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

Weekly photo challenge – orange

Here are my entries for this week’s challenge. Check out Sue’s website for much, much more. I was surprised how many photos I had that has orange in them.

Freshly landed prawns at Dunbar harbour

Boat in the orange sunset at Coral Bay in Cyprus

Orange centred polyanthus

Dunbar life boat

Butterfly with orange stripes

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

Weekly photo challenge – parade

Here are my suggestions for the word “parade” in Sue’s weekly challenge - see her website for more.

Pipe band contest Dunbar

Drummers at Dunbar pipe band contest

Swans on parade – well, kind of ….

Swans on parade – dress rehearsal!

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

Sunshine and snow, air travel and Stag’s Leap

A delay inthe blog as we were in Dubai for a week, visiting our son Stuart, daughter in law Catherine and 15 month old twin granddaughters Abigail and Lola, who are now energetic bundles of fun. One of my Australian colleagues said that you love your children and fall in love with your grandchildren, and of course, as a soppy old grampa, I agree. We left Dunbar in snow showers and 2 degrees. In Dubai, it was 28-31 degrees and wall to wall sunshine. Back home today – it’s still grey, cold and the occasional blizzard. It’s an amazing contrast to go within 24 hours from feeling the bite of the sun at 31 degrees, to feeling the different bite of the strong east wind on your slightly suntanned face. The flight to Dubai from the UK is between 7 hours and 7.5 hours, depending on direction – so a relatively short flight for those of us used to travelling to Australia every year. When you think about air travel, it’s a very odd experience. On the one hand, it’s a private experience, as we all have our own seats and can choose whether or not to talk to others. Also, we all do different things during a flight e.g. some people watch film after film, others read more and watch less, while others – to me the strangest of all travellers – do nothing except sleep and stare into the middle distance. The one thing about long distance travelling I noticed, is that your taste level in relation to films can drop dramatically. When you get to that stage when you are too tired to read but not tired enough to sleep, you will watch films which you would never go the cinema to see or watch on TV. On the other hand, this is a very public experience, similar to being in a theatre audience. You are addressed collectively by the crew and organised collectively to board, and keep seated for take off and landing. I am half way through reading Sharon Olds’ award winning book of poems Stag’s Leap. It’s the story her divorce and is a collection of very frank, honest, touching and often heart rending poems. If this sounds like a dreary set of poems, it’s not. One judge commented “Her journey from grief to healing is so beautifully executed”. Yes, there is pain and grief, but there is also humour and, despite her loss (her husband left her for another woman), the poet values what was rich in the marriage, although some readers may think that she shows too much tolerance for her ex. There is some beautiful turns of phrase in the book and I recommend it highly.

Google Glass, dreich day and flowers

In The Guardian which hangs expectantly in my letter box each morning when I get up, a recent article on Google Glass, the latest product in wearable computing. There’s a picture of Google’s Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google wearing what looks like a pair of glasses with the lenses removed, and a little camera attachment added. The “glasses” can take photos or video and are voice controlled “OK glass, take a picture” is one of the examples cited in the article. Now, this sounds like my sort of technology. On this blog, I’ve commented more than once that, while out on my bike, if I could only blink my eye and take a photo, I’d get great shots, like the other day, out with my mate John, and a buzzard flew just over John’s head. I’d never get this shot with my SLR camera or my phone camera. So, potentially a great new toy for us? The concerns in the article are about privacy and the author gives an example of a Glass wearer in a cafe, taking a video of the people there – without their knowledge of permission. Not only does this breach privacy but the fact that Google will retain all the footage taken by the Glass, is also potentially worrying e.g. what will Google do with all the video/photos? Of course, this could happen with a mobile phone in the same cafe but the argument is that we are more likely to see people videoing us in the cafe, than we are to notice the Glass, which will be developed to be part of normal glasses and indistinguishable from them. Technology and privacy is not a new problem, of course, but it would be good if some guarantees on privacy were forthcoming from Google.

In Dunbar today, it’s very dull, raining on and off, and there’s  a strong north easterly wind coming off the sea. It’s what we call a dreich (pronunciation) day in Scotland. The sea is a deep metallic grey and the sky is a a mix of dull white in parts, with lumps of dark grey cloud whizzing by. The wind will cut your face if you face east for long enough. There’s a biggish tide rolling in and an endless succession of white waves are fighting each other to get to the shore first. My grandfather used to say “Aye, it’s a day for the fire” i.e. sitting around a coal fire. Having said that, my wife went for a run this morning and I’m going cycling tomorrow when the forecast is the same, only a stronger wind. Photos 1 and 2 show the scene from the back of our house.

As Sunday is Mother’s Day in the UK, flowers arrived yesterday from our son, daughter in law and grandchildren in Dubai. Photos 3 and 4 show the flowers as a whole and a close up of one of the roses. If you look closely at the rose, could that be a Google Glass filming you from the middle of the flower?

Dreich day in Dunbar

 

Sea on a wild day

Flowers and reflection

 

Rose and Google Glass?

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

 

Peter Temple, Yotam Ottolenghi recipe and sandstone close up

I’ve just finished reading Peter Temple’s White Dog, a crime novel set in Melbourne. Temple is worth reading at any time and if you have not come across any of his books, seek them out. This is a tale of murder and deception and it is told within the context of the lawyer Jack Irish’s life, including his involvement with race horses, traditional furniture making, s well as his love life. The dialogue is superb – sharp and witty and while there are some scary violent episodes, there also laconic passages in this complex tale. Each Saturday, in my Guardian Magazine I read recipes by Yotam Ottolenghi. This week, he excelled himself with a chicken recipe. It is a dish with chicken thighs, onion, carrots, apples and pears. The link shows YO’s recipe and in making it, I used parsnips instead of small turnips and whole grain mustard instead of Dijon. You need to keep your wits about you as you are cooking the elements for short periods e.g. 4 minutes and you need to have all your vegetables and fruit chopped up before you start. The result is a very tasty, creamy, fruity dish with vegetables cooked to nice texture i.e. not too soft. Out for a walk yesterday on a cold but very bright February day here in Dunbar, where the strong north wind nipped your face and large breakers hurtled toward the beach at high tide. My walk was inland and I stopped to take close up photos of a long sandstone walk at the edge of town. The fits photo shows a close up of a wind worn piece of sandstone. I like this photos as it could be of a sandstone landscape with gullies and caves. I also like the spider’s web and the way your eye is drawn towards the lines and circles in the stone. The 2nd photo shows how the wall is constructed, with large stones on the outside and small stones in the inside. You can also how the wall stretches along the field. I took the 3rd photo as I was passing a field with 2 horses and one came up and put its face over the fence. There’s a notice saying not to feed the horses, so I wasn’t tempted, despite the doleful look.

Stone wall close up

Stone wall structure

Doleful horse