This is a sort of follow-up to my last post. I was obviously pretty emotional when I wrote it, so this is an attempt to explore the ideas from a slightly calmer and more detached perspective, as I do think this is something I need to understand.

Maybe I’ll never feel the way most people do about this stuff… but maybe that’s OK. Maybe I can find a way to thrive regardless. The situation with my past kind of sucks but it hasn’t prevented me from (eventually) finding love, finding amazing friends, succeeding at work, becoming a father to a lovely boy, finding activities that bring me genuine joy. There’s a lot to be thankful for, and next to all that the fact that I didn’t necessarily get here by the same path other people took seems kind of irrelevant.

But it still bothers me, at times anyway, and I’d like to understand why so that I can try to minimise it. I think a lot of the problem is the way these formative experiences are often framed when people talk about them. I wouldn’t mind so much if people were just saying “This is what my experience of being young was like”… it’s the fact that it often comes across as “This is what EVERYONE’s experience of being young was like”. Maybe that’s not the intention and it’s just careless wording, but I find it very alienating. It comes across as if either I’m in a miniscule minority for having had a different experience, or that I’m somehow not worthy of being included in the class of people being talked about at all.

Another issue is that age still seems to be viewed differently from other characteristics. I wrote a whole post about this years ago, and even now I still really don’t understand why we’re supposed to see someone acting atypically for their gender, race or sexuality as something to be celebrated and encouraged, yet someone who acts atypically for their age should have scorn and derision heaped on them until they get back in their box. Again this is pretty alienating for those of us who, for whatever reason, found ourselves out of step with the rest of our peer group – I think I could have coped with missing out on typical student experiences at university a lot better if having typical student experiences later on in life instead was seen as a normal and valid thing to do.

At this stage I don’t feel like I have a peer group anymore. There are individual people who I do feel a profound connection with, but I don’t feel I have much in common with my age group as a whole. It’s not that I dislike them; as with any demographic, many of them are good people. It’s just that I don’t feel a particular affinity for them any more than I do with people who are significantly older or younger than me. I guess people typically bond with those of their own age because they share the same formative experiences, or because they’re going through the same life stage at the same time, or because they became friends at school or university where most people were a similar age. None of those is true for me with my age group. By the time I took my first fumbling steps into the world of dating and relationships, many of my school and university peers were already married with kids. And by the time my son was born, their kids were already in their late teens.

But, returning to my earlier line of thought, how much does this really matter? I suspect maybe not as much as some people make out. We all know someone who likes to hold forth about the good old days, who talks as if they lived at the heart of some momentous and profound youth culture movement that defined a whole generation, with their finger on the pulse of the very zeitgeist itself. But I bet if you dug a bit deeper you’d find plenty of people from the same age group who don’t feel like that at all. People who either lived through similar experiences but didn’t see them as particularly meaningful, or people more like me whose experience was different in some major way. So yes, it’s annoying having to listen to those sort of people, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re in the majority.

Life is complicated. Everyone’s path is different, and many of the experiences that people may assume were universal actually weren’t. In a way I’ve become the inverse of the person I described in the previous paragraph: just as obsessed with this idea of the One True Experience that “everyone” should have when they’re young, except that while he (because it usually is a he) sees himself as the insider who was shaped by it, I’m the outsider who missed out on it. I don’t think that’s who I want to be. If the reminiscing pub bores think their best days are behind them then that’s up to them, but I’d rather embrace the wonderful people and activities I’ve found for myself and live in the here and now.

A part of me wants to end this post with a plea for more understanding of people like me who didn’t necessarily fit the mould. But I’m not sure that’s even really required. It’s not like we’re some oppressed minority, not really. I’ve never been barred from getting a job, or rejected by a potential friend or partner, because I didn’t get pissed enough in Fresher’s Week. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever been treated differently in any meaningful way at all because of this. I’ve told various people over the years what my youth was like and their reaction was generally sympathy for how it was making me feel, but indifference towards the fact that it happened, as if they didn’t see it as a reason to treat me any differently. In one or two cases it turned out the other person had had an experience quite similar to mine and it actually made me feel closer to them.

(* Disclaimer: I know I sound calmer and more rational right now, but I reserve the right to sink back into the state I was in when I wrote the previous post at any future time my brain deems it necessary).

Between the ages of about 15 and 25, I lived an isolated, unusual life. I missed out on just about all of the major social milestones people normally go through at that age. I didn’t move out of my parents’ house. I didn’t have any real friends for most of that time. I didn’t go on dates or have girlfriends. I didn’t travel. I barely even went on nights out. I’m now 43 and I still feel like I can’t escape from the legacy of those wasted years.

