I am reading Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. People seem to love this book because it takes something as historically dense as the building of a cathedral and weaves it around the story of a cast of humans. For my money he could leave out the fictionalized human stories and just write about the politics and the technicalities of the actual building. It was nice to wander around cathedrals and know some details about their construction, especially the ruined ones. But really, I don’t need fictional human characters to make me find this fascinating.

It’s oppressively hot and humid here, so I keep browsing through my photos of Scotland and imagining cool damp breezes. Actually, the day I took these it was more like gale force winds. At times I felt like Marcel Marceau doing the old wind walk routine, except my hair was standing on end like a wild woman. I can almost hear the wind singing in the wires of the bridge.

Don’t know why, but for some reason since getting home we have all been getting up insanely early. Even my child who normally needs to have an enraged wombat thrown under his covers to wake up has bounced out of bed before 6:30. This morning I was up a 5:14. This is good because while we were gone our pool went green, and not green like “Oh, dear, double up on the chemicals and crank up the filter.”, green like we created a new eco-system, green like the pastures of Scotland. Perhaps it was envy. The early rising allowed us to get outside and scrub the pool in the balmy morning air.

Because I must share, here is our new favorite hotel. Our sitting room was the tower part, on the first floor. We could hardly bear to leave. This was taken after 10:00 p.m. It didn’t get truly dark at all, and the sun was back up at 4:00. Must be brutal if you have small children. How do you convince someone it’s bedtime when it’s broad daylight?

And for Rebecca…more wool on the hoof.

“… it passes through the bowels of awfulness and out the spangly sphincter of camp.” Mark Kermode, reviewing Mama Mia on The Culture Show.

God I love the BBC. That sentence alone was worth the airfare.

Hello from Scotland. It’s been a lovely cool rainy couple of weeks. All the locals have told us it’s a shame that the weather seems to be determined to skip summer this year, but we haven’t minded in the least. And we made some friends.