This is Gartmore House near Aberfoyle where I spent the Easter weekend with a score of sax players.  We did a lot of playing and filled in the rest of the hours of the day with agreeable socialising.

The house has some lovely large rooms each decorated in individual style.  I particularly liked the one with a cornice formed of a pattern of ships in relief, arising no doubt from its period under the ownership of a shipping family.  It's also associated with Robert Cunninghame-Graham who delighted in the name of Don Roberto when he enjoyed the gaucho life in Argentina prior to riding into Scottish political life weaving through Liberal and Labour till ending up as first president of the Scottish National Party.

 

The following weekend I spent in Elie with old schoolfriends.  The sun shone all weekend though it was fairly cold much of the time.  We walked about the beach and admired the views across the Forth to the Lothians.

My chums are into fine dining so we did some of that. The food was delicious but I'd have enjoyed larger portions and smaller bills.  That's my brutish and uncultured side showing through. We also wandered about the various East Neuk villages and enjoyed a show at the Byre in St. Andrews in which Liz Lochead entertained us with her poetry underscored here and there by a chap on a tenor sax.

In Crail, which is possibly the loveliest of the villages, we came across this warning sign and a tankful of the beasties. Undeterred a dead portion was purchased for taking down south for Monday's tea by one of the party.

A bonus from staying in a hotel in the South Tyrol is that you are given a free public transport pass for the duration of your stay.  If you are there for a week's skiing and are on the slopes all day it's of limited use unless you fancy spending your evenings on a bus.  Or if like me you don't mind taking some time off.

I hopped on a couple of buses to visit the nearby town of Brunico/Bruneck one morning.  Like every place in the region it has two names, Italian and German, as does every street in the town.  Those are not the only languages spoken as you can hear from this episode of From Our Own Correspondent that Siobhan alerted me to.  It's the last item and starts about 18 minutes into the programme.

Brunico is a pretty little town in a river valley amidst mountains.  It's on the far side of the mountain I was skiing on and from the hill on which sits its mildly impressive schloss you can see the Kronplatz plateau and a run that would have brought me down to somewhere not very far away but it was a bit black for my taste.

The region's linguistic complexity is due in part to it having been cut out of Austo-Hungary and given to Italy after the First World War.  There was subsequently a degree of forced Italianisation much resented by the local population.  In the thirties Mussolini and his chums got into the act.  A monument was erected in Brunico to commemorate the Italian Alpine Troops who died in the Ethiopian campaign but over the years it has been something of a focus for discontent with the Italian state and having been six metres high originally it's been blown up a number of times and replaced.  Now only a bust remains on the pedestal.

There's an article which doesn't deal specifically about this monument but which has a lot of interesting analysis of the history of South Tyrol under Italian control.  See  Fascist Legacies: The Controversy over Mussolini’s Monuments in South Tyrol

A monument I didn't see and which there probably should be is one to Nanni Moretti, the film maker, who was born in the town.

My skiing holiday got off to a good start when Austrian Airlines dished up lunch an hour or so after take-off from Edinburgh.  It was only 11 o'clock but I'd had breakfast around 6 a.m. so I was ready for it. That coupled with the spacious legroom was such a treat compared to the budget airline experience that has been the norm for my holidays in recent years.

Flying into Innsbruck with jaggy mountains on either side more or less on a level with the plane is a great experience on a nice calm sunny day but I'd hate to be coming down that valley in the dark in pelting rain with a vicious crosswind. I'd find it difficult to hold down that tasty pasta bake.

Then it was on to San Vigilio, the lovely little village where I was staying in the very pleasant and comfortable Hotel Teresa. They were not having a busy week and for a couple of nights I was the only client in the hotel. The waiting and kitchen staff who had been on when I arrived disappeared and people I took to be from the family who ran the place did the business except for one evening when they invited me to eat at a restaurant fifty yards away where the menu focussed on local specialities. The food was lovely, as it was in the hotel.

Davide, the main man in the hotel, was an avid naturalist (whether academically trained or just a keen amateur I don't know) and waxed lyrical about the wildlife in the nearby national park. If I'd been there for longer I'd have enjoyed a trip into the park, perhaps seeing the golden eagles that he said nested there. He'd been to Scotland looking for golden eagles and apparently the best book on the birds was written by someone based in Scotland.  He also reminisced about the Cannie Man's and showed me some of his whisky collection. At 15 euros a glass (twice the price in Milan I'm assured) I didn't try any of them.

They hadn't had much snow over the winter and I was there in very much the dying days of the season but there was more than enough snow for me.

You can see in this picture how the hillside is almost devoid of snow except where they have skillfully kept some pistes in goodish nick.

In the village there was no snow at all but up on the plateau where half a dozen lifts converged it was remarkably well conserved.

You can see also that it wasn't too busy and that it was beautifully sunny.  Perfect conditions to my mind provided you either don't mind trying to fight your way through slush in the afternoons or you're happy to pack it in at lunchtime.  The latter is my preference.

Apart from photos I've got a little video souvenir thanks to BMW.  It's not quite a Ski Sunday Slalom and merits a good strong shout of bend zee knees but a bit more practice and then the FIS World Cup  maybe.