And I feel like I never get a straight answer as to what this means. Those things I missed are considered “rites of passage”. People talk about them as important life milestones that mark the transition to adulthood. They go misty eyed as they reminisce about what those times were like for them. They write endless songs, movies, books and other media glorifying that time of life. People bond over these things, even decades after they happened. But then if I mention to someone that I’m upset about having missed out on all that, usually they suddenly start to downplay it. Suddenly it doesn’t matter that I missed out, because all that stuff was no big deal anyway, and what I’m doing now is more important. So which is it? Are they important rites of passage, or are they no big deal? Because they can’t be both.

I did try to make it better, once I realised what a mess I’d got myself in, in fact I spent years trying. But by then it was already too late. Technically I did tick off all those things I listed above, but it wasn’t the same, even though I deluded myself for a while that maybe it could be. An older person hanging out with teens and early twenty somethings, trying to be a part of their peer group, desperate to be included so that they can have some scraps of normal youth before it disappears out of reach forever, isn’t the same as someone who really is that age and is going through that life stage naturally. Much as I wish it was.

When I tell people I’m unhappy about this, they often respond that I should put it behind me as it’s in the past now. The important thing is that I’m happy in my life now. But I’m not happy now. Every day I’m forced to go out and live in a world filled with people who aren’t like me, people who’ve been through the normal life stages and become fully fledged adults, while I stay stuck in whatever hellish limbo this is, unable to ever move on, but having to put on a front and pretend everything’s OK. There are reminders everywhere of what I’ve missed. I see it around me every day but I know I can never have it. It’s torture.

Here’s an example. A couple of weeks ago I unexpectedly went on a night out with people who I know reasonably well but wouldn’t class as close friends. After a few drinks, the conversation turned to reminiscing about university. It always bloody does and that’s the problem. I think what got to me the most was the general tone of the conversation, the way it was presented as “of course, this is what it was like for everyone”. Well, that wasn’t what it was like for me. I wonder what sort of weirdo they would have thought I was if I’d said that instead of keeping quiet like I always do. They’ll know if they read this, I guess.

I know this is largely my own fault. I made choices that resulted in me having an isolated life at a critical time. I should have been braver and faced up to reality sooner and made more of an effort to connect with people. But this feels like a very harsh punishment for a mistake that had no malice behind it and hurt no-one but me. Am I really destined to be an outcast forever? Or is there a way out? I just want another chance. I was young and stupid. Maybe not in the same way other people are, but young and stupid nonetheless. Does it have to end this way?

The wall that I guess I built between myself and everyone else for protection at some point. Almost every social situation I feel out of place, like an outsider, like I shouldn’t be there. It doesn’t matter how nice people are to me or how welcome they try to make me feel. It doesn’t matter how much I have in common with them on paper. I can’t get past this feeling.

The standard advice for overcoming it doesn’t seem to help in my case. It mostly boils down to “just keep putting yourself in social situations and you’ll feel better”, or for the next stage, “try sharing something more personal with people and you’ll find you have more in common with them than you think”. Trouble is, even after putting myself in social situations for over two decades, I still feel this way. And when I try sharing something more personal with someone and they seem to accept it and still treat me the same, my immediate thought is “they obviously didn’t grasp what a big deal that was, otherwise they wouldn’t still be talking to me”.

Beyond that, all you really get is fairly meaningless and vague stuff like “you have to be be open to it” and “you have to give people a chance”. Well, no offence to those who say that stuff, I’m sure they do mean well, but I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with that advice. I’m “open” to socialising in the sense that I keep putting myself in social situations, and I “give people a chance” insofar as I keep trying to talk to them, but that hasn’t worked and I don’t know what more I can do. I can’t directly control how these situations make me feel. If I feel alienated and out of place, I can’t force myself to not feel alienated and out of place. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

Probably the most poignant example of this is that I’ve spent 20 years now working in a workplace that’s pretty friendly, that’s full of people who have loads in common with me in various different ways, some of whom have tried to reach out… and even there I still feel out of place. I’m a parent now too… but I feel horrendously out of place among other parents. I feel like to present yourself to the world as a parent, or as a senior software engineer or whatever, is to bestow yourself with some measure of authority, competence and validity, and in my case I feel that’s totally misplaced and undeserved.

Ah well. I suppose there’s one positive thing. You might notice that in the first paragraph I said I feel out of place in almost every social situation. That’s an improvement on a few years ago where I could have honestly said every social situation. Now I have a handful of people who I don’t feel out of place around, and I am massively grateful for that, more grateful than they’ll probably ever know. If I could spend all my time around those few people, there would be no issue… but sadly life isn’t as simple as that, and I’d rather not be spending the majority of my time feeling like an outsider.

Come on, brain. Tear down this wall. You built the fucking thing after all. I don’t think anyone else can do it but you. Please?

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you came to look at one of my political blog posts and got redirected to this one instead. Hi!

