Jacquetta

With 100,000 blogs being started daily, why do I dare to add to the blogosphere? Two reasons, mainly: recently life has become more interesting than usual: next month I'm setting off for Nepal for the first time so I'm hoping to keep up the blog from internet cafes ... With handwriting like mine, this makes more sense than scribbling in a tent by headtorch. As a total newbie, I see blogging as simply writing a legible personal diary that's open to public comment.

The other reason is last weekend's Independent Publishers Guild conference. Mark Thwaite's excellent talk was on ReadySteadyBook and the blogosphere, and led me to the Snowbooks blog which proves that a publisher blog can be readable. I was thrilled when my friend Philip Kogan won the IPG Lifetime Achievement Award. I've known him for over 30 years, learned a lot from him, and he has always fought the corner for the independent publisher. By coincidence, Snowbooks shares the Kogan Page premises, so clearly the time had come. We are a 21st century publisher, therefore we need a blog: does this follow? Time will tell.

I don't know about the second day of IPG as I had a more important commitment. Flying home to host grand-daughter Amy's first birthday party, I just made it 20 minutes before guests arrived. What a total contrast, just lovely to see babies crawling, clambering, smiling and interacting: here is Amy with her cake:

I’ve never been to a Memorial Service before, so flying to London to speak at the Lincoln’s Inn service for the late Sir Robert Megarry, my father, to a congregation of over 150 distinguished lawyers, friends and family was triply terrifying: concern about the journey timing, the imperative for self-control, and the total lack of any precedent in my lifetime. Unlike at the family funeral when I spoke about him from my heart, this time I had only to read somebody else’s words: Bessie Stanley’s essay on Success.

Five months after his death, this was a much less difficult task than speaking at his funeral. But in nearly 60 years of making myself, from time to time, do some bold things, I had never been so terrified. An hour later, even after uplifting music from the choir and Susan Anderson singing Dido's Lament, I was still hyperventilating, dry-mouthed with heart thumping, despite no physical exertion, no altitude challenge, no rational explanation. Only after the second glass of wine did my nervous system begin to calm down.

The event took place in Lincoln’s Inn yesterday, and the Chapel was full, with people standing at the back. Bryan Garner, who edited my father’s book A New Miscellany-at-Law (published when R.E.M. was 95 years old), had flown in from Texas to read an extract – about arbitration by hen turkey. Sir Martin Nourse gave the eulogy, which was both erudite and wonderfully affectionate. Representatives of his old school, Lancing College, were there and thanks to its website we can read Sir Martin's text online. The service was a grand celebration of R.E.M.'s 96 years, and the whole family is grateful to Lincoln's Inn for organising it. It is pleasing to see that the Law Reports website illustrates their account with Anthony Morris' fine portrait which the Inn commissioned in 2001:

Although I grew up in London, Tuesday was the first day I really saw the city afresh. With the high emotion of Monday's Memorial Service laid to rest, we went (I with husband Keir, son Sandy, sister Lindsay and brother-in-law Nick) to Dulwich Picture Gallery for their Canaletto in England (1746-55) exhibition. There's an extraodinarily timeless quality to many of these paintings, with gentle folk seemingly always at leisure, skies always blue and London's waterfront echoing shades of the Venetian lagoon. His paintings of Westminster Bridge, completed 1750 despite the bitter opposition of the Thames watermen, were particularly striking.

Later, on a whim I boarded the London Eye, finally fulfilling an intention dormant for the last seven years. It was a warm spring day, and by chance this was the perfect time to go, with a huge red sun kissing the horizon just as our capsule glided smoothly to the top of its 450-foot trajectory. At that moment, with the sunset glow over classical buildings, the floodlighting on the Houses of Parliament and Whitehall, with Westminster Bridge looking as great as Canaletto painted it, London really was beautiful. Although London often seems infuriatingly dirty, crowded and expensive, I intend on future visits to see it as if from the Eye and try to forget that I was a Londoner originally.

And so, finally, to the Gielgud for Equus, which made the deepest impression on me when I saw the NT production (with Peter Firth and Alec McCowen) on tour in 1974. Not many evenings stand out all that clearly 33 years later (!), and I was keen to see whether and how Peter Shaffer's play would withstand my high expectations. I needn't have worried: Richard Griffiths's self-doubting psychologist was conversational, credible and caring. Daniel Radcliffe's 17-year old Alan was convincing enough to create "that willing suspension of disbelief" - as well as moving well while naked, to the obvious delight of an audience with an unusual proportion of young women. Led by dancer Will Kemp, the horses were magical: balletic, athletic and palpably equine. This powerful play starts from a shocking (true) incident, cleverly delves into Alan's past, and ends by romanticising his pain and passion - but it certainly has stood the test of time.

Stirling Literary Society organised its Spring outing to Perth Theatre yesterday: the play was Humble Boy, written in 2001 by Charlotte Jones. Perth Theatre is great - a West End theatre in miniature - and this was the play's first professional production in Scotland. Felix Humble is a 35-year old astrophysicist who struggles to accept his bee-keeping father's death and his mother's new life. The script combines verbal wit in a middle-class, middle-England dysfunctional family with some splendid black farce involving accidental soup seasoning with the dead father's ashes: think Alan Ayckbourn meets Tom Stoppard. Jones weaves astrophysics, bee-keeping and psychology into the plot, and it's well written, with a superb cast.

Back home, daughter Helen and grand-daughter Amy were waiting. This was a momentous weekend in Amy's life, as she in the process of moving on from her first few faltering steps to walking as her preferred mode of transport. Each time she sustains the vertical for a bit longer, cue enthusiastic applause, with Amy joining in and sometimes collapsing as a result. Our black lab Bramble is tolerant of this "incompetent puppy", but puzzled by all the fuss. After all, her own pups had walked within their first weeks. Happil, Bramble tolerates Amy's assaults with calm good nature - even when Amy invades her bed:

One great thing about babies is how they put you back in touch with the child inside yourself. Under Amy's influence I have been rediscovering swimming (we are teaching each other). And only today I discovered a movie button on my camera in order to capture her walking, so the next step will be to find out how to upload it to my blog. Until then, the still photos above will have to do.

Yesterday the air was gin-clear, visibility superb, so I abandoned the office email mountain in favour of taking Bramble up a local hill, Dumyat, which has a Pictish fort, dog-friendly access and a view of the entire carse (the flood plain of the Forth). The views yesterday were captivating: to the north and west the snow-capped mountains, to the south Stirling Castle, the Wallace Monument and the sites of seven battlefields in the foreground, with the Pentlands and Moorfoots behind.

To appreciate Dumyat fully, read Rennie McOwan's chapter in our anthology Call of the Wild, which we published for the Outdoor Writers Guild. Rennie grew up in Dumyat's shadow, it was his playground, and he immortalised it in his wonderful novel for children Light on Dumyat. A well-known author and broadcaster, now semi-retired, he still sometimes speaks in local schools. Years ago, my daughter Helen came home from school full of the excitement of hearing him talk. And there's nothing like hearing the author in person to breathe life into literature.

I was reminded of this on Monday, when crime writer Christopher Brookmyre spoke to Stirling Literary Society - a group that, like Friends of the Ochils, was founded by Rennie McOwan. He read a wonderful extract from A tale etched in blood and hard black pencil which is about to come out in paperback - lots of us bought signed advance copies on the night - quite a coup for SLS! Not merely a gripping and amusing crime novel, it's essential reading for anybody interested in children and schooling. It's a vivid, authentic evocation of the casual cruelty of the playground, and the licensed abuse by some teachers, in the west of Scotland in the 1970s. It rings true, but it's also very, very funny. Brookmyre's website is lively, but oddly it shows the wrong colour on the jacket image: etched in blood should be red, not blue, obviously. Not many people have this book yet!

I spent the last two days in Kintyre, visiting Campbeltown for an event to support and develop tourism surrounding the Kintyre Way. This new long-distance walk opened in August 2006, and we are publishing a guidebook for it in October. Co-author Sandra Bardwell and I will do the research trip in May, but this was a golden opportunity to meet some of the people we want to work with, and also to get my first taste of the peninsula. The drive from Dunblane via Loch Lomond and Loch Fyne was wonderful, with stunning scenery on both coastlines, Atlantic and Firth of Clyde.

Campbeltown has a fantastic natural harbour sheltered by Davaar Island, seen above at sunrise just before the event. It was held in the Aqualibrium, a glaring white concrete cylinder housing a leisure centre and "family room" with appalling acoustics where our sessions were held – seriously headache-inducing for group work. What on earth must it be like when full of noisy children? Colin Hossack of the Forestry Commission gave us an inspiring presentation on the assets of Kintyre for the walker, and Steve Duncan provided the Visitscotland perspective.

Before the start, I had a look at the wonderful Lorne and the Lowland, known locally as the Longrow Church. Its tall tower dominates the skyline from Campbeltown Loch. An early work by John Burnet (1869), its wonderful sweeping curves create the warmest, most welcoming interior of any church I've visited. It's encouragingly well looked after, and obviously plays an active role at the heart of the community. I was lucky enough to find workmen repairing the roof, so I was able to get inside with my camera:

The only downside of my trip was over 40 midge-bites from my lochside evening walk. If that's what they're like in March, what must it be like in high summer? (Postscript 3.4.07: still itching badly, over a week later!)

I'm deeply sorry to learn that Clackmannanshire Council has narrowly voted to approve the Burnfoot 13-turbine wind farm above Tillicoultry. I was one of over 100 objectors, both as an individual and as a member of Friends of the Ochils, the society started by Rennie McOwan. The Ochils provide an island of wilderness not only for those living in and near Stirling, Alloa and central Scotland, but also for Glasgow and Edinburgh. They offer hills and moorland of character and distinction, which walkers can traverse by ancient Rights of Way. These huge turbines (102 m tall) will be close to their highest top, Ben Cleuch (721 m), and will intrude on the skyline for many Ochil walkers.

