Tongue is a small village (population 560) in the far North West of Scotland. A friend of mine was going to visit a client in Skerray, a bit further North, and he kindly invited me along for the ride. We stopped in Tongue for coffee and a bite to eat in the delightful Tongue Deli and Post Office. What a lovely little shop - used by locals and tourists alike. You must drop in if ever you're in the area.
Alisdair left me there, and collected me later, while he went off to visit his client.
What a lovely day it was. The temperature gauge in the car, showing the outside temperature, varied between -7 to and +2. A crisp frost in many places. The road, once it gets North of Lairg, is single track with passing places. On the way we startled 3 magnificent stags but they stopped long enough to have their picture taken. I had an hour or so to myself in Tongue and enjoyed a walk around the village, heading out towards the long-abandoned Castle Varrich. Had I had a bit more time I would have walked the extra mile or so to reach the castle.
On the way back we planned to stop at the Crask Inn, an isolated 'outpost' in the middle of nowhere, for some warming soup but it turns out it was closed, and will be until 7th Feb. We drove on to Lairg and found a pub that was open and the bearded bus driver therein gave me permission to take a photograph of him with his beard decorated ready for Christmas. Here are a few pictures of the day.
They tell me Christmas is just around the corner. I always know that Christmas is close when I hear Jona Lewie singing 'Stop the Cavalry'
Sometimes,
more and more often as I get older, I wonder if life has already been
mapped out for each of us, as if each of us has our own jigsaw of
life and the individual pieces of the jigsaw fit into that larger
picture as and when the time is right for them to fit in.
Sometimes
I feel that I'm in the driving seat of the entity that is Des but
perhaps the route I'm taking has already been mapped out. Even if I
occasionally turn off from that pre-planned route I always seem to
end up back on it, going in the right direction.
Russians
have a phrase for it, от судьбы не уйти, which means
you can't get away from fate. It may indeed be fate, or perhaps God
himself is steering us individually in the right direction. Whichever
view you subscribe to, and I confess I'm leaning more towards the
latter these days, it could well explain why I'm sitting typing this
blog at 6 o'clock on a Sunday morning in a 2* hotel in Tortosa in
Spain.
I've
mentioned before, on social media, that I quite fancy walking the
Camino de Santiago. There are several different routes and I had been
considering what is known as 'the English route' from Ferrol down to
Santiago de Compostela, a route of perhaps 120km. I've had a bit of
time on my hands this week and have started to think about going to
Ferrol, on Spain's NW coast to recce the start point (time spent on
reconnaissance is never wasted!). It's easy to forget that Spain is a
big country. Salou to Ferrol is a distance of more than 1,000 km: 9
hours by car, 13 hours by train, or less than 2 hours (but more than
£100) by plane from Barcelona to A Coruna.
Why
it popped into my head I shall never know but suddenly I thought
about visiting Tortosa. One hour on the train from Salou at a cost of
just over 4 Euros with my 'senior rail card', and 30 Euros for B&B
for 1 night. It's only a single room with no room to bring in a cat,
never mind swing it, but the bed is larger than a standard single and
the room is perfectly adequate. I shall see later what they mean when
they say a 'buffet breakfast' is included. I shall also discover
whether the 7 a.m. start time uses the rather more flexible Spanish
clock.
Allow
me to, finally, get to the point of the blog. I arrived here
yesterday afternoon and started looking on the internet for things to
do. I stumbled across a site called wanderlust and there found
reference to the Vies
Verdes,
(or green routes) disused railway lines that have been converted into
scenic (and largely flat) walking and cycling trails. "The Baix
Ebre Greenway, a 26km section of the old Val del Zafán railway, is
particularly enticing. From the former station of El Pinell de Brai,
the route runs via red-rock ravines, limestone caves, orange-blossom
meadows, impressive viaducts and tunnels, and the Ebro River to reach
the historic city of Tortosa".
All
that remains for me to do today is visit the bus station and see if
there is a bus to the far end of the route - I don't particularly
want to do 26km to then turn around and do 26km back again! Having
completed my recce, I plan to return another time.