I’ve taken the political posts down. I’d been thinking about it for a while, and in the end it seemed the best option. The truth is, it wasn’t doing me any good to be spending as much time as I was thinking about things that make me angry and that I can’t realistically have any influence over, so I’m going to try and stop.

I know a lot of people won’t agree with this. They’ll see it as pathetic, even childish to bury my head in the sand instead of facing reality. They would probably argue that if I strongly believe in what I was saying, I should try to do something about it, try to change people’s minds, campaign for things to be better, etc. It’s true, people can sometimes make a positive difference that way… but I haven’t been making a difference. I’ve just been getting myself worked up into a state of anger and stress over the news almost daily and occasionally venting on here in a way that was unlikely to convert anyone to my point of view.

Even if I was to direct my anger towards something a little more constructive, I have to be realistic and balance the very small positive difference I might be able to make against the considerable personal cost. I’m not particularly good at campaigning or persuading people and I find that sort of thing mentally draining, not to mention that it would take a lot of time I just don’t have these days. On the other hand my family need me to be good at being a husband and father, my employer needs me to be good at writing software, and I need myself to be in good enough mental shape to cope and actually enjoy life sometimes. Spending half my energy getting wound up by the political situation jeopardises all of that. And if the worst should happen and things in this country are potentially going to get really bad in a way that affects me personally, I need to be on top form to deal with it as best I can.

And some people would no doubt say it’s pathetic that I can’t control my thoughts and emotions sufficiently to stop that stuff from bothering me so much. I disagree. What I’m doing now is taking control over those effects, the only way I know how. I’ve made no secret of the fact that my mental health isn’t the best and I make no apology for that.

My views on the issues I wrote about haven’t actually changed. I’ll still be voting against the stuff that pisses me off any time I get the chance. I just don’t want half my life to be consumed by unproductive thoughts about it anymore.

But why not leave the old political posts up for people to read and just don’t write any more of them? Several reasons, really. Firstly in cases like this I find it easier to draw a line in the sand and try to make a clean break with the past. If I left the posts up I might decide not to write any more now, but then change my mind next week and go straight back to my old ways again. Secondly, whenever new comments come in on the old posts and I get notified about them, it drags all of these issues back into my awareness again and I’d rather avoid that as much as possible.

Thirdly, contrary to how it may have sounded at times, I actually don’t want to alienate all the people who disagree with me and cause further division. Some of them are people I need to be able to get on with, even people I care about. Their views don’t make them bad people and it does no good at all to introduce unneeded tensions into my relations with them.

And finally, those posts were just not really in the spirit of what this blog was supposed to be about. When I started it back in 2011 I just wanted somewhere to post about things that I found fun or interesting, and to talk a bit about my ongoing recovery from anxiety and depression related problems. It was never meant to be dominated by angry, divisive political rants and I’m hoping to take it back to its roots in the coming months.

Thanks for reading and, whether you’re of the same political persuasion as me or not, peace be with you 🙂 .

I’ve been going through a rough patch again lately and I feel like I could easily end up losing sight of what’s important, as well as forgetting the progress I’ve already made. So, inspired by seeing a friend’s bucket list on Facebook, I decided to make one of my own.

I’ve included a lot of stuff that I have already achieved, but that’s deliberate, to remind me of how good the last few years have actually been and what I can do if I put my mind to it. Conversely the stuff that’s not yet ticked off is a little sparse right now, but I’m sure more stuff will come to mind to flesh it out with now that I’ve got this list.

So, without further ado, on with the things! They’re not in any particular order, I couldn’t be bothered sorting them by importance or anything, and in any case my idea of their relative importance probably changes with my mood. I also haven’t set myself an end date of a particular significant birthday like some people do; my next “significant” birthday is uncomfortably close already and so wouldn’t give me much time to make progress.

First the ones I’ve already achieved:

Get married – done 05/2016

Buy house – done 05/2014
Take part in Beltane – done 04/2014, and every year since

All painted and costumed up and ready to go for my first time as a Torchbearer

Release a smartphone app – done 2014
Learn 3D modelling – done 2016
Learn to code in JavaScript – done 2015
See my favourite bands live – done 06/2016
Do a paid freelance project – done 2017
Create a blog – done 09/2011
Get promoted at work – done 07/2017
Go on all the big rides at Alton Towers – done 09/2015

I know it’s blurred, but that gives you a better impression of what it actually looks like.