The Ochils should be conserved in their wild state for our grandchildren, not despoiled by the distorted economics of subsidised turbine construction. The Ochils are under siege, not only from proposed windfarms (two approved and four more the subject of public inquiry) but also by the Beauly to Denny power line. As Stuart Dean said "we could be sleepwalking to a disaster in the Ochils".

Wind farms should be small and designed for local needs, such as those in Gigha. Large-scale turbines, if we must have them, should be out at se, but we should also invest in other, more reliable forms of renewable power and do more with hydro schemes. The turbines are productive only when the wind is right – not too little, not too much – but they ruin the horizon 24/7/365.

It's already too late for the first Highland vista for visitors heading north on the A9 from Dunblane: the Braes of Doune windfarm already ruins that. I know that its 36 turbines were manufactured in Campbeltown, and I can see why windfarms are more popular in Kintyre because they bring much-needed jobs. But already the blades are being manufactured elsewhere, and it can't be long before UK labour costs mean that these huge, ugly devices are wholly imported. Why don't we account for the major energy demands involved in their manufacture and transport before permitting them to spread at such terrible cost to our beautiful scenery? This is utter folly!

Belated realisation of how unfit I still am, together with a spell of stunning weather, led to a week of work punctuated by the odd hill climb: Dumyat by the less-trodden route, Ben Chonzie which still had mountain hares in their snow-white coats, then Ben Ledi on Wednesday afternoon. Here is Bramble on the summit of Ben Chonzie, with its wonderful 360 views: the mountain behind her is Schiehallion:

Still, I am conscious that these efforts are all "too little, too late" and feel nervous about my ability to keep up the pace/survive the medical tests on Xtreme Everest. And I'm sad about leaving my husband Keir for so long, I'll miss my children, and I'm worried lest grand-daughter Amy forgets me completely in the coming month.

I'll also miss Landrick, which is beautiful year-round and especially now with the bird life on the pond. A couple of weeks ago I looked out to find a mute swan had dropped out of the sky (sadly s/he left the next day), I often see our friendly heron, we have two resident oystercatchers and yesterday the first ducklings were launched by their proud mum:

She can't protect them all, of course, and today only four were left, which upset me more than usual: the callous crows had left the pitiful tiny corpses lying in the open. We leave on an evening flight from Heathrow, so there's been time for a good long walk with Bramble, prepare the weedkiller, half a weekend with the family, finish off the packing and now for the EDI/LHR flight. First I had to burn a couple of CDs for photos downloaded from the digicam, gather up chargers, instructions and batteries for sundry electronic bits and pieces, and generally make sure I've got enough to keep myself occupied: I dread boredom on a long flight, and can't usually sleep. I'm really surprised how full the Jagged Globe kitbag now seems, all for under a month. Just hope I make good use of it all ... and that I can update this blog from Nepal.

From one of Namche Bazaar's internet cafes (altitude 3400m/11,000ft), I'm trying to catch up, despite the sensory overload and backlog of events since I last blogged - not to mention the distractions of street noise and meter ticking at 10 rupees per minute: this is only half the rate in our Namche lodge but still five pounds per hour, a small fortune in Nepal!

The highlight so far was today's pre-dawn excursion from our lodge to the military base which has an amazing viewpoint towards Everest, flanked by Nuptse and Ama Dablam. So I have finally seen the summit of the world, clearly and with awe. I watched the light dawn over the ridge about 7 am. Most iconic of all summits, Everest has entered the English language and seems an overworked metaphor, as whenever somebody is a bit stretched they talk of attaining their "personal Everest". To me, the Nepali name Sagarmatha ("goddess of the sky") seems much more fitting. (Chomolungma, meaning "Mother of the Universe", is the Sherpa/Tibetan name.)

Afterwards, I had a heart-warming experience. On return to the viewpoint later, I had carelessly left my wallet in its cafe-museum. Noticing later, I returned a third time, not in panic, but with total confidence that the Nepali attendant I had spoken to would have kept it safe. He had, and I knew I didn't need to check its contents, although obviously I was happy to reward his honesty: rupees to the value of about 40 pounds in sterling could have represented considerable temptation. So here in Nepal, Friday the 13th was my lucky day.

We (the Xtreme Everest volunteers) are certainly working hard. Our daily routine begins with a half-hour testing session (blood oxygen saturation, pulse and blood pressure, then a strenuous 2-minute step test, then re-test, then swap places and repeat all). We do this before breakfast and sometimes it is followed by further tests (blood samples, exercise bicycle and neuro-psychological). We have trekked so far between Lukla and Monjo, over precarious suspension bridges and steeply uphill to Namche Bazaar. My maximum power output at Namche was a mere 140 watts, but producing it was just as big an effort as the 170 watts at Kathmandu.

We realise that things get inexorably harder as we gain altitude: Base Camp has about 50% of the oxygen available at sea level. But our morale is good, we know why we are here and we are getting feedback on our performance. We also had a good briefing on the brain from a young doctor in Kathmandu, and last night an excellent talk on hypoxia by Monty Mythen. He is a Professor at University College London, and also a great communicator who involves his children in his professional life: his use of Brio toy railway to explain hypoxia will remain with us all a long time.

We arrived at Pheriche yesterday from Deboche, after criss-crossing the river by various suspension bridges and with a net altitude gain of 550m/1800ft. It's a wind-swept spot, known as "no-frills" and famous for housing the HRA (Himalayan Rescue Association) clinic. The HRA is a wonderful outfit, founded in 1973 to provide free medical care to Nepalis and paid-for help to trekkers. Its daily briefing on altitude sickness is excellent (over 40 trekkers attended today's) and apparently nobody who has attended it has later died of altitude sickness - so far, at least.

Outside the HRA stands a stainless steel memorial to those who have died on Everest since the 1924 Mallory/Irvine expedition. It's inscribed with the names of nearly 200 climbers and sherpas who have died in the attempt. The chilly vertical surfaces of its split pyramid in have ample room for adding the names of those who have yet to die. The death ratio seems fixed at a predictable 1 in 10: one death for every 10 successful attempts. But of course everybody who attempts Everest thinks that this refers to somebody else.

This morning I completed my testing: the normal diary set, plus blood samples and the infamous bicycle ramp test. Although my maximum power output was much lower (125 watts cf 170 watts in Kathmandu) and maximum heart rate also down (160 bpm cf 181 in Kathmandu) I can't say that pedalling the bike was any less effort. However, at least the testing was brief, so there was time to go for a walk and also to attend the afternoon briefing at HRA. We have dinner at about 6.30 pm and retiring later than 9pm is considered staying up very late!

It looks so simple on a map, Friday's climb from Gorak Shep to Everest Base Camp, with an altitude gain of a mere 180 metres. But net gain conceals a multitude of undulations - too gentle a word for the stark rocky ups and downs. There was a slow section where we were supposed to keep 10 metres apart because of rockfall danger, but the real reason it took a full four hours was the superb clear weather combined with stunning scenery: you had to stop, stare and take loads of photos. We were walking first alongside, then on top of, the Khumbu Glacier, with brilliant views of Nuptse, Everest and Pumori. Coming into Base Camp, although you can no longer see Everest's summit, the views of the Khumbu icefall were closer and more breath-taking than expected.

Physically it wasn't that tough because we went so slowly, and for once I found myself more comfortable near the front of the group (mostly I've been hanging near the back, but altitude is a great equaliser:). Yesterday's exercise bike ramp test showed a further decline in my maximum power output and heart rate (only 120 watts at 150 bpm now, compared with 170 w/181bpm at Kathmandu) but that's expected. We also did smell and taste tests, had retinal photos, spirometry (breathing tests) and neuropsych (block design, dexterity, memory of 15-word lists, coding and speed reading) so this took most of the day.

The food is definitely more varied than before, with fresh fruit as well as vegetables, and they are working hard to entertain us here. Last evening's illustrated talks were on how your mitochondria handle oxygen (more challenging viewing than Eastenders), and also a photo-history of attempts on Everest. Despite the deep chill inside the communal mess tent, we stayed alert and took in most of this. Back inside my tent it was another very cold night (about -15 or -20°C) and your breath quickly turned into clouds of icicles. Sleep was punctuated by the loud (and surprisingly close) sounds of avalanches from the Icefall. We have just heard that the summit team have postponed their departure as a result: seems wise! This morning I shall explore the Icefall, but with great caution and cowardice as it does seem to be on the move.

Yesterday we descended to Namche from Tengboche (3860m/12,700ft). My day began at its monastery, which sits on a spectacular ridge surrounded by snowclad mountains. My three previous attempts to make sound recordings of the monks chanting had failed, so I went along to the service at 6.30am with my sound kit: fourth time lucky. The early service was also more atmospheric than the 3pm one, where thoughtless tourists ignore the clear and understandable prohibition on flash photography. Anyway, the recording was captured, breakfast quickly swallowed and we set off by 8am.

During a net descent of 420m (1400ft) over 4.5 hours, down a path that undulates a fair bit, we felt a rush of well-being as the vegetation grew lusher and the air richer in oxygen. And not far above Namche, we were thrilled to see 7 eagles wheeling and soaring over the valley, really close to the path. You never get that close to a golden eagle in Scotland!

Had a busy afternoon in Namche, rejoicing to find moving around much less effort than last time: what a difference a fortnight makes! Revisited my favourite internet cafe and not only found a raft of emails (thanks, guys) but also played around with our website: it was obvious that, thousands of miles away, my PA had just released a new book (our Speyside Way) so it seemed like a good idea to feature it on our front page. Making this change gave me a curious sense of satisfaction: can't have lost all my brain cells!

