The most notable thing I've done recently has been to walk along the coast from Aberdour to Kinghorn.

I took the train to Aberdour, very few passengers, all wearing masks.  Being not so very far from Kirkcaldy, Aberdour and its beaches is a place I was quite familiar with in my childhood.  The steep hill as you enter the town from the east provided thrills for the young cyclist but was the very devil to get up.  If I ever got up it without unmounting and pushing I'd surely remember it to this day.  So I guess I never did.

As an adult my visits have been much more infrequent.  I went climbing on the cliffs with a Stockbridge neighbour once and have a photo to prove it, if I could only lay my hands on it and I've taken the kids to the Silver Sands and the photographic proof is likewise somewhere unknown.

But this visit is documented in pictures.  First there's the castle, closed because of Covid.

It's been there a long time.  According to Historic Scotland its origins may date back 900 years.

This obelisk is more recent.

I noticed it in the distance as I walked down to the beach, too much of a detour for me to bother trying to get to it but thanks to my camera's zoom I got a picture.  I assumed it was built to commerate something or someone but when I researched it I found that it's purpose was to be spotted from afar.  From much further afar than from where I had spotted it.  From the other side of the Forth in fact.  It was apparently built by the Earl of Morton in 1744/45 to be viewed from his estate at Dalmahoy.  A handy landmark for today's Dalmahoy golfers to line up their shots.

So much of interest before I even got to the beach from where I possibly saw Dalmahoy, but without being that precise there is much to be seen over the Forth.

I got down on my knees to take this one.

Getting up again reminded me again of cycling up that brae out of Aberdour.

Then I set off along the track that runs between the railway and the Forth from where I took lots of shots of Edinburgh which I combined to make this panorama.  Click on it for a bigger image.

 

The British Aluminium plant that used to guard the western approaches to Burntisland closed down in 2002.  The husband of one of my cousins worked there and then turned his hand to psychiatric nursing when it closed.  On the main site there is now a very pleasant looking housing development.  The path from Aberdour runs parallel separated from it by a stream the banks of which have been sympathetically landscaped.

There were plans to develop the area on the seaward side of the path for leisure activities but I couldn't tell if any of that has been done. The "red pond", a deposit of sludge that is produced as a byproduct of converting bauxite to alumina is still there.  Maybe too toxic to do anything with?  There's a castle over there too.  It was on the market two years ago for £500K.  Might still be.

When I was a youngster Kirkcaldy's outdoor swimming pool was derelict and the indoor pool they have now hadn't been built so going to Burntisland's pool was a popular excursion.  It seems still to be there by the western end of the links but I didn't check its facilities.

At the entrance to the links there's a plaque showing people of note who were either born or lived in the town. No great surprise to see Thomas Chalmers, founder of the Free Church of Scotland or William Dick of the Dick Veterinary College or Henry Farnie who wrote the world's first golf instruction manual or even Mary Somerville the mathematician but there were a couple of surprises.  Robert Pitcairn was lost at sea when he was 17 but he must have been a popular lad since they named the island after him and David Danskin, founder and first captain of Arsenal FC.  My favourite though is probably Alexander Orrock who ran the Scottish mint in the 16th century and introduced the bawbee, the name derived from the name of his estate.   A more modern name is Anneila Sargent professor of astronomy in California.  She clearly profited from her time at Kirkcaldy High School.

It doesn't commemorate anyone connected to the world's first roll on roll off train ferry which ran from Burntisland to Granton from 1850 until the Forth Rail Bridge was built, presumably because no-one from the town was particularly instrumental in the project.  Passenger ferries continued to serve the route until the outbreak of the Second World War.  The service was revived briefly after the war and I travelled on it at some time before its closure in 1952.

I understand there was an attempt  to run a catamaran service in the early 90s but it didn't last long sadly. 

I went on to the beach and rested for a bit ruminating on my other connections with Burntisland.

It was the home of one of my sisters in law.  The family of one of my school friends made lemonade there.  I had a girlfriend from there.  Another childhood friend's brother settled in the town.  In my late teens I was in with a crowd who would drink cider and smoke late at night up on the local hill called The Binn.  Somone had access to a car to get us there.  

Fortunately the tide was out because then you can walk the next stage on the beach, otherwise you have to follow the main road.

Again you get great views of Edinburgh as you go along.

A noticeboard just before you leave Burntisland handily points out a couple of escape points should the tide come in.  One of those is by the monument to Alexander III who fell off his horse there en route to join his second wife the young Yolande de Dreux, but when I got to what I thought was that point I couldn't be bothered climbing up to it.  So I've borrowed this picture of it from Wikimedia.

