I’ve had a bit of a technological disaster of late. My faithful computron, bought in 2008, finally went to the gadget graveyard. It was on its second hard drive and hobbling along, wheezing, while it tried to keep up with the flashy decorations on websites these days and the emotional blackmail from sad google robot. But it was the casing that did for it. The screen has been wedged open for months and then (following a short flight from the hands of the Boy and clunking into a lap table) the keys started failing. I made friends with the on screen keyboard for a week or so waiting for payday (the first in over a year!) but without a space bar I didn’t feel up to blogging.
My new job at the council has required much work on my ear for North East Scottish dialects. I have met a new letter ‘JAI’ which has made trying to decipher post codes over the telephone much more exciting than you might otherwise imagine. I am slowly adjusting to working anti-social hours again. It feels much like when I used to work in a pub and I’d be leaving work and thinking about having my tea when everyone else was well off to bed. There are also the grim interactions with people as you cross town on the way in as everyone else is going home and shop keepers wish you a nice evening unaware that you (like them of course) will be working rather than returning home. The worst though is coming out of work to the small city centre full of drunk people smoking all over the pavement. I never really appreciated the appropriateness of the phrase ‘steaming drunk’ till having to share a small single decker bus at chucking out time whilst stone cold sober.
But enough urban misery.
The late working hours leaves the day to head down to the cliffs. We had a bizarre walk through the haar recently. The heat of August brings the mist in over the cliffs near Cove Bay.
The mist makes for an apprehensive mood and you look at things more closely. There’s an uncanny edge to familiar surroundings.
And the warmth must have been what enticed these shoals of jelly fish. I couldn’t capture their colours beneath the water. The tiny blue ones were a bright royal almost electric blue. And the huge red ones seemed to have beached themselves. But there was a curious array of petals and twigs laid over them – a jellyfish funeral?
The small harbour at Cove has a collection of boats and lobster creels and there is usually someone at work or just gone by. The Boy said these looked like dog fish which had been thrown back.
But this little guy seems to have escaped.
I had to be dragged away from the beach before I’d stop taking pictures.
I’ve still not seen a puffin or a sunbathing seal. But jellyfish were a small unexpected joy of this Scottish summer.
somethingspontaneous 