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Last year I went on a cruise down the Seine. On the first evening on board, as I was sitting in the boat’s lounge sipping champagne and watching out the window for my lost luggage to be delivered (I had a four-day wait for that, but never mind, Elaine – let it go), a lady approached my table and asked if she could join me. Of course I said yes. By the end of the evening Nancy from Florida & I had become firm friends. Over the next few days, we met two more lovely ladies, the Judys from Massachusetts, and the four of us have stayed in touch ever since (the other three have even met up back home in the States).

You know how people say, “oh, you must come for a visit”, but we never act on that? On the cruise, of course we all said that to one another – it’s what you do at the end of a cruise. As everyone is saying good bye, you hear over and over, “if ever you’re in [insert country/region/city here], you must come for a visit.” Well, I can understand that remote Orkney was not an easy place to visit. But a couple of months ago, Nancy looked a picture I had posted of Uncle Ian’s garden here in Carluke, and thought, ‘why not?’ So she wrote and asked If I had been serious, or was just being polite. And in four hours her plane lands in Glasgow!

I am so excited. Even though I really don’t know her very well at all, she struck me as a very easy-going traveller. I remember she liked wine (yay), fine dining (yay), was very interested in all the places we had been visiting (yay), was very interesting to talk to (yay), and has already been to Edinburgh and doesn’t need to go there again (YAY!!!). She likes all the places I’ve suggested which I’ve been meaning to visit but haven’t yet, and she’s made some unusual suggestions of her own (we’re going on a cruise of the Firth of Forth).

So, house is clean, dog is walked, and I’m off the Glasgow to pick up my new house guest.

This is the view from my lounge (living room) as I’m sitting on the sofa; through the big picture window I see a lot of sky, and the tops of my neighbours’ houses. Lots of different birds use those the houses’ ridgepoles as a stopping-off point: perching, strutting, sunbathing, arguing. We have crows, magpies, blackbirds, and wood pigeons. I hate wood pigeons.

Well, really, what I hate is mourning doves. A) they are really, really dumb. They nest on the low branches of trees; you can walk right up to them and they don’t move – just sit there, staring at you blankly, almost begging to be picked off; and B) they have that dreadful, haunting, bloody repetitive, mournful ‘hoo hoo hoo’ call. I’ve read that some people find their call calming. Calming? Calming? They go on and on, cooing and hooing, and just won’t bloody shut up. I’ve never been hunting, but seriously, that’s one wild animal I have thought about killing. Frequently. And the British wood pigeon sounds much like the North American mourning dove.

On July first, when I had all my decorations on display, my neighbour from across the street came over sporting her wee Maple Leaf pin to wish me a Happy Canada Day. I invited her in for a coffee and we sat in the front room on my sofa, chatting. She could see her house and chimney (which I believe is still a functioning chimney over the fireplace) and at one point we saw some wood pigeons land on her aerial. “God, I hate those things”, she said. “They sit on top of my roof and make that stupid cooing, and it echoes down into my lounge.” We commiserated on how annoying we both find them, and then moved on to some of the birds we do like: robins, wagtails, blue tits.

Well, now, every time I see pigeons on June’s chimney, I can’t help but imagine her sitting in her lounge in an easy chair, with a cup of tea and the crossword, with 20 minutes worth of the echo-y, amplified, ever-persistent cooing of a half dozen of those twits who are perched 12′ above her, pouring down out the fireplace, driving her absolutely mad. I do feel bad for her.

And I shouldn’t laugh.

I have always loved the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh – he was a Glaswegian and one of the great influencers of Art Nouveau in the UK.  His wife Margaret Macdonald was equally or more talented than her husband but of course, being a man, he was the more famous.  (I must admit to feeling guilty that I like his work better than hers – not a very good sister-supporter).  I even have some reproductions of their art back home in Milton.

So I always drag friends and guests to the Kelvingrove Museum to see some of his furniture (just re-read that last sentence – I’m making it sound like some of my guests aren’t friends – not the case at all, it just seemed to scan better).  Well, this past July, my company was someone who appreciates the Mackintoshes as much as I do, and we made a true Rennie Mackintosh week of her holiday.  As well as Kelvingrove, we went to the Hunterian to see more of their work (well, actually, we got lost and went to the wrong annex of the Hunterian – it was also very interesting so we ended up staying there and foregoing the Mackintosh building).  But the next day we went to a ‘house’ in Pollokshields Park; the House for An Art Lover was built only 25 years ago using blueprints that the Mackintoshes had entered into an international competition in 1901.  It was amazing – all the accurate style and detail of 125 year old designs, but able to be used, and touched, and sat upon.