Striding on into Pettycur bay I took some more pictures.  Here is a distant view of the bridges.  So distant that you really need a click to make them visible.

There's a lot of sand on this beach.  I thought the poles sticking up here and there might have been for some form of net fishing but a quick google tells me they were in fact defences against gliders landing.  

A little further on you come to the pretty vast conglomeration of holiday homes that overlook the beach.  Can't say I fancy it.  I have erected a tent on the beach in the dim and distant past but that was not to provide overnight accommodation, rather a shelter for discreet changing into swimwear or discreet canoodling.

There's a hotel in the middle of the park where I saw the Inverkeithing Community Big Band perform an excellent gig as part of the Fife Jazz Festival a few years ago.  I've got to know some of the players since then.

Pettycur was one of the points from which ferries crossed the Forth centuries ago but the harbour is a very tranquil spot today.

The last leg was a bit of a slog uphill from the harbour into Kinghorn but I was rewarded with this lovely view of the beach.  I thought of rewarding myself with a spot of lunch at the bar with a garden not far from this viewpoint but the Covid mitigation ordering system just seemed a bit too tedious so I didn't bother.

This is another beach that I frequented when I was a kid.  I particularly remember the evangelical groups who would tell bible stories and get us all singing religious songs.  The only one I could remember as I sat looking out over the beach was "the wise man built his house upon a rock" but google later brought a number to mind such as "this little light of mine" and "Jesus loves me" .  Youtube is full of them.  They sound a little jazzier than I remember the tambourine shakers of Kinghorn producing but the messages are there and I'm sure my ten year old self would have been thrilled if they'd had Youtube on a big screen.

Claire alerted me to a jazz band called Kansas Smitty's who run and perform in a bar of the same name in east London.  During lockdown they are presenting what they proclaim to be the only vitual jazz bar in the world on Saturday nights.  That's a payable event but they are a presence on Youtube where you can catch them for nothing.

They happened to be doing a livestream gig from Ronnie Scott's which is where I heard them.  A handful of personable young men led by the charming reeds player Giaccomo Smith playing mostly their own compositions which I'd call modern but mainstream.

They provided a pleasant curtain raiser to the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival 2020 which faute de mieux was also an online experience.  I thought they did exceptionally well in putting togethere a varied and interesting programme.  It consisted predominently of videos of previous events but there were a number of lockdown performances including three Italians playing a mix of acoustic and electronic material in the woods near Turin.  I liked the music but not the soft focus filming.

I loved Playtime's gig from the Pathhead village hall and Aku performing in some cavernous underground space in Glasgow.  In another guise the Aku players appeared with others in a wildly crammed Glasgow flat giving it laldy while a pot plant spun round on a record deck. Tolerant neighbours on that stair.

Some of the reruns I'd seen live but not Lorna Reid.  I'll make a beeline to hear her when live performances reappear.

I haven't seen much else in the way of online entertainment.  I've watched a bit of TV without much enthusiasm or memory of what I've seen, inched a few episodes further through Narcos on Netflix and finished off some books.  The Whitehall Mandarin was a forgettable spy story.  At last year's Book Festival I heard the author of The Orchestra of Minorities speak at an African novels event and made a mental note to read it.  Now I have but didn't much care for this sorry tale of woe.  In parentheses The Old Drift  which featured in the same event and which I characterised as potentially the Great Zambian Novel I read some time ago but failed to enjoy.  Unnatural Causes is the professional autobiography of a forensic pathologist who's slit open every notable violently deaded body in the last forty years - absolutely fascinating.  The Way We Live Now which I read as a coda to watching its TV adaptation on DVD was equally fascinating.   

Of course being set in the 1870s it's the way they lived then but snobbery, greed, hypocricy, spendthrift sons, struggling mothers, lovers' misunderstandings, unrequited love, good samaritans and financial scams are with us still.

It's a couple of weeks now since we were relieved from the obligation to travel no further han 5 miles from home for leisure.  But since we were still enjoined to avoid public transport the concession appeared to favour car users (of whom I am no longer one), stalwart cyclists (certainly more than 60 years since I travelled 5 miles on a bike) and wheelers (I'm not one of those yet).  And I suppose walkers, but walking 5 miles before setting out on a leisure walk?

