Slow week

It’s been a slow week.  The Book Festival is long gone.  The other Edinburgh festivals are finished.  The cricket season ended last week, and the series against Bangladesh doesn’t start until next month.  We don’t go away anywhere until towards the end of October.  The weather is changing, making it sometimes more difficult to get out for bike rides and runs.  In any case, I can’t persuade Fat Mac to get on his bike, the Tall Thin One is in Shetland, JD is in France, Lindsey is at work, it’s not long since I saw the TAK, I don’t see Donald until next week, I’m more or less up-to-date with adding journals to JournalTOCs, and it’s a slow, slow week.

The most exciting thing that has happened this week is that I bought and fixed a new toilet seat.

They don’t make toilet seats the way they used to.  Somehow, the last toilet seat only lasted two years, which means that I am now spending about £1 a month on toilet seats.  The last one got stained.  The one before, which lasted three years, became lumpy as moisture got into the MDF.  The one before lasted four years until it became wobbly.  At this rate, replacing toilet seats will eventually become a major financial outlay.  I can’t remember my parents ever having to replace a single toilet seat.  Aye, they made them to last, in those days.  Even Fat Mac has replaced his toilet seat recently (along with the rest of his bathroom).  If I could persuade him to get on his bike, no doubt he would tell me about how toilet seats in the sivinties were far superior.

But in terms of functionality, my new seat is a major improvement.  Both the lid and the seat can remain in the vertical position, if you want it to.  All previous seats came crashing down when you lifted them, due to the fact that the tank was too far from the wall and there wasn’t quite enough space for the lid and seat.  I even got a plumber, who was called for another purpose, to look at the last-but-one seat, and he couldn’t get it to remain in the up position.  But the new one has a different design, and stays in the vertical position, if you want it to.

The new toilet seat was made in China, of course, and is formed from thermoset plastic, so shouldn’t go lumpy, and has rust resistant stainless steel hinges, fixable from the top, so shouldn’t go wobbly.  It is ‘soft close’ which means that it doesn’t come crashing down, but as I said, this is less of a problem because it stays up, if you want it to.

I also cleaned the front stoep and stairs.  Having a clean stoep is a very African thing, and my stoep and stairs had become encrusted in grime, making it sometimes a bit slippy when wet.

In fact, due to it raining every time I step outside, I’ve only cleaned the stoep and the top one-and-a-half stairs so far.

Already, the ‘patio-cleaning-brush’ which I bought from B&Q for a fiver the other day has half fallen apart with some bristles coming off.  Once I’ve finished, I’ll take it back to the shop as unfit for purpose.  I’m not having stoep cleaning implements becoming as big a financial outlay as new toilet seats.

A new toilet seat and a cleaned stoep.  If it would stop raining, I could play golf.  It’s been a slow week.

Expanding Edinburgh to the east

The new Aldi store, McCarthy & Stone retirement flats, and care home at the western approach to Portobello are all gradually, or in the case of the Aldi store rapidly, taking shape.

Barratt Homes have published details of their plan for Baileyfield South, quite near the new Aldi store, a proposal for 500 new homes.

As I cycled south of Portobello the other day, I noticed how quickly the development at Newcraighall is progressing.

Newcraighall, from the north

Across the road from Newcraighall another new housing estate is being constructed, Balfour Park.  If you look carefully in the background to the above photo, you can see the new-ish Queen Margaret University campus in the distance.

Now, there is a Planning Application for a development of 1330 Homes, a school and roads, at Brunstane.  Here is the proposed strategic masterplan.

Above is the site of the proposed development at Brunstane, taken from the cycleway, which stretches to the grounds of Newhailes House.

There is currently supposed to be a big shortage of new housing in Scotland, but the above, put together, are massive developments, all within one area east of the city.  No wonder there are some protests.

Marching for elephants

We took part in today’s Global March for Elephants & Rhinos.  The route went from the Meadows down to Princes Street.  There were similar marches in many cities of the world to draw attention to the plight of these wonderful animals.  Every day around 100 elephants in Africa are killed for their tusks, and the rhino situation is getting critical.

Looking for the Riggonhead Defile

It is perfect weather for cycling, just now in Scotland.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to tempt Fat Mac on to his bike, so today I went searching for the Riggonhead Defile by myself.

The Battle of Prestonpans took place on 21st Sept 1745.  271 years later to the day, by amazing coincidence rather than planning, I went cycling looking for the Riggonhead Defile down which the Jacobite army walked from Tranent, very early in the morning of the 21st, to outflank the British government forces led by Sir John Cope.  Riggonhead Defile was a path through swampy ground which took the Jacobites down towards Port Seton, to the east of Cope’s army.

