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We went for a walk this past weekend around Reelig Glen, a wonderful gem of a walk just a short drive from Inverness.

I’d been there before, but on this occasion the time of day allowed for great winter afternoon sunlight penetrating the deep, thick forests.  The trees in Reelig Glen are tall – one tree was, when measured some years ago, declared the tallest in Britain – and so what light does reach ground level gives the place an eerie, magical feel.  It’s only a short loop, but feels like another world when you enter.

I’d love to go back some time closer to sunrise or sunset to get some even better photos.

Looking back over the last twelve months of 2012, it’s safe to say it has been a good year.

No, I didn’t win anything at the London Olympics and nor was my glee due to the SNP’s sweeping gains in the May local authority elections or the news of Justin Timberlake’s assassination or Tony Blair’s arrest for war crimes.

Rather on a personal front, much happened that was definitely good news.  Late last year, just before Christmas in fact, I submitted my second book in the mullet series, the sequel to Up The Creek Without a Mullet, to my publishers.  It came out this year to some warm reviews, pleasing sales, fun events, and nice feedback from readers, not least in New Zealand where part of the book was set and where significant media attention greeted my quest to that country’s five mullet locations in 2008.

Getting the book written also freed up some time – and spurred me on – to get more travel writing done, finally getting round to writing up some short travel pieces and publishing them on my website.  Among all that, I even managed to spend some time on the two ideas for novels that I have been merely kicking around my head for far too long.

I also managed to travel quite a bit this year, with a trip or two through various parts of Europe, numerous explorations around Scotland, and plans emerging to go to New Zealand to help promote the book.

In other news, my Esperanto continues to improve, and I attended the joint Scottish/British Esperanto congress in Edinburgh in April, the first of many opportunities to use the language in travel.

As for 2013, I’ve no idea what to expect.  I am not really one to make predictions.  Instead I am simply content that 2012 was a happy and enjoyable twelve months.

At least… that’s the plan.  How was your 2012?

Nicole and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary this past weekend (it’s a great fortitude that our anniversaries are on the same day, really).  We’ve set a pattern of taking it in turns to organise a surprise for each other, and last year I took us to Austria.  This year was Nicole’s turn and she chose one of the prettiest parts of Scotland, the dramatic Applecross peninsula.

Before getting there, though, we spent a night in a hotel north of Inverness.  It was lovely, but I’ll keep them anonymous as I’d like to have a dig at one aspect.  In their luxurious lounge were some bookshelves filled with a curious and entirely unrelated collection of books, seemingly acquired in an entirely random way over time.

The oddest were the Usborne Guide to Hamsters (“with internet links”) and a book that looked out of the 1970s and featured Terry Wogan on the cover.  I only wish I’d gone back to my room for my camera.

There was also a 19th century book titled “Why I Am A Christian” written with all the colour, verve and cheer you could imagine emanating from a dour, hardback Victorian-era epistle.  Besides all that, there was, for some inexplicable reason, a large number of novels translated into German, including a Dan Brown I’d never heard of and a science fiction novel or two.  It was quite the oddest collection of books I’ve seen for a long time and perhaps leaves some clues as to the sorts of people who have stayed at the hotel over the years.

When we got to Applecross, we stayed in a beautiful and snug wee cottage for a few nights, enjoying the occasional breaks in the rain to go for walks, drives and expeditions to the (justifiably) famous Applecross Inn.  But the cottage rivalled the hotel for its curious reading material, principally in the form of entries in its guestbook.  Among the numerous glowing comments were some that led me to really fear for this country’s city dwellers.

One guest complained about the steep gradient to the cottage, saying it was “not good for people with disabilities (heart condition)”.  Another objected to the fact that the cottage’s view was of a “farmyard” (when it was actually of a modern house on a croft – a bit of education about the differences between farms and crofts needed there I think); though someone from the same town as that writer thoughtfully though unnecessarily followed up a few comments later with an apology for his brethren.  Someone else complained that their two year old had been caught trying to escape through a skylight.  Another person even thought it fair to criticise a bed in a particularly cosy and snug bedroom for being too small: despite the fact that if the bed had been any bigger the room would have been less of a bedroom and more of a dojo.

Quite how these stupid people survive outside the limits of the city they come from (and why they bother venturing furth) is a mystery to me.  Much as, I imagine, the “countryside” (as everyone except those living there seems to call it) is a mystery to them.  One of the strengths of Inverness as a place to live is that you’re always able to appreciate and understand both rural and urban Scotland.  This beautiful part of the world was barely a couple of hours’ drive from home, and a gorgeous drive at that.

