range of writers across the UK. This week’s entry by Paul Evans struck me as very poetic in its descriptions of bees at Wenlock Edge. Evans refers to the bees as “bombastic majesties” and writes ” The carder bumblebee hovered at the mouths of flowering currants with the precision of a docking satellite, a furry ginger blur against carmine pink flowers”. The phrase “a docking satellite” is startling and the rest of the article gives the reader an excellent feel for the environment, as well as the writer’s enthusiasm for his topic.

Recently, a good friend introduced me to Libribvox. The website states that “LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net”. You can listen to audi0books, short stories or plays on your laptop or you can download books or plays. I have been listening to Hedda Gabler while riding my bike. One of the added value aspects of Librivox plays is that you get the stage directions as well as the voices of the characters in the plays e.g. it tells you that Hedda Gabler has just entered the room or that Hedda Gabler looks aghast. A great new resource for travellers, walkers, bike riders – and everyone else.

Eider cascade by Tim Wootton

Winter sun by Tim Wootton

Craning day, cycle route and Ben Waters, and Bert’s Bar

This morning, I walked along to Dunbar Harbour to see the biannual craning day. In the spring, the yachts are craned into the harbour and in the autumn, they are craned out, as the high tides in winter could cause damage. Organised by Dunbar Sailing Club, craning is an elaborate process of fixing straps to the yacht, rapidly painting over the gap left by the supports, holding the yacht with ropes at either end, and steering the yacht over the harbour. Photos 1-3 below show the spectacle.

Out on my bike yesterday, for a 27 mile (44K) ride and a fairly hilly route after the first 5 miles, to Cockburnspath (pronounced Coburnspath or Co’path), up the Abbey St Bathans road, up the hill to Oldhamstocks, then another hill as you leave the hamlet, on to Innerwick and then up a big hill to The Brunt farm, then (thankfully) down Starvation Brae (Photo 4) and back home against a cold east wind. On the bike, I was listening to, amongst others, Ben Waters’ Boogie 4 Stu. Waters is a fabulous piano player in the boogie woogie style and he features heavily on the alblum. There are also tracks featuring Mick Jagger singing Bob Dylan’s Watching the river flow and the final track is Ian Stewart (to whom the album is a tribute) sings a great version of Bring it on home.

On Tuesday, my pal Roger and I had our monthly meet up and we’ve been trying out food and beer in a range of pubs in Edinburgh. We started in Teuchters for lunch and some excellent Timothy Taylor Landlord beer. Across the road is Bert’s Bar where we had the tasty April Theses. This bar has several exhibits relating to the law on the walls, as well as account books from the pub dating back to the 1940s, so it’s an unusual bar and well worth a visit, although I’d avoid days when there are rugby internationals in Edinburgh.

Craning day in Dunbar harbour

The yacht is strapped up and ready to lift.

 

Craning day in Dunbar harbour

Swinging the yacht over the harbourside

Craning day in Dunbar harbour

Lowering the yacht into the water

 

Looking down Starvation Brae

Table 9, snowy run and daffoldils

When my wife and I were in Dubai, we were treated to a gourmet experience at the Table 9 restaurant. Table 9 is run by 2 young chefs who used to work for the (in)famous chef Gordon Ramsay. It’s a very pleasant restaurant, not at all pretentious, and the service is excellent, but it is the intensity of the flavours in the food that stands out. I had the taster menu and swapped the veal for scallops, plum and seaweed, which sounds an odd mixture, but the scallops were done to perfection and came on a bed of fine seaweed, on a base of intense plum sauce. While the scallops were excellent, for me the key highlights were the lobster dish – lobster, coconut and mango (see 1st photo – sent to me by Table 9) . I talked to Nick Alvis, one of the chefs after the meal and he agreed to send me a photo and a description of a couple of the dishes. The lobster dish is “Lobster marinated in chip shop curry sauce. Coated in roasted coconut with fresh mango and coconut cream puree.” All I can say is that they must have found a fabulous chip shop. The flavours in this dish hit you one after the other. An excellent culinary and artistic touch is the mango – what you think might be pasta in the photo. The other highlight for me was the lamb – “Lamb, smoked aubergine, scratchings, tomato: Smoked aubergine + raisin puree, plum tomato chutney (vinegar, sugar, shallots), large leaf spinach, lamb belly scratchings and lamb dressing (roasting juices, vinaigrette, lamb fat and lamb stock) – a range of mouth watering tastes all in one dish. This is a treat and a fairly expensive i.e. one to save up for.

Back home and from 31 degrees and wall to wall sunshine in Dubai, back to 2 degrees and a biting NE wind and snow. I took my wife Val up the hills for her morning run – slightly more sheltered up the hills. Snow here in the morning melted but a few inches up the hills (see 2nd photo), so a muddy and snowy run (see photo 3). Too cold for me to go on my bike, so I went to the gym. I do this only in desperation as I find the gym very confining and even with downloaded Guardian short stories and Thinking Allowed to distract me, it’s always a long slog.

