Black Hill and Scald Law

Black Hill (NT188632; 501m) and Scald Law (NT192611; 579m)

I’d not even looked at a weather forecast for yesterday, much less considered any potential hills, as I had expected us to spend a good chunk of the day loitering around a caravan workshop in Livingston*. As things turned out, we were free to go by 9.30am, and found ourselves with a blue-skied day and absolutely no plans.

What to do in such a situation? Well, repair to the nearest supermarket, obviously! (Obvious to us, anyway, as supermarkets generally have level car parks, generously sized parking spaces and, most importantly on this occasion, they sell croissant).

The map was considered over second breakfast, whereupon Bertie’s nose was pointed towards the Pentland Hills, via the worst quality road that we’ve driven in a long time. The hastily-made plan was Black Hill and Scald Law.

Arriving in the Threipmuir Reservoir car park, lunch became our first priority (yes, lunchtime already; second breakfast had been a prolonged affair), but by early afternoon off we strode towards our first objective, which was set off nicely across the reservoir:

There may well be a path up all or most of this hill, but after following a well-trodden line for a short while we struck off uphill and from there just followed trods through the heather until there was no more uphill to be had, and a surprisingly small cairn was found:

The views over Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth were clear, as well as towards our next objective (the lump on the right in this snap):

A reasonably straight line was taken to pick up the good path which runs from Bavelaw to Penicuik and from the col it was a simple ascent up to Scald Law, passing  on our way a chap making hard work of pushing his mountain bike up; his companion waited for him on the top:

Our return route saw us skirt around the end of Black Hill, but otherwise was a repetition of our outward route. Given an earlier start we probably would have made a circuit by nipping over East Kip and West Kip, but we hadn’t, so we didn’t.

It was still the perfect day for a walk as we returned to the (now largely empty) car park having walked 8.2 miles with around 600m of ascent.

(*A week or so ago, I noticed a fault on Bertie’s bed, the nature of which suggested it needed looking at sooner rather than later. An appointment was thus made at Knowepark Caravans in Livingston for next Tuesday, but they’d agreed that, if we popped by on Thursday morning this week then they would have a quick look to try to work out what was causing the problem.

We were outside an hour before they opened, with the expectation of sitting around for at least a couple of hours after opening before they even squeezed us in. To our surprise, they made Bertie’s bed their first job and we were on our way again by 9.30 (unfortunately, without the bed being fixed and with next Tuesday’s appointment cancelled because they didn’t have, and couldn’t get in time, the part required, but at least with confirmation of what the problem is and with instructions as to how to fix it ourselves once we get hold of the part).)

Cairnpapple Hill (NS987711; 312m)

This pleasingly-named little hill was convenient for our whereabouts today, so after we had hunted down some LPG and elevensesed and lunched in between the Forth rail and road bridges* (a popular location), off we tootled to the edge of Beecraigs Country Park (through which we walked a few years ago on one of our Big Walks).

It hadn't escaped our notice that the wind had picked up throughout the morning and there was a squall blowing through as we parked in the litter-strewn car park to the west of the hill. I donned my Paramo and headed out, hoping the rain would have passed, and I would have dried out, by the time I returned (it had and I did, but I only dodged the next shower by seconds).

With the summit of the hill sitting about three quarters of a kilometre from the car park, as the crow flies, and with there being a mast access track leading half way there, it was always going to be a quick outing. The biggest unknown was how I was going to cross a couple of field boundaries. The answer was one convenient gate and one gap in the barbed wire/wall which was slightly more conveniently placed than the next gate I could see. Twelve minutes after setting out I was at the top.



After wandering over to look off the east side of the hill...

... I came to realise that my descent was not going to be as easy, purely because the strength of the wind, which had blown me up the hill, was an impediment in getting down. It kept stopping me in my tracks, making me glad I wasn't any higher up today.

The whole outing came in at 1.5 miles, with around 75m of ascent, taking just 27 minutes, including the detour when I lost control of my hanky and had to go running after it (talking of running - my day started with a trundle on the edge of Loch Leven, just outside of Kinross. Rather a nice location for a jogette, I thought).

