A weekend away

We got away for the weekend as you will have read in J's blog. We toodled up through Perth to Forfar via a couple of castles and so on. There is no shortage of the former in the area, that's for sure. We didn't actually stop in Perth and will do that some other day as there is a great castle there - Stirling - which also houses the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders Museum and Archive, and the Black Watch museum is also in the vicinity.

Instead we saw a few little castles on the Saturday and a big one - Glamis - on the Sunday. The latter was where the Queen Mum was born and often lived. It was a good example of a lived-in castle, but it's all just a reminder of the huge gap between the classes over here. Sometimes the overwhelming feeling wasn't to be impressed, but rather faintly disgusted.

On the way back we saw some Pictish carved stones. These were the predecessors of the Scots, at least in the east of (present) Scotland. They were Christians so the carvings were combinations of Christian and pagan symbolism, some of them pretty gruesome. We finished the trip by driving over the impressive Tay bridge at Dundee and visiting 'Scotland's Secret Bunker' which isn't so much a secret any more. The latter was built during the Cold War as an early warning radar site originally, then converted later into a command bunker where a regional government could survive nuclear attack. It was surprisingly large and quite impressive for that, though the equipment now looks antiquated.

The economy continues to create headlines. LloydsTSB has bought out Halifax-Bank of Scotland, which was a bit of a shock here as HBOS was the largest bank in the country. Predictions are that thousands will lose their jobs as branches and offices are closed/combined, and of course ripple on effects can't help our own situation.

The jobs continue in their mind-numbingly boring fashion. Today one of my colleagues made the error of asking the bureaucrats whether they would like more paperwork, and surprise, surprise, they said "yes". Now a job that was taking perhaps 2 minutes a pipe will take 5. What the hell was she thinking? Sigh.

On Monday we started badminton at a local school. It was a good run around, and we weren't too bad for almost beginners. I did find that sometimes the shuttlecock went straight through my racket, but I'm sure it won't do that as often when I get my eye in.