Enough of the rantings. Beyond all that, it was a lovely weekend.  I’d been to Applecross before, but really enjoyed taking the time to relax, explore with the camera, and see a lot more of the peninsula than I had before.  Here are the photos.

The (self-imposed) deadline looms.

As is all too depressingly obvious, it’s not long until Christmas and that is my deadline for finishing off my second book.  This will, as I may have mentioned before, run on from UTCWAM, chart my adventures in England, Canada, New Zealand and the western USA, and effectively bring the mission up to the present day in terms of trips.  The working title for the book is “Mullet 2″, but that too easily lends itself to various secondary titles, like “Mullet 2: Mullet Harder” and suchlike, the realm of which I am more than inclined to avoid.

Such titular considerations have been at the back of my mind, however, given the pressing need to get the actual content finished.  It had been looking a bit touch and go of late, and indeed I actually planned to finish it this time last year, and then this summer, but I am confident that aiming for this Christmas will be the last delay.  Obstacles have basically revolved around lots going on in real life and the day job, so finding time to sit down and write – even with my free Mondays – has been hard.  But increasingly as I’ve found the time, I’ve been more effective at using it, and I’m now more confident than ever that I will hit the target.

The easiest bit – for the most part – has been writing about the trips themselves, which were of course great fun.  A little trickier have been the intervening bits, trying to remember what was happening in life, what mullets I discovered when and how, what things are entertaining or relevant enough to write, and how all fits in the right order.

I’ve got the bulk of the book finished, and I am now in the process of finishing up the “in between trips” sections, and then follows the numerous rounds of redrafting and editing.  I’m definitely in the final straights now, which is a relief after a frustratingly long time in getting this second book near to completion.

If it is to be published, we should be looking at some time later on in 2012.  I will of course keep you posted.

If you’ve been in Aberdeen recently, you won’t have escaped the furore over the plans to turn Union Terrace Gardens (right) into a big square.

The idea came from Sir Iain Wood, one of the city’s richest oil industrialists, who has wanted to give £50million of his own money back to the city that helped generate his wealth.

On the face of it, it’s a striking and thoroughly altruistic gesture.  However it’s proved to be a hugely divisive one because the plan involves building over Union Terrace Gardens and raising the ground to the level of the buildings around it.

There are six options, and a consultation has recently been running to gauge public views about them.  I noticed it when I was in Aberdeen on Wednesday, and given that I had a spare hour I decided to pop in to have a look.  I discovered the next day that it closed just a couple of hours after I’d visited, so my being in the area with a little free time was a lucky coincidence.

Let me explain the basic idea of the plans.

The night-time photo above is, I’m afraid, the best one I have on Flickr of the area in question.  To set the scene, Aberdeen was, a little like the Old Town in Edinburgh, a medieval city built on a number of hills.  Later developments such as bridges and new streets effectively raised the city, leaving parts like the Denburn Valley, pictured, a little below the new street level.

If you explore the side streets around Aberdeen city centre you get a real sense of that historic heart  lurking beside (and often below) the city centre’s main artery, Union Street, and such explorations will show you how the city was raised to a higher level (1|2|3).

And this is all, by the way, entirely separate from the beautiful atmosphere of Old Aberdeen proper, lying about twenty minutes’ walk north, the main features of which include Aberdeen University (Scotland’s only medieval campus university, founded in 1495) and the gorgeous St Machar’s Cathedral (left).

Belmont Street, at the heart of Aberdeen’s nightlife and cultural scene, is just out of the big photograph above, running along the other side of the buildings which back onto the left of the picture.  Union Street, the main shopping thoroughfare, is at the far end above the arched bridge.  The three gorgeous Victorian icons of “education, salvation and damnation” are behind where this photo was taken from.  The road and railway run through the centre of the picture, and Union Terrace Gardens are to the right.

You can see from the bridge in the background, plus where the gardens meet the street on the right, the level to which it is proposed the ground is raised.  The road and railway would be covered, but so would Union Terrace Gardens.

There has been substantial opposition to the plans in the city, with protesters claiming that the beauty of the gardens and an important green space at the heart of the city would be lost forever.

I am not convinced I ever had much sympathy for the opponents of the plan.  I never thought that Union Terrace Gardens were particularly well-used or promoted enough, and while they were certainly pretty they seemed to be more of a spot for sleeping rough than enjoying the serenity of a public park.  Having lived in Aberdeen for over five years and still being a regular visitor, I can say that I’ve probably been in the gardens no more than a handful of times, barely for more than a few minutes, and never to spend any prolonged time in.  The lack of footfall through the park is surely in the main due to the lack of sunlight that come from it being at a sunken level.  Yes they are nice gardens but they are just not sunny enough compared to the city’s other lovely public spaces such as Seaton Park or Duthie Park.

