Ne'er-do-wells.

A wonderful morning. The scudding clouds giving way to blue skies. There's a warm southerly wind that makes being out a pleasure. One of the wild flowers that line the farm track has lantern heads that have dried in the recent dry weather and now crackle and snap in the breeze. There was a breakfast cereal that used to snap crackle and pop. I wonder if it's still made ?  

The crows that congregated on our roof have moved down to the  potato barns where they line the field walls, glare at passers by and sunbathe. Periodically they take off in a huge swirling argumentative mass before settling on the power cables which sag alarmingly when they land. Is it the near presence of humans that's made the birds suspicious or have they always been jittery ? When we moved from Scotland to Italy we spent our first night on the road at a hotel in Northumberland. The wire fences on either side of the entrance gate were adorned with dead crows. Probably twenty of them in total. This gave the place a Hammer House of Horrors feel that presumably served some farming purpose. A country warning to crows 'Don't eat my barley !' or ' Don't glean my corn !' or some such thing. I'm glad our local farmers are content to leave the crows to their own devices.... as they do with everything else including the light footed young foxes who scamper on the path ahead of us.

It's a couple of days since we returned from Glasgow but we're still happily commenting on the cheerful service at the restaurant and the hotel . To be greeted with a smile is a delight.

We think we're out and about early but the farmers automated dispensing machine is already running low on strawberries and only large trays of a dozen or more eggs are left. All the half dozen cartons are gone. The second home owners continue to snap everything up.

In town the fun fair is being set up. This has been going for centuries in one form or another. Local residents disapprove of the sort of clientele it attracts. The retired Church of Scotland minister ( the one who raged at the students who 'cavorted amorously' on his new flat roof kitchen extension )  refers to them as teenage Ne'er -do-wells. This is the sort of archaic term you only hear in places like St Andrews or Crieff. The art that festoons some of the rides is so awful it serves as a reminder that aliens must surely live among us. They almost manage to get things right but somehow catching a true human likeness is just beyond them. Two 'luscious lovelies' - as the fair attendees might call them - painted on the side of one ride also serve to tell us the fairground aliens exist in a time that isn't woke.

We stop to read the menu on the burger wagon. It has an exhaustive chip offering. 'The Font' thinks " Chips with any of the two above " will be a favourite of the ne'er- do-wells. Donuts are served in portions of four.

The souvenirs on sale in the local shops tend to the 'tat' end of the spectrum but the candle shop has a new range of mugs and jugs which are a higher order of creation.  The robin and Scottie jugs pass muster although demand for jugs by the day trippers might be limited.

An iconoclasts viewpoint ? :https://www.noemamag.com/why-is-everyone-in-tech-so-sad/

Briefly in the news and misunderstood but Russia and MAGA playing it up :https://www.dw.com/en/whats-behind-the-algeria-morocco-rivalry/a-78258062

Updating high rises :https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/articles/engineering/civil-engineering/2026/a-new-way-to-build-safer-more-sustainable-skyscrapers/

Always worth reading for saying it as it is :https://michaelmcfaul.substack.com/p/july-2026-reflections-on-europe-nato

Crowds

 

It's grey and cloudy but the golfers are happy to get out onto the Old Course while it's dry. 

Down by the starters hut a group in matching red outfits are recovering from their flight from Chicago by going on a long walk. Three of their party have gone missing. We know this because they ask passers by if they've seen three folks in red jackets.  We haven't. Their jet lag doesn't seem to be bothering them at all - or if it is they're hiding it well.

This must be the week when absolute peak  visitor influx is recorded. So far everyone seems to be in a convivial 'laid back' frame of mind. The number of visitors from mainland China has surged this year due to the introduction of direct flights from mainland China to Edinburgh. Some, most, arrive in tour groups but more and more hire a car at the airport and drive up with their famillies to spend three or four days here. This morning - if their matching caps are to be believed - there's a perfectly turned out foursome from Pine Valley  Beijing waiting to tee off . By lunchtime the pavement down here will be packed solid.

Badly parked tourists in enormous SUV's ( that stick out into the street ) and local farmers tractors do not make for happy bedfellows. Driving through town is like an obstacle course. The potato harvest is about to kick off. We now try to avoid town between nine thirty in the morning and five . Parking is literally impossible.

Transparent flower :https://x.com/Hana_b30/status/2085589560562459060

In a small place you recognize so many of the youngsters who graduated. This young lady seems to have enjoyed her time here and now deems herself an 'influencer' with a devoted following:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tom03mEVW5E

An American summer spot :https://www.farawaysagharbor.com/

Warm welcomes in Glasgow.

