Carless weekend

On Friday evening I was back at Aye Write, this time with Heather, to hear Liz Lochhead speak about books that have influenced her. I really enjoyed it; she is a very good speaker and I found her talk to be both fascinating and even inspiring. I had read almost all of the books that she quoted, and shared her opinion of them, especially Wuthering Heights, which I read through one night as a teenager, finishing just as dawn started brightening my bedroom.
On Saturday James and I went to Play, Pie and a Pint to see the play about Chic Murray, entitled “A Funny Place for a Window.” I saw the play last May and I have been looking forward to taking James to see it, because I knew that it would appeal to his sense of humour. And so it did, he was laughing throughout. Even though I have seen it before I thought it was excellent and Dave Anderson was great as Chic Murray. We emerged from Oran Mor into a lovely sunny afternoon, and went for a walk through the Botanic Gardens and along the banks of the Kelvin to Kelvinbridge Underground Station below Great Western Road. The reason for this rare foray onto public transport (for me - James stalwartly takes the train to work every day) was necessitated by Alasdair borrowing the car for the weekend, as he and Cat were heading north for some hill-walking. We managed fine without the car all weekend; on Saturday evening we travelled by train to Heather and Ewan’s where we had a very pleasant evening (which included a delicious tagine) and then later took a taxi home. We were gratified that travelling by taxi from Lenzie to Cambuslang cost only the very reasonable price of £14 - the occasional taxi ride like this and using public transport when necessary is going to be much cheaper than running two cars, so our recent one car experiment * seems to be turning out well so far.

* When Jamie’s Volvo’s lease - taken on by us when he moved to New Zealand - expired, we decided not to replace it, to see how we get on with one car.