Stravaig + TheRetreat#3

Posted on 7th December 2025 by The Chronicler

“There’s no such thing as an intelligent accident”.

Blue sky, dry tarmac, under-construction road and cycle route. Been here before, only it was a differing hemisphere. That time it was a pot hole and a surveyor’s pole, this time it’s a drop curb and an access to a field. Bike and cyclist part company as the tyre glances off a minuscule drop kerb; The Navigator is sprawled at the side of the road. She knows instantly that this cycle tour of the great rivers of France is over.

Our guardian angel might initially have been absent without leave but she does turn up quickly. A car stops and the driver offers to call for an ambulance; having a local who can accurately say where we are is useful. A siren wails in the distance and I’m watching to flag them in…. of course it slides in behind me. Initial investigations commence and it soon becomes apparent that she’ll be taken off for admission to the nearest hospital. Leaving me in potential limbo, two bikes with all our travelling wealth, cards, cash, documents. There’s a tool hire business across the road, so I run over with the first bike, hoping that the blue flashing light will garner enough sympathy to find a place to leave them. I really don’t care, I’m going to be in that ambulance when it leaves.

That guardian angel is suitably chastised, and is looking now to garner back some brownie points. Which is how we collect a new life experience: to be blue-lit and two-toned to the nearest hospital for triage. It’s also how I find out that a French postcode is all numerical, as I fill out the first of many pieces of information, searching the keypad of the ambulance’s computer for the capitalised EH of a UK post code. Trivialities.

Some hours later, dosed up on morphine and Valium, pain not diminished, it’s decided that she’s to be transferred to another hospital, for a visit with their trauma team. This time by private ambulance for which the card pay terminal materialises, on the end of a disembodied arm, from out of the front seat. Different country, different system.

Hospital Two: somewhere in Lyon, (thank goodness for app. mapping). I produce the various documents and prop a counter, conversing through a narrow grill as the receptionist photocopies every single page of The Navigator’s passport. An expanded 54-page passport. Then passes out a slip of paper, the request to pay a fee. I had anticipated a charge; it just wasn’t for €6,000. Something has been lost in translation, or at least in the unusual way of writing a monetary sum. (On that previous occasion we’d been divested of 3,000,000 pesos, so this didn’t seem so bad). The pay terminal offers relief and clarification: €60.

Time starts to lose all meaning sitting in a hospital waiting area. The hands on the wall-mounted clock rotate relentlessly, yet have meaningless significance. We’re being held in a lost world under the aegis of the god Stasis.

Eventually the trauma team come and collect her, wheeled away on a gurney, clutching a drip bag of morphine to find out what will happen next. Quarter of an hour later she walks back to the waiting area under her own volition, smiling the blessed relief of pain freedom. That and lungfuls of gaseous nitrous oxide, aka laughing gas. The shoulder dislocation has been re-located. There’s also the ominous advice that the head of the humerus is fractured and might require surgery…. “when you get home”.

Our earnest endeavours to avoid air travel are being challenged for a third time. Once for a pandemic and now twice for failing body parts. It’s becoming a habit, one that, I’d rather not get accustomed to. But when illness intervenes we reach for the credit card and blow the cost, most of which won’t even be insurance recoverable. We just want to get home… quickly.

Bike boxes created out of cardboard, sourced from the local cycle shop. The owner initially asks after the rider, then with more concern, the bike. Flight tickets and taxis scheduled, we start the trek for home.

An arm in a sling is a wondrous passport for queue jumping, legitimately sitting in the pensioner’s seat and eliciting ‘club class’ concessions. Not. At the departure gate, we’re awaiting the announcement that those with children and persons who need more time to board should come forward now. It would be yet another new experience. It doesn’t happen. Were consigned to the scrum and the rammy. However we do get a sympathetic extra helping of walnut cake with the inflight sandwich and coffee.

There is an account, possibly apocryphal, of a college lecturer who charged their sports science students with finding the nations with the lowest incidence of physical exercise. The work is completed and the answer is in: The Netherlands. The lecturer suspecting this to be dubious, knowing that their nationals have a six month longevity increase over the western mean, checks their methodology. One of the questionnaires asked “do you take exercise?”, to which the majority answer had been in the negative. A ‘lost in translation’ moment, a confusion between the cycle as exercise and the cycle as transport.

So it’s no surprise that this Dutch predilection for confusing exercise and transport is also writ large at the airport. There’s 85 departure gates between arrival and departure, a 27 minute walk has been predicted, nae: mandated, (Usian Bolt did the maths), only it omits the coagulation of irate passengers at passport control and the fact that we have less than an hour to complete it. That and the further facts that we’re sat at the rear of the plane, are ten minutes late and the fire doors inexplicably close and lock on the sky-bridge, with ourselves on the wrong side. It’s a neat excuse, but we’re still one of those highly annoying passengers who have to be called, the ones you have to assume are more interested in perusing the delights of retail opportunities at the duty-free emporium. We make the flight with under a minute to spare. Seems that we might just be able to get home quickly.

We do, in no small part due to the kindness of friends… a car is waiting at the airport’s pick-up to take us home.

Picture credits: A re-located shoulder with a bit of photo’ bombing. Top right is a ‘koru’, a Māori icon representing a furled fern leaf and the message of ‘new beginnings’. Often worn by divorcees, but whose presence is fully justifiable… for it’s made of cow bone and was carved two decades ago by The Navigator in NZ.

Stravaig + TheStair

Posted on 4th December 2025 by The Chronicler

Thoughts and photographs on a theme of treads, steps and stairs.

