eye_of_a_cat

and I'd really rather not be, since my books look like they've bred and colonised the study while I was away. I missed most of the excitement here last week ('here' isn't too far from Gleneagles) - some anarchists smashed some things, some roads got blocked, and the train station was closed for a while. The highlight was a panicking woman in the town centre shouting "Get inside! They're coming from KFC and they're destroying everything in their path!", which everyone found quite funny.

I went home via Glasgow and did some touristy things with a couple of friends. There aren't really many touristy things to do in Glasgow, especially if you're all broke and none of you can drive, but we saw the Cathedral and the Museum of Religious Art (which has Salvador Dali's 'Christ of St. John of the Cross' - it isn't the same to see it when it's not a huge picture at the other side of a big empty space, but you can imagine), and then wandered round shops designed for the rich and trendy to try on a series of increasingly amusing hats. The Wetherspoons in George Square was giving away free cups of coffee, too.

Home feels like going back to the Shire (which would make this either Rivendell or Mordor, depending on how many deadlines I have). It's sleepy and summery and green, and full of people who don't entirely approve of all this going-off-to-have-adventures nonsense.




Mostly it's farming country - the black-and-white blobs here are cows, and my horse once had a panicky tantrum on the road where I took this picture because a two-day-old lamb was toddling towards her. (This was a horse that feared nothing and once tried to bite a Land Rover. Weird.) The first farmers here arrived about five thousand years ago, and lived on the hills because most of the land was wet and boggy. There's a Neolithic burial chamber (from about 3000 BC) nearer the top of that hill in the background. The hill is called the Cloud, and it's supposed to look like a sleeping cat at twilight, but nobody I know has ever been able to see it.



The black-and-white blob in this one is my dog Tyke, who doesn't much like standing still for photos. The canal was built during the Industrial Revolution for transporting coal and, um, industrial things; this bridge is big enough for a horse towing the barge to pass underneath, but a lot of them are quite low, so eighteenth-century people got through them by lying on their backs on the top of the barge and 'walking' through with their feet on the underside of the arch. Now the canals are just for anglers, cyclists, the occasional teenager on horseback claiming it's perfectly okay to be there since the towpath was built for horses in the first place (ahem), and non-horse-drawn barges.



Milestones like this always tell you how far you are away from where you've come, instead of how close you are to where you're going. (The lettering says 'From Marple 21 Miles.') I used to walk to work along this towpath every day - there's a very angry swan that lives along this stretch of the canal ("Feed me! Now!"), and usually hundreds of butterflies sunning themselves on the path that fly up when you get close, so that you're walking through a cloud of them. Also, lots of blackberries.



The barge on the right is probably people on holiday, although some local people who leave near the canal have their own barges. My friend's parents let us go out on theirs to celebrate the end of their GCSE exams; we were allowed to take turns driving (steering? piloting? whatever), but I crashed it into some bulrushes after about two minutes.



The dog was getting quite impatient with this photo-taking business by now (she's hurrying me up here). One of my favourite things about this part of the world is how the light's usually dappled through trees like this, so you're almost in the shade most of the time.



That's a viaduct that still carries trains. The valley was carved out by a tiny stream that still runs through the bottom of it, and serves as an overflow for the canal. It's always freezing cold and makes great paddling in hot weather. There are otters living in it further upstream, which my friend's brother discovered when he came down here fishing; he was reeling in a big carp when an otter swam up, grabbed the fish off his hook, and swam away.