Moreover, building over the dual carriageway and railway line will be of great benefit to the aesthetics of the scene, and the idea of connecting Union Terrace (the road to the right of the gardens in the picture), Belmont Street, Union Street and Rosemount Viaduct (behind the photographer’s vantage point) seems quit sensible on paper.

Not that I am unequivocally in favour of the proposed new city gardens, however.

It was with a mixture of lazy ambivalence and only mild curiosity that I ventured into the exhibition to see the six options, and having considered them briefly I am somewhat underwhelmed by them all and unpersuaded that any  would truly add something to the city that couldn’t be done in other ways.  They all represent sledgehammers lining up to crack a nut that nobody can agree requires cracking in the first place.  So that’s my main reason for being concerned about the plans.

Secondly, I passionately believe there are better ways of thanking or cheering up Aberdeen than by giving it a square it’s not sure it wants.  If I had fifty million spare, I’d give it to Aberdeen Football Club.  Nothing would enthuse the city’s overoptimistic football fans, not to mention wider population, more than its perennially underachieving and underfunded football team returning to former glory.

And sadly it is down the highway of massive investment that you achieve things in football these days.  So what better way of using your wealth to restore morale, profile and exposure to the city of Aberdeen than through rebuilding a European-class football team?  Plus, you’d never have to put your hands in your pocket in a city pub for the rest of your life.

But my third reason for being sceptical of the city square plans is that I think they’re picking the wrong spot.

I reckon that the true heart of the city is further east, at the Castlegate – the historic connection between King Street (the road north), Union Street (heading west) and the roads down to the harbour and beach.

Castlegate – so called because it was the site of the city’s castle, destroyed in the Wars of Independence in the 1300s and never rebuilt – is perhaps a tired spot, and no doubt it lost some of its purpose when the city’s trams were removed along with the Castlegate’s role as its interchange.

And incidentally, I think Aberdeen would really suit and benefit from having trams back and it’s a tragedy that Edinburgh has given the mode of transport a bad name.

But anyway.  Surrounded by a mixture of the imposing and the ornate, the medieval and Victorian, and across from the Town House and the magnificent pub designed by and named after Archibald Simpson, Castlegate is an impressive spot and could easily be more so.  The neglect it has experienced over the years could easily be repaired, and if the beautiful Citadel and other buildings fronting the square could be used for a more inclusive civic or cultural purpose then you could have a magnificent setting in the making.

Restoring life to the Castlegate would be much cheaper than trying to create it from scratch over Union Terrace Gardens, more effective, and – as it would draw more obviously upon the city’s historic layout and architectural heritage – significantly more in keeping with the character and soul of the city.

But maybe, just as I found with the exhibition and consultation I browsed round in its final few hours, my not being an Aberdeen resident perhaps negates the validity of my views.

For what they’re worth, though, you’ve just read them.

I’ve always been interested in languages. It’s probably the single thing that most powerfully demonstrates human diversity and represents the gateway to understanding the world better.  If there is one free skill I’d love to have for no effort in return, it would be fluency in one or more other languages.  I am not fluent in anything other than English, sadly, though at school I studied Gaelic until second year (which was compulsory), German to Standard Grade and French to Higher, and narrowly chose not to do languages at university alongside Politics.

That said, I’ve always practised my French and German wherever possible, be it when travelling, hosting couchsurfers, or meeting or visiting French- or German-speaking friends. I’ve been complemented a number of times on my enthusiastic but faltering grasp of both, and I have been told that I’d be just a few months’ immersion away from fluency in either.

Yet something always niggled at the back of my mind regarding French and, especially, German: a dissatisfaction with unnecessary complexities. Such as rules that were broken so often as to be meaningless, complex rules of grammar that seemed to erect more barriers to effective communication than bridges, and the realisation that French and German suffered from geographical “weak spots” meaning their value as international languages was questionable.

And don’t get me started on gender and cases. I never understood quite why a noun needed to be masculine or feminine, or why adjectives or the word for “the” should change according to their place in the sentence. That’s one great thing about English, where we’ve more or less done away with these grammatical quirks that have their root – so to speak – in Latin.

Of course, English is not free of criticism on this front.  It’s a widely-spoken and beautifully expressive language, yet one full of inconsistencies and absurd rules. Everything from the multiple ways of pronouncing “ough” to our odd plural rules (mice and men, but not hice and cen, for instance) presents a language that must seem immensely complicated to new learners.

