A snap from the trip back

It started with Christmas Eve at Eva’s Name Day party. As usual the food and the company were both excellent. Here is a photo of just a part of the feast that Eva had laid on.

Christmas Day was spent with Rosie and Dom and more food and then some pleasant dozing in front of the TV

The next stop was Hackney – more food – and a long and chaotic game of Trivial Pursuits. The photos are here.

Then we gathered at my brother Chris’s new house for our usual sedate Swash family gathering. There were so many of us that we had to have a shift system for eating at the table. The photos are here

The highlight of the evening (it even beat the supremely entertaining secret santa) was a musical interlude when the kids demonstrated their nascent musical skills. Lucky you – here is a video

Next we had Ilse and Mick around for dinner – more good food and good company.

Here is a photo of Ilse brandishing some chocolate nugget

Finally we managed to get to Chris and Janice’s for a small new Year’s Eve gathering – time for a bit more food

Photos are here

Isabel and I travelled up to Bridlington at the weekend to meet up with John and Moira to go to a concert by The Specials. The journey up was wild with torrential rain and the motorway was littered with wrecked cars. When we arrived the sea at Bridlington was heaving and I managed to get a few nice shots of the storm waves.

The next day was sunny and windy and we walked out to Flamborough Head.

In the evening we went to the concert. The crowd was predominantly middle aged men, lots of cropped hair, two tone paraphernalia and the odd pork pie hat. The Specials came on with an explosive entry and the crowd went bonkers and several hundred blokes started to leap about  frantically reliving their youth. Isabel and Moria retreated to the balcony but John and I decided to get stuck in and proceed to leap about, crash into people, shout and generally get very hot and sweaty. The Photos are here.

I managed to shoot a bit of video in crowd and here it is. John is in the white T-shirt. The sound is not great because the volume of the band overwhelmed the mike on my little camera.

A generally tremendous evening. The next morning as Isabel watched me climbing rather creakily out of bed she gently sang “You did much to much much too old….”

Then we spent some days with Isabel’s family at Lochgoilhead where, amongst other things, we undertook a marathon Trivial Pursuits contest over several evenings. Finally Isabel and I went on to the wonderful Isle of Arran for a few days before returning home. The photos are here.

I jumped aboard his boat down by the Angel and went thought the long, and rather daunting, tunnel to Kings Cross and then on to Camden Lock. All in all a really pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

The Video starts at the high point on the Saddle looking down into Glen Sannox and then there are a couple of clips during our return journey down Glen Rosa.

Just got back two weeks walking in the west of Scotland, we started on the West Highland Way at Crianlarich, went on to Loch Lomond and Lochgoilhead and ended up on the marvellous Isle of Arran.

Of course I took hundreds of photos and will be posting some shortly when I have finished sorting them.

In the meantime here is a very short video I shot as we approached the summit of Ben Lomond. Hiking to the top of the mountain was hard, not least because it was sunnier and hotter than we expected, but we both found the descent the hardest on our tired legs. In the background you can sometimes see Isabel in her orange shirt and also Loch Lomond which had been our starting point three hours previously.

I shot this video using a wonderful little gizmo called a Stickpic which lets you attach a compact camera to the end of your walking stick -- the result is a video that almost seems as if it was shot by an accompanying camera man. Spinning around with the camera, which I do a couple of times in this video including at the summit, produces a really impressive visual effect.