Go hostelling around Europe – done 2012-2017
Go skinny dipping – done 08/2014
Run 5km – done 09/2015
Run 10km – done 09/2016
Explore Scotland Street Tunnel – done 07/2014

Explore Botanic Gardens Station – done 11/2014
Explore East Fortune Hospital – done 08/2013

Explore Barnton Quarry bunker – done 02/2005 and 06/2014
Visit a disused tube station – done 12/2016
Learn to play the complete Moonlight Sonata – done 1997
Learn to play Chopin’s “Black Keys” Etude – done 2013
Learn to play Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu – done 2013
Learn to play Bach’s Fugue no. 20 – done 2013
Learn to play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue – done 2015
Visit Croatia – done 05/2013
Visit Tropical Islands Resort – done 07/2017
Handle a large house spider – done 11/2016

Now the ones still to come:

Have a child – due 09/2018!
Climb the main hills of the Pentlands
Visit Italy
Go to a ghost hunting night
Play a pipe organ
Learn to speak German
Finish writing my 3D software
Make some 3D environments with my software
Get weight down to 80kg (and keep it there)
Learn Chilly Gonzales “Solo Piano II”
Write a book

Should keep me busy for a while 🙂 .

This blog post by my brother is worth a read (in fact his whole blog is, but I’m going to focus on that particular post just now). In the second half he brings up things that I’ve thought about before, related to social media and mental health. He points out that making negative posts online when you’re struggling is sometimes frowned upon, and that people who do so are often labelled as attention seekers, something that I’ve observed as well.

I’ve always thought that the “attention seeking” accusation in particular is an odd one. Surely seeking attention is exactly what we’re trying to encourage depressed people to do when it gets too much to deal with on their own? There are any number of mental health awareness campaigns out there these days, and the core message of pretty much all of them is something along the lines of: don’t suffer in silence, don’t bottle up your feelings, reach out and talk to someone when you feel down. If we’re serious about that message (which we really should be), we’re going to have to accept that it will mean seeing things we might not be comfortable with on social media from time to time.

Some people seem to have a curiously black and white view of mental illness sufferers, as if we can be neatly divided into two groups: on one side the “moaners” who just complain incessantly about their problems and are never going to get any better, and on the other the more positive people who are bravely and quietly putting in the work required to get better. In my experience it doesn’t work like that at all. God knows I’ve done a lot of moaning in my time (mostly on specialist forums but occasionally on regular social media), but I’ve also put a lot of work into trying to get better, even at times when it felt completely hopeless.

Other people I know are the same; there is no great divide. The people who are moaning helplessly one day might be pouring their effort into recovery a few hours or days later when they feel a little better, and even the most dedicated positive thinker needs to vent from time to time. In fact, if anything I’d say the people I’ve known who never expressed their negative feelings are probably less likely to get better, because they seem to be less in touch with what’s going on in their heads and more likely to be in denial about their problems.

Maybe some people are fine with the idea of talking about mental health, but think that social media is the wrong forum, and that those sort of discussions should be kept for family and close friends and professional therapists. That’s all very well, but not everyone has those options. Some people’s families and friends aren’t sympathetic to these issues. Some people have no family or close friends. As for professional therapists, NHS waiting times for them are ridiculous and not everyone can afford to go private. Finally, some people (myself included) might simply find it easier to be open online than they do face-to-face.

The downsides to being too negative in public are often pointed out: you’ll drive people away, you’ll just wallow in your problems and become overwhelmed by negativity, you’ll regret revealing such personal stuff later on. What’s rarely brought up is that there are also significant downsides to not talking about it. The main one, in my experience, is that if you’re going through massive turmoil inside your head, it’s basically impossible to forge any kind of meaningful connection to another person if they don’t know about it.

When I was first suffering from social anxiety and depression, I followed the standard advice of trying to meet people at social events and meetup-type groups. I would dutifully go along to as many of those as I could, then try to pretend as best I could that I was a normal person and didn’t feel like I had a huge aching void inside me. To put it bluntly, it was a total waste of time. I hated every minute, I felt horrifically out of place, and I never succeeded in making a friend that way.

Things changed dramatically when I stopped trying to hide what I was going through and started actually opening up to people instead, regardless of how negative I must have been sounding. Within weeks I had made several good friends, some of whom I was still in touch with a decade later, and within months I had been… ahem… more than friends with a few people as well.

Sure, it’s a lot nicer if mental illness isn’t a huge part of your life, but sometimes it is. And when it is, the only successful way I’ve found of building a meaningful friendship or relationship is to share that part of you along with the rest. Of course given the choice it might have been nicer to base those relationships on something more positive, but at the time there was simply no other choice. All the more positive stuff seemed to pale into insignificance compared with what was going on in my head, and trying to interact with people based on it felt shallow and dishonest. It was a choice between revealing the negative stuff or not having any meaningful interactions with people at all.

(The other option, I guess, is to recover from the mental illness first and only then seek out friendships and relationships. Maybe that would work, though I’m not sure it ever would have for me. It’s a lot more difficult to overcome these sorts of problems when you feel completely alone, and it’s difficult to start feeling like you’re a valid, fully fledged member of the human race when you have no friends and no love life).