And it’s not even as if English is the truly international language many claim it to be. Languages are a key tool for international travel and exploring other cultures, yet if you spoke only English I reckon you’d struggle somewhat across vast swathes of Russia, China, Latin America and the Arab-speaking world, four parts of the globe that will only become more important to us as they develop economically.

Of course, if you are a polyglot then you’re sorted. For instance, fluency in the six official languages of the United Nations – English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic – will probably see you cover most of the planet with ease. But I daresay such an achievement would require a true gift for languages that few of us possess. And that’s the point that bugged me with French and German – why should you have to be “good at languages” to be good at languages?

This is where Esperanto comes in.

Created by a Polish doctor as an international auxiliary language in the late nineteenth century, Esperanto was designed to be a simple, easy and effective means of communication between different peoples, and I have been aware of its exstence for years. I possess a “Teach Yourself Esperanto” book I bought many years ago, but cannot remember where or when, and to be honest it has been virtually untouched as long as I have had it, largely due to a lack of motivation.

But the basic principle of the language – simplicity – has always appealed. I have been thinking a lot recently about languages, contemplating improving my French or German or else starting to learn a new one. Last month we went to France on holiday and on a whim I dusted down “Teach Yourself Esperanto” and took it with me.

Thanks to the freedom of a relatively lazy holiday, I made swift and satisfying progress. I then reinforced my knowledge upon my return with the multilingual Esperanto learning website lernu.net. I also made contact with other speakers, and this past Saturday I went to Glasgow for a study day organised by the Scottish Esperanto Association.

Meeting other speakers was always going to be a key litmus test for me. It would move the language from the page or computer screen into real live face to face interaction, and transform it from an abstract and solitary interest into a potentially living, dynamic means of communication. Would using Esperanto with other speakers for the very first time turn me from a fleeting enquirer to committed enthusiast?

The answer was an emphatic yes. Why? Why was I interested to start with, why did I enjoy getting stuck into it, and why am I going to stick at it?

The main answer to all those questions is that basic principle, simplicity. On a two week holiday I’d probably spent an average of an hour a day on the language, yet I’d managed in that time to learn the basic rules and concepts plus a modest, functional amount of vocabulary. In fact, doing some rough sums in my head I reckon I gained as much Esperanto in those dozen or so hours as the amount of French I knew after a year of secondary school. This echoes with some figures I’d read previously, that it takes a native English speaker ten times longer to learn another European language than Esperanto, and many more times longer to learn an unrelated language like Chinese.

This simplicity is based on the logical way in which the language was designed. There are no irregular verbs or exceptions to any grammatical rule, phonetics and spelling are simple, word order doesn’t matter that much, and patterns and consistency abound in every feature of the language. That makes for an incredibly satisfying learning experience, because when you learn a rule you know you’ll never be tripped up later by exceptions or quirks, and can apply the rules without limits, rapidly expanding your vocabulary and capability.

It helps, furthermore, that Esperanto’s vocabulary draws very heavily on that of Romance and Germanic languages, not least Latin, meaning that on first glance the language already feels somewhat familiar. You don’t need much language talent to be able to guess what “la hundo estas en la aŭto” means.

One obvious flaw of Esperanto is that there are not many speakers – the estimated two or three million speakers are scattered thinly and evenly throughout the world. But that’s not a barrier in an age of global travel and internet communication, and in any case it makes existing speakers all the more welcoming and supportive to new speakers, as I found to my delight at the study day on Saturday.  Thanks to them, I already feel a part of a community.

In a relatively short space of time, Esperanto is, unlike any other language I’ve encountered, already proving a fun adventure. I might just blog about it – and perhaps even in it – as I go.

If you ever want to know what it feels like to travel to the other side of the world, but don’t have the time or money to do so, then allow me to suggest that you take the overnight bus from London to Inverness.  The feeling of exhaustion, plus the desperate need to sleep during the daytime upon returning, has given me the sort of jetlag that I’ve only ever experienced after flights to or from Australia and New Zealand.

A little over twenty four hours after returning from France I’ve more or less shaken the tiredness off, which is just as well as I have a very busy week’s travels for work coming up.  In that time, a major highlight has been sorting through my Paris photos and uploading a selection of them – we were only there overnight on our journey home but managed to pack a lot in.  The whole set from the trip, incidentally, is here.

I’ll be putting finger to keyboard with a few bits and pieces of what we got up to in France, but as a sneak preview it involved sunshine, castles and industrial quantities of delicious French cheese.

