Tenerife. Chapter 2. We circulate locally.

God that last blog was boring. I know I'm sorry. If we were real men we would probably have got out in the hills on the very first day - but this being abroad thing - it's a lot. Nobody speaks the right language. Everything is complicated. We didn't know how the buses worked or where to get them or how much they cost or where to go to or what it would be like. It seemed fair to go and have a run around Puerto de la Cruz and kind of get our bearings.

Since Peter had realised how far South we were going he had begun to obsess about butterflies again. What he might see. I tried to stem the flow early. I didn't want Tenerife to be just a list of the butterflies we didn't see. Couldn't it be its own thing? 

With a vague plan to do a run out to a ruin at the other side of town we set off into the morning sunlight.

Are the pigeons copying the stones or are the stones copying the pigeons. Or are they just drawn to each other?

Maybe 2/3rds of the way through town we were stopped by this beauty - a Red Admiral native to Tenerife I think. Peter has the detail. Vanessa Hotpants or something.

Xmas was ever-present but hard to take seriously. Jesus wasn't born in a warm country, after all, he was born in a cold country with Pine trees and sledges and Santa, wasn't he? Or why this?

Peter had always been a bit rude about the Monarch Butterflies but was willing to settle when it came to it. They were generous about sitting still for a photo and were dressed up to the 9s.

The local speckled woods, however, were as skittish as they are in this country, and just as up for a fight. Damn that blade of grass. As I was taking this photo, a fellow who looked like the psychopath in the original "Vanishings" film sidled up to us and asked in a Scandinavian accent what we were photographing. He said he was a biologist himself and from Sweden. Happily he didn't bury either of us underground.

When are the Koi not coy? When they're hungry! And at other times. Boom!

Charles, Camilla and Diana.

There were populous nativity scenes all over town.

Peter forgot himself and had a morning beer.

Yo Speckly!!!

Where are they?

Beautiful Bamboos

excessive

More monarch.

But the wise old owl says "tomorrow you will have to figure out how to get out of town!"

Tenerife Holiday. Chapter 1. Week in Hell.

I knew when I booked the flights that there'd be an argument about how early we got to the airport, but the information said be there 2 hours beforehand. In the past I would have added in some extra time for our bus to break down and for Peter to have a seizure, but these days I'm incredibly laid-back and I worked out from Google travel the absolute latest we could leave the house and still get there. Peter goes for diving out the door at the last moment but I like a bit of time so my alarm was set for way early - 4.30am. Unfortunately I woke up at 2am and stayed awake - so it was going to be a long day.

Everything worked. All our buses worked. Our tickets worked. Security was only 5 minutes. Peter grumbled as we had too much time to kick about in the pointless half-way world between security and the plane. Our flight was on time. We were off. About 4 and a half hours later we stepped off the plane into the heat.

Getting out of the airport took more time and effort than it should have. For a while we were being herded about pointlessly as a few planes seemed to have landed all at the same time and there were huge queues for passport control. It was hot and the security staff were asking for families with children to come to the front and a Canadian that had a voice that wasn't new to complaining growled on about how it was stoopid and pointless. It was tempting to get in a fight with him, just to release some tension.
Then there was a long wait in the heat for our airport transfer bus to arrive. We were getting surrounded by complaining old ladies and Peter was getting antsy. But then we got on the bus and our driver Angel put on a Jet2 welcome recording. There was a bit of preamble and then the voice said "but let's get to the important part...your week in hell". We looked at each other and burst out laughing. "That's very honest of them." After some reflection I think it was "how we can help".

We had a long bus drive up to the North but it was captivating seeing desert, palm trees, cacti, funny houses, spanish signs - as we got further North things got greener. We arrived at our hotel and went out for a walk in the warm evening. There was a huge swell coming into the harbour and areas of walk-way were cordoned off for safety. We wondered if there had been some especially large storm, but over the next few days we realised there are always large waves rolling into the harbour.

-------------------------OMG, I have work tomorrow and I am sitting in my running gear from hours ago, so I'm going to go. Meet me back here for Chapter 2. "There are butterflies!".

