Stu and his pal Bobby were looking a bit pasty having been through marathon Messenger chats, so it was time to be good parents and drag them somewhere dangerous. It was too wet for the lead mine so on recommendation from the swimming pool steam room we chose the Grey Mare’s Tail waterfall near Moffat, named after the Rabbie Burns Tam O’Shanter poem and every website about it mentioned danger and fatality – the perfect Sunday jaunt.
It took ages to get there a combination of distance and a plague of wee scooters who were around jamming the Border roads at 25mph.

The waterfall is a lengthy 200 feet drop, from its hanging valley in the glacier riven selkirk to moffat valley. We were fortified by lunch and beer (hey it was a dangerous path we needed courage) at Tibbie Shiels Inn, where on photographing the picturesque St Mary’s Loch I found the rocking jetty I was on was not as attached as it could be to the land. Lunch was enlivened by the family at the next table who were playing with Mummy’s handcuffs and managed to get the younger son locked with hands behind his back in pain, and the waitress who on bringing the plates asked ‘God?’ – I said yes but it turned out to be ‘Cod’ she was asking for, funnily enough I was having that anyway – a fishy tale if ever I heard one, and I won’t dwell on my Spotted Dick.

We took the waterfall path that was supposed to give the best view but it was stopped by a large danger sign and dire warnings (Abandon Hope All Ye who leap this barrier) so we took what I assumed was the tourist path which seemed to be full of people from Motherwell and asylum seeking children who were plainly rethinking their relocation as they were being dragged up the very steep path by exasperated adults who seemed to know quite how far it was still to go. Bobby and Stu demonstrated their fitness level by slumping down every 100 yards and I slumped down with them just so they didn’t feel left out…

The waterfall is best seen from the bottom – so climbing up is completely pointless as the view does not improve – but you do get to see the loch at the top (after trudging a couple of kilometres along a well maintained and springy but rocky path). The surprise comes that you turn a corner and the loch is just there – it is such an anticlimax after the huge waterfall drop – the loch stumbles into the stream with undue care and attention. Still on the way back you have gravity on your side and the stream turns into a torrent and then free falls down the 200 foot cliff.

We rewarded ourselves with pasties and espresso in Moffat and a jar of Moffat Toffee (which is misdescribed as it is really a sour filled boiled sweet) to keep us going to Dumfries where we found the Twelve Apostles stone circle at Holywood. The stones were protected by a herd of beligerent cattle who played “What’s The Time Mister Wolf?” with us – gathering together menacingly and then stopping dead when we turned.

The aviation museum was closed otherwise we could have seen the remains of the Spitfire found in the loch that I read about whilst waiting in the Doctors surgery earlier this week for my combination of lower colon blockage prodding and prostate check – just curl up into the foetal position with your trousers down – this might be uncomfortable – is understatment an essential part of the Hippocratic Oath?

Eskdalemuir has an interpretation board about their stones – the Loupin Stanes and Girdle Stanes. The Loupin ones were protected by a bog between the EU funded stile and the large stone entrance to the circle, but overlooked by splendid carved green hills. However the Girdle Stanes are quite magical with spooky Hawthorn trees festooned with ribbon offerings – I grabbed a twisted hawthorn branch for my wand with with a Bibbity-Bobbity-Boo wandered around the faerie grotto. Part of the stone circle is now in the middle of the river but this circle did have a magical feel and the twisted trees lent an edge of mystery and magic to the space.

Eskdalemuir is also home to a Tibetan Monastery which looks a bit like BuddhaLand – with statues and stupa and a 2 star tourist rating (they need to have trouser presses and kettles in the rooms to get higher). It is also home to road signs warning of Weak Verges, Red Squirrel crossings and Beware of Peacocks.

We travelled back thorugh Bobby’s old homeland around Bowhill and down the ettrick valley to the bridge where I once hung siphoning petrol from a land rover into a leaky juice bottle to fill my empty MG. We all dined late in the Buccleuch Arms where I was presented with the worst and certainly most solid Yorkshire pudding ever – but since we had been on a standing stone odyssey it was fitting.