Great cover on the front of  the latest Private Eye. Pithily sums up life in Europe this summer .

We go to Glasgow for dinner with old friends visiting from Florida. The city in August is surprisingly quiet and feels even more so because so many restaurants are closed . The absence on vacation of 100,000 students and decidedly 'changeable' weather  may also have something to do with it.  Glasgow is chosen because Edinburgh ( a mere 50 miles away ) is booked solid with tourists in Scotland for the Festival. More than 3 million are expected this year which is a lot for the infrastructure to cope with.

The train to Queen Street is one of the old InterCity types that used to run to London and are now relegated to the Inverness and Aberdeen routes. They are due to be retired next year and have a spaciousness that modern trains don't have. The ticket inspector happily informs us that this one first entered service in 1976. 'The Font' observes that we may well have taken it to London when we were students. The conductor responds to this insight with a dour  " Aye. Use it while ye can . We'll all get withdrawn from service one day ".  A reminder that the Presbyterian undertaker school of client 'interface' is still alive and kicking north of the border.

We try a gastro pub, The Clarence, for dinner. Cheerful and  efficient are not words you often use about Scottish service but here the staff welcome us with broad smiles and show us straight to our table by the window.  The wine list is full of reasonably priced gems and we start with a spicily zestful Pouilly-Fuisse.  Angus has a Barnsley lamb chop largely because it must be at least 30 years since I last had one. I also can't remember the last time I saw one on a menu. It was good but there is only so much you can do with a lamb chop. Oddly, there are no green side dishes on the menu but there are more potato based options than you might expect to see. We end the evening sitting at an outside table drinking our decafs by moonlight while  commenting on how light the traffic is.

This time we're staying in the new Dakota hotel. This is one of those modern places that equates stylishness with black paint and subdued lighting. Anyone who has stayed at Schragers Royalton hotel in New York will know the style. On a practical note shaving in this twilight world is not easy. In both the restaurant and hotel students are employed to run the 'front of house' which may explain why everything works so well.  We were impressed  by the Dakota but may try the new Arthouse when we next go. One Devonshire Gardens is still my favourite but 'The Font' is a firm believer that we should try new places.

On our way home we change trains in Dundee. The poster with the caption " While living in Dundee, Mary Shelley wrote Frakenstein " may not have the positive vibe the PR agency thinks it to have.

Of great interest :https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2026/how-scientists-are-perfecting-chocolate

Glad to have been ignorant of these critters :https://news.arizona.edu/news/5-things-you-might-not-know-about-brown-recluse

Hope for hay fever sufferers :https://www.sciencealert.com/natural-protection-from-asthma-and-allergies-scientists-isolate-bacteria-behind-the-immune-system-farm-effect

Possibly important in helping understand what's going on:https://freesystems.substack.com/p/mapping-americas-political-conversations

This was interesting :https://www.stimson.org/2026/irans-political-system-after-the-war/

Peaches

The usually cheerful and always helpful postman is feeling glum. It's his fiftieth birthday and he wonders where the time has gone. The last birthday he can remember celebrating was his thirtieth and he can't for the life of him work out what's happened in the interim. The arrival of children will do that. This morning his right knee  is achy. I congratulate him and put his  pains down to the ( hopefully transitory ) wet and windy  weather. Postmen have started to wear shorts. This is another of those American trends that works well in sun drenched places but may be the cause of early onset arthritis in colder climes. 

South of the border the farmers are complaining about the lack of rain. With the grass parched by the heat they're having to feed their livestock reserves of winter forage. On the radio one farmer bemoans the lack of rain and informs listeners that this is the driest summer since records began. I might be wrong but I'm sure there's a farmer on every year saying the same thing. The same held true with French farmers . Up here these worries seem far away. It continues to rain as if it's going out of fashion. It's also cold. A high of 19C forecast for today.  

In town the builders are busy doing last minute painting inside the new restaurant that opens tonight.  In the space of the last 24 hours one of those plastic rose arches has been put up outside the front door. We shall give the place a day or two to settle down before trying it.

Peaches have appeared in the supermarket. In Italy we lived on them. They were often freshly picked and arrived on the table still warm from the sunshine. Here they are small affairs that need to be treated carefully. Leave them too long and they turn to mush, eat them too soon and they're hard and stringy. The secret is putting them in the conservatory at night where the combination of temperature and humidity seem to stir something in their semi-frozen deep chilled ( Spanish ) DNA that reminds them of home and makes them ripen. Peaches, like strawberries, do not transport easily. It's probably something to do with their high structural water content. These ones 'The Font' will cook with olive oil and pork.