The Lammermuirs with the Fast Boys and the Sunday Seal of Disapproval

So on Saturday we'd made this plan where me and Graeme Dunbar and Nick and Peter were all going to go for a run in the Lammermuirs. In which universe did this make sense? Not in this one. Not for small me. Also we were going to set off very early.

The weather forecast was good though.

So early on Saturday morning it was time to get up. The sun got up somewhat later. Happily Graeme had slept in so we were a little en retard. It gave me a chance to take care of some household chores.

We stopped en route at the Lanterne Rouge which recently won a much deserved award as Best Bike Cafe. I voted for it. Because refills of coffee. We all had 2 cups of coffee and I certainly felt more braced for the adventure to come.

It was icy cold and we were in shadow to start with. The boys were all very considerate but there was no-one who would naturally be jogging along at my pace. I tried to send them off ahead, but then they waited for me. Oh my giddy-god. At 11 miles or so I set them off up to Lammerlaw giving me a 1 mile head-start for the last few miles home and that's when I took 90% of my photos because I wouldn't be holding anyone up.

It was a beautiful day. Here are all my photos unfiltered with a lovely Bjork track called Vokuro on top of them. The music is very solemn but actually the atmosphere was more comedy than lament because coffee. I would do this differently next time but time is racing on so here is the imperfect product.

Today (Sunday) was another beautiful day. I got more sleep and was more well rested so more chipper and less frightened. We were planning to go to Gullane for a lope around. Nick said give him a shout too so we did. He'd been up until late and was a little subdued. His phone battery gave out and Peter's camera started to act up too. We were all tired and so it was quite a business-like canter round the usual circuit.

Coming back along the beach I reminded Peter that he had claimed there was a dead seal on the beach last week. I hadn't seen it and didn't really believe him. It was at the end of our 11 mile run and it was nearly dark. There was no sign of it today. I pretended to think the seal was a figment of his imagination and asked him if it had spoken to him.
He immediately shifted into character and it said in a slow, rather sardonic English accent. "Hello Mr Buchanan. I have some criticisms to make of you if you don't mind."
"What were they?" I inquired.
"You should have stuck in at school, you could have made something of yourself." it began.
"Instead you have let everyone down."
"And you've let yourself down."

Aaaah.

OH Blog, why have I forsaken thee?

Well you know, it's partially about working a full day on a Monday now. The weekend is so short. I finish on Friday at 6pm and it still takes time to get home.Then it all kicks off again before you know it come Monday morning.  I told Peter the other day, "Here comes the weekend. Friday night is the best night. By Saturday I'm already grieving that it'll soon be over." He says it's the same for him.

Look. I've devised a way of doing a massive photo dump. I realised the other day when I was flicking mindlessly through my photos for November that I liked whizzing quickly through all the photos, not just the ones I'd chosen and cropped and straightened. You get more of a sense of being there. If there's anything good, there tends to be more photos of it from different angles as I've tried to figure out how best to capture it. So I wanted to find a way that I could see that without wearing my mouse finger out.  I found some cheap software on-line and Hey Presto. I have also stolen a little bit of Underworld's music to sweeten the medicine. I haven't got their explicit permission, but I feel they would just want me to go ahead.

Okay, I've been thinking about this thing for some time now. It's called the theory and practice of running but it is really the theory and practice of everything. I have noticed - especially in the winter when it takes a lot of thought to get outside, that I'll imagine my run is going to be one way and then it is entirely different. I look out the window, it looks cold and miserable, I dress up warm, I make a plan based partially on what the Met Office says the weather is. Out I go. In a few minutes, or half a mile, I am too warm, it's fine, I wish I'd gone out earlier; the birds are singing, I wish I'd given myself longer. It feels nice to get some fresh air. I promise myself I'll get out sooner tomorrow.

At the start of November there was relentless rain, and then it got cold and things started to freeze. "Here we go" I thought, "Winter until April". I battened down my hatches. I started wearing tights. Then it got warmer again. Warm enough for shorts.

I keep having approximately this thought.....You think a thing is a thing, but it is only an average. So winter - in my mind it's quarter of a page of A4 - it's the part with grey skies and large flakes of snow falling from the sky on a wind-swept field somewhere....and then you go outside and the birds are singing and the sun is luke-warm and it feels like spring. Things aren't as thick or as concrete as they are in our minds. Well my mind.