The stairwell. That cold, forgotten space at the heart of a tenement building. Invariably a space designed to carry persons to an upper level, to distribute them to further accommodations, and into which little aesthetic consideration is given. An architectural backwater, forgotten and despised, a utilitarian buildscape.

Too often the recipient of those cheapest of floor coverings; the brown, disintegrating rubber-backed carpet or a cracked stretch of linoleum in the jaded colours of a previous generation. The stair treads worn down to bare stone, or to the ribbed patina of pitch pine. A commons that too often is not considered worthy of upkeep, of maintenance, nor regarded as any part of a home. This, despite the stairwell being the first element that any visitor encounters. First impressions… lasting memory.

Climb away up to the top floor of the open stairwell, lean over and feel the tugging grip of the vertigo plunge. The retreating twist of the banister rail and the spiralling, radiating spokes of step treads. Fractal images, pleasingly symmetrical shapes.

Castles, cathedrals and the Scot’s baronial tower-house are often the best places to encounter the turnpike stair, or so I had assumed. Tight, enclosed spaces where the visual aspect is restricted to a single half turn, but the imaginative view knows that a stumble will result in a long dizzying tumble, to be spat like a rat from a pipe at the bottom.

We’ve rented a studio on the third floor of an old French townhouse that has one such turnpike stair. Up which we decide to take our bicycles. There is an unsecured recess at the bottom, the ‘under the stairs’ cubby hole, beloved be interior designers for conversion to wine caves, broom closets and H. Potter bedrooms. The first dilemma is to decide which side to carry the bike on. The turns are tight, so bicycle to the outside where there is space but leaves you teetering on minuscule steps. (Castle tour guides recommend that you imagine each step as a slice of pizza, and walk on the crust). Or on the inside where they scrape the wall and there’s no rope handrail to haul on. To the third floor without anywhere to stop for a breather. I comment to the landlord on the ‘interesting’ access arrangement, whilst silently imaging the average North American visitor. He reads my mind, diplomatically saying how his heart sinks on seeing how they fill out his doorway with their gargantuan…. suitcases.

However all this is but a preamble and an opportunity as an ex-vegetable box delivery operative to observe, I’m well placed to anthropologise . Student-land common entry doors that will barely open due to the paper drift of brochures for a certain pizza chain and the scrap-land of chained up bikes draped in shrouds of cobwebs, keys lost, owners long graduated, still repaying the student loan. Or the ‘wally* close’, a floor and wainscoting of geometrically arranged glazed tiles in the ‘lobby’, the common access that today is guarded by the erroneously termed ‘buzz-entry’ security system. Or the entrance that had a massive gilded mirror on one wall, reflecting on a similarly proportioned painting of Skye’s suitable dark and gloomy Loch Coruisk. I always felt compelled to brush my feet for that delivery.

Once we could have been accused of the kettle calling the pot black. Our own lobby entrance was decorated to a mid 20th century aesthetic: chic brown corded carpet, institutional brown wall paint, a ceiling of generic stuccoed plaster, water-stained by leaking pipes, all weeping an aura of ‘old-house’. Then came a less than complimentary review and I’m stung into action. Weymouth pine to clad the existing plyboard cladding that in itself was a cheap repair for over two centuries wear and tear to the sandstone turnpike stair. The top floor, what once would have been the tobacconist’s store and a maid’s room was serviced with steps in the more economical pitch pine. Renovating these turnpike stairs was a long term project that had a neat degree of challenge and a practical way of learning how this style of stairs were constructed. In essence both stair and wall were constructed as one, no computer aided, machined flight of stairs to be crane winched into position in the Georgian era.

You can probably tell a lot about the ownership status of a tenement block by the state of their close… a pejorative view, pandering to stereotypes, but if I was a short-term student tenant being fleeced of by a rapacious landlord based in another hemisphere, why would I bother to tidy up the pizza delivery fliers? Or were the neighbours collecting their own junk mail and dumping it, in revenge for some perceived misdemeanour? So much to conjugate on as I hauled a veg box to yet another top floor flat.

More truthfully, these witterings are but an excuse for displaying a few of the all too many pictures from an album entitled: ‘Spiral +TheTurnpikes’.

PostScript#1: The vast majority of turnpike stairs scroll clockwise (as viewed from below), because the vast majority of the population are right handed. The reason is perfectly obvious when you consider that historically, turnpikes were conceived in the age of conflict and the sword. The English, your King, those Neighbours have breached the outer walls and are set on gaining entry to your home with murderous intention. As a right handed defender it’s much easier to wield that sword as you have more space than your attacker who you have to hope is similarly fisted. The problem only arises if he has an arquebus or is a sword wielding ‘Ker’ coming up your stairwell. The Scottish eastern marches, once the near-lawless lands of the borders had one family who were predominantly left handed, the Kers, whose castle at Cessford has a turnpike stairs scrolling anti-clockwise. From whenst we get the derogatory phrase to be ‘Kerie’ fisted’, which even into the late fifties in the Scottish education system, was considered deviant and required correction. Deviant: has the same root word as ‘devil’, and he was left-handed.

*PostScript#2: ‘Wally’, a grand Scots word, more applicable to the west of Scotland, meaning pale or white. It gives rise to the word for false teeth and terms like peelie-wally: to be under the weather, ie ,nae weel, or ‘wally-dugs’: those mass produced white figurine china dogs beloved by Victorians that today sell for a fiver in any charity shop.