I have an old map of the battle sites of Pinkie (1547), and Prestonpans (1745) on the wall in our front room, with a ‘line of march’ past Riggonhead faintly marked.  There’s a clearer map here.  Here is a print showing the Jacobites at the top of the Defile.  This map seems to show the path.  Here is a description of the battle which mentions a path through the marshland.  Here is a nice interactive map.  Last year there was a reenactment of Riggonhead March.

I’m not sure where the reenactment went, last year, and there wasn’t a reenactment this year, or at least if there was one they had finished by the time I got there, but I couldn’t find the exact site of the original defile.

The tracks have changed over the years, and there has been in the past a lot of shale mining in the area.  The land is no longer boggy.

According to my old OS map, the Defile should be to the right of the field shown above, or so.  I cycled round the whole field, but fences stopped me getting down to Cockenzie.

So I cycled back up through Tranent and along the Haddington Road, then took the first track to the left and ended up as above, but I think that this is to the east of where the Defile once ran.

That track eventually took me down, under the ‘new’ A1, to Blindwells mine water treatment plant and then on to St Germains.  Blindwells is mentioned in connection with the battle.

One thing which surprised me when reading about the battle was the relatively small size of the armies.  The number varies according to different sources, but there may have been about 2,000 Jacobite Highlanders.  Cope’s army may have been larger (up to 4,000), though many were untrained raw recruits.  The battle didn’t last long.  Cope’s light, inaccurate artillery got off a few rounds and then fled, whilst his main body of men fired one volley, which didn’t stop the Highland charge, and then fled.  Cope’s baggage train at Cockenzie containing £5,000 was captured, along with muskets and ammunition.

Lessons from the defeat at Prestonpans were learnt by the government and when the two sides met in battle at Culloden seven months later, Cumberland had a much better trained force, able to reload and trained to withstand the Highland charge.  At Culloden, the armies were larger but still relatively small.  The Jacobites had been strengthened by French, Irish and Royal Écossais units, and sources reckon numbered about 7,000.  The government troops were about 8,000.

When you consider that, according to Trevor Royle, only thirteen years later in 1759 the Duc de Choiseul gathered an army of 100,000 in Brittany with a view to invading England, it makes the armies at Prestonpans and Culloden seem very small.

Fat Mac turns into a lump of lard

Fac Mac has recently taken a turn for the worse.

Back in May, we managed to get him relatively fit enough to walk the Singalila Ridge, as I described here.  During that trek, each morning we got him moving after breakfast with the suggestion that there was probably a bar at the next village (knowing ourselves that there wasn’t), and by the sixth day he was actually walking alongside the Little Boss at the front of the group.

Since returning to the UK he’s been spending his time doing nothing all day long, and then soaking for two hours in the new bathroom that his daughter organised for him.  Then, early evening, he goes to the off license for a carry-out of six bottles of whatever beer is on offer that day.  Apart from that, he’s not been getting out much at all.

When I suggested that he wasn’t getting enough exercise, he protested, and said that he’s been doing regular toe yoga whilst in the bath.

Toe yoga!  Toe yoga won’t get you fit.

His six-pack has turned into a one-bag, and a large one at that.  A stone-and-a-half of lard!  When he goes down the three flights of stairs from his flat in Stockbridge to get to the offie next-door-but-one, just like marching soldiers crossing a bridge, if he doesn’t break step his stomach gets into an irreversible up-and-down motion which can carry him face-forwards into the tenement front door.

I do my best.  I suggested a cycle ride, but he said he’s too embarrassed about his body to be seen in public, and can we not wait for the dull and go to a bar and drink beer instead.

Just say ‘No’ to #indyref2

I’m neither for nor against nuclear weapons for the UK, but probably more against than for.  Merely thinking about nuclear weapons ever being deployed makes me feel disgusted.  Why should a small country need them anyway, and don’t they make us more of a potential target?  On the other hand, they helped put an end to WWII in the east, and we haven’t had another world war since then, so maybe they have helped to keep the peace.  Who knows?

With several complete megalomaniac nutters in charge of some countries in various parts of the world today, maybe it is better to be safe than sorry, even if you don’t agree with having such weapons.  If Trump gets elected to the White House, anything could happen in world politics, and I’m sure that he won’t be the last of his kind.

What I am against is Scottish secessionists using incorrect ‘no nukes’ arguments for their own purposes.  Fat Mac recently steamed off on the subject, “Uf theys wiz oan theyz’s oan doorstips an nae in Jockland they poash boys wudni wan they nukes sae much” he ranted.  He was only repeating what other secessionists have claimed, about the location of Faslane naval base in Scotland.

