Month: October 2025

Can you relax by being busy?

We were talking to our son Rob this week, who is about to go on holiday. He has been working very hard recently and is pretty stressed. His question to us was how best to use the holiday time to relax. Mandy’s answer was to do as little as possible. Maybe sit by the pool and read a book. My answer was that you can relax by being busy. Go on adventures. See some historic places. Explore the island. I then realised that that is exactly how Mandy and I have been spending our time in the Outer Hebrides.

Mandy has been mostly sitting in the cottage doing cross-stitch sewing or completing jigsaws. I have been dashing around, either with our guests or by myself, seeing new places and discovering new things.

For instance I mentioned in a previous blog the road end sculptures which you can find in some of the most out of the way places in North Uist. This week I went to see “Sanctuary” which is several miles down a road to nowhere. The sculpture is a metal tree on top of a rock on a small hill surrounded by tiny lochs. From the sculpture I could see a small cairn at the end of a peninsular in one of the lochs. I decided to wander out for a closer look, and to my surprise, on top of the cairn was a tiny version of the same sculpture.

This tiny sculpture is not mentioned in any of the guide books, not signposted, and is not even very accessible, requiring a bit of a scramble across rocks at low tide. And it made my day.

But are these adventures what I should be doing? Mandy is often asking why I can’t just chill out and do nothing. After all, I have been retired for nearly five years now. Shouldn’t I be finding my pipe and slippers?

My answer is that this is my way of relaxing. There is nothing better for me than going to bed with new memories to take to my sleep.

Am I wrong?

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Are the Outer Hebrides the most beautiful islands in the world?

Week two of our long trip to the Western Isles, and the weather can best be described as mixed. We have had beautiful sunshine, torrential rain, strong winds and complete stillness. The only consistent thing has been the beauty we have seen.

We have had our son, Tin, and his girlfriend, Cheryl, with us this week. Last week we were joined by Mandy’s brother Stephen. Perhaps because we have had visitors we have made the effort to get out every day, and we have been well rewarded.

When the rain came in to replace sunshine we had the most stunning rainbows.

When we were stuck in the rain we discovered a roadside seafood shack, serving the best lobster, crab and prawn rolls.

When it has been dry but cloudy we have still found the beaches to be pristine white.

And when the sun has come out, our visitors have made the best of the invigorating cold waters.

We have met bears in the forest,

Peacocks by the cottage,

And wild Eriskay horses in the roads

We have seen sunrises, sunsets,

And wonderful night skies.

And we are just two weeks into our six week break.

I do think the Outer Hebrides are perhaps the most beautiful islands in the world.

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Is this art or just a pile of mud?

We are away for a few weeks in the Outer Hebrides. More on that in future blogs no doubt. One of the things we have done this week was to go to the visitor centre in Lochmaddy, North Uist. It’s a nice place to go, with a small shop, a café that does excellent soup, toasties and scones, and a museum that is currently exhibiting everything you could want to know about the Scottish ferry company Calmac. It also has a small art gallery and that is what confused me this week.

Most of the floor of the gallery was covered in peat, with some sheep’s wool in frames around the walls. I like to think I am open to modern art installations, particularly the physical ones. I love The Tate gallery, and the Pompidou in Paris. I have climbed inside enormous human forms by Anthony Gormley, and tried to understand the blue pictures of Yves Klein.

But is this art or just a pile of mud? I love peaty whiskies so maybe I should have just rolled around in it to try to get closer to the artist’s meaning. Or perhaps I should have just filled my pockets and taken it back to the holiday cottage to put on the fire.

As we have driven around the islands this week, we have come across many areas of moorland peat that have been cut away for islander use. Piles of peat cuttings are drying in the autumn wind. For me, I have got more from looking at them, situated amongst incredible views and rugged countryside, than I have from this example, sitting in a sterile gallery.