^{(*On the way there Bertie got introduced to cobbled streets, and we also discovered that if he takes a camouflaged speed hump too fast then it's possible for his fully laden wardrobe rail to jump clean out of its brackets. Oops.)}

Creag Ruadh (NN685883; 658m)

On the 'old A9', which is now a minor road, running between Dalwhinnie and Falls of Truim, there's a nice big layby (NN 65049 87340) and it was there that we abandoned Bertie yesterday morning whilst we popped up Creag Ruadh, which sits the other side of both the River Truim and the current A9. Handily, there's a bridge over the river and a tunnel under the road.

The white dot is Bertie-the-Motorhome

Once on the other side of those potential obstacles, we opted to turn right, not left towards our hill, so as to make use of the available tracks. That resolution didn't last very long and having cut across country, back to the Allt Cuaich, we discovered a good ATV track which led us all the way to a gate in the deer fence (NN 66402 86761) that was protecting our objective. That was handy, as we felt uneasy with the thought of scaling the fence, given that there was an estate vehicle on the track above us, watching our every move (actually, he may have been doing something industrious and it may just have been a spot of paranoia to believe he was interested in what we were doing).

I'd expected this hill to be a heathery yomp, but again I was surprised. Beyond the gate continued the ATV track. On another day it could have been a mixed blessing due to its squidginess, but for us it was sufficiently frozen to give us easy passage - on the way up, at least. Where we did encounter unfrozen watery wallows there were even, on a couple of occasions, 'bridges':


The track disappeared just after we crossed the 500m contour and whilst we did see evidence of it here and there later on, it was as easy to just continue on our line in the right general direction. Easy that is until the depth of snow, combined with its texture, made me feel like I was on a Stairmaster. That was only the last little bit, until the nobbles which are the summit. I say 'nobbles' in the plural as this was another hill where I wasn't convinced that the summit feature stated in the Hill List was really the highest point. Both possibilities were visited, just to be sure.

That's Loch Ericht behind me

Retracing our steps, the day had warmed sufficiently to make the going less firm under foot - should have set out half an hour earlier!

This time we followed the ATV track along the burn all the way to the tunnel under the A9 and it was definitely the better route choice.

The stats were 6.4 miles walked with around 330m of ascent.

Creag Dhubh (NN677972, 756m)

Enough sitting around and strolling gently! Today I nominated a hill, albeit with not a lot of thought as it wasn't until we caught sight of it, as we drove SW out of Newtonmore on the A86, that I realised it wasn't a little hill. Being 20 feet shy of qualifying as a Corbett, it was far from a biggie, but it was still high enough to be holding a notable covering of snow (although not on its NE side, which is mainly steep/vertical rock).

A short hop and skip along the A86, from the deep layby where we had abandoned Bertie, was a gate in a deer fence and, to my surprise, beyond it was a clear grassy/snow covered track. In fact, this hill involved a lot more 'path' (mainly just trodden lines) than I expected.

The snow didn't become a consistent blanket until we were above 500m. From there we were most pleased that some chap had walked our route yesterday. More time would have been spent path finding, and progress would have been slower slogging through the snow, if we hadn't had some nice big footprints to follow.

It took us an hour and a half to get to the top and just over an hour to get back down - a fact I mention because it was startling how much less snow there was on the lower slopes as we descended than there had been such a short time earlier. In place of that snow were paths now masquerading as streams.

The outing came in at 4.8 miles with 550m of ascent. Here are a few snaps:

Mick, shortly before I nipped past him to make it to the top before him


I'm the king of the castle...


View to the east from summit


And the view to the west


Heading back down


Definitely less snow down here than there had been an hour or so earlier. Still stunning snowy views, though.

Nothing Much To Report

Saturday & Sunday, 4 & 5 March

With rain drumming down on the roof, Mick questioned my sanity as I slipped out of bed early yesterday morning and started donning my running gear. There was logic behind my madness: we were on a campsite until we had to leave at noon, thus it made sense to go and get wet as early as possible so as to give my gear time to dry in front of the electric heater before we had to unplug ourselves.
It was pretty unpleasant out, and thus the run was as short as I could get away with whilst still hitting my step count for the day as, in that weather, I had no plans of doing anything else active for the rest of the day.

The precipitation continued all day, turning to snow at some point in the afternoon. By the time the sun went down we were in a winter wonderland.

The snow turned back to rain overnight (so Mick tells me; I was busy sleeping and heard nothing) and looking out this morning I couldn't find the enthusiasm to go and slog up my intended hill (a reputedly uninteresting one at the best of times) in wet snow and slush. Instead we took a little turn along the riverside in Carrbridge...

