End of a Dystopian Year

The future is here

The last journey of 2017 on mid afternoon, 31 December, perfectly summed up a tragic year. The no. 2 bus was crossing the Vauxhall Bridge between the MI6 building and a platoon of multi-storey flats that looked bereft of inhabitants. The harsh urban landscape was vacant of people and traffic and dulled to death beneath the grey cumulus clouds. It conjured an image of the distempered politics and society that the first viral flush of Brexit has produced in 2017.

It echoed with the views of a senior civil servant that I spoke to yesterday and what the papers have reported today. Few civil servants believe that Brexit will work but nevertheless all other activities by departments have been sacrificed by ministers on the altar of a trivial pursuit for a false sovereignty.
R.I.P 2017

Stronachlachar

The Arrochar Alps over Loch Arkaig

After another night when the mercury almost disappeared we drove up to Stronachlachar. It is always an inspiration with the Arrochar Alps beyond Loch Arkaig luring you onwards towards Inversnaid before the alternative attraction of the road to Stronachlachar pier on Loch Katrine. There were quite a few cars parked but everyone had retired to the excellent cafe. We strolled along the lochside taking in the scintillating views and admiring the Victorian engineering that had provided Glasgow with clean water since 1852.

The by-product was to make the Trossachs a favourite tourist destination for the central belt residents in the Edwardian era. It prospered in the days when the ferries and railways provided a fine round trip for walkers or cyclists from the railway station at Balloch by ferry up Loch Lomond to Inversnaid and then to Loch Katrine. There were youth hostels and hotels on the approaches to Callander and Aberfoyle from where trains were available before these lines closed in the 1950s and 1960s as road travel ruined the sort of sustainable tourism that we yearn for today.

The area has become a mecca for the sort of coach tourism where visitors are held captive in group hotels and trailed round the so-called 'woollen mills' that are sourced with cheap imports. There has been far too little attempt to attract the energy and enterprise of younger visitors and residents. Cyclists and adventure racing events are beginning to exploit the natural advantages of the area including the hundreds of miles of forest trails, proximity to the main centres of population and potential for outdoor activities and promoting local arts and crafts.

The Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park has been notably poor at encouraging creative enterprises utilising indigenous produce and materials to entice visitors or at facilitating new housing and environmental developments with distinctive sustainable designs. The National Park has been too wedded to conservation, there has been no encouragement of development and the main centres of Ballat, Callander, Aberfoyle and Killin have stagnated since the inception in 2002. It has failed to take advantage of its designation to the extent that the Cairngorms National Park has achieved since it was designated at the same time. The Cairngorms has had a more open approach to developments, this maybe because responsibility for planning was retained by Highland Council. There has been a resultant strong insurgence of younger people keen to live, work and promote an outdoor lifestyle in the Cairngorms national park.

View down Loch Katrine from the pier cafe

Loch Katrine from Stronachlachar

Tourists

Loch Katrine and Ben Venue

The pier cafe at Stronachlachar

Boxing Day, a whiter shade of blue

Snow melt

Apart from the big freeze of Christmas 2010, I cannot remember when Christmas Day was not a grey day during our thirty years here. It was the same again this year but there was an overnight snowfall to brighten up Boxing Day.

Boxing Day is normally a day for some outdoor activity to recover from the Christmas eating fest. Unseasonal sunshine gave us chance to enjoy a walk up Lime Craig before abandoning our attempt to cross the waterfall above so we could climb Craig Mor as well. We decided on dry feet instead and returned to enjoy the Christmas leftovers.

View from the house

Queen Elizabeth Forest from Lime Craig

Ben Lomond top right

Ben Ledi

 Thirty years ago this would have been normal on Christmas day

Winter Solstice

Warning skies

The past fortnight has given us the coldest spell for several years with temperatures down to -7°C on most nights. Over the past week a veneer of sheet ice has been welded onto the pavements and tracks. Running was out of the question until this morning and even then I had to walk a good mile or so as some trails in the forest were sheathed in lethal wet ice.

There have been some gloriously bright frosty winter days between the darkness that descends with an ominous gloom by 4pm. The garden trees have taken on new colours, almost festive with their frosted profiles etched in the cobalt skies. These days have encouraged walks in the immediate vicinity but I am struck by how few people seem to venture out to experience the raw beauty of the winter solstice. I understand why hibernation seems like a good idea, doubly so with the continuing political travails that exist at the global, national and local levels. 2017 will not be missed.

Lake Hotel for lunch

Loch Ard as the sun sinks

Creag Mhor

Ben Lomond

Frosted Silver Birch

Cotoneaster waiting for the redwings 

Magnolia

Polyshambles, the Brexit negotiations

Unwitting Saviours of the Customs Union?

Brexit, don't you just hate it and all the confusion it causes as well as the all-encompassing damage it is imposing on so many aspects of life from inflation, failure to tackle real issues, political hatred, and the mood of despair. This week has been both the worst of worst weeks and, just possibly, the best of worst weeks.

One of the frequent phrases thrown about by Mrs May during her ill thought out General Election campaign was that "we have a plan for Brexit", unlike the Labour Party who were dismissed as being all over the place. Six months on, she is still claiming she has a plan. No one has seen it and, sadly for her sake, it is not shared by many of her cabinet, or the age advantaged ranks of the Tory party, or the DUP, or the civil service.

This week started with yet another collapse of negotiations as the DUP called foul on Mrs May in her attempt to obfuscate the proposals to have no border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and to remain outside the customs union. The chief negotiator, David Davis, made another bored cheery chappie appearance at the 'Exiting the European Union Parliamentary Committee' and showed no remorse for having misled the Committee into believing he had impact assessments for 58 industrial sectors. Nor did he have a contingency plan if there was no deal or know what day of the week it was tomorrow. Four days later Mrs May returned to Brussels in a pre-dawn sortie armed with words trawled from a thesaurus by her team of advisers that were designed to confuse the DUP, amuse the EU and create a temporary truce in the cabinet, who then hailed her as the new Boadicea.

I have really struggled to understand the implications of the agreement after watching several news programmes and reading numerous articles. Then a friend sent me an article from the Irish Times, Ireland has just saved the UK from the madness of a hard brexit, by the excellent Fintan O' Toole. It seemed to shed some light and also gave some sense of hope that the hard brexiteers may have been wrong-footed. This was confirmed when the serial duplicitous brexiteer, Michael Gove, claimed that we could change the proposals agreed by voting to change them at the next general election.