You really do not have to travel far in Scotland to find lovely vistas and beautiful countryside. We spent the weekend in Clackmannanshire, in the shadow of the Ochil Hills, that dramatic escarpment that rises up so suddenly from the flat glen of the Forth. A visit to Perth on Sunday gave us the chance to see a stretch of the River Earn that we either hadn’t come across before or had not noticed previously. The stretch from Perth west to Stirling, and extending into the Campsies, is one of the loveliest parts of Scotland.
Jan and I took the chance to drive a little distance west from Torquay, Victoria, Australia, along the start of the Great Ocean Road while we were in that part of the world last week. We stopped at Bell’s Beach to watch the surfers battling against the rollers (although I don’t think they were nearly as big, on the day we were there, as they can be).
It’s an impressive place - wide beach, high waves, blue ocean and set off by the cliffs nearby.
The Great Ocean Road was built by Australian soldiers returning from the First World War, and was intended as a practical memorial to their dead comrades.
A nice night-time view of Bahrain’s own twin towers. The two towers are shaped to funnel the wind off the Gulf through the gap, and the integrated turbines are supposed to supply up to 15% of the building’s energy needs.
After all the cold wintry weather of late, it was nice to find the waters of Loch Eck, just north of Dunoon, sitting as flat and as calm as they could be - a chance to catch some strong reflections in the lochside.
Visiting the new Cisco office at Eurocentral, close to Glasgow, yesterday, I could not resist snapping the Comic-Relief-enhanced Big Heids sculptures nearby.
Jan and I are selling our house in Lauder in the Scottish Borders. Lauder has been our home for just short of two decades - we’ve had some very happy times living in this great little village (Scotland’s oldest Royal Burgh!), but it’s time to move on. We decided a long time ago that we would eventually move to the West coast of Scotland, and that time has come. However, we will leave Lauder, when we eventually go, with no little sadness: this is where Kirsty and Ross, our kids grew up, and it will always be their home town, I guess.
Because we’re under no particular time pressure to move, Jan and I have decided to sell Redpath House privately, using a combination of Web 2.0 tools, social networks and more traditional means, but without the intermediation, for the moment, of estate agents. So, if you know of anyone looking to move to one of Scotland’s most beautiful areas, then point them towards the little wordpress.com blog we have set up to offer information about the house. The blog has the YouTube video and the Slideshare deck shown here, as well as a link to download the schedule and directions to find Lauder and the house.
Morocco’s capital city, Rabat, is a busy and vibrant place, though, I am told slightly, less chaotic than Casablanca. We spent a very interesting time last night walking through the old market place and surrounding streets in the city centre. It seemed to me you could buy pretty much anything there - and It felt like the whole population of Rabat were there doing exactly that. It was BUSY!
I’ve been driving for almost 35 years (how old does that make me feel?) and, until this year, I had had just one minor collision that could be put down to me, an absent-minded shunt into the back of a car in front of me in a queue at traffic lights.
In 2008, however, I have had two accidents. In the first, I hit a mature roe deer that jumped a wall to the left as I drive to the airport on a dark morning in March. The car was a mess but repairable; unfortunately, the deer was not repairable.
And now, last night, in heavy snow, this time heading in the opposite direction, from the airport to home, I lost control while doing the dizzy speed of around 15mph on a straight stretch of road (and just a couple of miles from where I hit the deer) and managed to slide into a limestone wall at the edge of the road. I still don’t know what I did wrong, but at least no one else was involved - and the only dent I received was to my pride.
The familiar ‘bottle-opener’ shadow of the Kingdom Centre extends across the Riyadh cityscape. The tower has a huge mall in the base, manh floors of offices, and the Four Seasons Hotel, in which I stayed for a couple of days.
