A Country Night in Inverness

We had a relaxing start to Saturday and enjoyed sitting outside in the sunshine at the cottage. After lunch we headed back to Inverness where we did a large Tesco shopping for some batch cooking, and then we met Alison and Hugh for dinner. Alison had booked  McBain’s, which is down at the river a short walk from the Eden Court Theatre. The restaurant was very busy and I was glad that Alison had booked, because Inverness is clearly very busy at the height of the summer. We had a tasty meal and a good chat. 
I’m just blogging The show that we went to see was Dominic Halpin and the Hurricanes playing “A Country Night in Nashville.” It was Alison’s suggestion that we should go and it turned out to be excellent, they are such a good covers band and played lots of well known Country songs. There was a great atmosphere and everyone was up dancing. The second last song was my great favourite “Wagon Wheel” and the last song was James’ favourite “Dance the Night Away” which was a great ending to the concert. 
Today I have been cooking all day while listening to podcasts and taking the occasional break to sit outside on the bench and drink a coffee in the company of Tom and Floof. Unfortunately I have run out of containers to freeze the food so I have had to order more online! 

Commonwealth Games 2026

Last night James and I went with Davie and Chanel to the Opening Ceremony of the Commonwealth Games. It was held at the Hydro and first we had a tasty dinner in Joia on Argyle Street. When we were walking through the tunnel that crosses the Expressway we could see all of the athletes lining up outside the Hydro to do their parade. The Opening Ceremony was excellent, very well organised. The King and Queen appeared to arrive by Tardis which was quite amusing, and were escorted to their seats by Sir Chris Hoy. There was music and dancing, and in came the athletes, happy and excited to be there after all their hard work in training. Various officials made some pleasantly short speeches and then there was more musical entertainment culmination in KT Tunstall singing “Suddenly I see.” There was a big queue at exhibition Centre station, but thanks to Chanel’s state of pregnancy were waved to the front of it which was delightful. A great evening.
And then today we were at the SEC to watch two sessions of the Commonwealth Games, again with David and Chanel. The first one we watched was five aside basketball which was very fast moving and very interesting, it took me awhile to pick up the rules. We had lunch in the SEC and then went to our second section, which was bowling. Again it was very interesting and I felt I learned quite a lot about the game. James and I left a little bit early because we were going to drive up to (Ullapool) in the evening. After dinner we captured the cats with unusual efficiency, and made good time to Ullapool, arriving at about 11 p.m. The cats were on good form and went outside to explore the garden. 
Further to my post on Wednesday, we saw on the news that all of the Cap Ferret peninsula has now been evacuated, either by road or by the same ferries that we took between Cap Ferret and Arcachon. 

Cooler Summer in Scotland

Our journey home on Tuesday went smoothly and by mid-afternoon we were reunited with Tom and Floof who seemed very pleased to see us and followed us around the house and garden.
I was shocked to see on the news that huge forest fires have broken out near Cap Ferret on the Arcachon Basin, where we were only a few days ago. And two local firefighters died earlier this week fighting another fire close to Bordeaux airport. As I have already mentioned in my last few blog entries it is very, very hot down there in South-West France and all of the grass and trees must be extremely dry and ready to burst into flames. 
I have recently been in touch with my Mum’s friend Heather from Glasgow School of Art in the 1950s. Heather has sent me a bundle of letters that my Mum wrote to her in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I was a little bit worried that I would feel very sad when I was reading them, but they were lovely letters and it was just like hearing my mum‘s voice again. The first letter was written just three months before my dad died in January 1997; at that time they couldn’t find anything wrong with him but with hindsight it seems obvious that the cancer had come back. Mum was never really the same after he died. She tried, and in a lot of ways succeeded, to get on with her life, but she had loved and relied on him so much, and missed him very much for the next 13 years. She did get a lot of joy out of all five of her grandsons, and she was a fantastic grandmother. She used to make all sorts of arts and crafts with them, they were very lucky. It was great that she lived just along the road and we could all pop in and out to see her. In one of the letters she had written a wee poem about Dad and her, here it is:
He was my life, he was my friend. 
Our parting had to come one day. 
But surely this is not the end
He waits for me? I cannot say.
But if we never meet again,
If what I had is all there is,
I will not be ungrateful then
That he was mine, and I was his.

Bletchley Park and The Cherry Orchard

The first thing that I noticed when we walked down the steps of our plane at Luton Airport was how pleasantly cool was the midnight air - so much cooler than Bordeaux! Our plane was an hour late when we arrived at our airport hotel, just a short walk away from the terminal, we dived straight into bed. 
The temperature today at Bletchley Park was 26 degrees, which I used to think was very warm but at 10 degrees cooler than Bordeaux it felt really refreshing! There was a nice gentle breeze too. We went to Bletchley on our way to Stratford-upon-Avon and the huts with exhibitions about all the secret code-breaking during the war are really interesting and the grounds are beautiful. James was fascinated by all of the code-breaking machines and the history of the place. We continued to Stratford and checked in to the Swan’s Nest hotel, a pleasant and very central hotel right beside the river. Dinner was at our favourite, the Rooftop Restaurant at the RSC, and then we went downstairs to watch our play.
The aristocracy in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard are so frustrating. They don’t want to lose the estate, including the cherry orchard, but they are not willing to do anything at all to save it. There was an extremely strong cast. Kenneth Branagh was energetic as Lopakhin, who tried and failed to motivate the estate owners with practical suggestions but was himself paralysed with indecision when it came to proposing marriage to Varya. Helen Hunt was the feckless matriarch Ranyevskaya and Bill Pullman was her idle brother Gaev. The younger members of the cast were also very good and their characters proved equally as incapable of helping themselves or each other. Michael Elwyn, who is 83, played the aged and loyal retainer, ultimately forgotten by the family, who shuffled around the stage muttering to himself. I really enjoyed it but James said that it’s the second worst play that I have ever taken him to (after Long Day’s Journey into Night!) I reminded him about Waiting for Godot but he said that didn’t count because that time he left at the interval! 
I saw Summerfolk in March this year at the National Theatre, which Gorky wrote as a response to The Cherry Orchard. So it was interesting to compare the two. Chekhov seems to sympathise with the melancholy and fading aristocracy who are losing their heritage and their way of life. However Gorky portrays his bourgeois characters as brash and stupid and unaware that the peasants will soon overthrow them in their turn.
We strolled back across the bridge to our hotel for a drink in the bar on this last night of our holiday. 