The bridge for which Carrbridge was named

I was particularly taken with the 'relic' qualities of this vehicle, which was sitting on the other side of the bridge

...before moving on and taking a turn around Aviemore.

In Aviemore we didn't have lunch at the Mountain Cafe as, even though we arrived before noon, the queue extended the whole way down the staircase. We browsed the shop downstairs at some length and noticed when we left that the queue hadn't moved. On the one occasion that we went to the café the soup was very good, but I wouldn't rate even the best soup as worth queuing for half an hour or more on a staircase.

After Bertie lost the sun in Aviemore, a relocation to a sunny spot in Kingussie was made, from where advantage was taken of the glorious afternoon by taking a stroll up towards Loch Gynack. We had no firm plan, beyond just strolling, but when we found a map of local walks it was adjudged that the 'Golf Course Circular' looked as good a route as any, so off following waymarks we went.

The going was a combination of snow, mud and slush (i.e. various shades of slippery), so a bit of boardwalk was a welcome respite:


Loch Gynack was at the furthest point in the circuit...


...before we came to the golf course and its fine views over the snowy Cairngorms:


I reckon it was only 3 miles all told, but it wasn't a bad way to spend an hour on a sunny afternoon.

Carn a’Ghille Chearr (NJ139298, 710m)

3 March 2017

With another fine weather forecast ahead of us, we dithered at great length yesterday afternoon in deciding which hill(s) to visit today. It was Mick who eventually came over all decisive, and thus our previously unbagged Cromdale Hill became our target, to be tackled from Glen Avon (the same start point as we used for its neighbour, Creagan a’Chaise in August 2015).

A good track took us almost the whole way up to the ridge, and we were soon overheating as we went up it, but after a cold night the great sheets of ice were a feature of the lower reaches.

With the track eventually petering out, off-piste we went onto a hillside littered with white animals. At first my mind suggested that they must be sheep, which was rapidly followed by the thought that it was odd to see sheep this high at this time of year. It turned out that they were mountain hares, in startlingly white winter coats, no doubt thinking they were well hidden when actually they stood out like beacons.

Completing the bulk of our climb, it was a joy to see what a wonderful place the ridge was on such a calm, blue-skied day:

The objective is within sight

Behind us the Cairngorms were looking fine too…

…and I was just admiring them as Mick snapped the summit shot:

And for completeness, here’s one of the two of us, enjoying the summit:

A few minutes away from the trig point, lies a prominent cairn and whilst we knew the trig was at the true summit, we thought we may as well visit the cairn, hoping that we could get a bit of shelter there to pause for tea and butteries (I said it was a calm day, and it was, but the miniscule amount of breeze was really cold!).

I’d not long sat down when half a dozen reindeer sensed that there was food around, and wandered over:

Those aren’t zoomed shots, they really were that close; look:

We had to push away the muzzle of that one just behind me as it kept coming in for some overly intimate contact.

It was already looking unlikely that we were going to get to eat our butteries, when the rest of the herd realised there was something exciting going on and came trotting on over too:

That’s not the whole of the rest of the herd. I couldn’t get them all in one shot.

Time to move on, we thought, whereupon we realised how unfortunate it was that my packliner is a rubble sack, which, in the act of packing stuff back away, sounds very much like an animal feed sack being shaken. The reindeer got quite animated. We gave our apologies and scurried off:

Rather than retracing our steps, a more direct line was taken for our return, taking advantage of the fact that descending rough ground is a lot easier than climbing it. It was a bit rough, though, and only a few hundred metres in, my left leg fell into snow-filled hole and I pitched forward. A fortunate manoeuvre, as it turned out, as in falling I catapulted my Garmin Gadget out of its place on the top of my pack, to land right in front of me, reminding me nicely that, in our hurry to leave the reindeer, I had forgotten to re-start it.

The stats were 6.6 miles walked with 1600’ (ish) of ascent. Thanks to the hares and the reindeer, not to mention the superb weather, I’m sure it will prove to be a memorable walk.

Ben Aigan and Knockan

Ben Aigan (NJ310482; 471m)

We could have started this walk from the small forestry parking area by Balnacoul, but Google StreetView suggested that the acess lane was narrowed by overgrown gorse, so instead we set out from the large layby on the A95, establishing en-route that the gorse has recently been cleared and that there would have been no impediment to driving Bertie up there. Still, a mile extra of walking in each direction did us no harm.