With Ali packed off to the Alps we had to fill the vacuum left behind with the lack of continuous stream of chat and bustle. The initial plan was to uncover the Lost City of the Shearers at Hownam, this was thwarted by a lengthy trail to the Heatherhope Dam, which used to supply Kelso with its water from the reservoir behind it. Feral goats kept a watchful eye on Kim, Mike, Stu and Cara as we plodded along the interminably long private road, having abandoned the AllRoad at the sign.

On innocently asking the depth of the reservoir I was given a convincing ‘20 feet deep’ and a scientific explanation of using the hills and the refractive index of the water to work out the depth, when the sceptical gene kicked in (alerted by smirking) and I looked around and spied the depth marker on the dam side.

We were going to be late for lunch so a trawl back past the golf cart filled with dead furry animals in the back, past the barking dogs and the squaking peacocks in cages and raced along the road to Jedburgh (leaving the Lost City still not found). Jedburgh was in the middle of an unfortunate combination of music festival and hurricane. We watched the musicians sheltering in their tent playing gamely on and disappeared into Simply Scottish for lunch (acceptable fare tempered by bad service) and on our return the tent had gone but the musicians were still playing – the audience had visibly aged though as the music segued from rock pop to folk.

So now fortified by duck it was time to visit the Unconformity – Huttons first glimpse into modern geology and very hidden in Jedburgh at Inchbonny. Not as impressive as Siccar Point, which he discovered a year later, but an acceptable attractive walk along the river and proximate to the icecream shop – where with faux american accent my enquiries about the ‘Lock Ness Monster’ (hey it was a large glass of red wine at lunch) was met with a bit too much seriousness from gullible Yorkshire tourists.

My meeting was at ten so with it being a sunny day I tramped around the streets to their offices, avoiding drunks and the revenge seeking mafia gangs (particularly those that looked like they had broken noses),
where I promptly tripped over the entrance step to arrive sprawled on the reception floor. So far so good.

I met with a nice Lithuanian chap with an unpronouncable name who I shall refer to as Leon (the pig ear farmer) and during coffee had a demo of their attempt to control the entire internet industry in Lithuania through the subtle method of online chess.

Business over it was time to relax by packing bags, checking out and wandering the streets in search of a bag to put a very large wooden car transporter in. Jackie, for the aforementioned transporter was indeed hers, saw a perfect bag and picked it up and with professional haggling stance was trying to establish a starting point when through impressive miming it was established that he bag was actually the shopkeepers personal one.

We stopped for pizza with dried enchilada chillis where Siegfreid went to the loo and was accosted by an obese old lady and her partisan husband who were knocking on his door and turning the lights on and off in an attempt to oust him from his toilet. We set off for the airport under construction and left for Prague for a connection to Edinburgh, since there were hours before the connecting flight we decided to wander around Prague and kindly dumped our handbaggage on the members of the part who were too weakened by the week to join us.

As we were journeying into Prague crushed in our taxi minibus a voice innocently asked “will we need boarding cards to get back in?”. Yes, someone had left theirs in their luggage – but not a lot we could do now so we decided to ignore her concerns and focused on that beer in the Prague square.

We were dropped off at the castle and spent a marvellous walk all the way down to the Astronomical Clock in time for its six o’oclock show and retired for a beer and being scots a plate of chips each – class always shows.

Wavell Magor (MBE) tried to negotiate with some scary looking mafia taxi drivers but we headed down from the square and got into a minibus with a postcard of naked women in the front. On the way we saw a rainbow cloud and a solar powered car park.

Of course getting back in wasn’t as easy as we had thought – especially when Jackie chose the stern looking eastern german shot putter as the passport woman – when refused she joined us, who in an unexpected and generous display of solidarity refused to go through passport too – so she let her through and we followed on in triumph to join the milling crowds of stag weekenders arriving.

Whilst waiting for the plane which was delayed we were sitting in the glass area of hte terminal building – watched the plane come in and then watched as an engineer walked out onto the wing followed shortly after byt he pilot. The engineer then started washing the rear of the wing and was down on his hands and knees (hopefully not just praying). The pilot came out again to spot a worried set of passengers watching through the window and disappeared inside and the flight was announced ready.