Then as if that wasn’t enough, later that week we headed north to Loch Lomond, Gare Loch, and Hill House, a home built for a businessman and his family entirely to the Mackintoshes’ specifications, in 1902.  Everything: the walls, the ceilings, the furniture, the lighting, the decor – Mackintosh had complete freedom.  Imagine living in a house where every seat, every piece of panelling, every doorframe is a unique work of art. As I already have Rennie Mackintosh tea towels, prints, postcards, and wall hangings, I refrained from buying anything more at the shop, but it wasn’t easy. The drive home along Loch Lomond to Balmaha (gotta love the town names), and through the Trossachs, was spectacular.

The last week of July was saturated with Mackintosh, and I loved every minute of it.

Last night, in the middle of a serious bout of insomnia, I started hearing noises in the house. I wasn’t scared; it wasn’t like footsteps, or doors opening; it was a steady clicking or tapping, like something was in the walls tapping on the studs. I got out of bed (I was wide awake, why not go on a wild goose chase in the wee small hours?) and wandered about until I realised it was the towel rail, turning itself on for no apparent reason. The only reason it even occurred to me to check the bathroom was that two days earlier, in the middle of the afternoon, I walked into the bathroom and accidently touched the rail, and got quite the start when it was burning hot for the first time in over three months.

I really have not mastered Britain’s heated towel rails at all. I honestly thought they were just to warm towels. I can’t believe I’m admitting this, but for the entire year that I lived in my first house in Kirkwall, I thought my bathroom had no actual heating – it simply never occurred to me that the towel rail was the heating. (I even went so far as to write my landlord to say I couldn’t find the thermostat for the bathroom, did they know where it was. They never replied.) I would turn the rail on just before a shower to heat my towel, then leave it on another hour to dry said towel, then turn the rail off. I spent an entire year thinking I had a freezing cold bathroom. I lived with it.

The rail here is different in that it doesn’t have an on/off switch. It seems to be connected to the overall heating system for the house, which I turned off in mid-May, as the weather was warm enough. Yet all of a sudden, in the middle of August, the towel rail has taken to turning itself on and off, intermittently and without warning. I’m not sure why – the radiators thoroughout the rest of the house are still off (I know; I went to each room at 3:47 this morning touching them to make sure).

So at least now I know that as autumn approaches, I will have a decently warm bathroom. And once I figure out why it is the only heating element in the house that is currently working, I’ll factor it back into the overall climate control system.

Speaking of heating elements, did I mention how hot the entire rail itself actually gets? This is a series of metal bars, heated to burning point, left uncovered, in a room in which floors can be wet and slick, and in which people are often naked. Seems like a recipe for disaster to me.

If my parents knew that I preferred Glasgow to Edinburgh and insist on taking all my tourist guests there, they’d be appalled.  My parents remember the Glasgow of the war, of the 40s & 50s – a gritty, ugly, working class city.  But I really like it – I find it much more interesting than Edinburgh (gasp – blasphemy!). 

One of the city’s mayors, back in the 80s or 90s, started a big ‘transform Glasgow’ initiative and it’s now an exciting city with interesting architecture, museums, galleries, and restaurants.  CB & I had two great days in Glasgow – one in the centre of town doing the Hop on Hop Off, then my usual visit to Kelvingrove Museum; then a second day on the south shore where we visited the Science Centre (not as impressive as the Ontario Science Centre, but still pretty good nonetheless), the Burrell collection (amazing – I want to go back there), and a building called House for an Art Lover.  Glasgow rocks.

Wow.  It really doesn’t take much to lose momentum does it? (At least for me.)

I had company in July and got out of the habit of writing my blog (I tend to sit down to write maybe three times a week on average).  CB was only here for one week – but that was enough time to knock me off my blogging track. 

And then, once something like that happens, at least in my case, it becomes bigger, and bigger, and bigger – a molehill of a task I normally enjoy turns into a mountain of guilt over a backlog that I dread.  Every evening for the last week or so I’ve said, “Tomorrow I sit down and start catching up on my blog.”  And next thing I know, it’s the next evening, and I’ve done nothing.  Again.

Anyhoo, I’m back on track – will start posting regularly again. And to show that I haven’t just been sitting around staring at the telly, I thought I’d share a photo from the Devil’s Beeftub – a hollow in the hills of the Scottish Borders.  Covenanters, cattle rustlers, Reivers, and Jacobites have all hidden here.