This has gone off at a bit of a tangent, but I think it still has relevance to the original point about social media. Basically, sharing how we’re feeling, whether in person or online, is a way of building connections with people, probably the only way of building genuine connections. When we make certain people feel like they can’t share their feelings, we’re excluding them from building those connections, quite likely at a time when they need that more than ever. Worse still, we are invalidating them and likely making them feel as if they shouldn’t even have those feelings, which can be surprisingly destructive. And I don’t think that’s a good thing.

I tried to write some thoughts on 2017 and 2018 in a Facebook status, but it was getting far too long for that so I decided to put it up here instead.

I’m looking forward to 2018 more than I’ve looked forward to most new years, but I think that’s more to do with my state of mind than with anything specific I’ve got planned, or any external circumstances. Over the past few weeks I’ve sorted out a long standing sleep problem (I hope… at the very least it’s a lot better now than it was) and it also feels as if I’ve made a lot of progress with my general mental state as well.

It’s weird… for years (well, decades to be honest) I felt like I was constantly struggling and struggling with it and getting almost nowhere, but recently I seem to have reached the point where it’s improving almost on its own without me having to do much at all. It’s strange but I like it. Of course a part of me is still worried that my mood’s going to crash again and I’ll be back to where it was, but I don’t know if that’s likely. Some of the realisations I’ve come to are things that I don’t think I could ever easily un-realise, so while there will no doubt be more ups and downs in the future, maybe I won’t ever be as down as I was before.

It’s been a good year in other ways, too. After feeling stuck in a bit of a rut with work for a while, 2017 brought me both my first ever promotion and my first paid freelance project, which have been great learning experiences and things I definitely want to build on. Doing the canal app has got me into the habit of working on projects in my spare time in a properly focused way and I’m trying to keep that up. In the past I’ve had lots of ideas but I’ve only worked on them sporadically, or I’ve tried to do too many things at once and failed to really get anywhere with any of them. So now I have picked one project that I want to focus on in 2018 and I’m trying to keep up the momentum on it. I don’t know where it will lead me, but that’s part of the fun.

As well as that, and some domestic things that I won’t bore you with the details of, there’s a few other things I want from 2018:

• Do some fun stuff! If 2017 had a failing, it’s probably that I wasn’t as sociable as I could have been and didn’t spend a lot of time having fun. So this year I want to do Beltane again, go travelling again, and whatever else takes my fancy.
• Stop stressing about politics so much. OK, I may not like what’s happening in the world right now, but there’s effectively nothing I can do about it, so there’s no point making myself feel worse by obsessing over it. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped caring, or forgiven the people who caused this mess, just that I’ve realised I’m a happier and healthier person for not thinking about it so much. And if things do go badly wrong, I’ll have a much better chance of surviving it and helping the people I care about if I’m happy and healthy.
• Get out of the city more often. Towards the end of 2017 I started to go walking in the Pentlands quite a lot, something I hadn’t done for a while. I definitely want to keep that up as much as possible, and maybe even get back to walking in the Highlands.
• Lose some weight… but only if I can find a way to do it without feeling constantly hungry and miserable (like I did last time I tried).

Happy New Year to anyone who read to the end 🙂 . I hope 2018 will be good to you.

Over the five years (oh god, has it really been five years already?) since I set up this blog, I’ve posted about most areas of my life at one time or another. I’ve written entries about my travels, my paid work, my geeky personal projects, my wedding, my slightly mad group of film making friends, my political views, my band, Scottish Country Dancing, mental health, and various other random topics. And I’ve written so much about urban exploration that I created a whole other blog just about that!

But I realised there was one notable omission: I’ve never written about Beltane Fire Society until now. That wasn’t a deliberate decision; it was really just that when I joined the society in 2014, this blog was going through something of an unintended hiatus (looking back, I only made three posts that whole year, and even one of those wasn’t really a proper post!), so I wasn’t in the habit of writing about stuff. I decided that now, having just done my fifth festival with them, would be a good time to put that right.

Photo by Martin Robertson. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence

Beltane Fire Society, for those that don’t know, is something of an institution in Edinburgh. It’s the group that puts on the spectacular Beltane Fire Festival on Calton Hill at the end of April every year, as well as the Samhuinn parade down the Royal Mile (usually) on Hallowe’en. These events have been running for decades now, but my first encounter with them was when I went to see Beltane a few years ago, because one of my dancing friends was taking part in it. I loved the atmosphere and the spectacle of it right from the start and went back the two following years as well.

(Beltane and Samhuinn are two of the quarter year festivals of the Pagan calendar. Although there are Pagans in the society, there are plenty of people of other religions or no religion as well).

