A Walk on the Wild Side...

I left you in Fort William, having just come off a mountain, quite a lot seems to have happened since then...

Headed back south via a night and a day in Glasgow.  Got well and truly Rennie Mackintoshed.  Didn't get stopped from getting home by a storm, which was nice. Didn't get too affected by the storm at all; a few trees interrupting my cycle into work, and some power lines in a river.  Standard. 

Here's a confession, I didn't see Jerusalem. I missed it both times. Boo. So Mojo was my first Jez Butterworth play. I enjoyed it - the acting was immense as you'd expect from that cast - but I'm not certain that I got it. 

And Lou Reed died. Everywhere has been chock full of tributes and whatever I say (as a British Gen X-er who didn't form a band after peeling slowly and seeing) really won't amount to much, but you know... 

 

Bagging Munros

Crikey we did some walking in the Mamores today - scrambled up some mountains that sound like Arabian hotels (Sgurr a Mhaim - that's not a real name) and went over the Devil's Ridge. There was snow, there was wind, there was rain, there were bogs, there were scree slopes. Felt like proper adventures.

Bagged three of those Munros (Sgurr a Mhaim, Stob Ban and Mullach nan Coirean) and three further Munro Tops (kind of like a lager top, but with more mountain - Stob a Choire Mhail, Sgorr a Iubhar and one without a name), which seems like a respectable day's haul.

Yesterday was a bit of a write off. The weather was grim, so we kept it low level. Went to Glen Coe. Kinda pretty, but guessing the rain didn't do it justice.

We're staying in the middle of nowhere, out of season, so there's not too much to do in the evenings. We've mainly been playing trivial pursuit. Unfortunately the pack is from 1988, which makes the entertainment and (recent) history questions pretty tough, and renders about 10% of the geography questions obsolete. Also there's a surprising amount of answers that are just wrong. When I was little I'd thought that the people that wrote trivial pursuit questions must be the cleverest people in the world, turns out they're not.

Big Ben

Ben Nevis: box ticked.

I'm not going to lie, I'm not in that much hurry to do it again. The last 45 minutes before you get to the summit were above the cloud line, which means a. It was pretty cold and b. All you could see were outlines looming out of the mist. Well bleak. It would be a half decent setting for a horror film.

There's quite a lot of warnings about taking the mountain seriously. We'd taken all of these at face value, assuming that they were many for us. With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect they weren't. I suspect that they were aimed at the girl in shorts, or maybe the man with two young children who'll almost certainly be descending in the dark, which will be exhilarating.

Still, box ticked.

Highland Fling

I'm up in the Highlands, doing the walking thing. It's taken me far longer than it should to get here - in terms of history, rather than your actual travel time (although we did have a goose-induced - ingoosed? - aborted landing, which added a bit to the travelling), walking in the Andes and the Himalayas before the Highlands is somewhat disgusting.

Completed day one - a jaunt round Glen Nevis. It was supposed to be a gentle warm up but I feel a bit broken. Hmmm. Gonna be aching by the weekend.

We're staying just outside Fort William. Turns out that the town is a bit less pretty than the surrounding countryside. That is an understatement.

Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be

So Betrayal is Pinter's most accessible play? I can sort of see why - it's witty and bubbly and kinda fun and the version I saw was (#accidentalpalindrome) well acted and on a decent set, but - and I'm not sure how to put this that doesn't make me sound like a Philistine - the story's a bit rubbish. If it had gone forward rather than backward it would just be a hackneyed subplot of a mediocre soap opera. Overrated.

Also saw David Walliams in A Midsummer Night's Dream.  It takes some doing to make a Shakespeare character seem like it had come out of a Little Britain sketch but turns out it's achievable. This was my second AMND of the year: I preferred the other one.

Have I seen too many plays this year?  So many that I've just become even more of a cynic (I didn't even bother reporting back on that turgid Much Ado that I saw a couple of months back, by not committing it to pixels I'd hoped that I could erase it, turns out it's lingering on in the back of my brain, being my go to reference for anything boring or bad). Or after seeing Chimerica is everything else just not up to scratch?

In other news, I recently went up that Shard thing. I liked it, although it was expensive.  Hadn't realised quite how much of London was made up of train track.

Tonight was possibly the last time that the original line up of Quiz Team Aguilera will be doing the White Horse Quiz. Been doing it most weeks for the last eighteen months, but now a quarter of the team is due to eject a baby from their womb, which is going to hinder quiz participation somewhat. We won (which hasn't happened all that often) which is quite a nice way to bow out...