Page 29 - Blog

Love at First Bite

When we think of a blood sucking parasite we normally think of the wilds of Transylvania and the canny Count Dracula or the brand new Inland Revenue office in Glasgow’s Atlantic Square not Scotland, but the nation was very much a part of the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s classic tale. And to celebrate this a new festival is being proposed to batter home those links with north east...

Sometimes there is something in the air, a trend that becomes almost compulsory and everyone’s at it and quite often we don’t always know why. One of those trends is re-wilding which is like a snowball gathering pace as it rolls down the hill. Recently bison, beaver and pine martens have been introduced and there’s talk of wolves and no doubt someone somewhere wants to reintroduce Mammoths, Velociraptors...

The news is full of energy stories at the moment and the drive towards renewables is in full flow with wind farm after wind farm either proposed or approved for the near future. In Scotland there has been an announcement for three new developments in the waters around Shetland which are expected to power some two million homes when the wind blows. The Crown Estate Scotland owns the seabed around the...

Are you finding the travails of modern life a bit much? Has the trek to work palled, or the working from home become a chore? I’ve included a lovely picture of the sea at sunset, that always makes me calmer and it is the view from our house. But many people need to get further away than just a sunset. For those of a sturdy independent cast of mind there is an opportunity to become that solitary creature...

Well it’s come to my attention that the legend of the Loch Ness monster might be somewhat based on fact. It seems that from a fossil discovered on the riverbed of an ancient African water course such creatures might have lived in freshwater. The rub is of course that the fossil is about 100 million years old and Loch Ness itself is only 10,000 years old.  The telltale fossils of the prehistoric monster...

So that’s Where the Name Salt Wives Came From!

Well it’s been a while since the massive TV series Game of Thrones introduced us to the term Salt Wives, but it seems that in raiding cultures from around the globe to build his wonderfully bleak fantasy reality the author saw that they were real in the Scotland of yore and appropriated the expression. 

Did you know that the shores of the Firth of Forth...

Kilt Shortage Hits Scotland’s Wedding Industry

In another life, well certainly a while ago in 2005, I organised a European tour for the three boys from Discovery’s hit TV series American Chopper and it wasn’t a lot of fun. I don’t know if you remember it, but it was a USA family business that customised Harley Davidson motor cycles for customers with more money than sense and fought each other tooth...

Single Malt Breaks the Record Price

I have this fantasy about investing in Scotch. You know, in the cold of a winter evening I’ll sit in front of the log burner with a fine glass and a dram of single malt warning in the palm of my hand and dream of owning rare Scotch. But for one lucky punter in Asia it has stopped being a pipe dream and they put a very large sum of money where his or her mouth is...

Platinum News

If you’ve seen a bunch of children in sports gear running with a large wooden object all round Scotland you may just have seen the Queen’s Baton Relay which is the Commonwealth Games equivalent of the Olympic Torch. The 2022 Commonwealth Games are due to be held in sunny Birmingham from 28 July to 8 August this year.The baton, which has a message from the Queen inside it, spent five days...

Good News! A Boon to Travellers and Lovely Personalisations to Be Had

Take a gander at the picture above and you’ll see it’s from this year and a trip on the ferry after a monumental drive to the channel. We crossed from Newhaven to Dieppe, it’s a four hour journey so it allows you to recover from the pedal pushing of driving and horrible, nasty motorway food. The crew are French, so their fare is...