As the map above suggests, forest featured quite prominently, but it was a nice old grassy track we were following:

Mick is blurred because he was moving so fast, not because I’m an incompetent photographer, honest.

Information that was either duff or that I had misunderstood had us taking a slightly longer than necessary route to the top, once we had popped out of the forest. My version of that route was slightly short-cut as, when I was blown off the path I decided that, as the wind seemed to be blowing me in the right direction, I may as well go with it.

The highest point of this hill isn’t the trig point, but a tussock 50m away. I’m standing on the most likely contender in this shot:

Mick put his glove slightly over the lens in this shot so as to give me competition in the ‘incompetent photographer’ stakes.

We did, of course, wander over to the trig too…

…before hurrying out of the strong, biting wind and back down to our exit point from the forest, via a more direct line.

A retracing of our steps had us back down on the A95 having walked 5 miles with just a smidge over 1000’ of up.

 A dumping-ground of a farm. I couldn’t capture all of the vehicles and stuff lying around, but this is quite a good representation of the whole.

Knockan (NJ351464; 372m)

With a soreness of his hip, Mick decided to sit this one out and thus offered to drop me off a mile up the road. I wouldn’t have been fussed about knocking that distance off the outing, except that it saved me a walk along the pavementless A95. There turned out to be somewhere to park just up the track I’d opted to use as my route, although being as slopey as it was, it wasn’t particularly comfortable for Mick as he sat with his book whilst I marched off upwards.

Hampered only by the presence of a couple of electric fences across the track (I say ‘track’ but at the point in question it was a track on the map only, not on the ground), all was straightfoward and it didn’t take long to reach the top edge of the forest.

From there I expected to have to yomp across country, so was surprised to find a gravel path had been put in to link the forest track with the windfarm track above:

Beyond there, I did have to yomp, but it was all easy going to the cairn which either marks the top or a spot close by (I had conflicting information as to the summit feature for this one, and suspect that the cairn has been moved to the highest point, as it matched the 10-digit grid reference I had, and I couldn’t find anywhere else that looked a contender for the high point). Unfortunately, I had another attack of photographic incompetence up here and this snap is the only direction in which I managed an unblurry shot:

Many wind turbines were to be seen in this direction, but hopefully the snap conveys the excellent air clarity

The weather hadn’t seemed threatening at all during the entire outing, so it was a suprise to hear pitter pattering upon Bertie’s roof within five minutes of my return. What good timing!

This outing also came in at 5 miles (unless you want to go to two decimal places, in which case it was 4.96) with just under 700’ of ascent.

--------------------

As an aside, there later occurred a bit of a panic about our gas situation. Colin’s gas tank had a capacity of 16 litres. Bertie has a gas capacity of 48 litres. Generally, a full tank on Colin would last us at least three weeks, but we can’t compare like with like, as Bertie (and our usage of his gas-driven appliances) is very different from Colin and we knew he would be more gas-hungry. Having set out on this trip with no idea how long his supply would last, I thought, late yesterday afternoon, that I would see how the bottles were faring. With the gauges being in a unviewable positions, a camera came in handy, and in reviewing the results this gauge had us concerned:

The gauge on the other bottle was reading just over 2 litres remaining. Was this one really empty already? Or was it full beyond its scale? If the former, then we were burning through gas so fast that we would run out during the night (a matter of concern, given it was below freezing by 5pm, and we really didn’t want to have to drain down his water system).

Just after we’d reasoned that 48 litres split between two bottles meant that we could expect the gauge to be reading off the top end of its scale, coupled with further reasoning that we couldn’t possibly have been going through 4 litres of gas per day, I remembered that I’d seen the manual for the gas installation somewhere on board. A bit ferretting around, followed by a bit of reading and a further trip out to the gas locker for a photo of a bit more of the equipment reassured us: after eleven days of use we had just over 26 litres remaining. I think. I hope…

Frosty Nights, Sunny Days

(Written on Wednesday 1 March, posting delayed by me being too lazy to walk up the road to get a better wifi hotspot signal that night.)

It was a fine day on Monday, followed by a cold and frosty night.


Setting sun, lighthouse, Typhoon landing

We can readily bear frosty nights when they're sandwiched between glorious days, so we were happy to wake to more uninterrupted blueness yesterday.

