The morning of New Years Day saw three or four hundred townsfolk plunging into the North Sea. This annual rite is known as the Loony Dook. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZOWvPk3bRo By the time we got to the harbour, found parking and made it from the car onto the beach the partying was over. The popularity of the event suggests that Loony Dooking is a good way of sobering up after the excesses of the night before.
Until now we've always lived in large houses. The Rickety Old Farmhouse in France was seven times the size of The last wee house before Denmark. The family house in Scotland was bigger even than that. The logic to aggressively downsizing was that rather than have half a dozen bedrooms that were empty 99% of the year we'd put up friends and family in one of the local hotels or in the house in town. In return we'd have a relatively maintenance free house you could just lock up and leave. This strategy works relatively well although this year the hotel of choice modelled its decorative style on that of a provincial airport lounge in Maine. Anonymity rules.
Good news. Ondine, one of our favourite fish restaurants in Edinburgh, is opening up in St Andrews. How they will manage to find staff when their competitors struggle has yet to be seen. Around here sky high prices for rental accommodation, the post-Brexit inability to get visas for European staff and low unemployment levels have made finding qualified staff more of a lottery that it should be .
Another substack gem. This time the subject is late bloomers :https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/fifty-late-bloomers
Chinese robots :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2UxtKLZnNo
9 comments:
Hari OM
...and is Ondine going into direct competition with The Seafood Ristorante? We await reports from the 'battlefront'! YAM xx
They both serve the same market and are located within 100 yards of each other so it will be interesting to see how they coexist. Will Seafoods on the water location trump the cooler vibe of Ondine ?
Th loony dook might be a good hangover cure, or it might be a prelude to a heart attack.
The Chinese robot is interesting, capable of many applications.
The robot is fascinating to watch and yet, equally disturbing as I envision its potential future use in warfare. Loved seeing all the British Open winners displayed. Some great names there, and I had forgotten Tiger Woods pulled it off three times. Had to make hot cup of tea after watching the loony dook. Brrrrrr!
Darn blogger. That was me above.
Just thinking about the loony dook and plunging into that frigid North Sea water was a good enough wake up call to start the day!
A belated Happy New Year! That hotel lobby really is dispiriting. My son would love it - he does not share my taste for "character" in hotels and loves the kind of cookie cutter places where everything is exactly where it is expected to be. Maybe that's the demographic? I enjoyed the substack piece about late bloomers and was awed by the robot video. I did the legal work on some very advanced-for-the- time robotics projects many years ago - at that point, the technical challenge was climbing stairs, but it seems that things have moved way beyond that now.
The hotel lobby, though space looks warm and dry. Loved the Late Bloomers piece, and that dip in the North Sea should be called "Hangover be gone"!
Several of the "late bloomers" listed seem to have taken off in their 30's or early 40's which rather expands the definition of "late."
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