I got back home late laden with honey liquer and lithuanian chocolate and a ten Lita Lithuanian note with a picture of the “Lituanica” monoplane which crashed on its transatlantic flight with the two pilots looking as bent as a 10 Lita note, which the British Embassy girl told us was popular in Vilnius gay bars.

I had a business meeting that day and figured that it was unlikely I would find them never mind deliver any form of coherent conversation so emailed to move it into the next day.

Of course I couldn’t actually see much but fortunately had prescription sunglasses and managed to wander out and find an optitian – strangely enough not far where my original pair were nicked! I then had to go through some miming to explain to the optitians who could not speak English why a guy on a cloudy and rainy day was wandering into their store in sunglasses with a swollen nose. They used the sunglasses to take the prescription and wrote down a time for them to be ready which seemed to be after they had closed (I foxed them by turning up early and getting them). Whilst waiting I took the chance to wander around and find the Frank Zappa statue before retiring to the hotel for a rest.

Dinner that evening was going to be special – the ambassador and the British Embassy girls were going to join us. We walked to the restaurant and found a lengthy queue outside which we naturally avoided and went to the head gesticulating and shouting “Ambassadore, we are dining with your ambassador” followed by “with this meal he is spoiling us” by less reverential members of the team. It was noticed that several people in the queue left in disgust with us seemingly avoiding queuing (whereas in reality we were not dining in their smelly part – but had our own private cellar – lined with wolf and bear skins – which you reach past the large tree growing through the building and past a pool of what looked like sharks but we were reliably informed that they were dogfish.

I wasn’t feeling best well and Fiona beside me had still not eaten anything at all and had steeled herself to attend the dinner, when we were presented with a dish of chicken stomachs it took a great deal of will power not to be unwell over the table – however Siegfreid had ordered the pigs ear and we were glad we were at the other end of hte table. Siegfreid’s dish came on a huge platter and consisted of various dishes including the large blob of pigs ear which he was tearing into with gusto and which took several hours of continuous eating to finish.

Lithuania has a pagan ancestry and the poppy-seed cake was excellent. I decided it might be a trifle unwise to risk a night out on the town so we settled into pagan honey liquers back at the hotel and went to bed reasonably early to be fresh for my meeting the next day.

With only an innovation round table meeting scheduled for today it was time to run around Vilnius at high speed being a tourist. This started around 7:30am walking around the churches, the cathedral and circum-navigating through the labyrinth of streets around the University. A highlight was the Gate Of Dawn which has an icon of which there is a copy in the Basilica of St Peter in Rome, yes a copy this is the original. It is so revered that people cross themselves and pray within streets of it and approaching it – to actually get to it you have to go on your knees filing up in a line up a worn staircase into a room with the icon and rows of nuns and tearful old ladies on their knees who believe it to have miracle-working power.

I walked to the British Embassy and managed to recruit a dog who walked with me along the river, before I disappeared into the treasure that is the Church of St Peter and St Paul – the baroque interior is breathtakingly beautiful and light catches the crosses and golden stars and moon held by white cherubs. With a chandelier in the shape of a ship and white statues with no eyes I was hard pressed to leave that place.

After the riveting innovation meeting, at one point I had fallen asleep but my snoring had alerted our team leader who promptly kicked me in the shin, so I was ready to walk back over the Gediminas hill to the tower and see the delightful view over the city. I took the cable car back down to the archaeological museum with splendid neolithic exhibits and walked up the main shopping street near the cathedral to the KGB building.

The KGB museum of the Genocide of the Lithuanian People – is a grim reminder of what the Soviet Union did to the partisans they caught. A tour with walkman narrated by a former inmate takes you through cells where prisoners were locked in darkened rooms, forced to stand on a metal disc with the floor filled with water (which froze) and the comfy cell which is padded to deaden the sound of severe beatings. There is also a chilling death cell where many bodies were excavated. This was somewhat enlivened by being mixed in with a group of schoolgirls who kept opening cells to find me in them in a sort of worrying game of hide and seek in a KGB torture cell.

Leaving the museum the day was dark and wearing only a shirt and trousers from the earlier meeting I ended up running thorugh streets filled with wet people for forty minutes before reaching the hotel entirely bedraggled and worried about my core body temperature – solved by a warm shower and a glass of honey liquer (made to a 6th century recipe).