The Namche lodge was unexpectedly busy with two other Xtreme Everest groups, Group F having been delayed 24 hours by fog at Lukla airport. Club Namche's chilly basement was transformed for our benefit into a party venue, by sparkly lighting, funky music and plenty of booze. All this followed immediately after dinner, which meant I was still in my hiking boots. (An oddity of trekking is that you often wear heavy boots all day and evening, and you don't always take off any clothes before retiring.) What I didn't know is that the Ceroc session wasn't just a demonstration, but also a lesson and all of us were to take part. So I learned the beginnings of a new type of dance (it's a cross between jive and salsa) in hiking boots, at 3450m/11,300ft!

My husband, Keir Bloomer, retired yesterday from his job as Chief Executive for Clackmannanshire. The Council held a lovely presentation for him in the afternoon: it was terrific to hear how many other people think he's a great bloke too. Then we went on to dinner to celebrate, or at least those who hadn't been up all night with the General Election count did. Foregoing the pleasures of being Returning Officer, as at previous General Elections, on Thursday turned out to be one of his better decisions!

Tomorrow I set off for the Kintyre Way, having collected my co-author Sandra Bardwell from Perth today. The plan is to leave at 6 a.m. to drive to Tarbert, drop Sandy there, drive myself to Claonaig so that she walks Day 1 while I do Day 2, then taxi back to collect car and Sandy and write up our notes on the laptop. Working this way, we expect to cover the entire 89-mile route plus spurs and including a day-trip to Gigha by the end of Thursday. This should let us collect all the material and photos that we need for our forthcoming Rucksack Readers book The Kintyre Way.

It may sound ambitious, but at least it's an answer to all those prophets of doom who say that Keir's retirement will create a problem for me in having him around all day ... It looks like he too will be busy with freelance work, and it'll be at least a fortnight before we will coincide at Landrick on a weekday.

Today is Friday the 13th, and the news is both sad, and predictable. A rare and beautiful bird of prey has been killed by the turning blade of the ugly, pointless wind farm on the Braes of Doune. Red kites were persecuted almost to extinction in the past by gamekeepers, although we now know that they mainly eat carrion. Various reintroduction projects, including the one at nearby Argaty, have worked hard to save the red kite. Now we are killing them in a different, 21st century way.

Like long-distance walking, the opportunity to see rare birds such as red kites and osprey is known to attract environmentally aware visitors. Wind farms are springing up in Scotland because of crazy government subsidies that make them attractive to landowners, while ruining our most precious asset: our scenery. Now we know that they not only could kill rare birds, but actually have done, will the tide of public opinion turn against them before it's too late for other skylines?

I'm not against renewable energy. We have plenty of water hereabouts, and schemes like Cruachan have proved that hydro power can provide electricity when the grid is under pressure without despoiling our countryside. Water power is controllable, unlike wind power which is notoriously fickle; wind power is least likely to be productive when power is most needed - in cold, high-pressure winter weather. So let's have more hydro power and save our scenery, as well as the red kites.

The West Highland Way was my very first long walk, in May 1998, and it was a revelation: I and three friends had a wonderful week. Indirectly (and via Kilimanjaro) it led to the creation of Rucksack Readers, the guidebook business that now more-or-less earns my keep. Naturally, the WHW was one of the first books that we produced (in 2000), and I updated it for a 2nd edition back in 2003. With stocks are running low, I thought I'd re-walk the entire Way for the next edition. The southern portion is accessible from Dunblane, so I'm doing it in stages: last week was Milngavie to Balmaha (20 miles), then Balmaha to Inversnaid ("only" 14 miles, but more tiring because of the terrain).

Yesterday, with a good forecast, was Inversnaid to Crianlarich, so husband Keir kindly gave me a lift to Inveruglas (having dropped off my car at Crianlarich en route). That let me reach Inversnaid by ferry across Loch Lomond, which was a glorious start. A robin made my day by posing on a waymarker; I'm holding my breath while reaching for the camera. Then it was splendid walking along Loch Lomondside, noticeably easier than last time (in May 1999 I rewalked the whole way, with rain morning noon and night, but when you're charity-sponsored, giving up is not an option). It wasn't just better weather or that I'm more experienced, the Way actually has become easier, with bridges over burns and boardwalks over awkward bits. Some mixed feelings about the wildness tamed. Also, now that I'm using my poles properly, powering along using upper body strength, it's like having an extra gear.

From time to time I walked with three lovely guys from down south, who were doing it for the first time. Bees seemed very fit, and I think Brad and Marc were wondering why they had let Bees decide the important things like how many days to take (six is ambitious for first-timers with heavy packs)! I enjoyed the chat, and it's amazing how quickly the miles sped by. If they remember to email it, I'll add the photo I took of them. I was surprised (and indignant) that having read on the official website that a map is essential, they had assumed that they had to buy all ten OS Explorers (at £7.99 each)! I showed them my handy little Footprint map which costs £4.95, shows the whole route, is waterproof and fits your trouser pocket. Since they hadn't yet got their Explorers out of the rucksack, guess which is more useful? Tempted as I was to linger over lunch with them at Beinglas Farm, I knew I had to bash on to Crianlarich, from where I'll resume soon to complete the northern half.

On Sunday, I resumed my West Highland Way hike, starting from Crianlarich with the goal of hiking the 48+ miles to Fort William by Tuesday afternoon, taking the train back to the car back to Dunblane. Logistically, it all worked perfectly, with overnights at the Inveroran Hotel and in Kinlochleven. The weather, however, was something else. Remember that great forecast for August? Well, it didn't apply to those three days, at least not in the Western Highlands. Apart from the fact that trudging through soaking ground in horizontal rain isn't much fun, it certainly thwarted my hopes of getting photographs for the new edition of my book. Of course I could and did check the validity of the directions, but I suspect I'll end up having to go back in better weather. It's really frustrating, having climbed the Devil's Staircase, knowing that you are looking north over the splendid scenery of the Mamores, to see nothing but cloud, rain and mist!

On Monday morning I had walked from Inveroran to the King's House, where a nice thing happened over my lunchtime bowl of soup. Being in the business, I always look to see which guidebooks and maps people are using, and had been talking to some Danes with a really old Footprint map that they had used 9 years ago and were still finding good this time around. A guy from Paisley then told me about this neat guidebook he had, with drop-down map and signpost graphics and all waterproof. I waited until he got it out before producing mine and saying "snap", revealing myself as author and publisher. Even better, he too was using it second time around, it having rained both times, and although it wasn't pristine, it certainly didn't owe him anything. He thought this was an amazing coincidence. It certainly made my day.

On arrival in Kinlochleven, I fell into conversation with a fellow guest who clearly knew the Way rather well. I asked how often he had done it, but he couldn't remember "about 15 or 16 times" he thought. This underlines the fact that this walk has something special.

After my last hike, I took up the issue of how the official website recommends maps, by the way, and I am delighted to report that as a direct result it no longer lists the 10 OS Explorer maps. So if my friends Bees, Brad and Marc are reading, they can see that I listened, learned and acted - even though they had bought the wrong guidebook!

Yesterday was the start of the 2007 Edinburgh Festival, and the most memorable day I have spent there. We began in the Queen's Hall with Jane Irwin and the Hebrides Ensemble. Jane Irwin used to be famous for singing like Janet Baker, but now she's famous for singing like Jane Irwin. Her performance of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder was so moving that the audience was silent and still for a full ten seconds after the sound of its final bars died, before bursting into inevitable applause. Harper's lean arrangement of Mahler's orchestral score for 8 instruments was intriguing and fresh: less is more.

After the interval, the Hebrides Ensemble played Osborne's Balkan Dances and Laments, which they had recently commissioned. It draws on his interest in folk and popular music from the South Balkans, as well as his rigorous classical training, and features a new method of playing the piano: a string is bowed with horsehair, which sounds gimmicky but was very effective. Sandwiched between Mahler and Berio, Nigel Osborne was in good company, musically speaking, and the audience obviously liked the fact that the composer was not only present, but also shook hands with the performers.

Even better, because husband Keir works with Nigel Osborne through the Tapestry Partnership, we had lunch with him in a nearby restaurant, so I got to ask him the questions that had been building up in my head. The conversation ranged widely over Balkan history, James Joyce, his pioneering work in music therapy for child victims of war, his music school in Austria, the Robert Winston conference in Glasgow in September and a dozen other topics. He speaks about a dozen foreign languages more fluently than I'll ever speak a single one, and if he weren't such a modest chap, I'd almost resent so much musical and linguistic talent in just one person.

After lunch, we went to some Fringe theatre, and finally to On Danse, the most eclectic and athletic dance programme I've ever seen. Montalvo-Hervieu is a blazingly creative Spanish-French partnership, and their company marries creative video animations and multi-talented live dancers in an improbable but brilliant fusion. Hip-hop, classical ballet, break-dancing and trampolining all blend in this choreography, to a background of music by Rameau. The playful computer-based morphing and antics of the animals made us laugh out loud at times, with elephants pirouetting on tightropes and storks doing gymnastics. There was a subtle and surreal interplay between the live dancers and their filmed (naked) selves, via the catwalk, halfway up the massive upstage screen. It was utterly different from any other ballet.

We went to a stunning performance of Monteverdi's Vespers yesterday at the Usher Hall. In a world seemingly obsessed with fleeting fashions and newness, it's heart-warming to find that a work composed almost four centuries ago (1610), performed on authentic period instruments, can speak so strongly and directly to its audience in 2007. Conducted by Jordi Savall, the Catalunyan singers were memorable, the baroque ensemble (La Capella Reial de Catalunya) and surprised us all by performing an encore by Arvo Pärt (2004), movingly introduced by Savall.