The Zurbaran catalogue has been delivered the bookstore. We pick it up on our way back to the car.

A quick skim through shows it to be well written and superbly illustrated. Perhaps we'll try to get down to see the exhibition in London ?

Thoughts on Denmark . I'm not sure the winter weather is a positive :https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/probably-the-best-country-in-the

Tourists, jabbering quail and costume continuity.

We watch Richard E Grant's 'Very Modern Odyssey' on Channel 4. The actor  follows the path Odysseus took on his travels around the Mediterranean. Every so often Mr. Grant positions himself against a suitable backdrop and intones a portion of the Homeric poem in grave tones. Sometimes he does this dressed as an ancient Trojan. Much of the first episode is shot in Malta which seems to have transmuted into an altogether more stylish place than I remember from my brief school trip there sixty years ago. When he's not dressed as a Trojan warrior the actor appears in each scene wearing the same leather jacket and knotted woolen neck scarf. This must have been stifling in the summer heat. The producer presumably thinks this provides a form of continuity but leaves me wondering if the poor man is suffering from a throat ailment. We shall watch next weeks episode to see if the 'shouty' pace eases off a little. The visit to the Megalithic temples on Malta with the heavily accented professor justified the investment of an hour of our time :https://heritagemalta.mt/explore/hagar-qim-and-mnajdra-archaeological-park/

August brings with it the tourists. It also brings unsettled weather. At this time of the year the Atlantic weather patterns do unpredictable things. It has bucketed down overnight. The grey skies do nothing to deter local dog walkers or the super charged organizers of the summer school for kids. This operates on the " get 'em up early and into bed late " approach to managing lively teens. In between the youngsters do hearty things non-stop until they're ready to drop. This is a wise strategy with this age demographic.

The gannets are still doing their thing offshore. This morning our attention is drawn to the sounds emanating from the farmers  cabbage patch. The quail chicks are darting in and out of the rows of cabbages chasing each other. They make that high pitched warbling jabber as they play. This puts a smile on our faces. The chicks seem to have avoided the attention of the local sparrow hawk.

Back in the village we come face to face with a group of lycra clad cyclists. They're all Americans travelling with the 5 star 'Off the beaten track' cycling company. The group are about to sit down for breakfast at a table set up on the grass by the potato barns.  Bacon, large sausages and baked beans are laid out in stainless steel dishes. These are being warmed by small night lights which make for a very luxurious breakfast buffet touch. We wonder if  Americans eat baked beans for breakfast. Europeans would have been happy with a half decent croissant .The cyclists rave about Edinburgh. " It's so so Continental and just like Paris but without having to deal with the French " observes one lady with a gloriously Upper East side accent. This, 'The Font' observes, is an unusual perspective....on many levels.

An English view on America :https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/the-ordinary-sublime-of-the-american

A hopeful take on Iran:https://www.turkiyetoday.com/opinion/peace-dividends-what-a-reopened-iran-means-for-turkiye-and-the-region-3224503

Archaeology :https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/archaeology/a73323885/silver-amulet-skeleton-discovered-christianity-history/

Into the unknown with weight loss drugs :https://www.sciencefocus.com/wellbeing/weight-loss-drugs-mental-health

Youthful inhibitions

The gannets are out in force. They follow each other along the coast in ruler straight lines - a dozen or so birds at a time. These flocks keep on coming one after the other from their nest 20 miles away on a small barren volcanic outcrop in the middle of the Forth. The gannets have had a rough year with avian flu so it's good to see so many of them together. The village twitchers think the birds numbers are down 30% due to the disease. As the gannets pass the old life boat station they suddenly rear up to a height of thirty or so feet , turn and then plummet, wings sharply folded, down into the sea. There must be a huge shoal of fish here to attract so many of them. How do they pass the news on ? How do they avoid each other ? The sight of so many birds doing these impossible synchronized manoeuvres holds us spell bound. Heads lowered to dive they send plumes of water flying in every direction.  Watching them we're almost happy enough to clap but don't , settling instead for a low murmur of appreciation.

'God bless the just'. A suitably Presbyterian door lintel on the cottage that used to be the weigh house.

£19 for a bunch of local wildflowers tells me that the Edinburgh folk have arrived to spend the whole of August in their summer homes. True enough the farm shops car park is full of little Porsche SUV's and those Range Rover Velars that are so popular in the Georgian terraces of Stockbridge.