I decided I wanted to take part in Beltane, and in 2014 I finally got around to it. BFS isn’t a monolithic organisation. The tasks of running each festival are delegated to various groups within the society, which are quite fluid and change frequently. In addition to the very visible performance groups (the Reds and Whites and so on), there are also several less visible (but no less important) production groups dedicated to making sure everything runs smoothly and safely. Like a lot of newbies to the society, I started off in one of those groups: the Stewards.

The Beltane 2014 stewards, up on the hill waiting for the excitement to start

Stewarding didn’t really come naturally to me, but that was actually one of the reasons I wanted to do it. I thought that learning how to talk to the audience members and deal with whatever situations might arise would be good for my confidence, and I think it was. Although I was still quite nervous when the night came, it all went smoothly and I had a great time. The public were overwhelmingly good natured and the worst that I had to deal with was one man who refused to move out of a performance space until I’d taken one of the After Eight mints he was offering me! I also got a far better view of the whole festival than I’d ever had as an audience member.

I stewarded for two more festivals following the first one. Both were more challenging for various reasons (the first because it was on a Saturday night so the crowds were huge, the second because I had to extinguish a stray torch ball, something which thankfully doesn’t happen very often), but I still enjoyed myself.

Photo by Martin Robertson. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence

Being a steward was described to me by an experienced BFS member as a Beltane “gateway drug”, and I can see what he meant… the more I watched the other groups with their colourful costumes and mesmerising flames up close, the more tempted I was to join them. For Beltane this year, I finally made the leap and joined the Torchbearers.

The Torchbearers (Torchies to their friends) are the cloaked figures that walk solemnly alongside the procession at both Beltane and Samhuinn holding burning torches. They seemed a natural group for me to gravitate towards, since looking serious and ignoring everyone is pretty much my default behaviour in public places anyway. But also, I was looking forward to having some involvement with fire other than putting it out when it spread to places it shouldn’t. (Plus, the fact that the torches are fuelled by parafin-soaked balls of cotton gives the potential for all sorts of ball jokes).

The run up to the festival didn’t go quite as I’d planned, since I caught the worst flu I’ve ever had in my life and was stuck in bed for two weeks and could hardly speak for another two. But by Beltane night, all that was forgotten and I think it was probably my favourite BFS event so far – the view of the huge crowd and the other performers down below as I came up onto the Acropolis with my torch was so breathtaking that it was all I could do to stop myself grinning with delight and gazing around in wonder, which wouldn’t have been very in-character.

All painted and costumed up and ready to go for my first time as a Torchbearer

I returned to the Torchbearers for the Samhuinn that’s just passed. This time the costumes were more elaborate and, after a few false starts, I learned how to use a sewing machine and made myself a very nice red and green cloak. (Though unfortunately, given the weather on the night, it wasn’t a very waterproof cloak!).

But what really defines the Beltane Fire Society is the amazing, very welcoming community behind it, and that, more than the fire and face paint and cloaks, is what’s made me keep going back. As well as the public festivals there are always numerous social events going on behind the scenes that I wish I had more time and energy for. If you’re thinking about giving it a go yourself, I’d strongly encourage you to just go for it. I’m very glad I did.

Laura and I got married on the 28th of May. Since I’ve previously decided that going for a walk by a river, fitting new spark plugs to my car and finding an Android music player app that can do gapless playback were important enough life events to merit writing blog entries about them, I decided that this probably was too.

For a long time, I didn’t used to think I’d ever get married. To be brutally honest, if it wasn’t for the rise of internet dating I probably wouldn’t have; I may be a bit less neurotic in some ways than I used to be, but I’d still rather ingest live slugs than attempt to chat someone up in “real life”. So it’s a good job I’ll never have to, now!

We’re just back from honeymoon (well, mini-moon… we might still do a bigger holiday later in the year) and it’s all still a bit of a blur. So far the most noticeable difference between being engaged and being married is that once you’re married you no longer have a wedding to organise, which believe me is a very welcome difference right now. But I guess since we’d already been living together for four years, bought a house together, adopted cats together, and so on, actually tying the metaphorical knot was never going to suddenly change everything the way it would have back in more conservative times.

But enough waffling: what was the big day like? Well, the main thing I noticed was that it was over so, so quickly. After all the months and months of planning things, booking things, preparing things, I was left reeling at the end of the day thinking “Was that it?”. That’s partly because our ceremony was so short (not being religious, we went for a humanist-ish one, and didn’t have any long readings or anything like that), but even the other parts of the day seemed to be over in a flash.