Before the concert, waiting in line to buy a programme, we were stunned to recognise the bloke just in front, after he turned round, as Alfred Brendel. Some conversational greeting seemed inevitable. Fortunately we had heard him play the previous evening in this very place, so were not too overawed to mumble something about how much we had enjoyed his concert, only to be told, in his self-deprecating way, that it wasn't a terribly daring programme. (It had been a masterly performance of Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart piano sonatas, plus two Schubert impromptus.) Now you don't want to impose on the world's most famous living pianist, especially not in a programme queue, but we couldn't quite let that pass. Only at the Edinburgh Festival does this kind of encounter take place!

In this Caribbean paradise, it's still a shock to recognise that today is the haunted "9/11", the day when everybody remembers exactly where they were when that first, deeply shocking footage of suicidal aeroplanes ploughing into the Twin Towers was broadcast repeatedly, almost obsessively. We are still finding out all that it means.

For me, it was the day before my first visit to South America, specifically to Peru to hike three Inca Trails in 10 days. So being deprived of cameras and film at Edinburgh airport seemed a major setback (we publish very visual books which need 70+ photos each). EDI wasn't allowing ANY hand baggage, not even one camera. Two weeks later, after needless worry about X-ray fogged film, I was delighted to find that I had plenty of good shots for our Explore the Inca Trail. Six years on, I am (escapist, perhaps) relieved to be away from television, newspapers and anniversary reminiscences. Like the images of floral tributes, I'm not sure that all that stuff helps us to learn, to regroup and to move on.

Before leaving Scotland, I mentioned to a friend the forthcoming diving on St Lucia , and got a weird "Jetta, don't you ever just chill?" kind of reaction. But I've never known such depths of relaxation as when diving. Today's dive featured a large, friendly turtle, maybe one-metre across, on the wreck of the very photogenic Lesleen M at 21 metres depth (and the water so warm I don't need a wet suit). I'm diving with Island Divers, who combine sea-level relaxation with deep-water professionalism: highly recommended. Can there be anything more deeply chilled-out than swimming with a turtle, stroking a turtle, not even trying to keep up with a turtle?

On arrival in St Lucia, my watch battery packed up. Soon after, I noticed that my travel alarm battery had also succumbed. I already knew that my dive computer battery was sinking too low to be viable (so I borrowed a depth gauge from Island Divers). At home, all this time-uncertainty would have driven me demented, but in St Lucia it simply didn't matter. And the village resort Ti Kaye was just wonderful: once you've stayed there, you'll never want to take a shower indoors again!

Last Friday, my Apple laser printer stopped working. No reproaches, I've only hammered it daily since 1989, but since my best friend and computer guru Bob Tennent was due next day, I waited to get his confirmation of its death. On Monday I ordered an Epson (6200N) on next-day delivery and spent Tuesday chasing up why it never reached us: we live in the wilds and I was desperate, with our next Rucksack Reader at a printout-demanding stage. On Wednesday it arrived, and thanks to the simplicity of Mac, it was unpacked, installed and working inside 10 minutes ... and then I became uneasy about the landfill angle.

Having recently installed a new, full cartridge in the old Apple printer, I thought I'd offer it back to the lovely people at Supercharge who have been providing my refills all these years. Bill McCormack sounded kindly, but amused. Seems I'm the last customer they have left using this antiquated printer. Oh well, it was worth asking. Before saying goodbye, however, I mentioned that felt from the fixing roller cleaner had wrapped itself around the roller, could that have caused a problem? Like Bob, he thought that impossible, but said it should work without one. So I tried removing it anyway, reconnected everything and was stunned when it sprang into life again: does this presage another 18 years??

So I phoned Bill again, whom I've never met, but who now seems more like a friend than a supplier. He has promised to send free replacement cleaners, and actually seemed happy about the renaissance. Perhaps he thinks we may go for the Guinness Book of Records. So obviously I'll go on buying cartridge refills from him. And after a slight struggle with temptation, I am keeping the elderly Apple printer and letting my husband have the superlative new Epson. OK, the Apple hasn't got anything like the resolution, but for long-service it surely deserves some loyalty. How many Windows users can be using the same printer as 18 years ago?

So my printer is not dead, but resurrected, and recycling has paid off with a knowledge of its innards that I woudn't otherwise have gained. And as for saving the printer after experts thought it was fit only for landfill, I am astounded, but I rejoice.

Today I am 60 years old, and proud of it. It's a pleasingly round number, I'm lucky enough still to have my own teeth, robust good health and at least most of my faculties. And my whole family and four of my closest friends are joining me for a celebration lunch at the Sheriffmuir Inn, my favourite watering-hole near the site of the battle. It's a pub I've been walking to with dogs for over ten years, and we'll walk both ways today.

I don't, however, feel a day older and am getting fed up with the way officialdom has started to talk to me as if all pensioners are doddering, pathetic or faintly imbecile. TransportScotland tells you its bus pass is for "older and disabled people": older than whom? And don't they mean "or" and not "and"? Various letters have been arriving from schemes into which I paid trivial sums many decades ago (having turned self-employed when I was 30) demanding obscure choices to be made, screeching "you are retiring in X days": wrong, I'm not. Actually I've no intention of retiring now, nor in 5 years' time, nor perhaps at all unless my health breaks down. My father finalised his last book when he was 95 years old, and I'm enormously proud of that.

I really love my job, and as long as people go on using our guidebooks I intend to continue publishing them. I suppose I ought to apply for the bus pass and I shall definitely spend any "pension" windfalls (probably on diving kit or a new digital camera). But please, no more talk of retirement as if it's axiomatic. I'm off to Ireland tomorrow to check out changes to the Wicklow Way, one of several new titles we'll be announcing this year: much more fun than retiring. Rant over!

Well, Sunday 24th February was the most brilliant birthday ever: helium balloons, banners, presents, champagne, cake and singing, even a flashing badge (!) - but above all about eight of my closest family and friends making a ridiculous fuss of me. Totally undeserved, but perhaps once in 60 years the delight is somewhat excusable? I was particularly pleased to be able to inhale the helium from the balloons so as to hear the very silly high-pitched voice that results. Must find out how to upload MP3s to this blog so you can share this giggle.

My wonderful son gave me the most generous presents: an iPod shuffle, which I had no idea I wanted but now realise that I can't live without, and a voucher for an hour-long microlight flight. Having reached an age when I am much more interested in collecting experiences than belongings, I can really appreciate what Experience Ecosse, his gift voucher website, has to offer. My resourceful daughter and amazing grand-daughter gave me thoughtful, personal and feminine presents. And my endlessly creative husband has given me a voucher for a Mystery Trip in late March: so far I don't even know which continent, only the dates ... more idc. But I'm hoping that the stunning book of David Doubilet photos is a hint that there'll be some diving ...

And the following Sunday, when I didn't think it could get any better, there was this truly wonderful party for grand-daughter Amy's second birthday. About 7 toddlers and 11 assorted adults all gathered in daughter Helen's flat, and had a ball for a couple of hours. Despite what they say about the Terrible Twos there were surprisingly few tears or tantrums, and we all enjoyed it thoroughly. I'll never forget Amy blowing out the candle on Sheila's and Celia's incredible birthday cake:

Tomorrow I'm off to the Independent Publishers Guild conference in Brighton, which usually makes me feel more like a publisher again. Hope it still works this year!

Yesterday I went to Glasgow for the second day of the Tapestry Partnership event Learning and teaching and all that jazz. I had heard great things about the day before, when Nigel Osborne had masterminded the performance of 1000 Scottish primary children with Beats from Brazil and the Tapestry Jazz Radio Orchestra. But on Friday, I had two incentives: one was to hear Jerome Bruner, whose thinking I have admired for 40 years, and the other was a dinner in his honour at the Hotel du Vin (1, Devonshire Gardens).

In 1969 while studying for a Master in Education at Glasgow University, I first heard the Bruner hypothesis, that

Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

This bold claim has been the subject of ill-informed ridicule by people who think it's obvious that you can't teach calculus to a young child. But a very young child on a swing can experience acceleration and slowing-down, and may feel how the rate of change varies at different parts of the arc ... If so, he or she is well on the way toward an enactive understanding of calculus. Combined with Bruner's powerful notion of the spiral curriculum, in which children revisit subjects while moving from enactive to iconic to symbolic levels, this challenges the lamentable dumbing-down which results from underestimating what and how children can learn.

It was a pleasant surprise to hear that a man who had risen to fame in the post-Sputnik era was still alive, let alone able to travel to Glasgow and perform in public. Yesterday he held 800 teachers and others spellbound. He was not merely "amazing for a man in his 93rd year", he was simply amazing. Lucid, articulate and able to draw on a long, rich lifetime of experience, this was no routine lecture. Bruner (unlike many other Tapestry lecturers) had found out a great deal about Scottish education, had related his message to the Curriculum for Excellence and was confident enough to depart from his script. He had that remarkable knack of engaging with his audience, who rewarded him with a well-earned (but unprecedented) standing ovation.

And over dinner, I was lucky enough to be in conversation with this erudite, modest and charming man. I made the most of it. Here was my chance to ask about his journey from Harvard to take up his Chair at Oxford: he had skippered his 42-foot yacht across the Atlantic to take up this post, as you do, he explained, because shifting it by other means would have cost a silly price! He seemed to be enjoying his stay in Glasgow, having gone to Nigel Osborne's opera Differences in Demolitions the previous night, and fitted in a visit to Kelvingrove Art Gallery that afternoon. He kindly signed my copy of The Process of Education. This highly collectable book will never be up for auction on eBay, at least not in my lifetime!

Yesterday evening we went to the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh for a most remarkable event: a concert in honour of Nigel Osborne's 60th birthday. Nigel is a man of such all-embracing talent that it's easy to forget what an exceptional musician he is. After being a concert violinist, he became a renowned composer and pioneer in music as healing in war-torn countries. The people who had turned out to celebrate included the Hebrides Ensemble, the Edinburgh Quartet, members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Mostar SInfonietta. And the compere was no less than the incredibly witty Richard Stilgoe, with poems and anagrams for the occasion. He even had the whole audience singing in canon (in Serbo-Croat, obviously) just to cover the scene-changes.

