I ran into Butterscotch in Southampton yesterday

Poor child in the picture. She has no idea whats about to happen to her...

Cactus Baby

It looks like my cactus is growing another baby.

Well, I know its just a division of the main plant but I'm excited anyway. Yays.

Aliens have landed in my garden!!!!

Or something like that. I have absolutely no idea why there is this almost perfectly circular patch of taller grass in the garden.

Perhaps the invasion is imminent.

Guildford

On Wednesday I met up with Kathryn in Guildford. We saw ducks and cows and canal boats. Every-time I see a canal boat I can't help but wonder whether Rosie and Jim are in there.

Oddly enough the day after, I was watching a program about street crime and saw various trouble makers and arrests right where we had been walking. What a comforting thought.



Apart from that I can't really say much about Guildford.

Blair Atholl

On Monday I went on a random trip with a friend.

Random trips are where we go to the train station and buy tickets to a random destination without any prior knowledge or planning. So far this has worked out well for us, and we've been to places like Dunbar and Dunfermline, both of which we enjoyed. This time we went to Blair Atholl, not far from Perth, which is a little further then we had been before.

It turned out to be a bit smaller then we had hoped but we headed to the main attraction, Blair Castle, and spent a couple of hours exploring the grounds, although we didn't go in the castle itself (cos it was like £9 and we are cheapskates).

It was quit interesting, despite the rain, with lots of very tall species of trees and pretty flowers. Though I swear the birds there were pocessed or something. This one peacock especially seemed to be following me.

There was even this slightly spooky, ruined chapel that we spent some time examining.


This garden appeared to be locked up already, though supposedly it was open for another half hour. Shame, since it looked really pretty too.



We did get a good look at naked Hercules though.


Next we attempted to get to a nearby glen which started off fairly well, with a walk past a fast flowing river and through some picturesque woods.

Here we stopped for vital provisions. Thats my friend in the picture.

Somehow between completely missing signposts, terrible senses of direction and fear of the local neds, we ended up back where we started from at the castle. Eventually around 7, we found the right path to the glen and made a desperate attempt to reach our goal. However, due to the fear of missing the last train, (we had no idea when this would be since neither of us checked the times) we had to abandon our search just short of the end.

On the way there though, there was this odd wooden building, containing and surrounded by derelict cars, and for some reason, what appeared to be a heap of rotting turnips. To make things more bizarre the car in the picture above, despite missing most of its wheels, contained a variety of puzzling objects, including an Eeyore air freshener, some novelty Christmas antlers and a ring binder. Definitely wins the prize for biggest WTF of the day.

On the way back to the station we got fairly lost and ended up wandering through the wilderness for quite some time before we finally found this glorious way out sign.

In turned out that we had nearly an hour and a half left until the last train. We would have eaten in this period, but the only place that seemed reasonable was closed for the day. To top it all off, we couldn't change in Stirling due to diversions and would have never gotten back to Edinburgh at all if it wasn't for Inverkeithing. But all in all it wasn't a bad trip and I will definitely go on more random trips in the future.

First Post!

So I finally got round to making my first post. I am making this blog mainly to share and record the experiences, I have in Japan next year. Until then I guess it will function as a kind of personal blog for anything I find interesting. I intend to create another blog parallel to this one for my more geeky interests (anime, manga, video games J pop etc) so that my more normal friends don't have to endure my ramblings on those subjects.

For now I leave you with the glory that is Shortsman

http://youtube.com/watch?v=HfffJ9vHBAQ