Art in the Submarine Base

It was our last day in beautiful Bordeaux and the temperature rose to about 37 degrees in the afternoon! We had breakfast sitting outside a café in the Place de la Comédie which was a great place for people watching. Then we had a stroll around the old town before taking a tram to the Musée Mer Marine in the old harbour area of Bordeaux. It was a great wee museum, all about the history of sea-faring in Bordeaux from pre-historic times through Roman and medieval times to the modern day. It was really interesting, with lots of model boats of different eras which I loved. It was a short but hot walk from there to the Bordeaux Submarine Base (Base Sous-Marine,) built by the Germans during the Second World War, which is now used as an arts venue. The concrete walls are amazingly thick which makes the interior fairly cool, and we watched two projections all around the walls of several huge halls; one was about Matisse and one was about Frida Kahlo. The submarine tanks are still full of seawater, twelve metres deep, so the projections were also reflected in the dark water which was very effective. I was sitting on the concrete floor watching the display when an official came up to me and told me to stand up; he explained that the designated seating area was in the next hall. I was so flustered when I was getting up that I managed to knock my sunglasses irretrievably into the water below. And there they must remain, along with the ghosts of Nazi submarines. The official pointed this out to me rather sternly, which I thought was a bit rich considering that it was at least partly his fault!
By the time we were ready to go back to the hotel I just couldn’t face the twenty minute walk and then tram ride back to the hotel so James very kindly ordered an Uber which was air conditioned and so pleasant, and it delivered us right to the door of the hotel. We had cool drinks in the bar and read our books for a while before heading to the airport for our evening flight to Luton. 

A Day at the Seaside

We caught a morning train to Arcachon. What a lovely little seaside town it is! It’s also very smart and there are posters to warn that topless people (whatever their gender!) will be fined. We had breakfast sitting in the shade outside a café decorated with flowers, then wandered through the market where James bought me a sundress, a beach bag and a towel for the beach. But before swimming in the sea we spontaneously jumped onto a ferry which took us across to the peninsula of Cap Ferret. On the way we got an excellent view of the famous Dune du Pilat; basically a really massive pile of sand. The pretty seaside village of Cap Ferret is even more upmarket than Arcachon, and it has lots of oyster beds on the seashore. We walked along the front and had cake and ice cream at the delightful but expensive Frédélian Restaurant. By this time it was very, very hot, and the sea breeze was like a hot hairdryer. After a refreshing drink beside the pier we caught the ferry back to Arcachon. There was a long queue of day-trippers heading back so there were extra ferries running, which was very helpful. James found himself a bench to sit on and read his book, under the shade of one of the huge, mushroom shaped pine trees that line the promenade in Arcachon. And now arrived the highlight of my day; a swim in the sea! It was very busy in the supervised area of the beach; lots of families with sunshades and towels, but it didn’t matter because there was plenty of room in the sea! The sea was like a warm bath but it was cooler than the air temperature and it was absolutely idyllic swimming about in the gentle waves from the many boats. Eventually I reluctantly left the water and used one of the beach showers to remove most of the salt from my body. I dried off so quickly in the heat that I barely needed my towel! We had dinner in one of the beachfront restaurants, watching the waves lapping in the sand. We caught the 9.05 p.m. train back to Bordeaux, which takes about 50 minutes. By the time we got back to the hotel it was dark and we had showers and went straight to bed, exhausted. 

Back in St Emilion

We visited St Emilion two years ago with Jenn and Russ and it was lovely to be back in this beautiful little village with its steep cobbled streets and many wine shops. It’s really easy to get to by direct train from Bordeaux, which only takes just over half an hour. It’s about one and a half kilometres walk from the train station to the village; We had breakfast in a little café called Le Bouchon before strolling around the streets. James did some wine tasting at Couvent des Jacobins and treated himself to a bottle of red. We decided to return to Bordeaux late afternoon when it was extremely hot so we treated ourselves to a taxi back to the station kindly ordered for us by the proprietor of a café. To our surprise the taxi which arrived was a very smart Tesla whose doors opened up like gull’s wings. We got envious looks when we drew up at the station in it. A mercifully air-conditioned train carried us back to the city in comfort. 
In the evening we sallied forth into the town centre of Bordeaux, a little cooler than during the day. I took off my sandals and joined the many people paddling on the surface of the Water Mirror (Miroir d’Eau.) It’s in front of the Place de la Bourse, and is a large reflecting pool with only 2 cm of water over gigantic granite slabs, which is still very pleasant on the feet. We had a delicious dinner in Place St Pierre and lingered over our coffees in the twilight. As we headed back to catch the tram back to the hotel we could see the Pont de Pierre bridge over the Garonne, lit up against the darkening sky.