Do you like golf?

If you do you may have been at the Loch Lomond Open which just finished here in, well, Loch Lomond. Well,not in Loch Lomond, but near it. If you were here, or are thinking of coming next year, can I make a few suggestions?

• Please don’t drive there. There’s a proper link bus from Balloch station now. Lots and lots of people drive to this tournament, and the A82 fills up extremely quickly. Quite why you need to drive to somewhere where you’re going to walk about all day is a mystery to me.
• If you must drive there, consider not using the A82. There’s not one but two viable alternative routes to and from the golf course, through Helensburgh, or through Helensburgh via the Glen Fruin haul road. They’re both attractive drives, and given that the A82 is full of parked cars during this event, will probably be quicker. In particular, don’t start driving towards Helensburgh then turn left at Crosskeys back towards the A82, because that’s stupid and won’t work.
• If you insist on going via the A82, please, whatever you do, don’t get impatient.  I drive to work daily past Cameron House, and on every single trip during this tournament I have been forced to brake very suddenly by impatient people suddenly driving onto the road in front of me from junctions. To slightly rephrase that, I’ve nearly died at least four times in the last three days, and it’s getting a little trying.
• If you are a motorcyclist, either going to the golf or trying to get round the parked cars, please consider driving on your own side of the road. I’ve lost count of the number of bikers slipping up the traffic dangerously wide on unsighted bends, and that’s frankly trying as well.

There you go. Personally I detest golf. But I’ve tried to be polite. If you must go and watch this absurd sport, please have a little consideration for the people who live and work in the area and have to use that horrible road every day.

Bulgarian Christians Mark Transfiguration

Bulgarian Christians Mark Transfiguration
In Bulgarian folklore, that days has another meaning.

It is believed to bring a transformation in the natural environment, ushering fall and marking the nearing end of summer.

Funny that it should be so early there; I remember last November, it still looked like summer. Well, a little.

Here I guess the end of summer is the end of August. Though the weather can be good right into September, and the boundaries between seasons are kind of fractal, with summer and autumn coming and going several times in a couple of weeks before things settle down and become depressing.

Strawberry Summer

It must be long, cold winters that do it. But every summer, the Norwegians go mad for strawberries.

After a month or so of anticipation, and stunningly high prices, from mid-June on they are everywhere, in the supermarkets, in the shops, in the petrol stations, in the market squares, by the side of the road.

Driving along, one regularly sees signs with a huge picture of a strawberry, and a distance. Strawberries! Giant strawberries, 200 metres ahead on the right. And there, in a layby, under an umbrella will be a table, usually manned by a person of apparently "ethnic" extraction—Norway seems to be having similar difficulty with this sort of thing as Britain did a few years ago—who will be happy to sell you a gigantic box of strawberries for 20, or maybe 15 kroner.

And you can take that box home, and eat it with sugar and cream, and then the very next day you can go out and do the very same thing.

There's nothing better, at least for a while.

Like many aspects of Nordic summer, the strawberry summer is short and intense. Last year I remember, by mid August, the stalls had begun to disappear, and the the supermarket shelves were full of oppressive walls of one litre tubs of… strawberry jam.

And absolutely no one was buying them.