That’s not to say it wasn’t enjoyable, though. The venues excelled themselves and everything was perfect, just the way we wanted it. The ceremony itself, for all its shortness, was quite moving and about halfway through I found myself wishing I’d had the foresight to put some tissues in my sporran. (Judging from the loud sniffing noises emanating from the rows of people behind me, I wasn’t the only one). I didn’t even mind being the centre of attention as much as I thought I would. I think the adrenaline and the sheer joyousness of the occasion was carrying me through, so that I was still able to give smiles and hugs to the guests long past the point where I would normally have slipped into sour-faced, monosyllabic mode and wanted to go lie in a darkened room.

One of the highlights was the fantastic best man’s speech that Alex wrote. Here’s an excerpt:

“I think who [gcat] is, really, is a very caring and non-judgemental person… and a bit of a nerd. And for me, that word has no negative connotations whatsoever. He’s not one of those trendy new nerds who are basically normal people who like superhero movies. He’s a proper, old-school nerd who gets absolutely obsessed with the most obscure subjects, regardless of whether anyone else is into them or not”.

I’m pretty happy with that summing up of myself, though he did then go on to make me sound completely insane by following it with a list of several of my obscure obsessions from over the decades, including some that I’d almost forgotten about myself. (I gave a short speech myself just beforehand, but that mostly consisted of puns referencing the fact that we got married on a canal boat).

Another thing that struck me was that the whole process of getting married wasn’t all as romantic as you might think. A lot of the time is taken up with practical and logistical stuff: making sure the cats’ litter trays have been cleaned out before you leave the house for the night, spending what seems like an eternity in a kilt hire shop watching your fiance’s uncle winding up the staff, and so on.

The Mini Moon

Due to June being very busy for both of us, and the wedding itself being quite expensive, we weren’t sure if we’d have the time or money to go on honeymoon straight afterwards. So we decided to compromise and go on a little trip up north the week after the wedding, possibly going for a more traditional holiday somewhere hot a few months later, once our savings had had time to replenish a bit.

Strangely, whenever I’m packing for a trip where I’m going to be “doing nothing” (and I certainly intended this to be one of those) I end up taking far more stuff with me than I do for trips where I know I’ll be working, or doing a lot of sightseeing, or whatever. I think I just worry that I’m going to get bored, and feel the need to take a large selection of books, DS games, etc.

As it turned out, we couldn’t have asked for a better holiday home, or better weather. We stayed in a cottage in the midddle of nowhere (well, technically it was next to one of the main roads through the Highlands, but main roads through the Highlands can still be quieter than our residential backwater in Edinburgh, so we weren’t disturbed much by the traffic). Although it had a few interesting features – cold taps that sometimes ran hot, a staircase so steep that a sign on the wall warned that it was best to use it as if it was a ladder – that was all far outweighed by the lovely location and great facilities.

And the hot tub.

We spent a lot of time in the hot tub, and a lot of time lying in the garden in the sun afterwards. I made a valiant attempt at clearing the huge backlog of transport-related books that I’d been meaning to read, but it was no use – due to buying yet more of them in Kingussie and Aviemore, the backlog ominously grew even bigger.

Although we’d generously been given a huge selection of presents from our not-very-traditional wedding list on Amazon (which included plenty of board games and other fun stuff in among the more normal household items), we’d also been given quite a bit of money and gift vouchers, and we took advantage of the cottage’s surprisingly good wifi to spend some of that.

In addition to buying some sensible items, we also blew some of the money on hoes 😉 .

Our main outing on the mini-moon was a day out on the Strathspey Railway, which runs regular steam trains from Aviemore up to Broomhill, stopping at Boat of Garten on the way. In addition to the lovely views of the Cairngorms there was some interesting old railway equipment in various states of repair to look at as we puffed our way along the valley. We had lunch in the restaurant car on the way. Doing things like that always feels classy to me, as if I’m in Murder on the Orient Express… or better still, on the Excess Express from Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door.

I decided it was about time to upgrade my ageing Skoda Fabia to something better. The Fabia’s been a good car mostly, certainly better than the Fiat Punto I had before, but it was getting to the age where it was accumulating niggling problems at an ever increasing rate: one of the back doors had got jammed shut (again) which, aside from being annoying in itself, would have needed fixed before the MoT; the body was no longer watertight and I would frequently find the carpets saturated with water or the inside of the windscreen soaking wet after a rainy night; the screen wash tank had started to leak and there was possibly a slow coolant leak as well as I’d had to top it up a few times in the past year or two; the engine was sounding more and more reluctant to start and I was worried that some day it would no longer start at all; the handbrake seemed to fail every year and need expensive repairs no matter how gentle I tried to be with it. Worst of all, the stereo I installed had broken and I was stuck with an old one with no aux input to connect my phone to!

The engine itself still seemed to work OK (it had been pretty reliable, only needing a few replacement ignition coils over the years) but had racked up over 110,000 miles which is a fair amount for a small petrol. So, with the wedding budget finally under control, it was time to look at new cars.

