It’s lovely having both sons back home for the weekend. We all enjoyed an afternoon spent at the Scottish National Gallery, viewing a “Beyond Caravaggio” exhibition, and then as part of Open Doors we visited Riddle’s Court, an old A-listed merchant’s house off the Royal Mile. We were joined by some of Jamie’s friends.
One of the rooms at Riddle’s Court
Then it was time to feed at Dishoom, the Bombay Cafe in St Andrew Square. The place was very busy, even at 6pm.
Fat Mac was supposed to be cycling to Balerno with Lindsey and I today, but, although everything was previously arranged, he emailed me to say that his BMS (Bunker Mentality Syndrome) had taken a turn for the worse and that he was having to spend the mornings nowadays sitting in a cupboard. Mac failing to pitch up was probably the reason why Lindsey and I managed to get to Balerno. Every time me and Mac have set out for Balerno in the past, we’ve ended up in the pub in Cramond, getting sozzled. Cycling to Balerno is supposed to be Mac’s favourite route, though because he has absolutely no sense of direction and can’t map read, he has only managed it once, when his friend Poisonous accompanied him and showed him the track. Even then, Poisonous probably got him to Colinton and announced “Here we are in Balerno”. Mac wouldn’t know the difference.
I was going to take the opportunity today to show Mac the wonders of Google Maps, and NCR 75. He only knows the location of four things – his local pub, the off-licence, the supermarket and his allotment. More than 100 yards anywhere else and he gets completely lost. So I thought that GPS could open up a new world for him. That’ll have to wait for another time.
The NCR 75 from Leith to Balerno is currently under repair in a couple of spots, so our route today wasn’t straightforward. It was a lot easier getting back to Porty, and also downhill most of the way.
The pub in Balerno
It’s an excellent ride to Balerno. It passes so many new housing developments, and following the Water of Leith takes you along some super paths. The way we went, via some diversions, ended up being 53.4 kms, with 264 metres of ascent, which on top of my ‘half marathon’ walk yesterday fits in well with Lindsey’s fitness schedule.
We managed a 36 km bike ride today, mainly before the rain, to Musselburgh then through Dalkeith, past Newbattle Abbey College (shown above), and on to the lovely Dalhouse Castle (shown below), where we stopped for coffee, before making our way back to Portobello.
The library at Dalhousie Castle
There’s a ‘secret’ door in the library, which opens into a bar.
You can’t see them in the above photo, bu there were three roe deer in the field.
We went along some tracks which were new to me, beside the River South Esk. Excellent route for most of the time, apart from having to cross the bypass on the way home.
Lindsey’s fitness schedule in preparation for southern Morocco isn’t half knackering! 10 km run on Monday, 5 km run and 8 km bike ride on Tuesday, 70 lengths of the pool on Wednesday, 55 km bike ride on Thursday, and 6.5 km run and 5 km bike ride today. The longer bike ride to South Queensferry was very enjoyable, with wonderful views.
Looking east from Dalmeny Estate
Three bridges over the Forth
Coffee stop in South Queensferry
Shaun has started an MSc at Strathclyde University, in Glasgow. At the weekend we delivered some of his kit and took him out for a meal. His flat, in a residence block run by an independent company, is new and very nice-looking.
Calzone
Encouraged by our part descent by bike of the Parenzana earlier this year, seduced by a holiday sales presentation I attended, and intrigued by the title of the tour (Atlas Descent), some time back I booked an Exodus cycling trip to southern Morocco, for this coming November. When Lindsey looked in more detail at the trip notes, she saw that the Challenge Level was 5, meaning “You have a good level of fitness and are looking for a physically challenging holiday. Previous experience is essential for activity based trips”.
Hmm. The most challenging Exodus trip that we have undertaken so far was the Singalila Ridge, last year. That was Challenge Level 3, and below you can see what shape I was in after a week of it. I visibly aged by about ten years.
Then Lindsey read a review of the Morocco trip in which the reviewer wrote that for a ‘descent’ there was a surprising number of uphill sections, and that some days were definitely ‘red grade’ rides.
We had no idea what that meant, and so Lindsey started to put together an educational and training schedule for the trip.
When we were up at Loch Insh last month we had a starter session in mountain biking, given by Mitch, who was also our guide for the kayak trip the next day. We learnt a few important basics about mountain biking, especially, for example, when to stand up out of the saddle.
Yesterday we continued the schedule down at Glentress Forest, where we hired two bikes and set off up the various trails.
There are excellent trails of all levels at Glentress, and they are well signposted. We enjoyed the time we spent cycling around the hills above Peebles.
Green grade
Blue grade
The grades (green, blue, red, black) seem to be similar to those used for skiing. A green and blue are shown above.
We managed the green and blue grade tracks fine.
We got suitably covered in mud.
Next time we’ll do a much longer blue grade track, with some red grade bits in it. We must also do some distance training on our own bikes, as the longest day on the Atlas Descent is 75.0km. I doubt if Lindsey and I have ever cycled that far in our lives. Fortunately, there are support vehicles for the trip, which means that at any time you can say “I’ve had enough. Take me to the bar in the next hotel, please”. Of course, neither Lindsey or I would ever consider such a thing.