It's a measure of Nigel's popularity that the event seemed to be organised largely by his students, notably Clea Friend. Seven of his students had each composed one-minute pieces specially for Nigel, so this was their "world-premier" - with the Edinburgh Quartet. What a refreshing diversity there was among them, the hallmark of a great teacher. For me, a lapsed oboist, the highlight was the stunning performance by Nicholas Daniel of Nigel's amazing oboe concerto, a work apparently delivered about 10 years after it was commissioned, but was certainly worth the wait. And what a huge treat to hear the aria from Nigel's latest opera, Differences in Demolitions. Michael Popper performed an extraordinarily moving dance (to Bach/Busoni) without ever moving his feet and Ruaraidh, Nigel's young son, played piano and guitar for his dad.

The formal part ended with Sevdah songs from Teo Krilic and friends, with lots of audience participation and scarcely a dry eye in the house. The party afterwards probably went on all night, but Keir and I had to come away, returning to Dunblane inspired and humbled by all that talent. Respect, Nigel, and remember that life begins at 60 ... from one who knows!

Yesterday was our 40th wedding anniversary. Despite marriage being not much in fashion these days, I'm rather proud of 40 years of it - and all to the same man! Keir Bloomer is remarkable in so many ways, and although officially now retired, he is very active as Chairman of Tapestry and still a leading light on the Scottish educational scene. He's come a long way since the idealistic 20-year old student who married me on the last day of our last term at Cambridge University. I'm glad to say he is still idealistic, in a good way. And over 40 years of being seldom apart, he has always been, and ever will be, my best friend, as well as cherished husband. I believe we have helped each other to be true to ourselves, to keep on growing, questioning and exploring.

Our dearest friends Celia and Sheila had laid on a wonderful barbecue in their beautiful garden near Loch Lomond to help us to celebrate. Food and drink taste so much better in the outdoors, especially surrounded by family and close friends in a beautiful setting:

Daughter Helen had her camera along and captured the lovely flowers we'd just been given. Grand-daughter Amy was there too, capturing hearts, minds and limelight. Her Uncle Sandy is brilliant with her: it's a pleasure just to watch them interacting. And our dear dog Bramble was included, so the whole family was together: what a lovely day we had.

Just back from Edinburgh airport after a wonderfully long weekend in Tuscany. Based in the lovely Casa del Sole, Camaiore, this was a chance to see Italy afresh through the eyes of two-year-old grand-daughter Amy and daughter Helen. Keir and I (Il nono and La nona) enjoyed a different perspective. Yes we went to the Piazza dei Miracoli, Pisa, but we also visited the Pinocchio Park (and the superb gardens of the Villa Ganzoni also in Collodi), the zoo at Pistoia, the play park in Camaiore and cycled around the walls of Lucca pulling Amy in her chariot. Considering that Keir was about the only person I knew at Cambridge who couldn't manage a bicycle, I thought it was remarkable that we all survived the Lucca walls without injury, and although the puddles spattered poor Amy she didn’t seem to mind at all. We all climbed to the very top of La Rocca in San Miniato for a great view over the town.

The only downside of all this is that I have to leave home tomorrow morning at 0415 for my return trip to Kili. Were it not for the necessity of swapping Italian holiday clothes for high-altitude trek gear, it's barely worth returning to Landrick from Edinburgh airport. The trouble is that all that pasta and vino rosso has added to the task, and there was really no chance to do any training … I’ve always believed (hoped?) that the most important organ for trekking at altitude is your brain (rather than heart, lungs or legs) but I hadn’t expected to have to put this theory to such a severe test! The Lemosho route I’m trying this time at least has a long approach, but it joins the strenuous, scrambling Machame route. Although I’ve done Machame before, at the time I was an important 8 years younger, several kilos lighter in weight and much fitter. Still, if this ill-prepared pensioner can summit once more, it will prove that anybody can.

So I have no small misgivings, despite the usual pleasant sense of anticipation of any long-haul adventure. I love Tanzania, I am still fascinated by the world’s highest free-standing mountain, and I’m hoping to bring back many and much better photos. I’m taking my new Leica-lensed digital camera and hoping that I’m far enough up its learning curve to dodge many of the mistakes I’ve made before. I look back with embarrassment to my 1999 attempts, taken with a borrowed APS camera(!) This pre-dated the formation of Rucksack Readers and was chosen purely because it was very light, at a time when I was most uncertain if I could carry weight at altitude!

Contrary to what many folk think I'm not actually interested in computers, only in what they empower you to do. (I programmed my first mainframe computer over 45 years ago.) I seldom upgrade unless forced to, and I am still devoted to my eerily silent Apple Cube despite its great age (virtually "last century"). Above all, I am still running not only my business but also all domestic, personal, family and other contacts using a wonderful HyperCard stack that my guru Bob Tennent and I developed in 1989! HyperCard was fast, friendly, flexible and (perhaps fatally) free. It was easy to adapt to developing needs and I simply can't imagine life without it.

Sadly, although Apple has kept faith with its legacy users who can run HyperCard in a window under the obsolete OS9, successive upgrades have been less and less compatible with keeping my wonder stack updated, and no new Mac can run it at all. My Cube is groaning under its workload and has slowed to a point where I notice delays. I saw this coming, and actually bought HyperCard's modern descendant SuperCard a few years ago. And then I postponed and procrastinated ... SuperCard is fundamentally different, a more powerful piece of software, slightly scary. Despite being about 95% compatible with HyperCard, I was worried about the other 5%. Normally 95% of a programmer's effort goes into fixing the last 5%. No longer a spring chicken, I funked the idea of having my life and my business paralysed by inability to debug unfamiliar code. It was, after all, nearly 20 years since I had been competent at HyperTalk coding ... and my LaserWriter which also dates from that era is still going strong!

Fortunately, SuperCard has three enormous assets, beyond the fact that it works with modern Macs. First is a HyperCard conversion utility which (to my enormous relief) took my stack (now with nearly 9000 records) and converted it into a 95% usable SuperCard project. Second, there's a wonderful user group where my "seeking help" message (concerned with the other 5%) has already provided 47 response messages from SuperCard developers who are really generous with their time and expertise. Third is John Johnston, user group member and teacher at Sandaig Primary School in Easterhouse, Glasgow. He has already helped me loads by email, and I haven't even met him yet. Look at the pupils' blogs, podcasts and projects on his school's amazing website. The result is that despite a hair-raising week since I converted, some scary "Bad Star" messages and a lot of messing with code (SuperTalk, AppleScript et al), I now have a working project which is very nearly as useful as the previous stack and not all that much slower.

Whilst I appreciate Danny Goodman's altruism in insisting that HyperCard be free of charge, had it been sold even at a sensible price, I bet it would still be alive and well and available on modern Macs, thereby saving all of us who loved it the pain of switching to SuperCard. Just a thought about market forces.

I returned yesterday from a magical few days in Cowal, the peninsula that reaches down like a crab claw around the Island of Bute in the Firth of Clyde. Having published books on long-distance walks in both Kintyre to its south-west and the Arran to its south, I'd been thinking it would be logical to publish a Rucksack Reader to the Cowal Way, a long walk devised by Jim McLuckie of the Colintraive and Glendaruel Community Council. I was encouraged in this idea when one of its Committee members approached me in Campbeltown over a year ago, saying that stocks of their own guidebook had run out. Published in 2001 with Lottery funding, that book was written by John Fisher, and always seemed readily available in Cowal but almost unobtainable outside. That isn't my view of how to bring in visting walkers, with their sterling, dollars and euros, to an area rich in scenery and wildlife.

The 2-hour drive to Ormidale (where we met in Jim McLuckie's lovely house) was extremely scenic, passing three large lochs (Lomond, Long and Fyne). The meeting was most enjoyable: longer, and with more laughter, than I could have hoped for: thanks, Jim, Michael and Annie. It would be lovely to think it might lead to a guidebook.

Anyway it made a good excuse to stay with my dear friends Bob and Di Tennent in Blairmore, from Ormidale only half an hour's drive easterly. And despite a fairly dire forecast on Wednesday, we had an amazing sail in a Freedom 21 around the Holy Loch and down the Clyde to Kip next day. The breeze was at least Force 4/5 and although the photo below is of the right boat, it's one that Bob took earlier this year. I should explain that we weren't actually flying the spinnaker for the good reason that there was too much wind: we were surfing at up to 7.3 knots even with the mainsail reefed! It's a long time since I've felt such sheer exhilaration and it was deeply refreshing.

On Thursday I headed for Glasgow, mainly to meet John Johnston for lunch at the Ubiquitous Chip. John has become my SuperCard guru and was kind enough to fix a few problems on my laptop after lunch. It's wonderful watching a skilled programmer at work, even better when he is solving problems for you, and SuperCard's trace facility is very slick. John teaches at Sandaig Primary when he isn't writing creative SuperCard software such as Rommy Robot (see his blog) and rescuing folk like me who are out of their depths. After our email exchanges in July, it was great to meet this amazing former zoo keeper and enjoy a civilised lunch. Endearingly, it turns out he's a little absent-minded, to the extent that he told me if you withdraw cash from an ATM machine but walk away instead of collecting your cash, the machine takes it back and credits your account! (This presupposes that somebody else doesn't lift it meantime, so is not recommended.) This was just one of many things I learned today:)

And, returning to Dunblane yesterday afternoon, I couldn't believe I'd been away for only two nights. It always seems as if you've been away for longer when a ferry is involved.