Steaming mugs of tea/coffee awaited us as we arrived at Louise's (gemini-challenge.blogspot.com) house mid-morning and it probably goes without saying that those drinks were accompanied by much chatting. Thanks to some chivvying from Louise, and no thanks to some faffing from Mick (perhaps a grossly unfair accusation, but we will come back to this later) we did prise ourselves from the sofas and off we strode to sample one of Louise's regular walking routes.

Past a pond we went, where I paused to snap a poor representation of the scene before us:


Some bits of the route I recognised from a past walk, and all of it was lovely.

I had to wander off track to snap this machine

With lunchtime upon us, we shunned a perch on a shady rock, in favour of plonking ourselves down on the opposite side of the track in the sunshine - a good ploy until the sun went behind a solitary tree, only to re-emerge as we stood to move on (whereupon I also came to discover that the sit mat that I found on the Welsh coast may look the part, but it actually possesses no waterproof properties whatsoever).

Our lunch stop may not have boasted a view (except of gorse bushes, three feet in front of us), but by clambering up onto the shady rock we had shunned, I could see over the relatively young trees, to a view of the Moray Firth:

Despite appearances, Louise wasn't clapping!

Apparently I didn't take any more pictures after that point, even though we still had four miles or so to go. They were very nice miles, but I was probably too busy chatting.

Coming down the final undulation of the route, a couple of showers could be seen nearby and, alas, the five minutes of pre-walk faffing (for which Mick graciously accepted the blame that we unreasonably heaped on him) became important as that's how far from the end we were when a sharp haily shower hit.

The stats for the outing were 9.1 miles walked with an amount of undulations which I've not yet calculated.

Left to my own devices, I would have been completely oblivious to it being Shrove Tuesday yesterday. Louise is rather more knowledgable/organised and thus occurred the very rare event of Mick and I having pancakes on the appropriate day*.

We had intended to leave Louise in peace this morning, but a quick cup of tea with her morphed into taking advantage of another stunning day with a turn around another of her regular walking routes (which was partially a skating route in the iciness of the morning).

I tried to get a better shot of the partially frozen pond. I'm not sure I succeeded:


Today's main feature was passing the Mediterreanean-esque buildings which were disused and threatening ruin last time Mick and I saw them, a few years ago. They've now been done up and were set off nicely by the sunshine:


Pre-walk faffing had been kept to a minimum today, but it wasn't important as there was no hint of a rain cloud from beginning to end.

I've a feeling we covered the 5.25 miles at a good pace, but I've not yet downloaded the track I recorded (for which reason I'm also rather vague as to where we actually went).

We left Louise in peace at lunchtime and now find ourselves sitting with a cracking view of a snow-dusted Ben Rinnes. There are clouds about. It would be nice if they cleared by morning.

^{(*thank you for the hospitality Louise and David, not to mention Aedan for the skillful pancake making!)}

Brown Muir (Marilyn, NJ258548, 339m)

It's been quite some months since I last went up a hill and almost the same length of time since I walked any distance. Brown Muir, tackled from Altonside, to the NE, proved to be a remarkably gentle reintroduction. We couldn't have asked for better conditions either, with clear skies, excellent air clarity, frosty ground and no wind.

Most people seem to tackle this hill from the end of the minor road to the NE, but being still new to the extra width of Bertie-the-Motorhome (he's 4" wider than Colin), I was reluctant to take us down such a minor road just yet. Happily, some journeying around on StreetView had revealed a good place to park, just yards off the nearby B-road (at NJ 29414 57381) and we were happy to walk the extra mile in each direction.

So, up a tarmac track, serving some waterworks (amongst other infrastructure, a covered reservoir liberally adorned with solar panels - a good use of space, I thought) we went, onto a rutted track, and onwards to pass the falling-into-ruin buildings at Moniesmouie. Our 1:50k map suggested the track would end there. Our 1.25k map said it would continue and so it did - a rough track all the way up to the mast which lies a few moments away from the trig:

Interesting trig point

The trig isn't the quite the highest point but a step over a fence and fifty metres further brought us to a selection of heathery tussocks, one of which is apparently higher than the rest. I tried them all out for size, just to be sure.


A retracing of steps saw us back down to Bertie two hours after we had left, having walked 6.5 miles with around 750' of ascent.