The sheep in the field down by the sea are living their best life. They're hunkered down in the shelter of the long grass. A heron is standing to one side of the field watching them. Why it's doing this is a mystery. It ignores us as we wander by. In fact it has an almost imperious arrogance although being a heron this can be forgiven.

The bakers still promoting a strawberry 'fayre'.

The strawberries from the automatic farm dispenser are already selling out fast. Another sign the summer home folk are here. The incomers descend on the shops and cafes like a swarm of super energized locusts. Hermes headscarves and town shoes are much in evidence.  Early rising to beat the rush is a necessity.

The news this morning again dominated by the failed plans to sell off the World Cup to private investors. This has generated the closest thing to towering rage you could get across the European media. Part of this anger may be due to the involvement of the Kushner family, part to the money grabbing vulgarity of Infantino himself. Other, perhaps more pressing,  global injustices generate less rage.

Simple drawings can be good :https://substack.com/@cleoidus

This is how English is used by a younger generation. The line ' terminally-online geeks who need to touch grass ' is a construct I could never have dreamt of :https://substack.com/home/post/p-209281038

The trials of a gardener :https://robdoingrob.substack.com/p/chaos-in-the-garden-the-battle-between

The BBC on communicating in 12026 :https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time

Cheap food was never normal :https://lenispooner.substack.com/p/cheap-food-era-ending-canada

Figure 3 is worth looking at :https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2025/trumps-tariff-revenue-tracker-how-much-us-collecting-which-imports-are

A software glitch.

I do not know what's going on with blogger today. I've tried to fix it but nothing can be done and some , but not all, of the text is backed in white. The links don't seem to work and then hey presto they do. Hopefully, tomorrow the glitch will have disappeared. I'll come back to it later in the day and see if the glitch has gone. It may be something to do with posting from the i-Pad rather than the desktop.

The good news is that something wonderful and delicate and unexpected ( and tall ) appearing in the rock garden in the courtyard.

The smoked fish guy is running late and is just setting out his stall at the monthly market. He's recently started to do fish pates and gives 'The Font' some mackerel and salmon to try. He makes the best roast salmon we've ever tasted.

Later this week a new restaurant is opening up where Brewdog used to be before it went bankrupt. There seems to be a Greek flavour to the menu which may test the taste buds of the more conservative locals. Main courses are kept below £30 which is now considered to be 'cheap'. We peer through the open door and see that the builders are in doing some last minute 'snagging'. They don't seem happy to be working on a Sunday.

The cheese monger has missed a letter 'C' from their bill board. When it comes to cheese 'exciting' an 'exiting' are very different concepts.

The workmen installing new refrigeration units in Tesco are coming to the end of their work. The store opens again next week. While they've been closed Sainsburys at the other end of the street has done their level best to keep up with the heightened demand but with limited success. At the end of the day the shelves are a bare as a supermarket in Hoxas Albania.

Saturday night. The Manhattanites have asked me to call them. It's a year since we've last spoken and I'm not sure whether the familiarity will still be there. Oddly, it is. They've interrupted their weekend because they're unsure how the war in Iran is going. Some of them are firm adherents of the 'one last push will do it' school of thought. A minority (?) have drifted into a form of inarticulate despair. One man, in his late 30's and an unlikely candidate for introspection, asks if its inevitable that things get worse. This is an unusual question to be asking while sitting beside a pool in the Hamptons .They wonder if Iran, after six months of bombing, will come to the table. They also wonder if the mischief makers in Moscow and Beijing can resist the temptation to get involved. All are puzzled why Washington thinks Russia and China are well disposed to them. This coming week will tell us a lot. Of course not so long ago America had a State Department that had an institutional memory that understood consequences. In todays world that is a very passe concept. In the meantime the threats keep on being issued but there's no follow through. Expect back tracking while the meaning of that old phrase 'bitten off more than you can chew' sinks in.

Saw this French take about what governments know :https://x.com/Elsa_Trujillo_/status/2082847935935455708

British politicians and clothes :https://edconway.substack.com/p/what-andy-burnhams-80-t-shirt-really

The secret to consultancy :https://www.siliconcontinent.com/p/what-do-consultants-get-paid-for

Scamming authors was something I'd only recentl heard about. Apparently it's a big thing - which may something about egos. This response was humorous :https://besskalb.substack.com/p/how-to-torment-a-scammer

A take on the Odyssey. I enjoyed the movie but didn't really clock it was supposed to be the Odyssey :https://emily613.substack.com/p/if-you-can-bear-to-hear-the-truth

A blog by the woman who recently wrote the good book on Weimar :https://www.katjahoyer.uk/p/poor-west-germany