I like road movies. I also like road books. Hmm…is there actually a genre such as ‘road books’? I don’t think so. A ‘roadbook’ (one-word) has a definition “…a diagrammatic book typically used by rally co-drivers and overland travelers to navigate across uncertain terrain.” I don’t mean ‘roadbook’ in that sense. I mean a book which is like a road movie, in which the main character is travelling by road. A specific type of travel book.
Interstate, by Julian Sayarer, is such a book, and I really enjoyed reading it.
The boy can write! Sometimes in a very creative way, as well. Occasionally, I couldn’t follow all of it, but that wasn’t important, as the gist was still obvious.
“Outside, I sat beneath the lip of the roof, bleached green by copper running with old rain. A vegetable patch and long line of harvested beanstalks stood opposite, behind a few leeks waiting to be dug from the soil. From the rafters of the porch hung four haunches of venison, the blood drying in the sacks of translucent skin remaining on each muscle, shaped in red harps set with black strings. The wind blew earily through the valley and so came the gruff sound of a length of twine pulled down by the weight of dead limbs, sliding slowly against the metal hook that held each swaying haunch. Beneath the hanging meat, an old hurdy-gurdy with a broken leg sat under a covering of dusty soil.”
I particularly like the imagery in the following paragraph.
“Misery seeks company. I nod, mutter condolences as she goes on folding clothes and I watch, thinking how small she once must have been. I look at the woman: her bucket-sized head, her shapeless, moonlike body, her fat arms made of ringlets, like two giant caterpillars crawling out of her torso, flying as she shakes out blanket-sized T-shirts pulled from the washing machine. Her gut must be two and a half metres all round, about the size of the tyre on her truck. She’s a sphere, just four planes that pull towards the crushing circumference at her middle. Sure, she’s disabled now and deserves compassion, but still, this size ain’t normal. As she stands there, it’s as if I can see and feel her own arteries squeezing, fighting, waiting to disappear into themselves and give up ghost. I see her father standing next to her, just as I saw her ginormous husband in the canteen with her. And I wish heart attacks on nobody, but really, was anyone surprised, was cardiac failure considered bad luck and does she expect a fate so different for herself?”
The book is about a hitchhiking road trip across America, and the ‘state of the nation’ as exemplified by the people Sayarer meets and sees on the way. OK, a concept that’s been done before, but not recently, partly because hitching is more and more difficult in today’s untrusting world. A fair number of the people Sayarer comes across are blue-collar workers who seem to have lost most of their purpose in life in modern-day USA. Even though every ride he gets is a moment of faith restored, by the time he reaches Modesto, in California, and has to walk for miles, he’s had enough, and the writing gets weird, but weird in a creative way. There’s also a tip of the hat of course, at one point, when he’s jumped on a freight train, to Ti Jean. There had to be, didn’t there?
I did a fair amount of hitching when I was younger. Now, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone with their thumb out on a UK road. I used to hitch from Edinburgh to Elgin and back on a regular basis. Sometimes I could be up in Elgin before opening time (11am, when the pubs opened, in those days – the seventies), and sometimes not, when there were few lifts. I must have walked nearly every step of the old A9 during those days, and long stretches of other roads, as well. As Sayarer points out, on page 58 of my Arcadia Book edition, you need a good place to stand. There needs to be a place for a lift to stop, as well. But sometimes, there are simply no lifts. I once took seven hours to get 30 miles. So, sometimes, you need to walk. In Interstate, Sayarer walks quite a lot.
Why are ‘road books’ so good to read? I think that one reason is that it is easy for the authors to write about the real characters they meet, and yet there’s unlikely to be any comeback. The author, and the people he meets, are like ships that pass in the night. If you write a book about people you know well and see on a regular basis, it is much more difficult. What are those people going to think when they read about themselves? Even in this blog, I have to be careful. Obviously, or maybe not so obviously, when I write posts about Fat Mac I tone things down considerably, and because he spends most of his time dozing in the bath thinking about ‘the sivinties’ there’s little chance that he’ll read the posts, in any case. It’s the same with many travel books – I’ve written about Paul Theroux in the past. Being a travel book, he can write: “They drove away, leaving me by the side of the road. That was to be fairly typical of my experience with aid workers in rural Africa: they were, in general, oafish self-dramatizing prigs and often, complete bastards.” It’s unlikely that he’ll come across those same people ever again. But sometimes, even with travel books, there’s a comeback, as I described in this post about an experience Theroux had.
Sayarer is pretty hard on modern Americans. Here’s what he says:
“They say America’s socially flat, a classless society. And you know what, I couldn’t agree more. They are dead right: Americans have no class, none at all, no style or gravity either, they lack the modesty that class demands. As for the idea that Americans have no social prejudices, no class system, that idea could not be more wrong.”…”Americans don’t split social hairs so much on a basis of refinement or culture, but money.”…”Cancel the aid budgets, tell the DEC that America is the world’s foremost humanitarian catastrophe.”