This is a half a kilometre deep – to give perpective, that ring of bricks in the lower right is at least 60′ across

Everyone who comes to Scotland wants to see Edinburgh, and rightly so. There’s a castle, a palace, the ugliest parliament building imaginable, and that’s all just in the Royal Mile. I thought I was fed up with Edinburgh, having done that Royal Mile many many times, and only went to keep my friends/tourists company. I prefer Glasgow.

But I have to say, this most recent trip was an eye-opener for me. Edinburgh really is a study in contrasts: the old city (archaeologists believe Castle Rock was first settled in the late Bronze Age – that’s old) that the tourists love vs the New Town (built in the 1700’s) full of shops and restaurants; a major urban centre with quaint fishing villages and towns attached; crowded, cobbled streets vs huge tracts of land (if you know, you know); and free museums and galleries on every other street corner (only a slight exaggeration).

It’s taken me almost two years in Scotland and countless visits to actully start to appreciate Edinburgh.

Of course, the nice weather helped.

And I still prefer Glasgow.

One of Scotland’s more interesting, but lesser-well-known-outside-the-country, cultural attractions is the World Heritage Site called New Lanark. Founded in the 1780’s by some philanthropic mill-owners, and further developed by one owner’s industrialist son-in-law, it was an early experiment in progressive, socialist-yet-still-capitalistic, reform.

The mill owners believed that workers should be treated fairly, particularly the children. They created a small town, complete with school, church, nursery (the first in the world to be supplied by an employer), a store with reduced prices, and a full-time, on-site doctor. Obviously, by our standards, the ‘progressive’ working conditions were still appalling (deafening machinery, ten hour work days, children workers, and cramped housing), but compared to other mill-working towns around the UK, the employees were very fortunate indeed.

Robert Owen believed children deserved an education and he paid for their schooling until the age of 10, 11, or 12, at which point they started working at the mill, ten hours a day. In spite of what we would think of as horrific child labour, New Lanark became known around the world for its forward-thinking approach to mill-work, an example for factory owners throughout Europe and the Americas. This ‘village’ with its working mill existed until the early 1960’s, and in the late 1970’s it was turned into the most remarkable museum, historical site, and parkland.

Five years ago my sister & I visited New Lanark and were both impressed with and enterained by the set-up. When you first enter the mill, you’re directed to a ‘ride’ – one of those swinging pods like at DisneyWorld, locked in place, and sent along to hear the story of ‘Annie’, an 11 year-old Victorian mill-worker. Of all the things we did on that holiday, that was the one that has stuck the most in our memories (well, except maybe my Dad tripping on the beach at Berwick – we Reids find the weirdest things funny).

So, when my friend CB came for a holiday, I knew we had to go to New Lanark. And Annie didn’t disappoint. As well as hearing the story of Georgian/Victorian mill workers, we saw the machinery, the store, the school, and some of the homes (hovels by today’s standards, but a step up in Victorian times). And the setting is stunning – set in a valley with rivers, trees, walkways, and gardens; it really is beautiful. CB was as impressed with the site as my sister & I had been – well worth the trip.

*When I wrote my sister to tell her where we were going that day, her reply was: “Oooohh, the ride where you get to experience child labour in a thrilling way….Whoo Hoo.” Nailed it.

No, these are not ‘Mother’s Little Helpers’, and no, I don’t have a problem. This is currently what my medicine cabinet looks like. It’s not as dramatic as it looks: there are Vitamin D pills (I live in the far north); anti-seasickness tablets (I lived on an island); paracetamol (I’m clumsy); anti-histamine (Scotland had a very high tree pollen count this past spring); and naproxen (last year’s bout of bursitis).

Notice they’re all in blister packs. All meds, prescription and OTC, are sold this way in the UK. Even some vitamins. This seems to be a safety measure to ensure people don’t overdose.

And I’ve just found out that you cannot purchase more that two packages (a total of 32 pills) of paracetamol at one time. If, for example, you and your husband are going on a two-week trip, you with a recent injury (say a sprain), and he with occasional back pain, you can’t just pop into Boots and buy a 50-pill jar of Tylenol. You would have to go to Boots and get two boxes of 16 pills each, then head over to Tesco and get another two boxes there. And if you use the self-checkout on the way out of Tesco, your paracetamol will be flagged, and a sales clerk will have to come over and approve your purchase there. Interesting.

Well, this morning I did it. I started looking up flight dates, times, and costs to return to Canada. The window I’m looking at is the first two weeks of November. That’s at most 122 days. Sigh. When did that happen?