Stravaig + TheNightDawn

Posted on 1st December 2025 by The Chronicler

It’s the deep night. Off in the distance a vehicle’s horn sounds intermittently; repeatedly intermittently. It can’t be the fishmonger, so it’s either somebody locked out, or the mortmen are collecting the plague bodies. The expectorating oldie in the seniors’ housing that’s part of the hotel complex across the courtyard must stand by an open window to clear his nicotine-encrusted lungs; so quiet is the night that he might be in the room next door. The ecclesiastical campanile on the horizon that chimes a solitary strike for a canonical hour. Matins or Lauds, I don’t check the clock. The silence has heft, it carries texture, yet we’re rooming in the middle of the old town. I find myself listening for the swash of wet tyres on limestone cobbles to get some indication as to whether it’s started to rain and is it a morning to be wearing waterproofs. A tent doesn’t have this restriction, neither did the garret with its skylight in Caen. I miss those meteorological predictions. Only the night still stays solid, silent.

Maybe I dozed, for time seems to have moved on.

The various elements of a crepuscular dawn climb slow out of the night, like a tuning orchestra, a series of discordant notes slowly coagulating around the instructing band leader’s chord of ‘C’, slowly solidifying into one harmonious note. Stars perish with the growing luminescence. Light seeps into the recesses of a chimney stack, a monochromatic window morphs from a blank wall, a grey scale of detail emerges.

Only for the crashing crescendo of sunrise to rip across the city.

Stravaig + TheLaFermé

Posted on 15th November 2025 by The Chronicler

Last May we rolled off of the ferry into ‘ferméFrance’ and the quintessential French holiday season. This year we rode out of Caen to discover yet another holiday event.

There’d been the premonitions; the city for the last few days had had its fair share of elderly grandparents in loco parentis, being chaperoned as they do their grand-kid duty. It’s school half-term, a two week event, that in nor’east Scotland is still referred to as the ‘tattie-holiday’ and here as ‘toussaint’. I’ve yet to see any evidence of child labour in the apple orchards. The plots are vacant, the tractor-trailer waiting expectantly for a harvest, the windfalls being munched by cattle. I’m at a loss as to where all the cider and calvados actually comes from.

We’d booked a room in a village that appeared to be well serviced with eating options, both restaurants and a source of road food for the following day. Only it’s a Monday so the restaurants won’t open, neither will the baker who’s off for ‘vacances de la Toussaint’, five others that we could have frequented were similarly indisposed. T’would appear that we’re getting well practiced in the habits of ‘day-one’ cycling mishaps, despite our best endeavours. Eventually the evening meal is sourced by backtracking to the previous village and dining on two filled baguettes and a bottle of red.

In Angers we were recommended to visit a museum of modern tapestry. It’s open year-round, with an exception for five days; with unerring expertise we catch one of those five. Another day, another town; when we arrive to find ‘la place’ dug up. It will always elicit a smile simply because we’ve found so many plazas, squares, places under remodelling programmes, in so many places. Now I look to see as to why the ‘Heras’ fence, the heaped excavations, the tree truck garlands. Inevitably it will be a date related commemoration: Donegal550, Caen1000, Glasgow850, Junín a donation or inducement from an extractive industry.

The Armistice remembrance is forthcoming, so we make a note of possible closures. Forewarned is forearmed. In Tours everything is shuttered for the morning, so we assume that will be the norm and make appropriate arrangements. In Nevers they do it differently, it’s afternoon closures only. It takes training, skill and courage to be this proficient.

Mildly confused, they are mere inconveniences in comparison to the ‘le grand ferméFrance’. That has to be the vehicular closed road.

Two weeks on EuroVelo 6, 900kms with less than five score vehicles encountered, most of whom pass whilst we ride the long bridges over La Loire. Canal towpaths, levée maintenance roads, deserted village streets, most traffic-free, others disconcertingly silent. It’s exactly as we anticipated, we have been here before, yet still it’s a surprise. Riding around the English southern coast, as we did for a fortnight before sailing the channel, where a rolled double six and a half hour negotiation is the standard requirement just to escape a small conurbation. Here this desertification verges on the surreal.

Trailside warning, Mayenne, France. That car seems way too pleased with itself.

Maybe I’ve been imbibing too much fantasy fiction of late, too many parallel worlds with fantasticals passing between, that I’m starting to become discombobulated. There’s a thin veil that separates the frenetic auto-centric from the silence of the trail. Our day starts by navigating a series of the town’s cluttered street junctions, then towing a phalange of impatient commuter traffic across a long narrow bridge, only to slide down a cobbled access, thro’ the veil and into the quietude of that vast river’s bank. It finishes by crossing that same river on a still canal’s aqueduct, through a boatyard and popping back out and into the intimidation that is tonight’s Main Street. Two universes, but only one world.

PostScript. Not that we haven’t had an occasional auto interaction. This one was definitely unusual: courtesy to cycles is good, maybe sometimes too good. The divided cycle path and a main road are running parallel, when the former is routed across the road. We are some way off when the approaching car stops to let us cross. Monsieur WhiteVan who is tailgating, brakes hard and protests with the horn. Words are being exchanged as we cross, what comes next I get to observe in my rear view mirror as we quickly exit scene. Now they’re both out of their vehicles; you’ll observe that I haven’t mentioned genders. Nose to nose as the volume ascends; fists can’t be far away. By which time the cowards are slinking around and behind a farm wall.

Fermé again. Check-in time was 13:00 (Booking.com), or 15:00 (Logis confirmation email). Or 17:00 in the real world. Sigh.