However, without worrying much about the fine print of the regulations and after a couple of false starts thanks to on the day adverse weather reports I set off for Abbotsford, that extraordinary house that Walter Scott built between Galashiels and Melrose.

The house has not yet reopened to the public but the gardens and grounds are open.  I caught the train to Tweedbank on the reopened Borders Railway.  Why on earth doesn't it go on to Selkirk, Hawick, Langholm and Carlisle? Perhaps like Edinburgh's trams they'll get an extension underway eventually.

I had intended to walk alongside the Tweed since the little bus that serves Abbotsford from the station doesn't run at weekends but there seemed no ready access to the river from the station so I walked there on a well signposted route through a housing area, across a main road and along a minor road.

Since my last visit decades ago they've built a visitor centre that hosts an interesting exhibition about the great man and his works, a gift shop and a café.  I visited the exhibition but left the rest for later, bought an entry ticket, provided my contact details for virus fighting and wandered around the gardens.

They are rather splendid.  I don't know who the chappie with his hands clasped is.  I expect there's a guidebook that tells all.

After the gardens I lunched in the café where I was served by a man in a perspex visor and gave my contact details again.  Next was the gift shoppe where I invested in some chutney and a copy of The Antiquary.  I've read several of Scott's novels but not that one.

I decided I would try to get back to Tweedbank by following the river.  It was a pleasant walk, narrower and muddier than I had perhaps bargained for.

At a point where the path split, one branch continuing along the river and one heading for the town I sought advice from some other walkers as to which would be the better route to get back to the station.  Their advice was to take the town path.  I wish I hadn't.  It was a boring walk and looking at a local map at the station when I got there ( a map I hadn't seen on my arrival) I could see how I might have got nearer by continuing along the river.  Even if I'd had to carry on to Melrose it would have been a more interesting walk.  Next time.  

There's been lots of on-line fun and entertainment in the last few weeks, some socially distanced outdoor meetings and a couple of decent walks.  One of the latter rather forced upon me when I went out to go to the Botanic Gardens having heard that they had reopened.  When I got there I discovered that you currently need to book in advance and that that day's tickets were exhausted.

So I set off along the Rockheid path towards Stockbridge.  When I emerged from the path instead of heading down to my left I crossed the road and followed a path that I'm sure didn't use to be there.

It led along to Inverleith park behind the Grange cricket ground.  What a good spot to be able to watch a game from.  Mental note made.

I bumped into a friend as I entered the park (spookily enough at the exact spot at which I had bumped into another friend the last time I was there).  I chatted to her and her grandchildren for a wee while and then walked on through the park and past the Gothic marvel that is Fettes.

I popped into Waitrose and bought some of the goodies that my local supahs don't stock and bussed my way back to as near as one can get to Leith Walk now that the tram works have shaken up traffic flows.

On-line socially there was Claire's quiz at which I performed miserably and the altogether intriguing mystery game called Plymouth Point where we followed clues to find a missing person.  I can't say I contributed a lot to the uncovering.  The heavy lifting being mostly done by the social media savvy younger members of the group.

I joined a Zoom event to watch a film Phil had been involved in making in Athens about democracy and to listen to some of the discussion that took place afterwards.  It was interesting but I don't give much for my chances of seeing a purer, more direct form of democracy springing up in my lifetime.  I'm not altogether sure that it would not be better to try to build on the representative form that we have at present.

I enjoyed Philip Glass's Akhnamen from the Metropolitan Opera

and several shows from the National Theatre.  A stunning Midsummer Night's Dream, a gloriously theatrical Amadeus, The Deep Blue Sea full of agonising emotion but which might have been better served by a stage half as wide and Les Blancs, a take on the chaos and brutality of decolonisation.

A lunchtime series on Radio 4 led me to the documentary film Icarus about doping in Russian sport.

Amongst the DVDs I ordered as makeweights to save postage on The Way We Live Now was Middlemarch which I enjoyed very much. I think the novel must have been amongst the many books that I disembarrassed myself of some years ago.  I'm now tempted to rebuy it but I'll endeavour to wait for the library to reopen.

I've read a few lightweight books, not all of them worth bothering with and am almost finished with The Way We Live Now which I bought as a result of watching the DVD.  I'm very glad I did it's an absolute pageturner.

I took the bus one day down to Silverknowes and enjoyed one of my favourite walks along to Cramond. It was a great deal busier than when I walked there a couple of months ago.  Social distancing was noticeable by its absence.

Cramond Island from Silverknowes

A corner of Cramond

Cramond imagined under the Romans