pumpkinstrokemarrow

A day or so ago, the ITV3 airwaves being bereft of Poirate fodder, we thought we would watch something called 'Stardust', the video of which we had acquired from somewhere or other. Not paid for it you understand. Thought it might be worth a watch given that I thought I had seen that the DT was distributing this classic film free one Sunday (a day on which we never buy the paper. We get the Saturday one for the TV guide and don't really need a second helping of motoring sections, travel sections, money sections, healthy living sections & etc the following day. One only needs so much newspaper on which to clean one's shoes, especially now that I am retired and do not clean them anything like every day. If I ever did. A custom which I believe my father held to through most of his working life. Must be his stint in the army which did it). Anyway, it turned out that we had become slightly famous by association.

As, a few years ago, we were visiting Skye and took a couple of walks on the road from Uig to Digg. Plenty of golden eagles knocking about and the views as one crosses the ridge, possibly a paleogene lava sill, from west to east are particularly stunning. Had never seen anything quite like it. We had heard in Uig that there was a large film crew in town, complete with lots of animals, doing some sort of fantasy adventure, with the most important luvvie being helicoptered in each day from the nearest civilised hotel on the mainland. The butcher in Portree (who did a very good line in black and white puddings) was unhappy with the way that the film crew was pretty much self contained and was not doing much of a job of spreading some of their folding stuff around. The result for us that our first walk was disturbed by the continual passage of various vans, most of which invited us rather bossily to get off the road as actors were coming through. They were clearly doing something up on the other side of the ridge, although we did not get that far on the first day.

And it turned out that our classic film was, partly at least, filmed in Skye and was more or less certainly the film we had come across when we were there. We recognised some of the landscape, although the film, at least as seen on telly, completely failed to capture the magic of the place. Still, a bit of fame by association.

Expertise on matters walking stick continues to grow. So I learned the other day that walking north up the western footpath of Hook road with a stick is a bit of a pain as it is very bumpy. Put stick down to find that the pavement is not where one expects it. And then in Guildford, happily hobbling along and very nearly stuck the stick down the hole left by a missing light in one of those luxcrete panels (http://www.luxcrete.co.uk/) you have outside older shops to illuminate their cellars. Might have given me a very nasty jolt. Eminently suable assuming one could lay one's hands on one of those ambulance chasers when one needs one. Similar experience in Long Grove Road where the cover in one of those access hatches in the middle of the road was missing. Cast iron affair, maybe six inches square, with the lid part which should have been covering the nice deep hole containing a stop cock for something or other being missing. Again could have been a nasty jolt.

More entertaining was the sight of someone about my own age, with a walking stick very like my own tucked under his arm, jogging across Rosebery Park the other day. One might have thought that he had the stick because he was lame. I can only think that he had been lame and was just starting to jog again, carrying the stick against the possibility of the jogging tearing the leg apart again. A prop rather than a necessity.