Stravaig + TheSerendipitous

Posted on 2nd November 2025 by The Chronicler

‘Serendipity’, as one dictionary defines it: ‘the unexpected occurrence of, or faculty for, finding valuable or agreeable things that are not sought’.

We’ve ridden out of Caen and along the defunct railway line beside the L’Ome, negotiated the watershed and found the La Mayenne’s ‘chemin de halage’, a canal path that will occupy two days of riding. To arrive in town on Halloween, the evening of All Soul’s or All-Saints day. I know the date because there was the silver-masked, black-caped ferry boatman at Port de L’lle. That, and the restaurants are advertising dress-up competitions. The idea of the chic French dressing in single use plastics seems counterintuitive, yet the evidence is all there in the supermarkets. All predictable, just check the calendar. What wasn’t was to find that our evening’s accommodation was situated on Rue Toussaint; street of the All-Saints.

To augment that serendipity, I open the room’s curtain to find I have my own personal piece of street-art right outside, called ‘Pluie d’amour’; ‘raining love’. Somewhat apposite as it’s raining hard, we’re not cycling and we’ve just been presented with an umbrella.

All a rather neat summation of that dictionary definition.

Stravaig + TheDöstädning

Posted on 1st November 2025 by The Chronicler

Swedish Death Cleaning. Whereby the adult siblings bully their parents into clearing out all the household detritus from the last three decades before it becomes a critical issue, and more pertinently, their own problem. It’s a case of prepping before the ‘oldies’ join the great majority. Or, as I now find it, creating another garden compost heap.

We’ve hesitantly offered our assistances in making a tentative start to some death-cleaning and John, with alarming alacrity, has not hesitated to accept. A plan of attack is formulated which has a chain-of-receding consequences. The shed (aka The Glory Hole) at the bottom of the garden needs to be cleared so as those three decades of accumulations can be deposited therein. Everybody knows that much will be destined for the cowp/dump/déchetterie, but there is a process of grieving that has to be followed. The shed has to become a purgatorial halfway house.

However to access the ‘shed-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden’, first it will be necessary to clear a path, hack back the vegetation, the tangled jungle of wisteria, ivy and decaying leaves. Which inevitably leads to the next conundrum; where to deposit all the hackings and clearings? The existing compost bin is adequate for what comes out the kitchen but not for a decade of luxuriant garden growth.

Build another? Out of what? The answers aren’t immediately obvious, in the main because they’re lost in the shed’s murk of gloomy recesses, consumed by cobwebs and an archive of children’s toys – toys long deceased. Even without knowing the inventory I know an answer has be in there. And it is.

Housesitting adverts always extol their pets, the home’s attributes, with an accompanying gallery of photos to verify the claims. Addendums on the proximity to food shops and quaint country pubs will be added, yet strangely, they never mention the compost heap.

Composting is alchemic. Turning lead into gold; base-metal banana skins into life-blood soil. The latter somewhat more easily achievable than cooking mercury or boiling toads. Simply chop, mix, stir then add the magic ingredient and leave nature to manage the transmutation. Eventually humans will come to learn that the elixir of perpetual life will not be decanted from a flask oozing mind-bending noxious fumes but will be the preservation and creation of soil.

It’s occurred on several ‘house-sits’. After a few days I’m looking for ‘something-to-do’. The borders have been weeded and the grass is cut, the alpaca poop collected and the grouting of moss in the monoblock scraped out; it’s time to inspect the ‘heap’. Now I can enter a happy place, becoming the sorcerer’s apprentice, to garner and resurrect, to resuscitate and revive a failing heap. I’ve probably got a mere week to raise the temperature of the dead slime-cold mound, with its pockets of dry desiccated leaves, empty egg shells, and bunches of faded petrol station roses.

Strangely, over that time I’ve come on many ‘heaps’ that are several years old, are mounds of sweet smelling, friable compost, yet they’ve never been spread. Strangely, and equally inevitably, there will be a pile of proprietary bagged composts stacked where they were lifted from the back of a car after a Sunday afternoon’s trip to the local garden centre…. last year.

By day six the ‘heap’ is oozing steam; it’s working and I have to decide how to explain the ‘magic’ ingredient. I could euphemistically suggest that the male of the species, Homo sapiens, has the plumbing to administer the ‘magic’ ingredient. But I don’t. However, if that is in short supply, I just collect sheep’s droppings to make a brew to feed the bacteria and microbes to help kick-start a heap. (It’s better I collect it than the dog I’m responsible for walking, does).

About half the ‘shed’s’ floor is now vacant, an uninhabited space that is magnetised, the lodestone has been placed, so it should be no surprise that a table and a cupboard have moved in. Pieces that have increased the availability of flat space, surfaces of allure, to attract more ‘stuff’. And ‘stuff’ attracts ‘stuff’.

As for the döstädning, I doubt if we’ve even made an impression, despite the two runs to the recycling centre and the queue of bags lined up on the narrow pavement outside, awaiting the council’s collection. (Caen’s local authority collects six evenings per week, eighteen times more frequently than at home). However there is a new ‘heap’ of moldering leaves and a ‘bug-hotel’ that has taken on the proportions of a highrise condominium, with one prospective bumblebee tenant expressing an interest.

No judgement here. This image is from the PB cellar….

Postscript: just received a note: “did we, (the collective ‘we’) fling out a small yellow bike?” It must be some subconscious human response, remove a piece of ‘stuff’ and its original owner reacts. They haven’t seen ‘it’, let alone used ‘it’ in two decades, but still a subliminal reaction is triggered. Our only conceivable response has to be…. when have the PBs ever disposed of a bicycle? Those beyond rideability grace our garden wall.