But I feel I haven't explained this very well. Here's the same thing again but on wheels.....I'm trying to leave for work in the morning.... many mornings I get out there and I wish I'd left just a bit earlier and taken my camera because when I get out, there is something good to see. The other morning it was frosty and there was a pink sunrise. I was huddled indoors with the heater on putting off the evil moment when I would have to go outside. I used to always be 5 minutes early for work but these days I am generally 5 minutes late, a kind of foot-dragging I disapprove of but am somehow trapped in.

1 mile into my journey on the bike, crossing St Mark's Park, the grass was all frosty and the sun was flashing pinkly on the last of the golden autumn leaves. But I was 5 minutes en retard and only had my shit camera.
I know it's wrong to call myself en retard, but I can't help it. Sometimes I just get angry. (Lol).

Another winter thought I've had a few times. Might as well leave it here too. It takes me markedly longer to leave the house unless I have to, not just because I'm hunkered down against the imagined cold outside, but also because it is somehow easier to get lost on the internet. I battled this for a few weeks and then questioned it. I quite like my semi-conscious excursions into internet world where you start off somewhere and end up somewhere markedly different. There are often unexpected delights - same as going outside for adventures. Today's treasure was a set of photos put up by a lady on one of the many fb groups I belong to. They were by a photographer called Erwin Olaf. He takes very staged photographs. I was particularly intrigued by this one depicting the controversial Greta.

I don't know what his take on Greta is but I like that the men in suits are tarred and feathered, or have they been in a sea polluted by an oil slick? Are the feathers left over by dying birds? Don't get me wrong. I'm not a Greta fan. When she arrived on the scene, telling the world what's right in a very teenage, black and white, self-referential way, I thought she was possibly a creation of people in the Trump camp seeking to further polarize the left and the right, to divide and rule.

Just to be clear. I don't like any of them. It's all wrong. I shouldn't be here. I should be in school.

But just to finish the original thought - maybe winter is a time for drifting and I should let it happen - the lights on the inside are brighter than the ones on the outside at the moment.

I'll leave you all with a story. The other night, Peter said to me "Are you going to do the Marcothon?". "I wasn't going to.", I said, and left the conversation. But then I started to think....Maybe I should. Maybe it would be good for Peter too. He, like me, is struggling a bit with the coming winter, with the reluctance to do anything, with the desire to eat. The pounds roll on, cabin fever sets in. He starts to talk in angry speeches. The latest one; "Scotland is a shit place". Uh-oh, I've heard it before. I try to stem the tide. "I know, I know. Scotland is a shit place. People say it's the best place in the world. It's because they don't have the imagination to go anywhere else."
I hope since I've said it, it will stop, but it's as if I have said nothing at all.
"People say it's the best place in the world" he says. Glarg. It's that time of year. We could probably call it depression if we were so inclined.
So I get to thinking, maybe I should do the Marcothon. It would spur Peter on to do it. And that would get him out. If I do it, I'm pretty sure that he will do it. Maybe he would feel better. Maybe there'd be less angry speeches. It would be mighty inconvenient for me to do the goddam Marcathon. I work 2 nine and a half hour days in order to claw back some free time during the week. With travelling time they are pretty much 11 hour work days. Fitting in runs there would be hard going. It's not just the running, it's the having a shower. But maybe I should.
So I say to Peter, a day or two later. "Did you want to do the Marcothon?"
"No!" he says. "Marco can't tell me what to do! I'll run when it suits me, and if it doesn't suit me I won't go!"
Oh.
I told you I shouldn't be here. I should be in school.

Wet weekend

Saturday was the beginning of a long-awaited week off work for me. I still had some things to do, but at least there would be no early starts and more time to get outside. It seemed a bummer then that Saturday was forecast wet. When the sun refuses to come out it's hard to get the people moving in our house. We reduced our plans from Gullane - no point - to Arthur's Seat - and then remembered we had unclaimed parcels at Telferton. Peter revealed that his parcel was his book-group book and it had already been at Telferton for 2 weeks. So off we set with IDs and rucksacks. I had no idea what was waiting for me. It's usually a book which seemed essential for the length of time it took me to look it up on Amazon and press "buy". I'm not going to give myself a hard time about this though - especially because the book in question turned out to be "Working with the inner critic". ( Lol.)

