Blog posts about Scotland at Permanent Tourist

I love gaudiness in the U.K. at Christmas and revel in the blinking, multi-coloured tastefulness of it all. Just so long as it’s someone else’s home, not my own.

Jo and I bumped into a couple on the train home from Milan a few weeks ago: a British guy working for the British Embassy in Bern, and his Russian fiancée. After talking about all sorts of stuff, including life as Brits abroad, we were invited to this year’s St. Andrew‘s Dinner to celebrate the […]

Jo’s parents found baby hedgehogs in their garden for three Fridays in a row during September this year. The animals were late babies – too small to survive the winter – so Jo’s father Roy drove the 20-odd miles to take them to the Wormit Hedgehog Care Centre, across the River Tay from Dundee. Jo […]

This grade A listed railway viaduct, just north of Dunkeld near the A9 main road between Perth and Inverness, was designed by Joseph Mitchell to carry the Inverness and Perth Junction Railway across the River Tay and opened on 9 September 1863 at a cost of £20,395; it remains in use. It is of lattice […]

During a violent storm on the evening of 28 December 1879, the centre section of the first Tay Bridge, known as the “High Girders”, collapsed, taking with it a train that was running on its single track. Seventy-five lives were lost, including the son-in-law of design engineer Sir Thomas Bouch. The total number was only […]

Not a great photo, but I’m posting it in order to wind up a security guard and highlight the photographic policy in the Wellgate shopping centre in Dundee. Moments after taking this, I was accosted and asked what I was doing. This photo is dangerous material, as I could’ve been taking this shot of the […]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mhowells/2403429191/ There seems to be a lot of comment about the new Flickr Video function introduced this week. The witch hunters who were in such uproar when Flickr went multilingual have found a new cause to flap at with their Photoshop tools and tacky graphic monstrosities. Their argument being that adding video to the service […]

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Or, in other words, T zero! It’s been a long and eventful journey up from Switzerland to Scotland, though we’ve had only a couple of minor hiccups and no real problems. I’ve been keeping a diary as we’ve been travelling but as you can imagine, I’ve more important things to think about today! I’ll post […]

Wonderfully happy memories of flying to Scotland last Christmas, spending time with Jo’s parents and later waking up with my love for our first Christmas Day together, at my parents’ house in England. This shot – a wobbly long-exposure I took using a tripod kindly lent for the evening by Jo’s dad – was taken […]