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Published: January 8th 2009
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New Year's Day
And some revellers are still going strong. Happy New Year. I hope you have less trouble working out where to start than me.
Being a festive season grump, I wasn't expecting much from Edinburgh's infamous Hogmanay party, where Kate and I ushered in 2009.
Kate went a day early, via her ancestral town of Strathaven, near Glasgow, where she bought a nice postcard of a lamp post. I dashed to catch the express train after work, and arrived at 8.30pm with the city already throbbing. Through some nifty footwork Kate had secured us cheap tickets for the street party. I met her under the ferris wheel at 9.15pm for the fun to begin.
It started with mulled wine in which the lethal ingredient was pepper, and ended at Belford hostel at about 5am when a drinking game left me behind. I'm not entirely sure of all the details in between, except that when the clock struck midnight, the crowds sang Auld Lang Syne without knowing the words, the fireworks went off (sorry Edinburgh but Sydney does it better), we went back to the hostel and the world went on as normal. Oh, and Kate, a new year baby, turned 25.
However the highlight was
Aquaphone
The tone produced sounded a little like a fog horn. in that hour from 11pm to 12pm, when we boogied and jigged to the amazing super-duper Peat Bog Faeries. To get a sense of the flinging with kilt-clad strangers, you can listen to a very dodgy recording of the show
here Yay, Peatbogs!
Of course not everybody got home that night. One of our roommates was still going strong until two days later when he invited himself into Kate's bed for a hug. Others never came home at all. But for us, New Year's Day recommenced bright and early at 8am. A certain somebody was excited about her birthday. So we walked up Arthur's Seat, the hill above the city, where I presented her with a birthday present. It was a tin of artificial snow. Then we went and cheered (or harrassed?) some cyclists competing in a triathlon. It makes you wonder what their resolutions were for the rest of the year...
That same day, but back in Edinburgh's medieval drag the Royal Mile, the street-performers and stall-holders were gearing up for another night at work. Among them was a tight-rope fiddler and, better still, an aquaphonist, whose instrument worked by spraying a high-pressure jet of water at
Fiddler on the roof, nearly
The little girl in the red jacket, however, stole this busker's show with her dancing. variously sized metal cylinders. We also spent a solid half hour in a gift shop sifting through hundreds of different badges, as you do. Kate found one made just for her: I Put the Sexy in Dyslexia.
THe plan had been to go back to the Royal Mile that night after dinner, but by the time that came around, us oldies were exhausted and groaning at the following day's 6am start to catch the bus to Glen Coe. It was kind of nice to stay in, though, because it meant I had time to talk to some of the old hands at the hostel, where I worked with oh so many months ago. Nice to see you guys, if you see this.
Next morning Kate very ably extricated herself from the boy who had climbed into her bed at 6am and we set off to the bus station. It turned out she could have had another hour of stranger-cuddle time, as the bus passed within metres of our hostel on its way out of Edinburgh towards Glasgow.
She got over it when, within a couple of hours, the bus was cruising along the west bank of Loch
Kaleidoscope
In Camera Obscura, the optical illusion museum. Lomond, and we were marvelling at the snow, and singing the inevitable song about Loch Lomond. The bus climbed through Crianlarich (my favourite Scottish village name - you have to here a Scotsman say it!) and Tyndrum onto a very bleak and frozen Rannoch Moor, before descending again into Glen Coe with its curvaceous hillsides and winter colours. Glen Coe village was coated with hairy hoar frost - although snow seemed scarce - and by the time we walked out to the bunkhouse about a mile out of town I was itching for a brisk run through the ice. So off I went slipping about the forst trails. Kate did a similar route while stalking deer.
When night-time came we wandered down to the boots bar at the nearest pub, the Clachaig Inn, for some seranading by a skinny giant in tartan pants who mixed up the words to Waltzing Matilda. It was perhaps a good thing we went out, though. The other people in the bunkhouse, a group of Cardiff University kayakers, were getting over the dry spell and lack of paddlable rivers by looking at girlie magazines. I believe the mags are still there, among the coffee
Morning
Glen Coe on Saturday, January 3. table reading material, if anyone is interested.
As always, it's hard to say what was the highlight of the trip, but the next day's walk up the Pap of Glencoe (or Sgorr na Ciche in Gaelic - much more melodic) came close. It was our first walk on a completely frozen trail, and views from the 750m summit were magnificent. It was also the only sizeable hill-top not inaccessible due to ice. Or wimpyness. The only bad points were a) that all the animals were hibernating with hot chocolates and marshmellows, and b) we somehow took an hour longer than the book suggested we should need. But that was OK, because we later worked out Kate had spent a month travelling around in the wrong time zone, and had set her clock an hour fast.
The video above gives a glimpse into the kind of silliness we got up to.
The next day was no less silly. We went to the Lost Valley, where the McDonalds, the clan that was massacred by the Campbells in Glen Coe in the 1600s, used to hide out. We didn't see any rugged highlanders, but it was a fabulous taste of
Pap of Glen Coe
The view from the summit on a snowy winter day. the mountains, walking among craggy summits, frozen waterfall and a shaggy sheep or two.
Alas, it was back to London on Sunday night. I won't whinge. You can read about how late we were
here .
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Stephen Crisdale
non-member comment
Well... a Happy Hogmanay to you too! (If only I knew exactly what it meant...)
You've laid-on the full multi-media experience!! I'm impressed... and not just by how cold your cheeks must have been after that little slip! You've obviously got 2009 off to a great start! BTW; do they make "artificial snow" out of water?