I didn’t expect to buy one so quickly. But on our very first afternoon of browsing car supermarkets, this grabbed my attention:

I’d been wanting to upgrade to something much more fuel efficient, and this eco model Seat Ibiza seemed to fit the bill nicely. Its carbon dioxide emissions per kilometre are so low that it’s exempt from road tax (even better than Laura’s £30 road tax Leon), and whilst I wasn’t naive enough to expect it to actually manage the quoted 80 miles per gallon on realistic journeys, it would certainly be a lot more economical to run than anything I’d owned previously. It also met my other requirements – 5 door, no smaller than the Skoda… and of course an aux socket on the stereo! Plus it’s a much nicer colour than my old beige car, which probably swayed me a bit.

I arranged to buy it the same day, after a quick test drive to make sure the 3 cylinder 1.2 litre engine (very small for a diesel) wouldn’t feel too underpowered. It was fine – while it’s not going to win any awards for acceleration, it actually feels quite a lot more powerful than either of my previous cars, so I was happy with that. I also checked the crash safety ratings after reading that one of the reasons this model is so efficient is that it’s unusually light – but thankfully, it has very good Euro NCAP ratings, so there’s obviously more to crash safety than just the weight.

(I won’t bore you with the details of the long saga of waiting for the small dent in the bonnet to be repaired that ensued after that. Ordinarily I would have been pretty annoyed and frustrated to have to wait two weeks longer than planned to pick up my new car, but since I ended up being stuck in bed for most of those two weeks with a horrible dose of flu followed by a chest infection, I had other things on my mind. I also lost my voice for a while, which gave me a good excuse not to have to bother with all the interminable phone calls to the dealer and get Laura to deal with them instead 😉 . And at least they were nice enough to throw in a full tank of diesel and a packet of Mini Eggs as compensation for the delay).

Of course, the most interesting question for me was: what would the fuel consumption actually be like? I didn’t expect to get 80mpg (except possibly when driving downhill at a constant speed of 45mph in top gear with a strong wind behind me for miles and miles) but I was hoping it would at least be impressive compared to my own car. I wasn’t disappointed.

I’ve had the car a few weeks now and have been keeping a close eye on the miles per gallon indicator on the trip computer*. On journeys in town, with a lot of stopping and starting and waiting at traffic lights, the mpg still usually gets into the high 40s (the Skoda would have been at about 30mpg on those trips). On medium length journeys with a mix of city streets and motorway/dual carriageway type roads, it manages well over 60mpg – in fact, nearly 70 on my journey to work this morning. Pretty good for a standard non-hybrid, reasonably sized car.

The trip computer shows a miles-per-gallon value that the Skoda’s one could only dream of. If trip computers can dream, that is. They’re probably not that advanced yet.

One of the fuel saving features, though, is slightly disconcerting. If at any point you put it in neutral with the handbrake on and take your foot off the clutch, the engine turns off to save fuel. The first time this happened I thought it had stalled and was about to hastily try to restart it before the lights turned green, but as soon as I put my foot back on the clutch the engine came back on very quickly. At first I shied away from letting it do this, scared that the engine wouldn’t come back on and I’d be stranded in the middle of the road, but after experimenting with it a bit I got less cautious. I use it all the time now when I’m going to be stationary for more than half a minute or so, and the engine always restarts quicker than I can even put it back in gear. Sometimes it restarts itself before I put the clutch in – I assume this is to make sure the battery doesn’t get drained too much.

(I think memories of my mum’s long drawn out attempts to start her ageing Fiat Uno on damp days probably contributed to my anxiety that the engine wouldn’t restart! Actually I had similar worries when I first got a gas boiler without a pilot light, that it wouldn’t be able to light the burner reliably. One of these days I’ll convince my brain that this is the 21st century and being able to start a diesel engine or light a gas burner automatically is really a solved problem now).

The most important improvement over the Skoda! Seen here with tasteful purple cable attached. (Sidenote: it turns out that Windows really doesn’t like it if you try to call a file ‘aux.jpg’!)

One thing though: no Haynes manual for this model! I guess that’s no big deal as I never ended up doing as much work myself on my previous cars as I’d planned to do (just replacing the spark plugs and coils, changing the oil, and fixing the heater blower) but I’ve always had a Haynes manual… I feel lost and disorientated looking under the bonnet without one. Much as I like some of the other books that Haynes have branched out into, it seems they’ve dropped the ball a bit on their core business of keeping up with new car models, sadly (I noticed they don’t do one for Laura’s car either).

* yes, I know trip computers tend to overestimate the miles per gallon, so it’s probably not really quite as good as it looks from those numbers, but it’s still by far the easiest way of seeing roughly how much fuel you’re using on each individual journey.