Making the most

With the sands of time not showing any signs of relenting their persistent trickling away, I have started to realise exactly how little time I have. The list of things I have yet to accomplish or enjoy whilst I am still in Scotland is an intimidating and embarrassingly large one, and one I am sure I'll not be able to address in its entirety. I'm going to have a good bash at it over the next three weeks though!

The most recent thing I was able to strike from the list was a trip to Loch Lomond. A place I have heard in song since primary school, and I thought it would be nice to explore those bonny, bonny banks whilst I am still close by. I didn't quite realise the size of that loch though…. 23 miles long, and up to 5 miles wide! Those bonny banks are going to remain largely unexplored by me for a little while longer, but there's a small stretch in the middle which I now know intimately. Well, as intimately as you can come to know a stretch of countryside in half an hour.

A weekend of excess and not enough sleeping has left my body aching and exhausted but it is a small inconvenience for the complete rejuvenation my soul has undergone!

And next on the list (apart from enjoying another week of the Fringe Festival with continued and unadulterated boozing) is a trip to Loch Ness next weekend. It'll be really nice to get back up into the Highlands for a little while and as we move through the more wild lands of Scotland I'm hoping to see a few more herds of deer in the passing forests and a couple of lone buzzards guarding the skies. And a few less swarms of midgies would be nice... but I think to hope that might be a bit daft!

Knowing that you're going to be leaving a place you love makes you think about the specific things that make you happy and realise that there's a lot to miss. I'm going to miss the smell of the brewery in Edinburgh as I go past it in the morning – that smell of warm Weetabix which remains one of the most homely smells of the city. I'm going to miss the restaurants I love and the people that make them such a pleasure to visit, and the bars I collapse in and the people that put me in a taxi home.

And when I'm in Australia there's even more that will make me look back with fondness on my time in the UK, and maybe create a pang of yearning in the pit of my stomach: cooking mighty feasts with the best ingredients; drinking good British ales in traditional British bars; playing my music at window-shaking volumes; electric guitars hanging and sitting on every surface in the room.

And there's bound to be some things that I have never thought about before: being on the same continent, that same piece of rock, as nearly all of my friends and family; the familiarity of knowing which direction the water will circle down the plughole; knowing that the if I were to get in a fight with a spider I'm certainly going to win…

So for the moment, I'm going to bask in all of these things. Over-indulgence of these simple pleasures whilst they are available is the order of the day. So expect to see me in my favourite bar with my favourite pint; or listening to my favourite band on my favourite sound system – maybe playing along on my favourite guitar through my favourite amp, and with my favourite friends around me.

...Whilst pointing and laughing at every little spider I see cowering in the shadows.


"On soft grey mornings widows cry
The wise men share a joke;
I run to grasp divining signs
To satisfy the hoax.
The yellow jester does not play
But gently pulls the strings
And smiles as the puppets dance
In the court of the crimson king."