KB

The Devil makes work for idle hands, they say.

Once or twice today I had a bit of a lull. And I was surrounded by maps, and, well, routes started to be plotted. There's a certain pleasure in poring over maps, plotting routes. Pondering all the myriad ways of getting from A to B, and trying to find one that's never been done, or to find the most interesting way of doing it.

Have you ever read a brilliant novel, and got so engrossed in it that you don't consciously see letters and words on the paper, you just see the images, and colours, and events happening in your mind? Maps are like that if you have a good one. You see a cliff, not a jaggedy line that *represents* a cliff. You're off on a voyage before you know it. But I digress.

So, first the boredom. Then the maps. Then, if you're unlucky, the temptation.

And before you know it you've got half a mind to do the Mournes Seven Sevens Challenge...to climb each peak in the Mournes >700metres, in about 10-12 hours.

Trailtrekker had *nothing* on that.

And, almost like an omen, the most recent map has downgraded one of those peaks to less than 700m now. So it's the SIX sevens, and six sevens =_____?

42, of course!

And as if that wasn't enough temptation, I then found out they've brought the Mourne Wall Challenge back this year, for the first time in thirty years...

If people keep making snowballs like this, I'm gonna end up firing them.

Now I'm a kinda guy. I don't lose my temper or start fights about politics, or football, or anything, really.

But I do love my weekend Irish Times. It's a proper newspaper. The old-school type of newspaper that weighs half a ton and employs a horticultural columnist who actually writes her own copy AND knows what she's talking about. This is a rarity.

The weekend Irish Timeses were stolen from the shop. That I can deal with. But when they offered me a free Daily Mail instead, I felt violated.

Now....this journal has got a lot to do with minorvogonpoet. Who pointed out that Seamus Heaney had used the bog metaphor to great effect. Some of his interviews show how much of a thinker he must be. And how much of a reader he must be.

My territory's a bit more basalt, a bit more eastern and solid than his farm near Castledawson. But I can still recommend his translations. Where my consonants crack belfast, his crack less but sing more.

The Journal of Thomas Dinely, 1861.

Dinely is an Englishman who was travelling in Ireland.

The guy who edited this journal is just downright cruel. After a passage where Dinely describes a lake overflowing with enormous fish, especially trout, it simply says:

[Here follows a statement about the fish called Sargus, which is unfit to print.]

COME ON! You can't just leave us hanging like that.

Now I'm going to have to spend hours finding out what's so filthy and obscene about the 17th Century Sargus fish.

Commander Hadfield's coming home tomorrow. Somehow part of my brain still boggles at the fact that there's some geezer whizzing around the planet, singing David Bowie songs and discussing the Gaelic name for "Belfast" on Twitter.

I think I like old Hadfield. He seems to be the right kind of weirdo.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo