Reasons to love life

1. The generosity, curiosity, laughter and understanding of really great friends - the people who will make this weekend seem bright and sunny in my memory even when I know perfectly well that it was freezing, snowy and rainy.
2. Scotland has some of the most gorgeous scenery on the planet and I'm still just about young and healthy enough (3 spoons of sugar in my tea notwithstanding) to trudge, scramble, tumble and drudge my way up to look at it.
3. Food can be so much more than fuel - so good in fact that every mouthful is more like eating an experience, than an eating experience.
4. It's great to come home and tell someone all about it.

From which you will tell that I had a fab weekend, getting cold and soggy climbing Ben A'an in the Trossachs and then luxuriating in the relaxed opulence of the Hotel du Vin, Glasgow, and its sublime bistro with great people, great chat and great grub! So thanks to my companions and especially the person whose idea and treat it was (and indeed for lending me her gloves when I thought for a panicky, pathetic minute atop the windy but hardly Arctic hilltop that I was getting frostbite - no, really).

Happy days.

Guess the speed limit on the A35

This is the A35 Christchurch road in Bournemouth. That's an A road, folks, between two places of, well, if not major interest, certainly respectable size and genteel aged population. I was there on Boxing Day, visiting my dad, having been forced by Darcy's wheezing one-man influenza epidemic (actually flu but as usual slightly exaggerated through manly suffering) to get behind the wheel of a car for longer than it takes to get to Sainsbury's. In fact, for the 2 and a half hour drive from Dartford to Bournemouth, gripping the wheel and staring bug-eyed at the car in front on the pre-planned route of M25, M3, A31 and A338. See what's missing? The A35, you gasp. Where I was clocked doing 37mph by some foul fiend of a nitpicking, over-zealous camera that clearly wasn't aware of my tea-deprived and consequently pitiable state.

Two things are very wrong with this: one, that an A road, yes A ROAD, not some pootling country lane, no matter how many elderly potential jaywalkers it may harbour, should have a 30 mph zone in the first place, and two, I should never have bloody been there in the first place except that of course I can't navigate my way out of a paper bag even if allowed to stop and think and turn the map this way and that, let alone in a rapidly moving vehicle and panicking lest I might be in the wrong lane at the unnecessarily large and exit-festooned roundabout. Grrrrrr!

New Year's Resolutions

I am sitting comfortably at my desk, with a hot cup of tea (Yorkshire Tea, for hard water - bought in error by a friend since our Scottish water is soap-bubble-heaven soft - but really rather good) - and pondering what to write in my inaugural post in my first ever blog.

I feel it should be something, well, important, goddammit, but then since this blog is starting life on little better than a whim perhaps I'm expecting too much of both my brain and the concept. I wonder how many blogs are, like this one, started as a New Year's resolution; one of those many hastily-formed and often swiftly-broken promises to oneself as the slow ticking of the calendar clock ('06, '07, '08) reminds us of the legion of things left undone and the dwindling time left for the doing. Which all sounds pretty downbeat, but I think resolutions, if you can keep them, are all about taking control and making sure you do in fact do the things that matter to you. Whether that's as simple as being nicer to some irritating family member who is nevertheless fond of you, just because you know you should, or as daring as starting a new life in Australia. Now I think Bridget Jones is wetter than the Pacific ocean and don't give a flying f**k for her obsessive daily charting of weight, fags and Chardonnay consumption but at least, given she was possessed by the burning desire to find fulfilment in bagging and banging her very own Mr Darcy substitute, she was trying in her own fictional, fluff-headed way to do something about it. Not necessarily the right things, but the things that seemed important to her. (Of the seeming importance of things that are not, more later.) And, hurrah, the very words I am typing now are evidence that I'm also doing something. I've kept one resolution at least! One down, four major and three minor to go.

So why blogging? What am I hoping to get out of this? What's it going to help me achieve? Not to find my very own Mr Darcy since, happily, he is in the kitchen making Beef Wellington right now. (Wow, there's everything good about that sentence!) No, I'm hoping this blog will do two things:
1. help me keep my other resolutions, major and minor, by letting me reflect on what I'm doing and where I'm going; and
2. be a kind of outlet for all the crap that's in my head, and an excuse to do something vaguely creative by producing writing that has no connection whatsoever, not even a 'do I know you?' passing acquaintance, with reports, shopping lists, email exchanges, studying, finances spreadsheets, or any of the other thousand reasons I usually find myself sitting at this desk with a cup of tea in my hand.