Tortosa
is a lovely town, if only it didn't suffer from that particularly
Spanish malaise of not opening its restaurants for dinner until 8pm.
I can't change their culture but I can choose to put my money into
the pockets of Indians, or in this case Pakistanis, who have the
required entrepreneurial skills to open their eating establishments
at a more reasonable, for me at least, time. And a nice kebab it was
too!
P.S. Breakfast was fine, but I get quite grumpy when I see people sneaking stuff out for their lunch - to me that suggests the hotel will need to raise its prices to cover its costs so I'll have to pay more next time.
2 blogs in a week, I have surpassed myself. I'm still dreaming of pushing through to 500 and then (self-)publishing a book for the grandchildren's coffee tables once I'm long gone. I shall always regret not asking more questions of my grandparents, especially those on my mum's side, as I know grandad served in India and nan was there with him, at least for some of the time. Here is a picture of the ship nan came back on. One of my cousins did the research and I saw nan's name on the passenger manifest. Must have been fascinating times.
On my way North to Scotland in a couple of weeks I will be stopping off at Stockport for lunch with the surviving aunt and uncle on dad's side of the family. I must quiz them. Again.
I digress, I'm quite good at that!
I've mentioned before that I enjoy the beautiful walk from Salou to Cambrils. I usually walk one way and take public transport back. This time though, the one remaining little grey cell kicked in and I realized it would be better to walk 'halfway' there and then walk back again, thus gaining the benefit of the sun on my front and my back rather than just one or the other. Hundreds of other people on the path, of many nationalities, either walking, running, cycling or whizzing along on skates. There was a small police presence (I mean small in number, not in size!), which doubtless did a lot to deter the usual throng of Africans from selling their wares (or maybe even somebody else's wares!) from blankets on the pavement.
One thing I did see were these artistic 'sand castles'. I don't have an ounce of artistic talent in me - it's the other UK Des Buckley who has all the talent.
Why is this blog entitled "one good turn deserves another"?
On my way off to do the walk I popped into the local barber's shop for a quick No. 2. Who should be the barber but a guy from Morocco that had been coming to my free English classes. A small world.
He gave me the haircut for free, instead of the usual 8 Euros. I was well pleased!
A video clip to finish? I heard Simon & Garfunkel singing "The Sound of Silence" this morning. It has to be one of my all time favourites and I have enjoyed listening to it since it first came out in the sixties. Hello darkness, my old friend...
Sorry it's been so long since I last wrote (it was the middle of February!). Let me assure my loyal reader that I'm still alive and kicking. Actually, I'm alive and sweating at the moment - just back from a run/walk along the promenade. Possibly a mistake to do it in the hottest part of the day but when did I ever listen to sound advice?
Two years ago today (30th June 2017) I landed in Barcelona to turn the page on this latest chapter of my life. You can't believe how much nicer to have my own little flat than to be paying rent every month to landlords/landladies as I was doing in Moscow & Warsaw. There the pressure was on to make enough money to pay the rent. Now I don't need to work as hard as there is no rent to pay. There is, of course, a management charge to the property administrators and a yearly tax to the Spanish government but they're not to the same scale as the rent was. I still like to teach though as I enjoy the buzz you get at the end of a successful lesson. So how do I spend my days when I'm not teaching? I always try to take bite-sized chunks every day from three of my 'elephant tasks' (tasks, not tusks) and a then a couple of easy-win 'taskettes'. What are my elephant tasks? Learning Spanish, keeping fit, and some kind of I.T. - all with the aim of keeping body and mind active. Learning Spanish. Not easy, at my time of life, to be learning a new foreign language. It seems to me that the reason we have two ears is that whenever a new Spanish word goes in one ear a Russian one drops out of the other. I recently paid for a self-study course and having paid good money for it I am now motivated to keep going. Keeping fit.In the Summer I like to run/walk along the promenade or go to the local municipal gym. I try for, and usually achieve, a minimum of 6,000 steps on my super-duper Samsung smart watch but I also try not to be paranoid about it. I.T. Just started to design and populate a new Microsoft Access database to help with the Spanish; a container, if you like, for vocabulary and grammar rules and exceptions. From time to time I also undertake webmaster-type maintenance on my website www.inter-bridge.biz It's been my experience that once you start talking programming 'stuff' to non-programming people they quickly lose all interest. So it's probably best to stop before you're bored rigid. Can't finish though without including, for posterity, the picture of me and Mo at a Fathers and Daughters dinner at the RAF Club in Picadilly the Monday before last.