Stravaig + TheSwerve

Posted on 22nd October 2025 by The Chronicler

.”You’ll be in France when you get on that ferry”. He was almost right and probably should have added a final “terminal”.

We’ve been on the southern English coast looking after a couple of highly opinionated dachshunds for two weeks, and having made the effort to travel the near length of the UK from another house-sit in Inverness, it seems profligate to waste all that effort. Europe is just across the water.

Time to start collecting ferry crossings, so we turn right and head for the ferry. The five minute crossing off of Hayling Island; best to start small and build from there. Thence to something bigger in Portsmouth.

Through the air-lock of the terminal’s check-in hall and into France. A coachload of sixth-year students managing to occupy all two hundred seats and all the auditory volume. I suspect that any congregation of a nation’s youth playing ‘snap’ could achieve such reverberations, so that doesn’t mark them as French. Non. It’s the complete absence of obesity. We’re in France.

Now booked onto the overnight crossing to Caen, first to visit my cousin and then…… we have no agenda, but we do have our two folding bicycles with us.

Stravaig + TheFameClaims

Posted on 27th April 2025 by The Chronicler

An adjudicator checking the authenticity for the FameClaim

“It is alleged, that here at ‘The Turf’, Bill Clinton, whilst studying at the University during the sixties ‘did not inhale’ when smoking certain substances….”. Or so claims the 42nd potus and a blackboard outside one of Oxford’s hostelries. Whilst ‘The Bach’ in Caernarfon purports to be the smallest bar in Wales, a similar assertion for England is made by ‘The Nutshell’ in Bury St. Edmunds, where it’s “happy to accept bus parties of two or fewer”. (Credit for their usage of ‘fewer’ in place of the once-ubiquitous supermarkets’ notice: ten items or ‘less’ at the checkout aisle).

Wandering as we travel, it becomes an intriguing interest, spotting these claims to fame, these desires for uniqueness. The ease with which I keep finding them suggests either I might have acquired an obscure ability, an embarrassing problematic condition, or more likely, they are simply everywhere.

‘Manawatū: the only river in the world to flow east to west through a mountain range’. I was left with the image of a stroppy troglodytic watercourse having a tantrum and deciding to be perverse by clambering its own way up, over and under rather than flowing along the more accommodating grain of the Ruahine ranges. This claim was spotted over two decades ago but not photo’-recorded; it being part of that amorphous late analogue era. Whenst e-mails were composed on a Kindle, whilst a film was still posted home for processing; what a quaint age that was. Still, that FameClaim has remained in my memory, in part because the rest of that day was spent concocting ever more spurious accolades: “two lane highway travelling in a northerly direction with a shrub-free meridian greater than 7 but less than 11 metres”. “The world’s first grass sward with a cow flop density of 3/m2… to see the sun rise”. Fanciful; mostly unverifiable. Then realising that others could out-compete my feeble imaginations: ‘Cabo Mondego was awarded a “golden spike” in recognition of the sediments, fossils and micro fossils from the Bajocian era that are found here, making it the only site in the world to serve as a global reference for the Middle Jurassic period’. I’ve spotted other equally long and wordy claims; most seem to come out of geological institutions. Possibly in honour of James Hutton, purported ‘father of Geology’ who could compose obscure and convoluted one-hundred word sentences when ten would have been equally eloquent.

Whilst the phrasing is important, a single word can be vital. ‘The longest ‘continuous’ herbaceous border in the world’, once claimed for the castle’s garden in Direton. Many might be longer, but they were not ‘continuous’. (Kew Gardens have subsequently established a longer and, more importantly, continuous, border). Now they could just have added the inexorable ‘Once’ as a prefix, just as others have done. ‘Once’ the longest railway in the world’, an assertion dating to the early British Industrial Revolution, ergo competition wasn’t fierce, it being previous to virtually every other railway in the world. The Hay Tramway was a horse-drawn wooden-railed network and the missing link between the dying canals and emergent steam. Today it’s a section on the Taff Trail.

Defunct and extant railway infrastructure does lend itself to these superlatives. The longest tunnel without an air shaft: Combe Down; Scotland’s longest heritage mural: Colinton Tunnel; ‘the only aqueduct to have its own station’: Avoncliff. The latter is an intriguing one, being constructed towards the end of the golden age of canal expansion. For the developers and financiers to incorporate two apparently competing haulage methods might suggest indecision, a hedging of bets, or enlightened prescience for a world two centuries hence. I get to watch a two-carriage Sprinter rattling along and into the station as a narrowboat glides across the aqueduct, over the river and the railway line. The coal, ore and aggregate that would once have been hauled along these still waters or iron rails, now grumble along the A36.

Then there’s the awarding authorities. From bread, beer and the deep fried batter trades, through the myriad arms of construction to the beauty, hospitality and touristic industries, there’s over four thousand opportunities to collect a FameClaim in the UK each year. Assertions to quality, age or authenticity. A gong for everyone. An ever-revolving hoard of annual award ceremonies, black tie dinners with ‘grip ‘n grin’ photos of gaudy gold-embossed certificates to hang on a wall. Only they’re too ubiquitous to make it a viable photo’ project and as with any over-supply, the economics of the market prevails, FameClaims become ubiquitous, devalued, and so rendered cheap.

Time to riddle the dross, create tighter parameters and curate a more refined collection. Enter the Geographical extremists.