My 26 July post was about my recent efforts to achieve HyperCard/SuperCard migration. The payoff was being ready to order a new Mac. My trusty Cube had been grinding slowly, overtaken by "progress", and my online publishing business needs five applications open just to process an order, up to ten if I'm editing, choosing images or reviewing page design. Since it's nearly seven years since my last upgrade, I jumped without hesitation to the best current iMac: gorgeous 24-inch screen with blistering fast (over 3GHz) dual processors and plenty of memory. Best of all, it took under five minutes to unpack, plug in its single power lead and get it surfing the web fast and gracefully. I enjoyed small details such as well-designed packaging, and the way the remote control works straight away and intuitively, just like an iPod. Here's hoping this will suffice for the next seven years!

And, had my Cube been unmodified, I expect that Apple's brilliant Migration Assistant – software that lets you transfer your data, preferences and settings from one Mac to another – would have made the next bit painless. Sadly, all attempts to get the Cube to start up in "target" mode failed, so Migration never began. Best friend and guru Bob Tennent managed to troubleshoot this: it's a side-effect of the Cube's retro-fitted non-Apple optical drive. We tried using Airport (wireless network) instead of Firewire, but that failed: you can't even instal Leopard (System 10.5) on a Cube so as to use its two-way Migration Assistant. Deep sigh, but there's no gain without pain, especially where computers are involved. I spent the next few hours reinstalling software, importing bookmarks and retrieving passwords, product keys and settings. Without my wonderful SuperCard project (which contains everything I needed, and much more) I couldn't have done it nearly so fast, and maybe I would have lost my reason ... so converting from HyperCard first was deffo the way to go!

All the data files from the external hard drive came across fine. I rejected Time Machine's kind invitation to back up automatically, fearing that this might have replaced all my precious ex-Cube data with the iMac's minimal data. Remembering the bad old days of MS-DOS (which expected you to know syntax in order to back files up in the intended direction) I'd rather make such decisions manually.

Right now, less than 24 hours after the box was delivered, nearly all applications have been reinstalled and nearly all peripherals are working fine. Downsides (so far) are that AppleWorks 6 won't run any more, and my 19-year old LaserWriter is unable to print: maybe the iMac thinks it's too last-century and won't talk to it? Or maybe guru Bob will talk me through the solution tonight. It was after midnight when I finally sorted the Entourage database and frankly, some Dutch courage had been taken in the meantime: sleep beckoned, so I left it overnight, downloading its updates.

Best of all, all orders have been handled and no customer (unless they happen to read this blog) will be aware of any disruption. And husband Keir, who was in Oban overnight (just as well, for all the attention I'd have paid him:), will return to find my 22-inch screen attached to his Cube, where it will give his PowerPoints more room to breathe.

I've just had a jaw-dropping experience: looking out of the window, I saw an otter ... a large, sleek, dog otter. It was only about 10 yards from the house, running across our driveway, where it met a fence and crossed again – in which instant I managed to attract Keir's attention so he saw it too. We haven't seen it since, but think he must have trotted in through the front gate, and presumably that's the only way he can leave because of our perimeter fence. Otters are my favourite creatures, and previously I've seen them in the wild only from a distance, and only twice before in Scotland (on the River Endrick and on Arran). So I was astounded to find one visiting our garden.

Landrick has the most amazing wildlife. We have a resident heron, known as Harry, who thrives on the fish in the pond, but also sometimes takes frogs and field mice. Roe deer are frequent visitors to the garden: unlike the otter they can easily jump the fence. We see brown hare and buzzard often, and stoat occasionally. We have had oystercatchers nesting in the garden, this year successfully thanks to my improvised shelter which kept the crows off. And a mute swan dropped in for a few days last year.

This year, unlike last when 12 ducklings all perished in their first few days, the ducklings have been a huge success: they were launched later, at the very end of June (instead of April) and their mother has been a total control freak, keeping them close and protecting them overnight by letting all 10 huddle beneath her. While out of line with infant-centred views about little ones choosing for themselves, this has the enormous advantage of having kept the little darlings alive. I wholly approve of this feisty mama, especially when she attacked me (I had picked up a duckling to let grand-daughter Amy stroke its superb down).

For weeks, I didn't even dare blog about them, in case I was tempting Providence, but now they are six weeks old and fledging, they are viable and have as good a chance as any. So here is our feisty mama, leading her offspring in closely controlled formation, with a larger close-up beneath: gorgeous or what?

I went to the Edinburgh Book Festival today, to hear one of my favourite novelists, David Lodge. He spoke mainly about his latest novel Deaf Sentence, but anyway I'd never heard him live before, and for me it's authors that bring books alive. His book explores the theme of loss of various kinds – of hearing, of his father, of youth, of retiring from employment. He skilfully exploits the comic potential of deafness via double entendre, pun and misunderstanding, acting out the premise that deafness is comic, whereas blindness is tragic.

He has hearing loss himself, but there isn't an ounce of self-pity either in his book or in his talk. With refreshing lack of political correctness, he describes himself as a "deafie". He also appreciates the point that my father demonstrated at age 95: being a writer is one of the few professions that can't forcibly make you retire. Let the market decide!

The EBF Main Theatre was packed to capacity to hear this charismatic writer read an edited version of the first couple of chapters. We all laughed a lot. In a few cases the laughter was delayed, and I realised that an unusual proportion of this audience themselves had hearing loss. The missing link was a skilful, sensitive sign language expert who somehow kept up with Lodge's dazzling stream of words. Indeed her hour-long performance was in many ways as impressive as his.

How on earth do you represent post-modernism, campus novels and linguistics (to pick three examples at random) using only hands, face and body language? And how did she manage to keep up that data rate for a full hour? Lodge is fiercely intelligent, articulate and deals in abstractions. He pulls no intellectual punches, and nor does Desmond Bates, former Professor of Linguistics and hero of his novel.

Question time was interesting: Lodge's hearing was clearly adequate to fielding questions, thanks to excellent microphones and acoustics. I had wondered if he would turn to the signer for "translation" but no, she just went on translating and it was fascinating to see how her body language independently echoed his, sometimes improving on it, although neither was watching the other. The whole event was truly captivating.

And afterward, my son Sandy took me to lunch at the Tiger Lily and I enjoyed catching up with his life a bit. He's in the process of hiring a PA to help with Experience Ecosse, his gift voucher company. Knowing how much a really good PA has helped me over the last 15 years, I deeply hope that he makes the right appointment. And having had a couple of amazing experiences thanks to his vouchers, I certainly hope that his company prospers.

I’m delighted to report that the dust has settled on my computer upgrade, and I’m back to using the machine as a tool rather than diverting energy into installing software, troubleshooting and choosing hardware. My SuperCard project is running sweetly on the new iMac and although it doesn’t try to exploit most of the new SC features, it does the job smoothly, and I can expand its functionality as I go along. And I have never seen photographs look as stunning as on its glossy 24-inch screen.

The problem with using my ancient laser printer was looking intractable with System 10.5 (Leopard), possibly related to its AppleTalk connection. Having swapped it with the new Epson printer (which I had given to husband Keir, see blog entry of 21.11.2007) for diagnostic purposes, I had the happy idea of making the swap permanent. Since husband Keir is not about to upgrade from 10.4 any time soon, Leopard gives me a good reason to retrieve the better printer! How ironic that a piece of machinery which has given 19 years' reliable service is now on borrowed time for reasons of software "progress"!

The AppleWorks problem has been solved, also in an unorthodox way. My own, legally purchased and upgraded AppleWorks CD had refused point-blank to instal under Leopard. Considering that all our invoices and many book manuscripts are in Appleworks, this was a major setback. The solution was a kind friend who emailed me his AppleWorks to try. Despite having the same version number (6.2.9) as mine, this one works a treat under Leopard. So all my recent concern about Microsoft Office 2008 and downloading a trial version of iWorks Pages was needless. I realise AppleWorks is no longer maintained, but feel I’ve done enough innovating recently and my motto remains “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.”. The time to change word processing systems is not now.

We woke up early, to catch an the 7.07 train from Dunblane to King’s Cross for niece Saskia’s wedding in Dulwich. Thanks to the train's slightly flaky wi-fi I am able to blog the sensational reappearance of the otter at Landrick only hours after it happened. At 0545, Keir came upstairs, breathlessly announcing that the otter was back, and devouring something on the pond. We hadn’t seen him for 9 days, so this was a welcome sighting … until we realised that what Keir thought was a large fish was actually the remains of our goose.

Jack had lived happily at Landrick since 1994, when we purchased her from Auchingarrich in the belief she was a gander. At the time we were seeking a breeding partner for our resident gander, who at the time we thought was a goose called Jean. She seemed lonely and the children were keen on goslings. The first time they mated, the gender double muddle became clear: in the words of daughter Helen (then 9 years old) “they’re doing it upside down”.

Sadly Jean (the gander) died the following year and we had lost faith in the supplier’s ability to sex a gander reliably so didn’t replace him. Year after year, Jack produced a dozen or more eggs, sat on them faithfully for weeks, fiercely defending her nest from anything that came close, and losing a great deal of body weight. Annually we used to break up her nest and dispose of the addled eggs, fearing she might die of starvation brought on by excessive and wholly misplaced maternal devotion.

The violent demise of the family's pet goose was both shocking and sad, though perhaps less painful than watching her declining or dementing or whatever happens to elderly geese. Welcome though the otter’s visit had been, we had naively imagined it would feed on fish and frogs. Having such a fierce carnivore in the garden is slightly worrying. All ducks and ducklings have disappeared, and since we haven’t seen any corpses we hope that means they’ve moved away, as opposed to been eaten.

Postscript: it was dark when we got back on Sunday, so my first job on Monday morning was to recover her corpse and give her a decent burial. I felt I had to photograph the corpse first, as so many people had been disbelieving about the otter's ability to kill an adult goose. Since all we saw was the otter feasting on dead goose in the middle of the pond, in theory it might not have been the actual predator. But otters are not supposed to eat carrion, and it seems far too great a coincidence.