Apropos of nothing, except that I like the music, here are 2 video clips of Peter Sarstedt singing. 'Frozen Orange Juice' and 'Where do you go to my lovely', both, I think from the 60s - the Golden age of music?
The first thing to remember when travelling to Munich, or indeed anywhere in Bavaria, is that they don't much say Guten Morgen (Good morning) or Guten Tag (good day) but instead use Grüß Gott (God's greetings). I flew to Munich (or München as it is called in Germany) on Friday. As you've no doubt gathered by now I pretty much love travelling
especially to Germany, where they have some of my favourite 'fast food' . Not forgetting German beer, of course.
I had an ulterior motive for going to Germany this time - I went to see an Andre Rieu concert in the Olympia Halle in Munich. I guess you either like this type of 'light classical' music or you don't. He tours all over the world with his Johann Strauss orchestra. It was the third time I've seen him live, once in UK, once in Poland and now in Munich. Here are two pictures of the concert venue. I'm perhaps the only person left in the world who won't take pictures of the group/act/turn while they are on stage performing so I took these pictures as the stadium was filling up and then turned my phone off.
On thing I had forgotten is that Bavaria, in February, usually means snow. This time was no exception but it was mostly on the fields, there was almost none on the streets of the city.
As well as going to the concert I took the opportunity to re-acquaint myself with what is, perhaps, Munich's most famous tourist attraction - the rathaus glockenspiel. Three times a day, at 11:00, 12:00 and 5:00 (in the summer), the 32 life-sized figures start to move and the bells chime. It is a re-enactment of 2 stories from the 16th century and you can read more about it here.
I also took a few pictures of the tourist 'tat' available to buy in the shops. Or it would be available if it weren't Sunday. German shops don't bother opening on Sundays. In fact they only open on Saturday afternoons on the first Saturday of the month.
My video clip, to finish, has to be an excerpt from an Andre Rieu concert. This particular clip has a pantomime bull chasing a woman dressed in red all around the concert hall. Cheap laughs but people of a certain age lap it up.
I gave myself the weekend off and went to Marseille for a couple of days. I flew from Barcelona on Friday (the flight was just over one hour) and came back by flix bus yesterday (which took 7 hours!). I found it to be a bustling city, especially on Saturday evening, when the streets were full of people. I was told it was a 'manifestation', but of what I don't know. There are several different shades of meaning to that word when translated into English, ranging from event to demonstration to march. There were scores of police vehicles on the street racing hither and thither with their 'blues and twos' almost deafening the eardrums. I even saw little gatherings of riot police ready to do their kettling or whatever French riot police do to contain situations. It may well have been a continuation of the 'yellow vest' protest movement that has such a hold in France at the moment. On Sunday I saw a smaller demonstration, all men, with their banners shouting for the release of Abdullah Öcalan, a Kurdish leader. Apart from all that 'excitement' I had an enjoyable few days in the city. I managed to work out how to release an electric scooter from its electronic 'padlock' (by logging onto their website and paying 'pennies') and enjoyed a whizz along the harbour esplanade, darting between the myriad of tourists who were out and about even this early in the year. Time to let the pictures speak louder than words.
Linguistically my brain became fried and several times I found myself saying Gracias in France and Merci in Spain.
I couldn't not have a picture of them selling fish on the harbour
This is the 'grand escalier' up to the train/bus station.
sleeping it off.
And now, a link to the 1971 film "The French Connection", filmed largely on location in Marseille.It is the full-length film so may not be available for long before it is removed.
