Big Hooses on Wee Hills

Today, a couple of big houses on hills. The first is just off Park Road behind Paisley whilst the second is in Pollokshields in Hamilton Drive. Both areas are replete with large villas and well worth a wander. Indeed, any location scout would die for locations like these! And this is the beauty of wandering with an open mind - you could be anywhere. I often think of Pollokshields as its very own Beverly Hills with its car-free roads (all the houses have driveways) and wide runway-empty tree-lined boulevards. And I haven't even been to LA...

Lifeline

This wet Monday morning, I just know I have to get out on the bike. A weekend inside does not bode well for the moving blood and the moving spirit. And so, expecting rain, I head out into a balmy November morning, dry. I nip over the chasm that is the motorway and find myself in Beverly Hills (Dumbreck) where I catch the train at the wonderfully hidden and quiet railway station. It's still dry, but I know that I'm heading west (to Paisley) and chances are I'll meet the rain on the way. But, it's that train, that wee line that was shut up during the Beecham closures of the sixties, that is the lifeline. It catapults me straight from my gaff in Cessnock to Paisley canal. Not only that but Paisley Canal's railway platform links up with the Sustrans cycle path down to the coast, so there are no cars to negotiate at all. Sometimes, I head down to the coast, but most times I do a circuit which finds me in the hills above Bridge of Weir and Kilbarchan and back at Paisley Canal some two hours later. And what a circuit it is. A lifeline that channels life into you. Especially when it's raining. There is no better way to wake up the spirit!

Soaked but awake!

Escape From The Circus

 The picture this morning of a troop of confused-looking camels (and a llama) stranded on a road on the outskirts of Madrid spoke volumes. It said that no matter how effective animal rights activists are in cutting electric fences and liberating imprisoned animals, the animals themselves are lost without a follow-up. It's no use having a revolution if you don't know what to do after it. Leaving animals to stand in the middle of a road is not liberation even if you do free them from their cages, because you've just released them into a larger cage.

Circus animals need to be freed from their cages and then re-educated (that is, rewilded and relocalized). This is the problem we have today with man. He needs to be re-educated and re-localized, and drawn away from the industrial into the natural. In the case of these camels that would have been the equivalent of cutting the electric fence and then leading them out (educate derives from Latin ex + ducere, to lead out) of the industrial estate (and their industrialised state) back into the desert whence they originally came. It wouldn't have stopped there either because these camels were probably born into the industrial which would mean that they would need to be retrained in negotiating and navigating that desert. In other words, in escaping from the circus (whether a big top or a big office) the process of liberation is not simply cutting a wire fence. It's a lifetime's work.

The President Has Left the Building

I'm not sure whose plane this was but it was sure big enough to be Air Force One and it was just around the time when President Biden was leaving (he only came for two days). I could hear it lumbering and struggling to gain height as I've never heard a plane struggle before. It was quite a sight and it just missed that cairn by only a few feet....

The Sun in November

There's a great tune by the English musician Matthew Halsall called The Sun in September. It's a real cracker of a tune eliciting Halsall's admiration of Nature and of the East. His latest album is coincidentally called 'Salute to the Sun'. Sure, the sun in september can be lovely, but can it really compete with, say, the sun in november, or indeed the sun in any of the winter months? Maybe, but just in case you're not familiar with the sun in November here's a few reminders...

Freebie & The Beanie

Two woolly hats, that's what I found today whilst out and about on the bike. The first was near Johnstone, a brand new Ralph Lauren beanie, with the second at Paisley Canal train station. I took the first but left the second, since the second was already being 'worn' by a family of woodlice on the wooden planter where I discovered it. And I was just thinking of a new woolly hat since my old Rab beanie is beginning to show signs of ageing. Maybe, just maybe, I have such power now as a sorceror that I merely have to think about it in order to materialise it. 

We live in a strange and wonderful world, do we not?