In fact, Faslane is 313 miles from Southampton, and 383 miles from Lerwick, and is therefore more or less bang in the middle of the North/South UK line.  As the Wiki entry on HNMB Clyde explains: “Faslane itself was chosen to host these vessels at the height of the Cold War because of its geographic position, which forms a bastion on the relatively secluded but deep and easily navigable Gare Loch and Firth of Clyde on the west coast of Scotland. This position provides for rapid and stealthy access through the North Channel to the submarine patrolling areas in the North Atlantic, through the GIUK gap to the Norwegian Sea. At the time it was chosen, the location was also close to the American SSBN base at Holy Loch, which operated 1961-1992.” 

Faslane is located in a logical and strategic place which happens to be halfway between Lerwick and Southampton, yet secessionists like to whinge about it and similar things.  If it ever looks as if there might be a nuclear conflagration, the subs would be long gone from Faslane anyway.  London would be a more logical target, but the secessionists ignore the facts in this case and others in their ongoing attempts to encourage a victim culture in Scotland.  Such websites as ‘YES to an independent Scotland’ and others still play on the Scottish victim culture created in Scotland in the 1960s and 70s by such people as John Prebble.

It was interesting to hear Sir Tom Divine mention this ‘victim historiography’ in his recent talk on Scotland’s role in the slave trade at the Edinburgh Book Festival.  Divine is actually a ‘Yes’ voter, but he is also a super historian.  I have just read that Devine said, some time ago: “The immensely popular books of ‘victim history’ by the Canadian writer, John Prebble in the 1960s and 1970s, on such themes as Culloden and the Clearances, have helped to forge the myth of Scottish emigration as a Highland experience, a diaspora of the clans.  It remains a belief shared by many Scots and overwhelmingly so by the Scottish diaspora in North America today who base their ‘history’ of the nation on Prebble and similar authors and remain quite unaware of the huge advances in the transformed understanding of Scotland’s complex past made over the past few decades.”

Thankfully the secessionists don’t mention the Clearances or Culloden so much nowadays, (though try searching Google for #indyref2 and culloden or clearances and you can still find occasional bile), but many of their more crude utterances on the Web still encourage a victim culture, especially among lower aspirational, blue collar Scottish workers, as if to say: “It’s not my fault that I’m not doing well.  It’s somebody elses”.  The somebody elses can be the posh boys, the money men, the bankers, Westminster, those in the south of England, London, or whoever.  It is the same type of anti-establishment thinking that resulted in so many people voting for Farage and Trump, and the secessionists hope to benefit in the same way.

The SNP are launching a new initiative aimed at achieving #indyref2.  To do this, they will target previously ‘No’ voters.  When I see them publicising a handful of ‘C’ list celebs who ‘Were No, now Yes2″ it almost reminds me of something out of China in the 1970s (“Were capitalists, now Maoists”).

Whilst much of the snip initiative will target previously ‘No’ voters, at the same time Alex Salmond is being encouraged to be a loose canon in order to rally their traditional support.  e.g. a couple of weeks ago Alex Salmond accuses BBC of ‘blatant anti-independence bias’.  The man who not long ago, in 2014, promised that the Referendum is ‘once in a generation opportunity’ now sets out prompt timescale for second Scottish independence referendum.

But as one of Alex Salmond’s former advisers has admitted, this time they will have to hold back the Cybernat trolls: Cybernats are damaging the independence cause, says former Alex Salmond aide.  Let’s hope they are successful in that one!

Many ‘No’ voters have a lot of respect for Nicola Sturgeon, but even she will find the latest Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures difficult to explain away.  Scotland now has a deficit of 9.5% of GDP, up from 9.1% (Greece has a 7.2% deficit) whereas the overall UK deficit is 4% and dropping.  The EU accounts for 15% of Scottish exports.  The rest of the UK accounts for 65%.  The SNP indyref2 initiative will consist of lots of stuff such as “Well, yes, things may get a wee bitty worse for five years or so in an independent Scotland, but then they will [miraculously] get better”.

But as soon as anyone mentions this sort of thing involving hard facts the secessionists complain about being negative.  So, let’s end on a positive note.

On a day when I can read (in Barclays’ Prosperity Map) that Scotland has achieved the biggest annual increase in household wealth in the UK, it is time to say a firm ‘No’ to #indyref2 and all of the divisiveness it would bring.

Morning mist at Garva Bridge

On Thursday evening I felt ill and stayed in bed all day Friday, which resulted in me missing a Fringe show in which a distant relative had a role.  I also missed a Book Festival show on Saturday morning, but managed to go with Lindsey and JD to see Geoff Dyer in the evening.  By Sunday I was feeling better, so headed for the hills with JD, camped at Garva Bridge, and slowly but surely walked up Geal Charn the next day.  The early morning mist at Garva Bridge, built by General Wade, was atmospheric.