Category Archives: Travel
Edinburgh’s London Road like you’ve seldom seen it before.
Lunch-time wanderings again but on this occasion with a twist. The COVID-19 calamity presented the chance to obtain a soulless, way-too-sharp semi-decent snap of London Road from the roundabout. And yes, I was ‘distancing’ as I ordinarily do (for people in this part of the world generally stink), and also donning ‘Corona Clobber’, i.e., latex gloves and surgical mask.
In any other age, the frame would be rammed with our clunky buses. But not today.
2020 is historical.
Lothian Road had a port?!
I did not know until last week that Lothian Road, right where the Odeon Cinema now resides, was once home to a port (Hopetoun), this the start/end of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Union Canal. Nor was I aware that Burke and Hare were among the navvies who built the waterway. Cracking article here in The Scotsman: https://www.scotsman.com/heritage/when-passenger-boats-could-dock-at-lothian-road-in-edinburgh-s-city-centre-1-5036076
A 13-hour journey quickly supplanted by the railway, imagine being sat on a barge for that long without the internet.
P.S. No midgets were harmed in the taking of that photograph.
Further reading:
https://canmore.org.uk/site/52712/edinburgh-port-hopetoun-union-canal-basin
A Carl Sagan quote blew my mind.
‘Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.’
^Wow.^
My Friday KFC adventure took on a bit more meaning.
The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895) … in 4K.
The terrified audience bolted from the theatre, so the apocryphal story goes. Why anyone would flee from a black-and-white moving image with no sound didn’t appear to come into the mythmakers’ thinking.
YouTube user Denis Shiryaev has given the Lumières’ slice of early cinema a 2020 makeover (4K and 60 FPS) and it has the effect of amplifying the nostalgia factor and the strange serenity of the ‘narrative’. The frame’s occupants always looked too nonchalant to me, this a time when the presence of the camera was meant to turn folk into a frenzy. A mere few minutes of research reveals the extras in the shot were asked to ignore the filmmakers, the subjects ‘directed’ so to speak.
This is the upgrading of vintage visuals done right, none of this Ted Turned colorization pish.
Further reading:
https://www.indiewire.com/2020/02/lumiere-brothers-arrival-of-a-train-4k-update-1202208955/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-51360644/lumiere-s-train-gets-4k-treatment-and-other-news
Inverurie getaway.
Secluded Aberdeenshire bantz this late January, which was another excuse to sit in Guinness pants and watch a batch of movies with a side order of multiple episodes of The Chase, intermittently knocking back ersatz Baileys sourced from Lidl. Every cottage/lodge on my ‘adventures’ up north I ascribe the moniker ‘The Palace’, and this was another plush compound I’d gladly return to.
Doing nothing in the middle of nowhere is a treasured pastime of mine; I’ll never understand bungee jumping or snorkelling or any of that stuff. The perfect trip I would define as sitting on my arse and not having to smile through silly activities, so this jaunt ticked all the boxes. I was even mildly active in my own limited way on this occasion, conducting daily jogs to ’90s trance and ‘conversing’ with some local sheep.
I said to myself, “It must be awful to be a sheep.” But then I concluded they don’t know they are sheep and this is a universal metaphor. It was my profound thought of the expedition. Other highlights include smoking a Cuban cigar, alphabetising by title the dwelling’s book collection, snapping a rainbow, and operating binoculars for the first time in two decades. I spotted a bird which wasn’t a pigeon or a seagull but I don’t know what it was.
A good time was had.
New Year’s adventures in Germany – Flughafen München-Bad Bergzabern-Straubing-Flughafen München.
Autobahn.
I’ve not been in a car this much ever, Munich Airport to Bad Bergzabern to Straubing to Munich Airport, a goodbye to the 2010s in a most chilly and mostly plastered Deutschland, with a soundtrack of the decade’s tackiest pop hits.
Bad Bergzabern in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate took in the delights of this wooden bad boy, which I presume was an observation tower to view troop movements as its vistas overlook the border with France. I climbed up the fucker and left a wee mention at the top, carving ‘Nuuuuu’ into the floor with a pocket knife. I am very proud of that. One day some random will scratch their head at the … ‘word’ and then hit Google. A lovely wee town, it even had a heaving club which was visited just after midnight, where locals sparked up inside. Flashbacks kicked in to a pre-2006 Edinburgh when you could smoke a cigar and not get chased off the premises by their interior ministry.
Midnight fireworks.
Straubing – not a lot happened in Straubing. I did my usual morning run/descent into death followed by a supermarket jaunt, and rounded off proceedings by watching Dragons’ Den clips for three hours off a tablet, contemplating the decade ahead and hoping that one day folk in airports will just fucking learn how to distinguish between the arrivals and departures screens (this also applies to the denizens of train stations).
Freezing run action in this park.
Goodies.
Other delicacies included the outrageous wearing of Crocs and the sighting of that ‘big pile of shit’ from Jurassic Park (1993).
All in all, quite the splendid wee trip. A civilised affair (for once).
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 