Elgin, Aberdeen, Glasgow...buses, bicycles and Spike Lee

There was a choice: Hire a car ("£270 including the excess insurance, sir"), which would have been convenient for the impending week in and around Glasgow and its nearby loch, or grit my teeth and embrace bicycles and buses.
Thing is, Susan's already down there with a Toyota Corolla Verso (thanks, Jim), a double bass and several weans. We don't need two cars on the mainland, and besides, I'm not insured to drive the Toyota, which means that on any social evenings in the vicinity of the River Clyde, not to mention James's apearance with the National Children's Orchestra, I may be able to partake of a small libation.Now that the Atenolol is kicking in and my blood pressure is back to normal. Approximately.
I bought my own blood pressure monitor (£12.99 off eBay) and oh, what fun it is to test oneself in varying circumstances (let's see...just back from seeing the excellent Spike Lee film - and it truly is a Spike Lee film, let no-one tell you otherwise - Inside Man, and it's shot up to 131 over 97, which is crap, actually; diastolic was down to 83 earlier on). Ah well.
Anyway, I've hired a bicycle for dotting about to trains and buses down in the Great Corruption that is Glasgow. And tomorrow I do that Megabus thing (£8.50 return) to get out of Aberdeen. Which is damp and dreich, dreich, dreich at the moment, though yesterday evening (see picture of me via phone) was gorgeous, golden and heavy with the hope of spring.
Yesterday was actually spent mostly in Elgin, Radio Scotland's current Soundtown. The show came from Elgin High School, and one of the school's several rock bands, Envoy, played live. There's a snap here of the lads setting up.

Cycling is something I've never quite stopped doing, and now I feel it's time, for many reasons, to commit myself to it as a mode of transport. One, it makes me feel good, and always has (something to do with that first, stabiliser-off lurch of freedom way back when); two, it'll help me get fit, and three, I'm planning a mammoth charity ride later in the year. This will be in aid of the Shetland CAT scanner appeal. All will be probably be revealed in due course.
It's time to get rid of the motorbike and for that matter motorbiking. I thought having the Harley would be a kind of "mature" way of coping with that adolescent urge to get my motor running, head off on the single track highway. But frankly, it's stopped doing anything for me. But frighten the living the daylights out of me. True, pushbikes face dangers on the road too, but the statistics fairly and squarely convince: old men on motorbikes are accidents waiting to happen; old men on pushbikes (on Sustrans cycle routes) probably just have high blood pressure. And I'm sick of petroleum products.My carbon footprint is the size of a diesel elephant's.
All of which will be hugely ironic if I get killed or maimed cycling around Glasgow next week. I'll try not to.

What's in a name?

I've always been fascinated by band names...but an automatic band name generator? Try it and see what you think. Frankly, The Chia Goldfish doesn't do it for me...

Your Band Name is:

The Chia Goldfish

Band Name Generator

That'll teach me...

We're into true late March Shetland weather now, severe gale nine winds gusting to who knows what, boats cancelled, power flickering off and then, thankfully, back on again. The snow has gone, but so has the stillness and sunshine of Thursday. Last nightit was hard to get to sleep for the perpetual swishing noise that signifies a really big wind, punctuated by enormous buffeting crunches and rattles from our (mostly, but not all)double glazed windows.
Tonight's ferry south from Shetland has been cancelled (complicated reasons involving Aberdeen's useless harbour being closed on Saturday morning, meaning that the boat south ended up in Rosyth, and now has to get back from there). We're all heading south this coming week, me and Magnus on Monday, Susan, Martha and James on Tuesday. Looks like the wind will ease tonight, but seas will still be rough tomorrow. Now where's that Phenergan...
Oh and we all remembered that today was mother's day. But we all forgot about the clocks going forward. This all reminds me of my previous life among premillenial dispensationalists, some of whom were sometimes caught out when the clocks went back, turning up at a closed and shuttered gospel hall to spend an agonising hour or so convinced that the Rapture had taken place without them.

Fine day

What a day! After all that moaning about the snow, what happens but the warmest day of the year, so far, but WITH SNOW! It's the first time in years I've seen the snow glittering. I was out and about earlier this morning, dressed in t-shirt and light pullover (yes, OK, and trousers) and I could feel the sun hot....well, warm...against my face. It's also flat calm. After the darkness and howling gales of the winter, it's just fantastic.
On a wee drive up to Eshaness, I saw Foula dressed in white for the first time ever. Foula being the most westerly Shetland island, allegedly the model for Tracy Island in Thunderbirds (only in the Caribbean, obviously) and identified by the Romans as Ultima thule, or the edge of the world. I've been there, and it's an extraordinary place, with the highest sheer sea cliff in Britain and some unsalvaged remnants of wartime aeroplane crashes.
One of the geese has, for the past fortnight, been sitting on a clutch of eggs right in the middle of our Stonehenge/Callanish/Brodgar flower bed. She knows it's spring!
Enough typing! I have blood pressure to reduce and snowmen to build. Oh, and work to do as well. Also golf clubs to clean and restore, but that's another story.

Pressure!

I conducted a little experiment today: using a portable monitor, I measured my blood pressure at 3.00pm and after the show finished at 4.00pm. 202 over 120 and 193 over 128. Which is not good. Normal is...120 over 80. Don't ask me what those numbers actually mean. Well, actually, I can tell you what they mean: they mean, lose weight, stop drinking triple shot lattes, especially the ones with Calvados on the side. Also Mike's chocolate muffins. Salty things like...all my favourites. Bacon. Pickled herring. Smoked fish. And cheese. In my heart of hearts (and I come from a classic West of Scotland family with a history of stroke and heart disease) I know the cheese has always been a big problem. I mean, just passing Mellis the Magical Cheesemonger (there's one in Aberdeen, just down from the Beeb)is an exercise in temptation-avoidance. Did I mention my high cholestorol? Ah, but that's treated with daily statins'n'aspirins. Sort of.
Interestingly, those blood pressure readings also revealed that my heartbeat was normal in the fairly stressful circumstances of broadcasting to a national and international audience. I clutch at such small mercies...jings. Cake and coffee, anyone? Packet of smoky bacon crisps? With mayonnaise dip? Oh, please yersels...