Set back by yesterday’s train running 50 minutes late, after undue anxiety we finally made it to Dulwich College Library with ten minutes to spare before the marriage! The service included wonderful readings from Ovid's The Art of Love (my sister Lindsay, Saskia’s mother), Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat (Giselle, Trewin’s daughter) and Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s The Gift from the Sea (Saskia’s friend Sarah). Saskia was a truly radiant bride, and my three other nieces (Olivia, Helena and Rosie) were cheery and stunning as bridesmaids. I’ll add some unofficial photographs after I get home: this blog comes straight from the train.

We walked back to champagne and canapés in Lin and Nick’s magnificent garden, where 96 guests later sat down to a superb meal featuring organic lamb, in an enormous marquee. Drink flowed very freely, the dance floor was well used but not too crowded and it was the happiest, least formal wedding I’ve attended. Speeches were made by Saskia, as well as Trewin, best man Dave, the bridesmaids and bride’s father Nick, the latter clearly unscripted, inebriated and, as ever, very articulate and entertaining. After a dubious moment when Nick seemed in danger of going over the edge, he drew back from the brink just in time: brilliant.

We were in Dulwich for a total of 22 hours, at the price of over 16 hours on trains or in transit, and although that ratio was far from ideal, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. The fact I had totally lost my voice to an unseasonal throat infection was a bit frustrating, but it led to some interesting conversations, necessarily one-sided. Several guests worked at Global Action Plan, an environmental charity that Trewin set up in 1993, long before sustainable development had become trendy. It now employs 50 staff on a wide range of projects aimed at home, school and workplace.

And I really enjoyed my chat with Helena’s boyfriend, Henry Hemming. His father, John Hemming, wrote the definitive Conquest of the Incas which was important to me when researching our Explore the Inca Trail. Henry has clearly inherited his father's writing talent and appetite for adventurous travel. He works both as artist and writer, and was talking about his latest book, In Search of the English Eccentric.

Saskia and Trewin already have established a lovely home together in Clapham. Perhaps that’s why they had requested no presents, instead asking guests to email a recipe and a photograph. We complied, slightly puzzled, and months later were thrilled to find all recipes anthologised into a smart, spiral-bound book with recipes attributed and displayed alongside the photos. What a generous and imaginative souvenir to give your guests!

A blog is the wrong medium for a photo gallery, but it may be a few weeks before the official photos are available so I'm uploading a few meantime for family and friends. Yesterday's entry gives the context. First, here are bride and groom, Saskia and Trewin, relaxing in the garden after the service:

The rest were taken later, inside the marquee, first Helena and Henry over dinner:

The bride's sisters, from left to right Olivia, Rosie and Helena making their wonderful speech:

And finally, late at night, here's my gorgeous sister Lindsay dancing with my fit nephew Seb:

We've spent the last three evenings at the Usher Hall for Edinburgh Festival concerts. Tuesday's had Brahms' Requiem as its second half, a work I first sang 45 years ago, and which I know and love from various perspectives, having sung it first as soprano, then as alto and once, to help out in rehearsal, even as "tenor". I also played the oboe line long ago. The Monteverdi Choir were absolutely wonderful, powerful despite their modest numbers, and a younger, more distinctive sound than a large chorus can produce.

However, Wednesday's event was a tribute to age and experience. After the Scottish Chamber Orchestra had romped through Mozart's evergreen 40th symphony, Alfred Brendel played Mozart's Piano Concerto 24. This was a masterly, moving performance, especially the wonderful larghetto which he made sound disarmingly simple. Brendel, of course, is a mere 77 years but is anticipating retirement just after his extended series of farewell concerts. Conductor Charles Mackerras, at nearly 83, made Brendel look young, but you don't need anything like the fine motor control (nor such feats of memorisation of scores) to go on conducting in old age as to continue playing at Brendel's level. Anyway, this was Mackerras' 56th Festival, and at the end of his standing ovation, Director Jonathan Mills announced Mackerras' appointment as its Honorary President - a post vacant since the death of Yehudi Menuhin in 1999.

And on Thursday, Brendel made his final farewell recital to the Festival audience. His programme returned to his classical repertoire with masterly performances of works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert - the same composers as we heard him play here a year ago, when he described them modestly as "not a terribly daring" selection. This time, we all clapped until our hands were sore, and he rewarded us with no less than three encores. The standing ovation was prolonged and emotional. Nobody present will quickly forget the 21st August, 2008.

Today was our last day at the Edinburgh Festival, overshadowed by yesterday's extraordinary protest at the Queen's Hall. It is difficult to imagine a more peace-loving, well-behaved audience than that which frequents the Festival's finest chamber music. Most of us not only were polite to the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign demonstrators on the pavement, but also took and read their handbills, afterwards submitting cheerfully to the unprecedented bag search on our way in to the concert.

By the time the performance of Haydn and Smetana by this talented and delightful young quartet had been disrupted by loud, ignorant shouting not once, but five times over, systematically, we were all feeling a lot less tolerant. The accusations of "Gaza genocide", "Israeli army musicians" and worse were wholly misplaced. Good grief, would Barenboim have lent his dear dead wife's cello to Zlotnikov if he didn't approve of the cellist both personally and politically? And with two quartet members also belonging to the Arab-Israeli West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, what possible purpose did it serve to shout abuse and spoil the concert for 900 music-lovers who had paid to hear this wonderful, but uncontroversial, programme of classical music?

Since the protesters had bought seats scattered about the hall, the authorities were powerless to know where the next outbreak would come from. Indeed members of the audience started looking sideways at the stranger sitting next to them, wondering if it was safe to continue listening. The event security staff had to manhandle the protesters in order to eject them, so elderly concert-goers had to clear the row to avoid being injured in the fracas. The audience demonstrated its hostility to the protest with slow handclaps and shouts of "get them out", but the noise and disruption still meant that the quartet had to leave the platform each time a protest surfaced. Fortunately they resumed thereafter, apparently undaunted, with unruffled professionalism, so we heard most of the Haydn and Smetana twice: great value!

We also had the benefit of impromptu speeches from the viola player, and from Jonathan Mills, who reminded us that the Festival's theme was "Artists without borders" and pointed out that they had hosted performers from Iran and Palestine, as well as Israel. Alas, the appeal against interruptions went unheeded until the second half, when we heard the Brahms in blissful peace.

The audience demonstrated their whole-hearted support by sitting out the concert (which lasted nearly three hours) and closing with a standing ovation. I've never witnessed such a thing at the Queen's before, and it showed how much damage the misplaced SPSC protest did to their cause. We were rewarded with an encore of the wonderful slow movement of Borodin's first String Quartet.

I went to a wonderful lecture in Stirling yesterday. It was at the Stirling Smith, which is currently hosting ten Leonardo drawings from the Royal collection, and has an associated series of lunchtime lectures on Wednesdays until 31 October. If they can even approach the standard of yesterday's, it will be a truly remarkable series.

The speaker was John Reid, a Consultant Radiologist and a bit of a Renaissance man himself. He ranged widely over paintings, anatomy, astronomy and the physics of recent medical advances in imaging, with a talk supported by stunning visuals – without a note or script in sight. Articulate, interesting and professional, he even worked in a reference to Big Bang Day!

From X-rays to MRI, his exposition of the incredible advances in technique left us all the more bemused by how Leonardo managed such detailed, accurate and incisive drawings 500 years ago. His Vitruvian Man of 1487 embodies the mathematical proportions of Vitruvius in astonishing details. And I shan't forget Reid's movie of the human heart demonstrating its pumping through the mitral and tricuspid valves – with full three dimensional realism – for a very long time. It was superlative.

It’s lucky that the PowerBook keyboard is near-silent, because I’m typing this in the same room that grand-daughter Amy is sleeping. She has had an exciting day, with no nap, lots of exercise, games with two large black Labradors, sociability and a swim. She wore the Polyotter today, a swimsuit with removable body floats, and it was her longest, and most independent swim so far. Then we visited neighbours and dear friends Malcolm and Aileen, which was a brilliant distraction from the fact that her mother was going out for the evening for a well-deserved break and her grand-father Keir was going to Glasgow for a concert to celebrate Nigel Osborne’s 60th birthday. We walked back up the hill in near-darkness (Amy in the buggy by now) and had the loveliest bath with bubbles. Before I had finished reading Jill Lambert’s wonderful “Peace at last” to her, she was already asleep.

Much as I would like to have gone to Nigel’s concert, fielding Amy was more compelling. (I’ve just found out that it will be broadcast by the BBC on Saturday 25 October, 22.30 to midnight, which is great news as he sang a cameo role in one of the opera selections and I’ve never heard Nigel sing before.) I feel absurdly proud of Amy’s water confidence, and her insistence ‘I can do it by myself’. This is approximately true when she’s wearing the Polyotter but doomed to failure when, as so often, she asks to come back in the water, after I had thought she was finished, without a stitch on. But she will get there, as long as she goes on enjoying it. She has the most wonderful social confidence, a real tribute to her mother’s patience and child-centredness. But she fell asleep before 8.30 pm and I needed to occupy myself for the evening.

Real work is now out of the question: the office is too far away to be in earshot, and neither music nor TV are compatible with monitoring her welfare. So this is the ideal moment to update my blog, which at least has proved useful to me when I forget things (which has become increasingly often lately). I’m wildly unreliable about update frequency but have decided just to accept my own faults and forgive them. If I blogged about some of the exciting things I’ve done recently, I might never be able to make myself write the book. My time in June on Kili by the Lemosho route is an example: I just have to keep my powder dry or the book would never be written.

