If scenery, in itself can take your breath away, The Highlands of Scotland will leave you gasping. Britain really is astonishing in its diversity of natural beauty. From Cornwall, through Devon, the changes are striking. The Chilterns, the Mendips, the Peaks and the Pennines; reaching there via Shakespeare’s own country, then the Lake District, flashing its self-confidence at you, well-earned through its proud survival through ice age after ice age. And then The Highlands, defiant and magnificent, sturdy and muscular, the product of a settlement of nature five million years ago. We gasped at times, it was sometimes that spectacular. Off the road, down the un-adopted lanes to lochs we could only locate on the large-scale atlas with ultra-close inspection. And The Great Glen, from Inverness to Fort Augustus, all covered in a rented 4 x 4. See Dulsie Bridge on Youtube. Check it out. See the lads leaping 60’ into shallow water, last summer. We were there in January, of course, so we have shots of its water, high up the Findhorn, covered in ice and rushing fast and furious, taken from the bridge. Just another of many secrets we came upon, sneaking around the hideaways of The Highlands.

Started in Glasgow, to visit Dorothy’s family. Been a long time, and it mattered.

Reason for originally deciding on making it a proper trip was to meet with Billy Sloan, Radio Clyde and Daily Record, to talk over this year’s plans. The following Sunday, he plays a Quality Of Mercy track and tells his audience he dreads my calls with racing tips. Says they always lose, but he is wrong. Why spoil a good story for a few facts, as they used to say at The Sun, and Billy well knows it! To Edinburgh (top and tail it all with business) eventually. Drew McAdam comes over and discusses things for his Diary column. Plays Mentalist tricks and astounds us and the wine waiter at The Balmoral. Drew is a sensational magician, but doesn’t get flash like some of his showbizzier contemporaries. That’s why he is such a mate. He’s not “on” all the time. Good writer, too. Proper company, he and Liz. Like the Scots all over, really. Proper people. And the snow buntings on top of Cairn Gorm. Proper survivors. What they eat is a mystery. But they flock and play happily in the icy wastes. Back home it’s goldfinches by the dozen, a cacophony in one of the high hazels as dusk nears. And blackbirds in numbers too bountiful for counting. Family upon family of Chaffinches; the Starlings, two or three at a time, are back, and nesting in the eves. Jay, so big and colourful; the Wren, dull brown and tiny but always entertaining: the little loner, the shy troglodytes troglodytes; the Green woodpecker occasionally; song Thrush snatches, tugs at long worms spotted between the cobbles under the ancient Yew; dense snow last week, thinner this, so far; the woods shimmer and sparkle in the half-light of dimming sun around four; bloody pheasants, almost all female, cause a nuisance, pecking at bird seed and mussing the garden lawn; they come stealthily from the woods, and I wish they’d stay there, with their fellow pest the grey squirrel. I wouldn’t willingly hurt any of God’s creatures, but the squirrel appears (and now that dreadful prig Mark Ellen comes, as ever, to mind when, at times like this, I question my belief in the decency and meaning of animal/human nature) to have no discernable redeeming features. He rips so-called squirrel-proof peanut holders apart and purloins the nuts. All the nuts. Like child-proof pill containers, squirrel-proof nut-containers do not really exist. Classy music writers do exist, many of them. But Ellen is a disgrace to his profession for using his privileged place to vent opprobrium, rampant and vindictive malice, against a musician who will not be allowed to defend himself (shame on The Times). The anniversary of his hurtful (yes, I can get hurt still, but only when the assailant is toying dangerously with the truth), vituperative sleight comes some time now. Let’s hope that by next year I will have forgotten. Writing songs again, slowly, piecemeal, six or seven at a time. To the North-west this week for a photo session. Hoping for inspiration via the lens and the results, so the songs will get finished. Maybe the Muse will come for me as we shoot. I will drift as usual as the lens focuses on only an outer shell, the inner soul in another place the camera has seldom captured. Off-camera I hope to see what really inspires me, in the real eye’s lens. Something to take my breath away. Something the camera will not capture. Something to make me gasp.

SH