With it being so close to noon by then, we might have stayed in position whilst we lunched, except that Bertie was parked in the frosty shade (he was nice and warm inside mind; I've now added "turn heating off" onto the pre-flight checklist) and, as he has a solar panel, it seemed a shame to waste all those lovely rays beaming down. A sunny relocation was thus negotiated, although it has to be said that as practical as a supermarket car park is (particularly when you need some supplies), it wasn't the most picturesque option!

Conflicting Wants

I thought aloud, in my last post, that Wednesday would involve a walk as well as more driving northwards. It wasn't to be. My target hill remained unvisited, as the forecast of heavy snow for Thursday morning made us think it wise to get over the Drumochter Pass before the end of Wednesday, to maximise our chances of making our tea-drinking date in Newtonmore on Thursday morning.

A location just outside of Dalwhinnie became our new destination for the day and that's exactly where we first parked up for the night, whereupon I trundled off up the road for my second undulating run in as many days.

The snow shower that came through whilst we were parked there had us think again. We had every confidence the A9 would be clear for our hop and skip up to Newtonmore on Thursday morning, but there was the small matter of getting back onto the A9. Northwards we moved again, eventually settling a little beyond our objective, in Kingussie.

It was a good call, as the car park in which we parked also serves the doctors' surgery, and thus it receives more attention than your average village car park. The blanket of snow to which we awoke was soon broken first by the village's mini snow-plough, then five minutes later by a full-sized model.

By the time we had drunk tea and chatted at length with Ali and Sue (newtonmorehostel.co.uk), then made our way further north, there wasn't much day left yesterday, so we made do with a stroll around Grantown-on-Spey. No bad thing as it had come to my attention that the previous days' undulating running had left me with rather sore shins. Nothing alarming, in that if I take any length of break from the hills, my shins always get very sore when I next introduce them to the notion of an incline, but it did leave me with the quandary of the conflicting wants.

I had some hills planned in this area and wanted to go up at least one, maybe two, of them today. But, I also want to do Elgin ParkRun tomorrow morning, and even one hill today would have left my shins too sore to run. The question thus became which I wanted more.

The conclusion: the hills I can do next week; the ParkRun I can't. So, today we settled for a couple of shin-friendly walks that were about as flat as can be (along the Dava Way, ex-railway line, and along a beach). Both lovely even if very short.

On the Dava Way in murky visibility this morning

There will be hills soon!

Halifax, Arnside and Orton

Tuesday 21 February

After two whole months of sitting at home, very little time was wasted, once we had Bertie-the-Motorhome's registration documents in hand, in getting him packed for his first trip away*.

Yesterday we set out northwards.
It was an interesting/scary first leg of the journey, to see Ma-in-Law in Halifax, as I was at the wheel. I've only ever driven left hand drive vehicles twice before (1997 & 2013) and both times they were automatics, and I was driving on the appropriate side of the road for the steering wheel. Driving a large, manual, left hand drive motorhome in the UK, in strong winds, left me feeling like a learner again. I'm sure I'll soon get used to it - probably to the extent that when we get home I'll get in the car and be reaching to the right for the gear lever.

Today we journeyed to Cumbria and spent a very enjoyable (and very well fed!) few hours with Conrad (conradwalks.blogspot.com), before continuing a bit further north to Orton. I didn't think we'd been here before, until we arrived and saw the 'coast to coast' footpath sign.

From the morning’s sunny start, it became wet at sometime during the day and by the time we parked up here the rain was fair lashing in the wind. I rued not getting out of bed earlier this morning for a bit of a leg stretch, as at around 4pm I still had four fifths of my daily step-count target to go. Resigned to donning full Paramo, it was Mick who tapped away on his phone and pointed out that if we ran the simple circuit he had just plotted then we would be out in the weather for less time than if we walked. A good point, I thought, and ten minutes later out we went into the weather.

After far more undulations than we ever get near home, it was two dripping people who arrived back at Bertie, to test out the effectiveness of using his shower room for clothes drying.

I believe there's going to be a bit of a lull in the stormy weather tomorrow so the question is whether to spend it driving or whether to go for a bimble somewhere. Maybe we can manage both, after all, the daylight hours are getting noticeably longer.

^{(*Yes, we could have packed him at leisure in the time he was sitting on the drive waiting to be registered, but, in an uncharacteristic attack of superstition I didn't dare make any plans or do any packing for fear of so doing provoking DVLA to reject our application.)}