Sunday 4 August 2013

Day six - Saturday!

So the first weekend as arrived. After a week of getting up ~0730 I had a lie in this morning, comfortable in the knowledge that once I threw open my curtains it would be raining outside... Scrambled egg (microwaved) and coffee constituted breakfast and I spent a good hour or two perusing my maps/books/the internet looking up potential walks. www.walkhighlands.co.uk is a superb website, giving ideas for routes and mountains, all complete with maps and height profiles - it's awesome! Thinking of doing a two-day trip to Knoydart in a spell of good weather to tick off Sgurr na Ciche and Ladhar Bheinn, two classic munro's. Also looked at my Cuillin map, piecing together a hazy plan to do the ridge on the way up to Lewis. We'll see...

Helen had gone up to Inverness for the day, so I cracked out the violin safe in the knowledge that I wouldn't embarrass myself infront of a bona fide Orkney folk musician! Got on pretty well with it actually, feeling like it's getting a bit easier to read the notes and process them to fingers, and getting a better tone out of the bowing. Disastrous lunch of microwaves pizza followed (I'm not buying pizza again, impossible to cook here even if the microwave claims it's also an oven!) and then I headed into the town to The Crofters to meet Tom, Neil and Brett. Neil's one of the new F1s, and found out he's born in 1990 - found it a bit strange to think he's younger than me but an F1, as up till now I hadn't met anyone younger. Pretty glad I'm not an F1 right now! Had a few drinks then stayed to watch the Celtic game so got food too. I had a lovely steak and ale pie and the game was pretty good, Celtic initially going 0-1 down to a brilliant goal. Was pretty funny watching the reaction in the pub, as the vast majority were supporting Celtic! I was quizzing the others about the extents of the football religions, was interesting to hear. Apparently at Glasgow you're not allowed to wear either a Celtic or Rangers shirt in the gym - crazy! And one Celtic supported in the pub had "I was there when Rangers died, hail hail" on the back of his shirt, I guess a reference to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hail_Hail_the_Celts_Are_Here. Also discussing the situation of the Scottish Premier League, in particular the 'split' of the table near the end of the season so that the big clubs play each other more times, but meaning if you were top of the bottom half and won all your games you wouldn't move higher in the table!! Oh Scottish football.

After that headed back briefly before we all made our way up to the hospital later in the evening to catch up with Eleanor and Pippa, the Edinburgh students staying in accomodation there. Forgot that all the shops here shut at 2100... Once we'd arrived we saw all the F1's were packing up their stuff ready to move out! A hall's style drinking followed; cheesy music on laptop, everyone sat on sofa's in accomodation with fire exit stickers everywhere - felt like going back in time! A select few then headed off to sample 'Ossian's' - what looked like a spectacularly bad disco, which in the day is the dining room of a hotel but undergoes a 'transformation' at night. It looked terrible. Needless to say I headed back home!

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