As we ran along the street and I waved to the Berlingo, I spotted something wrong. The back door was open!!!. I called a halt and we went to investigate and saw that there had been people in our car. People in a hurry. People emptying glove compartments, throwing all the carefully accumulated rubbish from the....bits for rubbish in the car door - you know what I mean. Do they have a name? From there onto the floor. There was a strong smell of screen wash. The cover was off from over the fuses behind the steering wheel. I ran back up to the flat and got the car-key to see if the car was still running.....
I turned the key, the car burst into life. Hallellujah. But shit. But hallelujah.

They'd taken all my carefully saved change from the ashtray. There was probably £12 in smash. The worst thing they'd done was pour engine oil and screen wash around in the back. And I think they took my radiator fluid. And I think they took my shorty wetsuit which I'd been keeping in the boot for about 2 years "just in case" I felt like a sea swim....

But there was no substantial damage. So hallelujah. Strangely they hadn't touched any of the mixed tapes we had in the glove compartment.

The run to Telferton is grim in the best of weather and it was a damp, airless, grey fucker of a day. A dead rat on the cycle path sang a song of better days while the fallen autumn leaves scattered all around.

We came back from the sorting office a different way, just to add in some novelty, and went to Sainsbury's on the way back. It was a ho-hum, work-a-day, low grade kind of run and a reminder of what a downer the winter can be and how hard you have to work just to get out.

Here we are at the automated tills in Sainsbury's.

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Sunday had been touted as a sunnier day and we had high hopes. To be specific I thought it might be nice to drive out to the Lammermuirs and set off past the Hopes reservoir there and maybe go all the way out to the windmills and back which is about 15 miles. The forecast kept shifting however and I tried to stay ahead of it with planning. Half an hour before setting off it was looking like it was going to be nicer in Edinburgh and we considered that, but then it was saying rain in Edinburgh and sunny weather in the Lammermuirs. So off we set for Gifford in good faith even as the skies opened and chucked it down all around us. We went into The Lanterne Rouge for the kind of courage that only coffee and cake can give and had huge slabs of cake and filter coffees. Honestly, I can't believe we didn't take pictures of our cake to torture you with but our brains had switched from the picture taking part to the consuming part. We didn't even talk until we had dealt with the business of cake. And coffee. And then we had coffee refills.

We drove up to the car park just beneath Hopes Reservoir and sat for a little while. There was little supporting evidence for the predicted sunshine. I have this persistent idea in my head about the Met Office - or at least the Scottish Branch - having been down-sized, so that now it's just a guy with a beard and DM boots which he keeps up on his desk as he swings on his chair. He builds his predictions based on what he sees out the window from minute to minute and also what mood he's in. Sometimes he flips a coin. As I look closer I see he looks something like my cousin Grant. Well now there's a thing.

Back to the Hopes (dashed). There we are in the recently burgled Berlingo hopped up on coffee and cake.

I wanted to run more than 13 miles just to get my mileage for the week over 30 miles but apart from anything else, it was going to get dark soon! So we let go of that. Why didn't we just run up to the top of Lammerlaw? So off we set

Cleverest picture of someone having a pee!

As we climbed higher we tuned into the immense variety of autumnal colour that was spread, albeit muted by the rain, all around us.

This, we discovered later, was a snow bunting, and it kept its distance but it wasn't scared. It accompanied us down the road for a good distance.

The top part of the run was mostly clagged in and we got cold ears. It was good to get back down from there. As we were heading back down we met a guy (called Ryan, as it turned out) coming up. He had misjudged the distance and  asked us if we had any food. He was obviously shaky with low blood sugar and relieved when we said we did. Happily Peter had a Stoats Bar in his pack so we handed it over and all shook hands.

We were much better tempered and happier after our run than before it. Getting out in the air and getting a bit of space helps everything. We are reluctantly strapping on our winter mindsets. "Just get out the door".

It was hard to leave the Berlingo in the street. We were extra careful to lock up before we left it. It looked at me all like #metoo and I was all like #Iknowbutthere'snoroomintheflatforyou and it was all like #couldhavebeenworsecouldhavetriedtohotwireme. 

Thus endeth the wet weekend.