Generally more easily verifiable, in the main arriving in the singular. There can be only one ‘Britain’s most northerly bus shelter’, ‘Scotland’s most southerly grocery store’, ‘the world’s most austral road-end’. We’ve chanced on two and deliberately hunted the third. That shelter could enhance its claim with the additional contention: ‘with a flowering cactus’, the last with the problematic citation that the route ‘ends in water’. One stands on Unst, the other outside Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, a ‘journey’s end’ that for us was but a way-station on a journey.

Some FameClaims (var. extremis), can be a bit more parochial, this from one local authority: ‘the District Council welcomes you to Tarbat Ness, the most easterly extreme of Ross and Cromarty’. Whilst others feel the need to augment their geographical extremism with a bit of added value. Frankie’s, not content with its ‘most northerly….’ distinction then adds ‘The National Fish & Chip Shop Awards’ 2015; to their bragging wall. Where that inevitable half-gallon jar of pickles graces the servery, usually it’s onions or eggs bobbing around in a marinade, a product that is first purchased when any chippie first opens and then never to be broached. Only in this instance it’s soused mussels that adorn the counter, where it asks you to look up, gaze out the window, out to sea, to see where its contents are sourced. ‘Shetland Fresh’, but possibly only in the sense of minimalist food miles.

Plotting this nation’s four mainland cardinal points is easy, they’re all punctuated with the exclamation mark of lighthouses. What’s not so easy is agreeing the nation’s precise centre* point.

muckle Great Granite erratic + Inukshuk, Glentruim

Do you measure from the mainland shoreline, do you include the inhabited islands, do you enclose the strategically yet utterly insignificant lump of guano-encrusted stone that is Rockall in your calculations? Or do you calculate the nation’s ‘mathematical centre of gravity’. I’m grateful to that august body, The Ordnance Survey, for explaining this concept and then doing the maths. Basically, take Scotland, place it on a spurtle and find its balancing point. It must have been a quiet day in the office. Still the empiricist or ludditical nerd in me wonders if ‘they’ took into consideration the differing volumetric weights of Lewisian gneiss as against the blowaway sands of the Morayshire coast, or that islet of Rockall sitting 230 miles west of North Uist must act as an elongated destabilising leaver. The answer that the OS proposed to this mathematical gravitational question is either around Loch Garry or a hillside in the vicinity of Schiehallion. As for the other geographical centres, they could be in Glentruim or a multiplicity of other possibilities.*** The former is marked by a repositioned six-tonne glacial erratic, and an underwhelming chiselled cross in a drystane wall that has taken several visits to find. An earlier iteration was stolen.

Yet another more questionable centre contender is a homophone located in the central belt. The motorway services area at Harthill that now styles itself The Heart of Scotland, where a red deer stag meets a muscular blood pump at the watershed on the M8.

So possibly this monologue’s moral conclusion should be that FameClaims are everywhere simply because ‘everywhere’ is unique. Set enough qualifying criteria and every everywhere can qualify. For example, our flat in Haddington could easily acquire its own FameClaim: ‘Scotland’s only mid-floor, mid Georgian property, located at 292°NNW to Scotland’s oldest continuously chiming curfew bell’.

Now having accidentally found two of the home nation’s smallest alcoholic-beverage-selling venues, I decide to delve into brainrot.com to hunt out Scotland’s own possible FameClaim contender. Almost inevitably it’s called The Wee Pub, it’s on the Grassmarket, Edinburgh and I’ve walked past it numerous times and not noticed it. Maybe my embarrassing affliction is in remission**.

PostScript*: Precise centre; not dead centre, which of course is the Glasgow Necropolis. @

PostScript**: I’m perusing our local library’s shelves and can over hear the old-boys on the Scrabble board. They’re counting their scores…. one has three ‘A’ tiles left over, the other has a couple of ‘E’s and a ‘W’, to which his friend intimates: “incontinence’ , it’s a wee Scottish problem”.

PostScript***: As per ‘@undertheradar’, I garnered the following…(note that Shetland has been place in it’s designated locale, astride the 60°N parallel and not parcelled up in a box only to be rammed into the wedge just outside the Cromarty Firth, like a misdirected on-line parcel).
-centroid based on a minimum bounding circle… in the sea near Buckie.
-centroid based on a bounding rectangle… to the nor’west of Dingwall, Ross-shire.
-centroid based on an orientated bounding box…nr. Arradoul, Banffshire.
-centroid based on a convex hull… Munlochy, Easter Ross.
-centroid based on the landmass… Trinafour, Perthshire.
-furthest point from mainland coast… Just outside Braemar.

Stravaig + TheBrollies

Posted on 17th March 2025 by The Chronicler

Among some of my more esoteric collections of photo’ albums, is one entitled ‘GrottyDay + TheMingin’Weathers’.* It resides between ‘Masquerade + TheFaces’ and ‘Melodic + TheMusikMak’rs’. It’s not so much a collective of late ‘sixties pop groups as a commentary on past encounters. The former initiated by that thousand-day pandemical interruption, the latter by a piece of Peruvian street art: an indigenous lady planting musical notation in the soil.

“In Spain, the rain falls mainly on the plains”, might once have been the oft quoted mantra of GB Shaw’s play ‘Pygmalion’, but given the vagaries of today’s climatically divergent patterns, no longer holds true. We’ve traveled the length of those plains, eight weeks, and haven’t needed to resort to serious wet weather kit; that is, until we reach the Atlantic coast.