Back at the house, with camera still in hand, I photographed some of the small daffodils which are now out in my garden (see photo 4). There’s poem I like by Alicia Ostriker called “Daffodils” and she writes ” I’m photographing the yellow daffodils/ With their outstretched arms and ruffled cups”. Daffodils always remind me of open mouthed choirboys with ruffs on their necks. They always have their heads slightly bowed, and appear to me to be diffident flowers, not wishing to be showy, despite their obvious beauty.

Lobster, coconut, mango dish from Table 9

Country lane and snow

Running in the snow and mud

Mini daffodils

Weekly photo challenge – action

Here are my photos for this week’s photo challenge - check out the others on Sue’s website.

Our son Jonathan in action at the Dunbar 10 Mile Race

Dunbar 10 Mile Race

Diving gannets off Dunbar east beach

Bradley Wiggins – winner of Olympic time trial 2012

Bradley Wiggins – olympic gold medallist

Pennyfarthing in Tauranga, NZ

Fergusson Park, Tauranga New Zealand

Gulls’ feeding frenzy at beach near my house

Fountains in Dubai

Fountains near the Burj Khalifa, Dubai

Ama Ata Aidoo story, February and spring flowers

Excellent reading and listening to fiction this week. Now that my sciatica has eased off, I’m back on my bike. yesterday’s cycle was slow because of my 3 week lay off but also because of the muddy conditions of the farm tracks along which I was cycling. On the bike ride, I listened to a very poignant short story by Ama Ata Aidoo, the Ghanaian writer whose work I had not come across. It was one of the Guardian short story podcasts and was read by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie whose novel Half of a Yellow Sun I greatly admired. The story is on the face of it a simple tale of a mother, her son and her estranged husband. The narrator (or observer as Adichie prefers to call her) is the village teacher. The story becomes more complex and more powerful as it unfolds. It’s one of the best stories I’ve heard for a long time – No Sweetness Here.

February in Scotland is always a mixed month – hints of spring and then a cold blast. Driving rain from the NE one day and warm (well relatively) sunshine the next. Ted Hughes’ poem February 17th represents the grim side of the month, while Carol Ann Duffy’s Chaucer’s Valentine represents the happier side. February is also the shortest month and for many people, this means that they get paid their monthly salary much quicker – a relief after what can be a long January.

The spring flowers have now started to appear in gardens and woods around here. The snowdrops – see 1st photo – are now in profusion in woods around Dunbar. More generally, there is the annual Snowdrop Festival in Scotland. Each year in this blog, I’ve quoted from Alice Oswald’s beautifully illustrated book of poems Weeds and Wild Flowers  – Snowdrop “Yes, she’s no more now than a drop of snow/ on a green stem – her name is now her calling”. Polyanthus and primroses and now showing through – see 2nd photo. Oswald writes of the primrose “bonny and blossoming / in a yellow dress that needs no fastening”. The daffodils are rising fast but no flowers as yet in my garden – watch this space.

Snowdrops

Polyanthus

 

Japanese translation, lifting and planting bulbs and Boogie Woogie!

A surprise email this week from Kazu Sunaga in Japan. Kazu translated my 1996 book Teaching information skills in schools (See first photo below). We met up again last year at the IASL Conference in Kingston Jamaica. My publishers had donated a copy of my new book Improving students’ web use and information literacy and at the conference dinner, I was asked to present it to a lucky winner. I asked the audience whose birthday was closest to mine – and it turned out to be Kaza Sunaga. There were some cries of “Fix!” when I told them who he was, but he was a genuine winner. So something to look forward to next year.

In my garden, the seasons change and one lot of bulbs – gladioli (see 2nd and 3rd photos below) comes out and other bulbs – daffodils, crocus and tulips go in. So some are lifted and dried for next year and the next lot are planted. This always reminds me of the novel and film Being There in which a simple gardener becomes a top political advisor with comments on gardening which are misinterpreted as insightful analysis e.g. of the economy – an excellent satire. Planting for next spring – I put the daffodils in one layer in a tub, then more compost, then the smaller bulbs, then more compost and finally spring flowers such as pansies, violas and polyanthus, so you  get a varied display. It’s a very satisfying experience.

Out on my bike this week, I listened (safely with the volume not too high) to The A, B,C, D of Boogie Woogie recorded in France and featuring top pianist Ben Waters and Rolling Stone Charlie Watts. If you like a mixture of blues, R&B and Boogie Woogie, then this is for you. It may not improve your cycling but it will give you a good feeling about life.