Just to show I am not a complete philistine, here is a Hebridean art installation I do like. It is called “Reflections” by Colin Mackenzie, and has been created to sit amongst natural rocks overlooking the island of Baleshare. It is both dramatic and quirky.

But that pile of mud? Hmmmm.

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Have I been retired too long to fix a PC?

My degree was in Computing Science and I worked in IT for 30 years, doing everything from coding to testing to project management; ending up managing hundreds of people supporting IT for major banks. While these last jobs were most;y about bureaucracy and a little leadership, I always retained an interest in technology. But this week, when my brother in law, Steve, asked me to fix his laptop I completely failed.

There are three reasons I can give why I failed.

Firstly, the way computers are built is different than I remember. Back in the 1990s I would maintain my own PC, installing a new hard drive (very hard), updating the firmware (very scary), updating operating system configuration files (very risky). These days everything has been made easier and safer but it is different than I know.

Secondly, I am older and less patient. Back in the day, when things went wrong I would see it as a fascinating challenge. This week I resented spending my time making things worse instead of better. I also hated how slow my progress was. That would have been normal thirty years ago but I have got used to fast processors with plenty of memory and fast internet.

Thirdly, Steve’s laptop was a pile of poo. It was running impossibly slowly. So I cleaned up the hard drive which did not help. I emptied the list of startup programs which did not help. I tried to update Windows which took hours, got hung, and did not help. I tried to reset the Windows installation, which lasted overnight, eventually failed and did not help. I even tried creating a clean Windows installation on a USB stick from my own PC, booting the laptop from that and building a “bare metal” installation. This appeared to succeed but ultimately built a laptop that was just as slow and unusable.

So here’s where my 30 years IT experience came in useful. Sometimes at work you had to know when it was time to stop banging your head against the wall, and throw the problem away. So I encouraged Steve to buy a new budget laptop. Two hours later I had got it set up, updated Windows, the BIOS and all the apps, installed Zoom, Teams, Antivirus and some Office software and it was ready to go.

I even found out things such as how to disable the new S Mode which stops you installing non-Microsoft apps. I may be getting out of date since I retired, and I may be a grumpy old man, but it is good to know that I still enjoy learning.

What I still don’t know is what was wrong with Steve’s old laptop? Any ideas?

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Am I too old to pretend I am a steam train?

I went on a lovely linear walk this week – part of the Lancashire coastal path from Glasson Dock to Lancaster. It was a beautiful autumn day – cold and crisp with watery sunshine.

I used to do a lot of linear walks. Mandy drops me off, meets me half way and then picks me up. In my time I have done the Pennine Way, Coast to Coast, Cotswold Way, Ridgeway, Cleveland Way, Hadrians Wall, most of the Southern Upland Way and many others. There is something that is very good for my head, walking with the dogs with my airpods plugged in, listening to podcasts or music, and watching the world.

Unfortunately both the eleven year old dogs and I have slowed down as we have got older, and Ziggy in particular has cancer and is not able to walk very far. She still suffers from fomo and mostly refuses to let me go without her, so this time Mandy picked her up early. Lulu and I then completed the walk at a slightly faster pace

There is talk with my sister in law of us attempting the North West Way over the next year. That is a serious 205 mile walk, incorporating some of the most dramatic parts of the Ribble Way, Pennine Way, South Tyne Trail and Hadrians Wall. I will have to get fitter if we are to attempt it. One of the problems is that when we are on the Narrowboat most of my walks are flat. Canals only go up and down hills when there are locks.

Even the coastal walk this week was flat. It followed a disused railway line that once carried goods from Lancaster Port (Glasson Dock) to Lancaster. I like disused railway walks because I can pretend I am a steam train and imagine how once it would have been to travel this route surrounded by smoke and soot, through this lovely countryside. It is probably a good thing there was just me and the dogs on this walk – no one to get embarrassed when I said “choo choo” as I was walking.

Maybe I need to put the trains to one side and get back to walking with others in the hills. It would be good for my heart, my head and maybe my social skills.

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