Inclement weather wandering can be illuminating. Granite cobbles are best photographed when wet, sunlessness removes any intrusive shadows that can bifurcate and despoil a piece of street art, as well as a chance to meditate on a national predilection for umbrella usage.

Of the album’s pictures featuring umbrellas, over half are Spanish in origin, a figure that has to be a fair measure for their ubiquity. For the wet day they are the required uniform.

It’s a somewhat surreal mind memory. A group of ‘kiwi’ travelers are celebrating their new year (time zones place them eighteen hours ahead of the local populace), when I hear him coming down the street. “Parasol…. parasol…. parasol….”. A streetmonger calling his wares, impervious to the revels, selling sun-shading umbrellas in a Guatemalan highlands town, only for a squall of rain to sweep down from the high ground. “Parasol… parasol… paragüas… paragüas”. Such a neat, instant lexical swerve. The day moves on, now it’s the Australians’ turn to count down to ‘the bells’ and the brief shower to pass, only I can’t tell, if at what point his sales banter reverted back to “parasol”. Possibly he had sold out, for a Latin without their umbrella is like a sun shaft without its shadow.

Dressed in black, he’s making his way down the treacherous, slick limestone pavement, both hands grappling with a rebellious umbrella. Gobbets of wash are being hurled off the pantile roofs and rain is being driven down the deep defiles of the narrow street. He turns the corner only to find that the tempest has found another thoroughfare, another angle to assault from, only for the boisterous brolly to have a tantrum and do exactly as you would expect; it disintegrates. In these conditions, I’m at a loss to see the advantage of such apparel, unless it’s land based training for windsurfing.

Further on down the street to find a bin sprouting one wind-wreaked brolly. I’ll score three more similar images by the day’s end.

Many Spanish cities have their own winter artisanal market, temporary wooden booths selling locally crafted jewellery, ceramics, leather and cork work, with always one artisan offering paragüa-sols. Brightly coloured canopies, graphics of summertime, but when the day turns to damp and there’s a need for their deployment, they miraculously turn to somber and gloom. Black brollies are de rigueur.

With that first sign of falling vapour, the street sprouts molluscs of glistening clam shells, congregations of canopies are clustered around the lotto stand whilst the under-prepared visitors, fresh off the cruise boat in their shorts and flip-flops shiver under the town hall’s porticos. It’s then that I see that a dangerous apparition is coming straight towards me. A spiked brolly, held ‘en guard’, propelled by two woollen-clad spindle-shanked legs, towing a shopping cart, ploughing a path down the middle of the street. Everybody and everything gets out of her way, she’s taking no prisoners. Boudicca’s grandmother is going to the store.

She might be passive-aggressive, but she’s not the true danger. It’s the spatially ignorant, who try to skewer your eyeball with the prongs of their umbrella, whom you need to avoid. Strangely, there isn’t a street trader selling safety goggles just when you need them.

It’s now that the cathedrals offer polythene bags for your dribbling bumbershoot, the supermarkets wheel out the carousel of furled gamps and the castor-shod Holstein cow** dons its own rainwear. Prompts for a sale, a sale of umbrellas that come with their own inevitably problematic life expectancies.

Another grand plaza, another pavement plaque, of another wind-wreaked brolly.

Black bowler hat, precision furled umbrella, station platform, the 8.21 up to town. The uniform of an early second Elizabethan Home Counties business gentleman. A graphic metaphor for a past age. With the exception of the golf course and the wedding venue, the umbrella has lost all of its prestige and much of its presence in the UK. Not so Spain.

Sumptuary laws. In the main prescriptions for appropriate clothing materials and their hierarchical colours, ostensibly regulations to control the moral economies, regulate excessive consumption and control trade. Today governments just use taxes, tariffs and the ban on paper straws.

The real reason for these laws were simple; to keep women and the plebeians in their appointed place.

One of the earliest written edicts comes from the early Greeks, which instructs ‘a freed woman to only be abroad with but one slave, unless she be drunk’. From Scots history comes the proclamation for the illegality of kilt wearing after the Jacobite rebellions and in the mid 16th century, the papal decrees restricting umbrella usage to prelates, priests and popes.

Historical references suggest that most of these controlling efforts were either occasionally brutally enforced or more generally just ignored. The plebs arguing that the control of excessive consumption should start with the courts of royalty and so stuck a metaphorical finger up at the elites.

All of which is a preamble to pondering as to why or how the umbrella remained such a prominent part of one culture yet disappeared from another.

Possibly those liturgical restrictions might have had some bearing, more likely is the fact that in all of these historical towns it’s simpler, quicker and easier to walk. In the UK’s instance the motor car with its steel carapace might have supplanted the paragüa, and with its air-con the parasol. In other instances it has not.

*Postscript: The Mingin’Weather album was initiated on a visit to an older Dundee. Plyboard hoardings surrounded the under construction V+A museum, which were adorned with a gallery of picture graphics and strip cartoons. The extended comic-clan of DC Thomson’s publishing world, from Minnie the Minx to Korky the Cat, Pa Broon to Oor Wullie all got an airing, as well as this plea to an older, pre-breathable-waterproof age.

**Postscript 2.0: Ale-Hop retailers, the shops with that black and white cow, are the places to go for the things you know you don’t need. Like a table top ‘poo curling rink’, a pink heart shaped bed for that risqué room in a doll’s house and a rainbow mono-horn on every conceivable animalistic stuffed toy. And umbrellas.

