Crash Survivor

Here's a conundrum. You find that after a computer crash, all the program drivers for your devices - graphics cards, sound cards, modem, CD-ROM - are corrupted or missing. All the drivers are available on the disks you've carefully stored away, or can be downloaded from the Internet. But you can't run the disks because the CD-ROM won't work because the driver is corrupted or missing. And you can't download the drivers because the modem won't work because the driver for the modem is corrupted or missing so you can't connect to the Internet ...

What do you do in a situation like that? Well, what you do if you're me - which you're not, but for the purposes of this exercise, you can pretend - is you sit and fume for a while, you try everything you can think of, to no avail, and then you send for a Computer Man and pay him money to put it right.

It's always interesting to look through the list on the Sitemeter to see what referrals to Boogie Street there have been. Given the recent lay-off due to computer problems, there was a nice long list to browse through, so trends were more noticeable than might otherwise be the case.

For a blog more or less devoted to painting, it's quite a chastening experience to find that a sizeable proportion of my visitors came wandering down Boogie Street in search of, first of all, the meaning of the words "Boogie Street," then the standing stones on Machrie Moor, Chip Chadbourn, a drawing of a banana palm (at least it's my drawing) but more importantly than anything else, whatever happened to Jimmy Nail.

At the Art Club on Thursday, I found myself between pictures, so I pulled out one of my neglected earlier pictures. It's a double set of balconies in Crete which was fighting me a while ago. I think I may be making headway with it now.

Balconies (Work in progress)

Isle of Arran

I liked Arran a lot. It reminded me of the Lake District and I suppose, geologically speaking, it might be part of the same mass.

Patsy123 and I had gone there to celebrate some friends' Ruby Wedding anniversary. For the first couple of nights we were in the house the friends had rented in Blackwaterfoot. Then, as more celebrants arrived, we moved into the Kinloch Hotel for a further few nights. Not a bad hotel, although every now and then we could hear a strange rumble like someone rolling a barrel down the corridor. Something to do with the heating system of the swimming pool, I believe.

They certainly served a fine full Scottish breakfast, with a choice of bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, lorne sausage, black pudding, fried tomato, hash browns, tattie scones, baked beans and mushrooms. Far too much unhealthy food, really, but when you're paying for it as a B&B guest ... what the hell, I indulged.

I liked the barman in the lounge, too. He offered what Patsy123 called three measures - single, double and whoops, my hand slipped. My glass of whoops, my hand slipped Laphroaig went down well.

Iron age forts and standing stones litter the island, and in the evening of our first day there, we walked to the standing stones on Machrie moor. Even in the company of other people, there's something a little unsettling about these stones, still standing after 3700 years, witnesses to who knows what on this desolate open ground.

The weather was, as is usual on my trips to SW Scotland, not all it might be, but we got off to a good start. Our first full day there saw me sitting for a while, looking out at a sky and sea of the kind of blues I've only ever seen in the Mediterranean. Wagtails played on the washing line and sparrows seesawed up and down on the pampas grass. A little idyll.

We'd spent that day driving round the island. At Whiting Bay we stopped and walked up to Glenashdale Falls. Pretty good waterfall. While the others went back the way they'd come (why do some people think that flip-flops are the ideal form of walking gear?), Patsy123 and I walked on a little higher, then dropped down on a much better track. The way was lined with the kind of hedgerow I'd thought had disappeared forever - wild fuchsia, roses, crocosmia, rowan, old man's beard, honeysuckle, vetch and yellow ragwort, were only some of the plants I could dredge up from the memory of my long-ago A-level Botany course.
By Sunday, the sun being enjoyed by the rest of Britain was lost to Arran. We sat under a long skein of raincloud and it just poured all day. My sunburn of a only a couple of days previously was becoming a fast-fading memory. There's really only one thing to do on Arran in the pouring rain - go to Brodick Castle.

The Castle is owned by the National Trust for Scotland, and as it's apparently much cheaper to take out membership of that august body and use it to enter National Trust properties in England, we joined.

It was Victorian Day at the Castle. Every room was staffed by someone dressed in Victorian garb, ready to fill you in on the merits and peculiarities of that room. Very interesting, if soon forgotten. There were a lot of rather indifferent paintings on the walls, and some decidedly peculiar ones of fighting cocks which looked like people standing upright in cock costumes. I did find a couple of pictures by Watteau - not great, but interesting - and was very disappointed to find the only Turner in the collection was being restored.

The display of children's paintings in the cafe , some of them reworking Picasso's Weeping Woman , others on a theme of portraits with one eye covered (who knows?) was, however, a good accompaniment to the delicious vegetable soup.

All in all, a good trip, and I still had the midge bites on my scalp to remind me of it several days after I got back.

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again..."

There's a lot of archaeology in Cornwall. In a day driving round only a small part of the peninsula, we looked at ancient standing stones, a standing stone put up around 500AD to commemorate a fallen warrior, and the ruins of the tin mining industry.

All very much to my taste.

While it might have been more comfortable to have done all of this in sunshine, much of our sightseeing was done in a gently blowing mist. But this certainly gave the distinctly Romantic remains of a tin mine, with its nearby chimney , a charming ghostly quality as it loomed over us out of the mist.

Later, parking by the road, we walked up a country track then out onto the moor to find Men-an-Tol. This is the relic which looks like 101 - three standing stones in a line, the two end ones straight upright, the middle one round, with a round hole in it.

The very worthy and interested Victorians messed around with these stones, as they did with many others, so it's unclear whether there was any astronomical alignment. It did cross my mind that it might be digital machine code, but the vision of Erich Von Daniken leered at me and I dropped the idea.

Legend has it that a sick person passed entirely through the hole will be cured. Both Buddy K and I stuck our feet through but I'm here to tell you that it didn't work. This is not a cure for planta fasciitis. But then we didn't actually pass bodily through the hole, so who knows...

Further up the track and in another field, is Men Scryfa. It's an eerie feeling standing in the middle of a field in a dense fog, with nothing but each other and a tall inscribed stone for company.

The stone is said to be the height of the fallen warrior whose death it commemorates, but considering some of it is below ground such that the inscription is partly hidden, he must have been quite a giant. Buddy K and I are about 5 ft 9 and the stone rose almost a foot above us.

Back on the road, there was another site not too far away. The probably very famous Lanyon Quoit. The Victorians stood these up too, and one was broken, so the monument is no longer as tall as it once was. But it's still a very impressive construction.