Speedysnail

Have Yourself an Isolated Christmas

Self-Isolating Calendar

We had a faint positive lateral-flow test in the family last Saturday and so have to selfisolate until next Tuesday, despite negative PCRs all round and no definitive Covid symptoms (although with Omicron it’s harder to tell). The chance of false positive LFTs is low, so we have to assume this one wasn’t, and Track and Trace want us to isolate either way, even with negative PCRs and multiple jabs. It’s not how we would have liked to spend the week running up to Christmas, but the rapid rise in cases was already putting paid to those plans; everyone here seems to have entered voluntary de facto lockdown in lieu of actual lockdown. The street has been unnaturally quiet all week.

What a fitting end to another difficult year. Looks as if January 2022 won’t be much better either. Hope you and yours can keep safe.

24 December 2021

Firth of Forth

A month ago today I took the kids out to a place J. and I had visited a couple of times when we first moved to Scotland: Culross in Fife, former Royal Burgh and home to a striking ochre-harled palace. We spent an hour walking around the town admiring its seventeenth-century buildings, before driving to nearby Valleyfield Woodland Park for a walk in the woods to admire miscellaneous fungi. We finished the day at Queensferry at sunset, taking in the red glow of the rail bridge while eating some of Edinburgh’s finest ice-cream and fish and chips. It was an enjoyable afternoon, captured in these galleries of Culross, Valleyfield and Queensferry.

Read more…

20 November 2021

20 GOTO 10

I was excited to see a sample of Sir Clive’s handiwork at a school open day yesterday…

Sinclair C5

They said it still works.

3 October 2021

Breathing Room

Two weeks ago today I wasn’t feeling quite right, and thought I’d better do a lateral flow test from the kit we’d recently been given, just in case. Within moments I was confronted with this:

My positive lateral flow test result, 7 September 2021

Damn.

Read more…

21 September 2021

Quiet is the New Loud

Now that I’ve got 2020’s sounds out of the way, time for a post about 2021’s (so far).

Read more…

26 August 2021

Begone

After last year’s non-holiday summer, everyone in our family was yearning this year to get out of Edinburgh for a proper summer holiday. With the Delta variant on the rise, international travel was off the cards, whatever the state of vaccinations, so like the rest of Britain we were looking closer to home. Luckily, school holidays in Scotland start earlier than in England, so we faced less competition for holiday homes in remote locations, and were able to book one without much trouble. It wasn’t cheap, but not as bad as some reports of costs down south.

Read more…

26 August 2021

Renewal

Springtime

This was a low-key spring compared with last year’s, without as many visits to the garden to track the growth of the flowers, but I managed a few photos of blossoms and blooms, plus my best-ever shot of a giant panda at Edinburgh Zoo (though don’t raise your expectations too much). This modest gallery ends with a sunset on Portobello Beach, briefly observed while picking up my teenage son from a friend’s place the weekend after lockdown ended. The way the summer is looking, I’m not sure how many more of those there will be.

10 June 2021

Snow Trails

As we’ve been doing for the past few years, we booked the kids onto a mountain biking course at Glentress for their school holidays this Easter, but when we made the booking six months ago had even less idea than usual about what the conditions would be like the following April. It turned out, of course, that this month is the tail-end of Scotland’s second Covid lockdown, when we’re all still supposed to be staying local, which for Edinburgh residents means no driving beyond the Pentlands.

Read more…

12 April 2021

Blighty

A year ago today was my last day in the office before the first lockdown, with our university telling us all to work from home a week before the prime minister did. For almost three months we’ve been in Scotland’s second lockdown, which is only now starting to ease: older primary school kids (including ours) went back to physical school full-time yesterday, and younger high school kids (including ours) have started going back a day a week until Easter.

Read more…

16 March 2021

Frozen II

There was no time to write anything here this month, so instead I’ll mark this latest period of lockdown with a photo or two of early-February snow.

Edinburgh, 10 February 2021

28 February 2021 · 1 Comment