We all went out to a splendid restaurant where our German colleague decided to don a metal helmet with spikes coming out of it and swinging a large sword around the room – he was christened Siegfreid immediately. Fortunately he only drinks Fanta (a Nazi created drink as Coca Cola was not shipped to Germany during the war) and he wasn’t wading through the cellar contents at the same rate we were. Fortunately the frilly dresses were better secured to the wall otherwise the evening was destined for a cross dressing experience which would certainly be caught on peoples cameras.

The gents toilet had a strange man in the middle of the room chanting.

We retired to the relaxing hotel bar for more honey liquer and wine before everyone retiured and I went wandering around the empty streets again – happening upon a student night club where I seem to recall pole dancing at one point. On leaving the club I was wandering back to the hotel with no taxis in sight and was approached by two men who looked somewhat like the russian mafia people one is always keen to avoid. It was fairly obvious that their intent was to rob or kill me so I took flight as best I could. The problem was manifold – one I was not entirely sober, two they were larger and probably fitter than me, three I was running down the main street in Vilnius with absolutely no one around to help and four between me and the hotel was a great deal of park on one side and narrow and dark streets on the other.

Fortunately there were a row of taxis one of which I dived into the back of, the driver was asleep but pretty much woke up when the two mafioso decided to follow me in and a pitched fistfight followed. I managed to kick one in the nose possibly breaking it and was punching the other when he punched me in the nose and grabbed my glasses – the taxi sped off and we reached the hotel whereupon we got the police. The police were more concerned about the reports they would have to do and the minimal chance of recovering my spectacles and left me bleeding into a hotel towel.

I went through my things and couldn’t find one card which may have been in an outside pocket so took the chance to cancel it just in case (I found it the next day stuffed in my arabic copy of the Koran for safe keeping but cut it up as it was now useless – for the elimination of doubt and prevention of riots it was the card I cut up and not the Koran). And of course called home waking Kim up at 3am UK time – really more because the credit card people said that it would effect a whole set of cards and because I felt it shouldn’t just be me suffering at that time of the morning.

Late to bed, early to rise – makes a man very tired – 3:30am and leaving around four to drive to Edinburgh for a very early flight to Prague and hence to Vilnius, in southern Lithuania. Turning on Radio 4 in the car there is a voice saying “…and now from Vilnius” – and a short piece about the problems of Lithuania having joined the EU now finding that there was an economic migration of sex workers to the UK. For a population that had already been severely culled by various invading nations they don’t want to lose anyone – never mind their sex workers.

We arrived, rather than landed, at Prague and shortly after it was back on an uneventful flight to Vilnius – apart from one of our expeditionary force feeling queazy (which turned into full scale vomiting and an inability to eat anything during the entire trip).

Booked into the splendid Shakespeare hotel – I was in the Hemingway Suite which was filled with animal skulls, pictures of Hemingway, books and a rifle hanging from the horns of a dead something. There was even a minibar – which was the least you could expect in the Hemingway suite.

Just time to change into the kilt and then it was off to the British Embassy for a presentation where I managed to insult the ambassador (Colin) by pointing out the correlation between his arrival in Lithuania and a population exodus. Following this was a reception which had the bad combination of a very attractive waitress serving free wine who you really just couldn’t say ‘no’ to. We met more Scots there (although I was the only kilted one) so it was looking like a Scottish invasion.

A bulging set of taxis ferried us to a restaurant where we ate and drank the night away (actually after the cabbage soup it was more farting the night away) before I retired to the Water World strip club – which was somewhat disappointing in not being as Wet and Wild as advertised with the noticeable absence of the swimming pool. Wandering back through deserted streets it was amazing to think that this was a capital city – no one around at all – it was a ghost town and no-one around to hassle you whilst wandering amidst the wonderful architecture and starry night (the next evening I would find out the downside of this).

When your next door neighbour offers to fertilise your field it is difficult to refuse. Being ever helpful I was out to separate the herdable and inquisitive Highland cow from the tractor leaving the sheep to fend for themselves.

David, the tractor fellow, looked at my position in relation to the tractor and with an experienced eye said ‘You might want to stand back a bit as it comes out at quite a rate’. I hadn’t realised his talent for understatement as I took a couple of paces back.