Stravaig + TheTransports

Posted on 23rd January 2025 by The Chronicler

There’s an initial sense of freedom, of having divested ourselves of the encumbrance of panniers and cycles. Now we have a daysac containing all our travelling wealth. Reduced to a simplicity of a few kilograms.

That initial release is short lived, for we’ve been moved on, passed into the vagaries of the public transport system, and a set of new experiences.

*Heading down the funnel to determine the destination*.

First up is Burgos bus station. A new and vast circular structure where the departure board is permanently blank and where the arriving buses reverse park like spokes in a wheel. A novel concept as the bus number and destination are now hidden from view. Another bus reverses in alongside, creating a metal funnel. As every S2 physics pupil knows, if you feed passengers and their luggage down this gullet you end with the obvious consequence.

It’s a neat calculation for inducing stress as you suffocate in a press of human traffic.

Strangely everybody else seems to know exactly where to stand in this increasingly constrictive space. Especially the crowd-clogs of ‘meet and greeters’ who you politely await, erroneously assuming they are intending to board. They never do.

Closed information desks the norm, somnolent departure boards the standard, with an exception in Úbeda where the other extreme can be witnessed. Every single departure is listed for that day and the following night. Taking minutes to scroll through, such that the flustered late arriving passenger stands frustrated, waiting the return of page one, only to realise that their bus is now pulling out. Late arriving passengers are also the norm.

In other terminuses the bus arrives face forward, which for recognition purposes might be an improvement. The illuminated header board has only the company’s name, the same name that’s depicted in decals all along the bus’ ribs. So I’m left hunting for some sort of evidence for a possible destination. A dashboard with a hi-vis vest, a clipboard, a confusion of detritus that almost obliterates the piece of paper with a suggestion that this bus is going to a place I don’t know of. Therein lies the problem; you can never find a route map, not even an up to date timetable just when you need one.

It’s always a slide along the ‘learning curve’, a snakes and ladders of gains and losses.

That first bus trip had been booked using a site that had charged in sterling what had previously been quoted in euros. Effectively an 18% commission. We won’t be caught with that one again. Although care is required. Another bus line appears to have outsourced its online seat booking to an independent ticketing agency. Commission isn’t mentioned and as the bus station is only a few minutes away, we head there to buy tickets for an overnight bus that will cross the whole of the Iberian peninsula. TheNavigator’s reaction when the agent held up his adding machine spoke volumes. She actually looked at it three times, putting on her glasses for the third glance just to make sure she was correct. The figure is nearly half the on-line quote.

It’s why, as we’re exploring a new town, we make a point of checking out the bus and railway stations. More often it will land you in some quirky situations, some interesting places that don’t appear on the trip advisory sites.

*Museum pieces in the midst of Madrid Chamartín railway station*

You’ll need to dice roll for a double six just to navigate or escape from Madrid’s two main railway stations. Atocha especially so, as it’s a mesmerising amalgam of differing stations that, even with no time pressure still took us half an hour to solve. Two weeks later, we’re passing through again, with a tight transfer and are never so glad to have done that preparatory work.

Madrid to Córdoba and Edinburgh to Thurso are the same distance apart by train. One journey takes 1hr47min, the other eleven hours less a couple of minutes. Scotrail willing. The difference is on Renfé’s overhead screen: a scrolling map and a speedometer: 267kph. The trackside electric stanchions a faint fleeting smudge, the only other visible indication of speed. A near silent glide through an agriscape that morphs from the monoculture of olive groves to irrigated cereals with a minor interruption for a few unharvested fields of cotton. The sierras to the south, soft shadows on the horizon, slashed with old snow, the pueblos blanco, small specked clusters of villages scattered along their flanks. But it’s all visual.

It’s a slow realisation. For some time we’ve both been aware of a less than wholesomeness to the journey and for an answer we keep commenting on the obvious. No bicycles. They are the physical missing element, what has been less apparent has been the abstract and intangible losses.

The pieces, the connective tissues that lie in between. I’m watching the scrolling commentary of countryside through the train’s window, that could just as easily be a silent tv screen. Only I’m not a part of it.

We’ve long advocated in favour of ‘the journey’ and against ‘the destination’. Railed against comments that questioned our tardiness;. “but you’d get there quicker if you flew”, “there’s nothing to see…it’s all boring countryside”. I know from the body language that it’s a discussion that I’m never going to win.

We’re moving at great speed, racing towards the next proscribed locale, the next ‘must see’. The next deep cobble-sett street, bracketing another Gothic domed cathedral in yet another claustrophobic horizonless city. Punctuation marks in a sentence without any explanatory or connective text.

We’ve strayed away from ‘the journey’ and embraced the ‘destination’. We’ve become voyeurs; vacation destinationers.

PostScript: Re: shipping goods. AirTags were of a particular concern apparently. Maybe they didn’t want to be ridiculed for the gross excesses of ‘road-miles’ accrued as our cycles wandered around Europe. Or that the actuality of their location miss-matched the supposed tracking information. Witness this evidence: Our boxes arrived at their intended destination on a Tuesday, on the Wednesday we receive a tracking memo that states they have now been moved to yet another German customs facility for tariff evaluation. Go figure.

*New, vast, and polished: Cádiz station*

PostScript 2.0: One week after dispatching our bike beastie boxes; sans airtags , I’m cynically smiling as I read that the European aviation industry has announced that they’re going to encourage passengers to fit tracking devices to their baggage, to help with the repatriation of lost luggage. No doubt the budget airlines will now take this opportunity to impose further surcharges for non compliance whilst we the customer, will be doing their job for them.

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Cycle Truant

A journal of bicycle adventures

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