11th - The Falkirk Wheel and Edinburgh
The Wallace Monument and Stirling Castle.
The
Falkirk Wheel - the first glimpse one gets on
arrival.
Notice the boat at the far end!
And then my battery went flat.
No, not my battery, the camera's battery. I
ran, really ran, to the van for the spare, but got back too late for a shot
to show the boats almost balancing as one descends and
raises the other enabling transfer from the
Union Canal
to the Forth and Clyde Canal.
To wait for the
next exchange would have wasted too much of our day, so I'll have to return
there. And when I do I'll be having a look at the
Antonine Wall too, the one everyone forgets
about because Hadrian's is much better preserved.
In Edinburgh TomTom found our first car park, Jo our second. Both were multi-storeys. With 1.5cm to spare we crept into the second.
Within no time at all Jo was browsing in a clothes shop. I wandered out of it
and noticed how peculiarly Asian these faces
looked. And I wondered about the differing approaches to advertising and the
impact of a polite message carved in stone versus a life-sized image
of a 33 year old bimbette dressed as a schoolgirl. Mind you, Queen Victoria's
Scotland was a ridiculous place too, and much of Scotland's tourism relies
heavily on perpetuating peculiarly distorted versions of the country's history.
Princes Street, Edinburgh.
The Firth of Forth.
A
mirror image of our view out through the window of my current
favourite restaurant.
I asked two of the staff if I could live there. They laughed, but not unkindly.
In Habitat I was disproportionately impressed by An Asian Odyssey. £100 and a
copy is yours.
Public transport doing what it's meant to do, I trust.
Not really an old-fashioned scene, so why do I expect to see a steam locomotive
here?
Nice bum.
I'm sure I'd have enjoyed the Andy Warhol exhibition, but entry wasn't cheap and by the time we found it we'd had a little too much city.
A gull sits on the head of a sphinx in Scotland.
What might Bill
Blake have made of that?
Or
Walter Scott?
On the
Caravan Club's site in Edinburgh.
We'd bought the tiny b&w TV in 2003(?) in York en
route to
Pickering. It works on the mains or, if you need it to,
when powered from the cigar lighter via our new 150w voltage inverter. We bought
that useful gadget from a firm you might know as Halfwits. The first one lasted for 20mins, but its replacement has been much
better behaved.
Increasingly we find that mains electricity is included in the price of a pitch on campsites in the UK, but in mainland Europe it's still an option as it should be. In France when the first voltage inverter died on us we had to pay for mains electricity to perform minor, but important to us, tasks like charging camera batteries, etc.
Roman Wall Blues
Over the heather the wet wind
blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.
The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.
The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone.
Aulus goes hanging around her place,
I don't like his manners, I don't like his face.
Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish;
There'd be no kissing if he had his wish.
She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.
When I'm a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.
W.H. Auden