He started firing fertiliser pellets and the yelp of the highland cow in the ‘next field’ warned me that perhaps ‘back a bit’ might extend to sheltering behind something, preferably very far away – this proved difficult in an open field and I was hit in the chest a few milliseconds later with several hundred pellets of hard fertiliser. Quite how the sheep managed to avoid all of this is a mystery that they seem to be keeping to themselves.

On the bright side at least it wasn’t slurry.

Another day listening to nothing but the Casshern Soundtrack and looking wistfully at pictures of Shiina Ringo whilst listening to ‘Stem Daimyou Asobi Hen’ over and over again.

Being the time of the year for Earthshine Stuart, Kim and I trooped outside on a crystal clear evening to see the crescent moon – this turned into a crimson red crescent over the course of the evening whilst in the darkness we listened to the sheep chewing and Flora picking the lock of the wooden enclosure with her horns.

Earthshine was written about by Leonardo Da Vinci

In the morning we had found one of our original ghost carp dead at the bottom of the pond – no trauma or obvious signs of disease – although the carp slime looked particularly green and slimy.

Fuelled with double espresso at the Sunday market from the man from Holy Island – it was the day to take granny around standing stone sites – the five of us kim, stu, ali, mad and me (with cara in tow) clambered around goatscrag, rambled around roughting linn waterfall (and climbed to the top of it) and the cup and ring stones there – lunched at lowick and then the five stones at duddo – we reached duddo with 55555 on the mileometer of the car, the five of us walked to the stones and returned and the time was 15:55. Time to buy a lottery ticket with fives in it…

we got back to find that another lamb was born (4 now) with bats swooping around my bat detector (I think it attacts them). Ali was musing about milking horses which turns out not to be so daft after all and asked how oysters reproduce which had us stumped until we found this page and being inspired headed off to the Mussel Inn in Glasgow the next day to down scallops and mussels and return via the Huly Hill stone circle beside the Newbridge Roundabout.

A cold (or more probably flu) was matched with Lemsip and Espresso then challenged with an Irish stew made with Guinness followed with Irish Coffee with Jamiesons all made by an Irishman, beaten to submission by the Legendary Alnwick Rum and hot milk – and was buried under a miniature chicken and chilean red.

Holiday Monday so we tried to go out for lunch – the Teviot Water Gardens were the first choice, and turned out to be everyone elses first choice so there was a 45 minute window before we could even get seated. So we foolishly abandoned that and headed into Kelso to the Waggon Inn.

They have a bizarre idea there of not taking your order until it is your turn – they deal with each table in turn and then surprise the chef with what everyone is having one at a time. At least the food was varied and tasty (black pudding tempura and chicken stuffed with haggis) although Ali’s baguette turned out to be an inedible cabiatta.

May Day – Rabbits Rabbits (or White Rabbits depending on your position), started with a swim and an espresso at the market – buzzing we then romped over a field to visit the James Thompson obelisk – Thompson wrote the words for Rule Brittania and ‘The Seasons’ poem (the first English language poem based on Nature, which figures as the centre of a celebrated copyright legal case that made the House of Lords and set in place perpetual copyright rules; Haydn wrote The Seasons after the poem)

Cycle down (or rather up) the College Valley – slow and steady with a strong wind against us – and constant change of bikes between Brompton folding bike, Orange Titanium T2 and a Raleigh mountain bike between various children an enthusiastic mother and a puffing father. We reached the monument for the crashed planes around the Cheviots in World War II (quo fas et gloria ducunt: Where duty and glory lead) – I assume the latin inscription ending with DU-CUNT were the last words, normally it is the germanic OH-SHIT.

We ended up with a superb downward cycle at great speed on the Brompton when I hit the hairpin (there is a theme here) and skidded round (just) and ended up with a burst tyre – commuters aren’t supposed to do that speed I guess. So a humiliating walk back to the car past the gauntlet of jolly self-satisfied walkers coming off the hill we walked last week. Fixing a back wheel puncture on a Brompton is not easy

No Photos as it looked like a total downpour so the camera was left at home, but here is a link to a map of what can be done on a College Valley cycle ride – on a less windy day.