Japanese translation

European crime fiction, back on the mountain bike, and autumn leaves and seas

For those of you who enjoy crime fiction, as I do, there’s a wee treat available for us at the moment. It comes in two versions. Firstly, a downloadable (worldwide) series on Radio 4 - don’t do what I did and download the episodes from the bottom – just do the Omnibus download. Secondly, a very good article by Mark Lawson in The Guardian at the weekend, which looks at crime fiction ” From Holmes and Poirot to Montalbano and the rise of Scandi-noir”. So, if you’ve restricted your crime fiction to North America e.g. George Pelecanos (one of my favourites) or Australia e.g. Peter Temple (another favourite) then widen your horizons.

Now that autumn is nearly gone, it’s back on the mountain bike on a Saturday morning at 8am for me and my cycling mates. Gone is the light road bike on which you can glide up hills and zip along the flat road. Mountain bikes are heavier and sturdier, and this is what you need when you go offroad. As I’ve said before, here in Scotland, we have open access to farm tracks, hillsides and routes created recently for windfarms. When you go off road, you expect to go slower and to feel the drag of grass, earth, stone and mud under your wheels, which are twice the size of your road bike. Of course, you get stuck in a rutted farm track and your bike slides one way and you go the other. You get back on again and cycle – if you can. Great stuff.

The autumn leaves are now at their peak of dazzling colour in this part of the world. Of course, it won’t last. A hard frost and a stiff wind will strip the trees of the last leaves which desperately hang on and display their dying splendour. The first photo below shows Edinburgh on a misty autumn day, with the trees desperately trying to lift the gloom. the 2nd photo was taken on a sunnier day at Gifford, a village about 13 miles (21K) from Dunbar. We also get high tides at this time of the year and there is nothing better than to watch the sparkling white waves rush to the shore and contrast with the very blue sea. The 3rd photo shows the high tide taken from the back of our house. More on my Photopeach page - use full screen at bottom right for best effect. (Winterfield promenade is on the other side of Dunbar from our house. The balustrade is a recent addition to our house).

A misty autumn day in Edinburgh

Autumn in Gifford

High tide in Dunbar

Florence, Italian art in the 1930s and cheeky squirrel

Our first visit to Florence and it did not disappoint. The cathedral (see 1st photo) and baptistry (2nd photo) are very impressive. When you think that the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building, is about twice the size of the surrounding buildings, then you get a sense of how immense the cathedral in Florence must have seemed when it was built, as it must have dwarfed even some of the large churches which existed at the time. The outside stonework and decoration are excellent examples of design and craftsmanship and the internal sculptures are examples of artistry of a very high quality. You have to remind yourself sometimes that the sculptures you see in Florence (e.g. photo 3) are the work of a sculptor with a small hammer and chisel. One of the exhibitions we went to see in Florence was Italian Art in the 1930s. It was a fascinating show of different kinds of art at that time – some were reminiscent of the medieval frescoes, others were similar to classic paintings, and some represented the Fascist movement in Italy, with strong, sharp lines showing a powerful image.

 Back home and on the bike, cycling up towards Traprain Law, a grey squirrel appeared at the side of the road. It was well away from any trees, so may just have been in the hedgerow. It looked back at me, ran ahead, stopped and looked back again. As I threatened to catch up with it – I cycled harder – it looked back again and then disappeared into the hedge. I heard a strange sound – what does a squirrel’s laugh sound like?

Florence sculpture

Italy: Pisa – and back on my bike

No blog last week as I was on holiday in Italy for a week. It’s short hop from Edinburgh to Pisa – 2.5 hour flight which is very short if you’re used to travelling on flights to Dubai  or Australia. So, a week of culture, good food and wine and mid 20s temperatures (12-13 here now). In terms of food, my wife and I did our homework. It’s too easy to go to cities across the world and go to city centre restaurants which are easy to find. In general, I find that they are expensive and often lack quality i.e. unless you are prepared to spend big money. Searching for “the best pasta in Pisa” we found the excellent Spaghetteria Alle Bandierine and even better, the Osteria dei Cavalieri. Both were restaurants off the beaten track and you could easily walk past these restaurants, as there were no flashy signs and no pushy waiters outside – just good service, good food (i.e. no pizzas) and a choice of Tuscan wine e.g. Trebbiano. The best known feature of Pisa is of course, the Torre Pendente or Leaning Tower. What I had not realised is that the tower is part of a stunning architectural quartet (see 1st photo) consisting of the Cathedral, the Baptistery and the Monumental Cemetery in the Piazza de Miracoli. The tower certainly does lean (see 2nd photo) but it was reinforced not long after it was built.

So today, as they say in Scotland, it was back “tae auld claes and parritch” (old clothes and porridge) and back on my bike. I chose a fairly flat route and did 50K. All the walking done on holiday must have done some good as my legs were strong for the most part. Autumn is definitely here now – the leaves are falling and the potato fields have been harvested and are now being ploughed. I saw a number of ploughs making chocolate cake of the fields, with flocks of seagulls following the ploughs. Although it’s sad to see the end of the summer fields of barley, wheat and potatoes, a glinting newly ploughed field is a sight for sore eyes.

Piazza de Miracoli, Pisa

Torre Pendente/ Leaning Tower