Governor's Bench

When we lived in Jamaica we knew it as Governor's Bench, a long ridge in the southern foothills of the country's highest peak, Blue Mountain. A path, with precipitous drops on either side, ran along the ridge. This one followed to reach its summit, marked with a....

....triangulation point which served as a seat. From there, one could look almost straight down....

....to the capital, Kingston, and the long Palisados spit which enclosed one of the largest natural anchorages in the world.

It was this view which brought home the vertical character of Jamaica, the way the island rose, like some monstrous creature, out of the Caribbean Sea.

It was quite a walk to reach the summit but the children came too, the older one three, the younger - who, as far as I recall, was simply manhandled up the track - a tender few months old.

What a difference a few years make. These days one would be frowned upon for taking a child up a mountain kitted out in a t-shirt, pants, and sandals.

Another Sunrise

When I was young and living in the place I most loved, each sunrise held the keen anticipation of another day - where would I go, who would be there, what would we do? - each moment of that life precious yet squandered away in the enthusiasm of youth.

Time squandered because what was left was finite, the days remaining accelerating towards that inevitable moment when I would be leaving that phase of my life for the dismal grey of the other place, in which most of my year was spent. So I hurried on to the next thing, always looking forward, not giving....

....the extant moment the time it deserved. So, instead of rushing though to my bedroom to get dressed, why didn't I just sit for a few more moments and watch the sunrise, watch it with an intensity which would burn it into my memory, an event to recall later from five thousand miles away?

So, with time running down towards a different ending, this morning I watched the sun rise out of the sea knowing this will be the last time for many months that we'll see it break that distant horizon. For the next few weeks it will lift out of the trees and then it will move further into the north and we'll not see the moment again until November.

Now, if anyone asks me what I've done today, my answer will be, "I watched the sun rise."

Getting Old

Recently, someone said something like, "One of the worst things about getting old is remembering what it was like to be young." I can't remember who it was that said this - a failing memory is another bad thing about getting old - but whoever it was made an interesting point.

This picture of me, aged, I think, fourteen, was taken at the Mombasa Club pool, called by us the 'chini club' because the pool was at the bottom of steep cliffs below the main club buildings. The occasion was the annual children's swimming gala, and I have vivid memories of events there some sixty-six years ago. But can I say of that very enjoyable day that remembering it is the worst thing about getting old? It sort of hurts, that I'll never do anything like it again, but I'm thrilled that I experienced it.

That's what I feel about so many of the things I did in my life: I'm so, so pleased I did them. There are only a relatively few things that I wish I hadn't done. Some of them were under duress - like going to school in England - and a few had bad consequences, which I regret, but most led to relatively minor problems. Even some of the things which, at the time, seemed might turn out pretty disastrously, in retrospect were okay. A good example was doing the two-year contract in Jamaica (picture of school classrooms above), which was very stressful in so many ways - but so well worth it for the beautiful places we visited (beaches in particular) and the lovely people we met.

So I think that the remembering what I did in the past is one of the pleasures of my present life; and I do it a fair bit. My memories are helped by photographs, but I don't have to have a picture in order to remember happy events. The only down-side is that remembering is best done while sitting in the sun, and the north of Scotland isn't the best place to do that, particularly at this time of year.

Parkland Savanna

I have always thought of this, my favourite landscape after the beaches of East Africa, as 'parkland savanna'. It's typically open grassland with stands of acacia, doum palms and, nearer the coast, a scattering of giant baobab trees. It's a landscape dotted with....

....towering termite mounds, and the home of....

....some of the world's most magnificent wildlife.

It's a perfect landscape for walking in search of game. Their presence adds another dimension: this landscape may be beautiful but it harbours some of the world's top predators; and the frisson between these two ideas is what makes it so very special.

It also makes a fine silhouette foreground for Africa's stunning sunsets.

Pictures taken in Selous Game Reserve, Tanzania. 

Sunrise

This picture was taken at 8.22 this morning, looking southeast. Sunrise was twenty minutes earlier, and this would have been down and to the left of where it's pictured so, in a few days' time, the point where the sun breaks the horizon will be obscured by the trees. In some ways that's good, because it means that we're beginning to climb out of winter, but in others it's not so good. Principal amongst these is the we'll not see these colourful sunrises again until late November as they'll be progressively obscured by the trees; and colour is important in wintertime, for it cheers us up.

I was born just south of the equator. There, there was little seasonal movement of the point of sunrise nor, to any extent, any variation in the time of sunrise. There were seasons but they were more to do with the weather: two rainy seasons and two dry.

I prefer the equatorial arrangement, mainly because it doesn't include a winter. The human race wasn't designed for the cold.

Elf Cup Viewing Time

The Japanese make a huge fuss of their cherry blossom viewing time - due to start, this year, around 21st March - and we have begun to catch up by creating demand for snowdrop viewing, but the Memory Wanderer household has a far more difficult phenomenon to capture, the year's first 'blooming' of scarlet elf cup fungi.

They tend to be found in damp leaf litter beneath well-established beech trees, often close to where snowdrops are flowering. As of last year we'd found five elf cup sites in Dunrobin Castle woods so, with the first ones due to appear about now, we set off this morning to see if we could find any.

The first site, near the castle car park, was empty, and the second (above) produced....

....just one - it's to the right of centre in this picture.

And that's one of the problems with scarlet elf cups: they don't come out in excessive numbers, like cherry blossom. If you want to see them....

....you really have to get your nose down into the leaf litter.

The third site we visited was the main one which, last year, boasted masses of elf cups in a fairly limited area, so was very impressive. It's deep in the castle woodland and today....

....produced just six 'blooms'. There were probably more but they're often quite small - this one was about 20mm across - they're....

....deeply buried in moss and leaves and, despite their startling colour, quite difficult to spot in amongst leaves which are a rich copper-brown.

But they're worth the effort, not least because of their startling colour. Of course, scarcity makes them even more desirable, like diamonds. Perhaps the Japanese should think about that.

February Sunshine

We've been enjoying a succession of visceral sunrises, this one yesterday with the British-registered tug Camperdown's lights visible in the Moray Firth.

The sunny days that have followed these dawns have pushed the air temperatures above 10C but the mercury overnight then dropped low enough for a sharp ground frost. Not that this has worried....

....the masses of snowdrops in the local woods where the thick, Scots pine canopy acts like a giant blanket.

The squirrels have been busy during the day. We see one regularly on our way down to the village but today we saw three, of which....

....one was much less shy than the other two, posing quite unconcernedly as I approached to within ten metres. Perhaps it was showing off....

....the hazelnut it had just taken from one of the feeders in the gardens that back onto the woods.