No gods, no kings, no billionaires
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s impossible to take a bad photo of the Kelpies. It may even be impossible to take a bad photo near the Kelpies. They look like they belong in Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences, or perhaps in an alternate history Soviet Russia of peace, prosperity, and strength. But instead they’re in Falkirk, just a short drive from the marvellous Wheel. Wow.
The Sunday after Christmas Abi and I took a short break inside our holiday. We drove North through Glenshee and Braemar to the Kildrummy Inn for an overnight. I’d found the hotel through Hotels.com, searching for accomodation in Aberdeenshire – I hadn’t heard of it before. The reviews were excellent, and the photos looked like the kind of place we like to stay in: Scottish rural, slightly old-fashioned, comfortable rather than swanky. The kind of hotel where we would not feel out of place going down to dinner wearing jeans and a sweater instead of “smart casual”. And indeed it was!
More than that: co-owner and chef David Littlewood was Scottish Chef of the Year 2013, and the Kildrummy Inn is clearly trying to make a name for itself in culinary circles – they won two AA rosettes in 2014. We arrived shortly after lunch service and were greeted by co-owner Nigel Hake, who saw us to our lovely room on the first floor. We hadn’t booked a table for dinner, because we weren’t sure what to expect. And to be perfectly honest, I had been thinking about an unpretentious fish and chips takeaway in nearby Alford. But despite not asking for it, he had kept a table aside for us anyway, and as soon as he brought us up the evening’s menu we were hooked.
We went down for a drink in the cozy bar shortly after 7, before being ushered through to the long narrow dining area at the front of the hotel. (There’s a second room next to the bar as well.) My starter was a chicken and apricot terrine with a black pudding bon-bon on top. The terrine was tender and flaky, but the subtle chicken flavour was overwhelmed by the intensity of the black pudding when I took them together. After the starter, we were served an intermediate course of rich and creamy celeriac soup with truffle oil, and dainty cheesy biscuits on the side.
For my main course…I had fish and chips anyway. I like it when a high-aiming restaurant serves simple food, and it was suitably delicious. The haddock was perfectly tender in a light batter that stayed crisp until the very end. The chips were double-fried, crunchy, and fluffy, and the accompanying pea puree was perfectly judged to lighten the deep fried goodness a hint of vegetable.
My dessert was a lemon posset, topped with burnt orange caramel, and blood orange sorbet on the side. I’d never come across a posset before, so I had to ask what it was: a milk pudding curdled with citrus juice. It was delicious.
My faulty digestion struck again in the middle of the night, and I had to forgo the pleasure of breakfast the next morning. Abi’s “Full Kildrummy” looked amazing, though. We had a nice chat with Nigel about computers, networking, and gaming before we headed off shortly after 11. We had originally planned to drive a bit further North-West and head back South via Aviemore, but we decided to just reverse our drive through the ridiculously scenic Glenshee instead. (Clear blue sky, hard frost on the ground, with snow-capped hills.) Abi had never been to the House of Bruar before, and we met Mum & Dad and the kids there for tea and a scone and some shopping in mid-afternoon.
Over the summer last year Alex got hooked on RWBY (pronounced “Ruby”). He got Fiona and Abi quickly hooked on it as well. I watched the trailers and the first episode at the time, but it didn’t stick for me. Then, over the Christmas holiday, Alex was playing the volume 2 soundtrack in the car, and I latched on to two songs in particular, “Dream Come True” and “Boop“. Unlike the sleek guitar metal of “This Will Be The Day“, the opening song of volume 1, those two songs are sweet and jazzy, with a bouncy swing backbone.
I gave the series another try when we got back home, and it drew me in completely. So I’m fully caught up now, and I’m converted to a big RWBY fan. The volume 1 soundtrack is more orchestral and instrumental; volume 2 has a better selection of catchy songs based on the characters from the series (“Dream Come True” is about Pyrrha, “Boop” is about Nora). These two albums were my first two music purchases of 2015, and they’ve given me a few great favourites already.
Another early music purchase of 2015 was Funkin’ Badass by Dutch band The Cool Quest. Warm and jazzy, laid-back funky hip-hop – it’s a great sound. Came across them purely by chance as I happened to tune in to a radio station I don’t usually visit in the car on the way to McDonalds a couple of evenings ago. Big win.
We didn’t watch many new films over the Christmas holiday (Divergent, meh), but we revisited some older favourites: Skyfall seems to get better every time I watch it (gorgeous framing, great use of colour). From Russia With Love, shows just how far Bond films have come in 50 years, and also how strong and pervasive the roots of the series are. Fiona and I are now watching the Harry Potter series from the start. I have only read and watched up to The Order of the Phoenix, and I find myself quite looking forward to catching up on the final episodes.
Lots of chickens were going missing and, naturally, it was assumed that roving dogs were to blame. Lal’s owners were thus a little surprised to see the cow sneak up to the chicken coop and to then grab and eat some of the chicks.
The Big Kill – New Zealand’s crusade to rid itself of mammals:
Listening to Callaghan on YouTube also reminded me of a point that Nick Smith had made the day of the saddleback release: in New Zealand, killing small mammals brings people together. During my travels around the country, I found that extermination, weird as it may sound, really is a grassroots affair. I met people like the Adsheads, who had decided to clear their own land, and also people like Annalily van den Broeke, who every few weeks goes out to reset traps in a park near her home, in the suburbs of Auckland. In Wellington, I met a man named Kelvin Hastie, who works for a 3-D mapping company. He had divided his neighborhood into a grid and was organizing the community to get a rat trap into every hundred-square-metre block.
“Most of the neighbors are pretty into it,” he told me.
Amusingly, just like the Dutch export their knowledge of water engineering, New Zealand exports its knowledge of killing small mammals:
Meanwhile, by tackling larger and larger areas, New Zealanders have expanded the boundaries of what seems possible, and they increasingly find their skills in demand. When, for example, Australia decided to try to get rid of invasive rodents on Macquarie Island, roughly halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica, it hired a New Zealander to lead the effort, and when the U.S. National Park Service decided to get rid of pigs on Santa Cruz Island, off the coast of Southern California, it hired Kiwis to shoot them. The largest rat-eradication effort ever attempted is now in progress on South Georgia Island, a British territory in the South Atlantic with an area of nearly a million acres. A New Zealand helicopter pilot was brought in to fly the bait-dropping missions. One day, when I was driving around with James Russell, he got an e-mail from Brazil: the government wanted to hire him to help it get rid of rats on the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, off Recife. David Bellamy, a British environmentalist and TV personality, has observed that New Zealand is the only country in the world that has succeeded in turning pest eradication into an export industry.
Most New Zealanders laugh at claims that Canadian moose have somehow survived in the south island wilderness since the 1910 introduction of 10 antlered immigrants from Saskatchewan. Purported sightings of the gangly ungulate are widely viewed as hoaxes inhabiting the same eco-illogical niche as the Loch Ness monster, Ogopogo and abominable snowman.
But a tuft of hair discovered by biologist Ken Tustin — a researcher in the remote Fiordland National Park and a long-time believer in the legend — has tested positive for moose genes at a Canadian DNA lab. The news has sparked a media sensation in New Zealand and prompted one of the country’s MPs to demand urgent protection for a beloved species long thought to have disappeared.
It’s all connected.
Last week’s experiment of being both lactose and gluten free ended in me being “in bed” all day yesterday with the worst case of DNV I’ve had in two years. So does a gluten-free diet alleviate my ongoing digestive distress? I’ll take that as a no.