That won’t be all written up for a few weeks, though, as I have mullet-related writing to do.  Yes, despite my promise to myself that I’d finish my draft of my second book finished before going to France, I failed.  I’m nearly there though – perhaps 80-90% finished – so am not feeling too bad about missing what was after all an entirely self-imposed date.  I think I might be done in a month or two, but given my past record I reckon it would tempting fate to announce another deadline.

On with the writing then.  If the post-holiday blues and general work busyness don’t get in the way.

Faith, hope and charity are quite a trilogy.  They are a trio of saints, three WW2-era RAF planes, a key verse in the Bible and even a play. But here in Inverness, they are most famous as the Three Graces which used to reside above a magnificent columned building on the corner of High Street and Castle Street, where the architectural (not to mention gastronomic) monstrosity McDonald’s now sits.

When their home was abolished they spent time in exile in Orkney before being recently bought by the council and returned to Inverness.  They now sit on the riverside, just in front of Ness Bank church.  They are quite attractive statues and tastefully fit their new home.  Here they are on the right, standing in a row with their names beneath them.  Click on the picture to see it in detail.

However, sometimes it takes an outsider to see something about a place (something I love about travel).  Recently we had some visitors staying with us, and when we walked along the river one of them pointed out that the names are in the wrong order.

Faith, suggested our friend, is the one in the middle clutching a Bible (who stands above the word “hope”).  Hope is the one with that great metaphor of hope, an anchor, perched atop the legend “charity”.  Charity is the one giving something to drink to a child, oblivious to being called “faith” by the plinth.  Despite being free-standing statues with a custom-made plinth, they have been clearly placed in the wrong order.  Either that or they’ve been playing musical chairs when nobody’s watching.  I can imagine the council stating the names are not meant to indicate the statue directly above, but that runs counter to the way that anyone would logically interpret the scene.

Is this an intentional placing, or has Highland Council made a gaffe that has, until now, been unnoticed?

The EU will be jealous of me, because unlike them I am shortly to remove that annoying grey bit from the middle of my “where I’ve been” map.

Just as Lesotho makes South Africa look like it’s forgotten something, the European Union purists must have been annoyed for some years now by that irritating and persistently neutral bit that can’t be coloured in despite the union’s recent spread eastwards: yes, the land of yodelling, clocks and versatile pocket knives that is Switzerland.

By the time you read this we will be en route to France on holiday, and are staying in the east of the country within day trip distance of the Swiss city of Geneva.

It’s a country that’s easy to scorn for its resistance to EU membership, and anyone who has returned home to the UK from a trip abroad will know what I mean.

When you approach customs, there are generally channels for two groups of passport holders – those from the European Union, and then those from other countries.  Those benefitting from the freedom of movement the EU allows can, broadly speaking, treat the union’s four and a bit million square kilometres of territory as their home, a cursory check of the passport being enough to welcome you to a country which, if it is not your own, is still somewhere you’re welcome to live and work in, on the whole without restriction.  Meanwhile those outside the European Union are directed to another channel, presumably so their passports and visas can be checked and stamped to ensure they are entitled to visit the country.

But of course, if you look again at the directional signs above the channels, it’s not as simple as “EU” and “other”.  The EU channel also extends the “fast track” to the European Economic Area (which include all EU member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway) and to Switzerland.

I can understand the inclusion of the EEA – an agreement exists between it and the EU that allows those three named EEA members to access the EU’s internal market in exchange for adhering to relevant legislation.  But Switzerland opts out of the EEA, for reasons I honestly cannot be bothered to research.  Why, then, they have free passage through the same passport stream as EU and EEA citizens, I have no idea.

Of course, there are strong arguments both for and against membership of the European Union, and the Swiss are perfectly entitled to choose not to be members.  But by joining EU channels at immigration points, it’s clear that they are getting all of the benefits of EU membership without the burden or responsibility of membership.

Why should I be expected to share a passport queue with a bunch of folk who pay nothing to EU coffers, for whom Herman van Rompuy does not speak, and who face none of the joys of the Common Agricultural Policy and none of the ire of UKIP?  This is a major injustice I am sure you’ll agree, and when I return to the UK I shall be sure to tell the uniformed customs person to whom I show my passport that I resent sharing space with the freeloading Swiss.

Revenge is planned, though.  Apart from entry to a few interesting-sounding museums in Geneva, I plan on spending as little money there as possible.  Mind you, that frugality is not just to spite the Swiss for opting out of the EU while claiming its benefits: it’s also because their prices – already among the highest in Europe – are apparently rocketing as their currency strengthens against the euro.

So, the challenge is on to get as much out of Geneva as possible while spending as little as possible.  It’ll be my first time in Switzerland but third time in France.  I’ll report back on both countries – and the rusty state of my French – in due course.

Au revoir!