Today we are off on a mystery trip. It's only a mystery to husband Keir, who officially doesn't know where we're going. I booked it a few months ago: no mystery for me! Sadly, the combination of anti-malarials, time of year and flight times must have given away the fact that we are going to southern Africa. It remains to emerge whether he has guessed the Mozambique bit (Benguerra Island). Since both my experiences of diving earlier this year have been muted, at best, he has probably guessed I'm keen to go somewhere coastal as well. The books I'll give him at Heathrow will certainly tell all: one on the Kruger and the other on Mozambique, where he can relax and bird-spot and I shall dive (weather permitting).

I've got a name for the pre-departure tailspin that precedes any holiday, but I never seem to get any better at managing or preventing it. In just over an hour we are off, and I had barely time to write this. Although I wrapped up the massive task of page-making our forthcoming Everest book yesterday, that meant leaving packing until today. And this morning I couldn't find my favourite camera, the excellent Panasonic Lumix with an 18x zoom. OK, I'll fess up to having other cameras (2 other digitals and I won't admit how many film-based) but this is THE safari camera. And until I found it, I couldn't start charging its batteries, which takes simply hours ... hence I'm sitting in my office waiting for the light to go off: ridiculous! Actually the combination of dive kit, underwater housing (for the other digicam) and so forth makes for a surprising number of batteries, chargers, adaptors et al, not to mention the wonderful obsolete dive computers.

Time to go now (EDI then LHR then Johannesburg), this entry filed just after mid-day but I'll schedule it ahead (for once) so Keir doesn't read it before we go.

We've just been staying at the Savanna Lodge. I had been sceptical of its website claim "the ultimate safari experience", but I was wrong, it's all true. The Savanna Lodge staff are passionate, dedicated and skilful, and the whole day is geared to maximising your chances of game viewing in the Sabi Sand Game Reserve (which borders the Kruger). The morning game drive leaves at 0530, with breakfast served on return. Lunch is at 1530 followed by the evening game drive. (Between the two you can sleep, swim, chill or whatever.) Guests are assigned to a 2-man team which takes you on game drives in vehicles with no sides or canopy. Sitting thus exposed, within a few yards of elephant, lion or leopard, really does feel like the ultimate safari experience.

Keir and I were assigned to ranger Shaune and tracker Nordic – a long-term partnership in which communication was mainly wordless. They had an uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time, each depending on each other's skills not only for successful sightings, but also for safety. They read the animal's body language, approach only when the animals are calm, often positioning the vehicle (engine always switched off) so that the animals approach it. Thus we found ourselves amidst a herd of 40-50 elephants, including very young ones and the matriarch, calmly feeding and walking past us, at one point only inches away. Here is one of the many photos I took (telephoto lens unnecessary:):

Elephant, rhino and lion were plentiful and most drives gave us close sightings of these and more. Rhino were even grazing quietly outside our cabin on the day we arrived, although I captured the one below at a water-hole, late afternoon. Shortly after, we saw these two lions near a kill, and they were so relaxed that they resumed mating. Apparently they do this every 15-30 minutes for as long as the lioness is in oestrus – only yards from the vehicle. I felt slightly voyeuristic at first, then just awe-struck.

But the most thrilling sight of all was leopard. Solitary, stealthy and secretive, it's the most elusive of all carnivores. We followed this female as she stalked and killed a baby kudu. The chase was literally breath-taking and the experience utterly unforgettable.

We really enjoyed the excellent Savanna Lodge food and drink: game drives always stop for a sundowner, and unlike many "inclusive" resorts, this one charges nothing for extras, whether drinks, laundry or bathtime luxuries (e.g. lavender oil in a quail's egg). They even give you a blank CD on which to burn your photographs!

Wednesday was my first day of diving here at Marlin Lodge, and it was sensational. Within the first five minutes, I found myself staring at this weird-looking mammal:

The fact there were a couple of sharks nearby was strictly a side-show. Dugongs are a threatened species, so rare that divemaster Paul had never seen one on a dive before despite 10 years of diving almost daily in these waters. There's a total of about 40 animals in this part of the Indian Ocean, and it's the icon of their Marine National Park. If I hadn't seen manatees in Florida before, I would have thought I was hallucinating. I found out about the dugong only after I saw it.

Dugongs (and manatees) are also known as sea cows, perhaps because they graze on underwater grasses, but (unlike the manatee's) the dugong's tail is fluked like a whale's. Sea cows are related to elephants, and reputed to be the origin of the myth of the mermaid. The photo above is courtesy of National Geographic. For once, I was glad I wasn't carrying a camera, as it left me free to enjoy the magic of the sighting.

It was the first of many dives I made on Two-mile Reef, although yesterday we went further afield to Cabo San Sebastian and dived to 29 metres in crystal-clear water. The journey there through the "washing machine" was a real white-knuckle ride, the motor-boat slamming hard through huge, confused seas. It was such a tranquil contrast then to drop below all that surface noise and share the cool, deep seascape with turtles, devil rays and potato bass. However, the bumpy journey was also rewarded with sightings of humpback whale and lots of dolphins, which was a considerably bonus on top of the diving. Above all, the diving was enhanced by divemaster Paul's relaxed, but highly professional style, which led to safe but enjoyable diving for everybody.

We've been in Mozambique for six days, and Marlin Lodge is stunning. Twice we went on a dhow cruise near sunset. The dhow is a traditional Arabic sailboat with a large lateen (triangular) sail and simple rigging (one halyard, one sheet). They have no keel: heeling is controlled by moving the passengers and/or sacks of ballast. The cruises are provided by the local islanders, in locally owned boats in which the mast looks improvised and sails are patched together from bits of tarpaulin and other material:

Our first skipper was all of 16 years old (his crew a year younger) and the teamwork whereby they handle these heavy, keel-less boats is most impressive. The rig is much more efficient on one tack than the other (where the sail presses against the mast). For our later trip, I had worked out how to get on helm, right across Flamingo Bay as it turned out. This photograph is significant as it is husband Keir's very first image taken with the Leica-lensed Panasonic Lumix camera that I used on safari:

To see how wonderfully elegant these boats are under sail, and why sunset is the best time to enjoy them, words are inadequate, so here's another image.

It's hard to know what became of December, although the 5th-13th was spent very enjoyably in France, ski-ing with friends and neighbours Aileen and Malcolm Johnson at Val Claret, just above Tignes. We had both the best conditions I can remember, and almost the worst, with two whole days out of seven when I didn't ski at all. However, it was so brilliant when we could that this hardly mattered. Now that the apartments at Val Claret have wi-fi, I routinely take my laptop and regard bad weather as an opportunity to work, rather than a challenge to ski regardless of wisdom. This has had a good effect on my broken bone tally: after three years out of five with successively a serious back and head injury, then broken clavicle, finally just a scaphoid, I was beginning to feel defensive when asked if I wasn't getting past it. Nowadays when blizzards loom, I just get out the laptop. Just as well, too, as a kind fellow skier spotted a mistake in our new Everest guidebook (on the back cover too) that had somehow slipped through all proofreading. Thanks to the magic of email, this was fixed, proofs rechecked and the whole book put to bed just as fast as if I'd been at home.

After the return from Val Claret, there wasn't long before Christmas and I must say that this was the most peaceful, amiable and enjoyable Christmas Day I can remember. I think Amy was partly the cause, but my wonderful family must take some credit too. Probably we were all seeing the event through two-year old eyes this time. Certainly she got super presents: Uncle Sandy provided a music centre with karaoke, and you can see how popular that was:

My pre-Christmas trip to the Early Learning Centre for the grandparent present had started badly, because I naively answered the assistant's questions about age and gender truthfully: this led to my being steered toward a toy ironing station! Once I told them she liked transport, we refocused on one of those garages with lifts, ramps and a helicopter pad and about 20 diecast cars of the right scale to go with it. Sandy and I had a wonderful time "helping" Amy (i.e. preventing her) sticking on the transfers and we all had a great time playing with her toys. Pure magic!

I confess to being more "hands-on" than most publishers, or even editors. Our forthcoming Cowal Way guidebook was finally nearing readiness for repro when I was struck by the fact that the authors had never written a book before, let alone detailed walking directions. So I decided to test their manuscript by trying to walk the 57-mile route from their directions alone. To avoid delaying the book (due out in May), this had to be done by the end of January. I knew the short hours of daylight would be challenging, but I hadn't reckoned on the deep snow. From Cowal's coastal roads, it's hard to believe how wintry conditions can be on the high ground.

My trip began early on Sunday 25th with a hair-raising drive from Blairmore to Portavadie along the thickly snow-carpeted single-track B836. It was passable by my car (front-wheel drive) only by sticking to the tracks of the previous vehicle as if to tramlines. Any oncoming traffic would have ended the attempt before it began: it took all the momentum I could muster to crest the hills.

On Tuesday, I left Strachur very early, apprehensive of the uphill hike to Curra Lochain, the watershed above Loch Goil. Its outflow burn was in spate with melt-water, and it seemed impossible to find a safe crossing for this raging torrent. The "stepping stone" (promised by the directions) was submerged, slippery and sloping. Alone, unsupported and with no desire to get frostbitten feet, let alone swept away, I hesitated, backtracked and finally overcame my loss of nerve by tossing my rucksack across. It contained my prized Lumix G1 camera, so then I had no choice but to follow.

After an untidy, strenuous leap and scramble, I sat down to recover my breath and happened to look up. And there it was, less than 100 feet above my head, soaring and wheeling: a golden eagle. I had never seen a wild one before (other than as a speck in the distance), though buzzards are commonplace at Landrick. Once you see an eagle close up, there can be no confusion: its silhouette is more like a plank of wood than a bird's! The moment was too magical to spoil by reaching for the camera, but this photo (taken elsewhere by friend Sandy Morrison) evokes it well:

The descent past Sruth Ban falls to Lochgoilhead was easy enough and I reached Drimsynie House just after lunchtime. Wednesday's plan was to go over the top and try to meet friends Rob and Di Tennent somewhere on Loch Long-side. The cloud level wasn't too low when I left Lochgoilhead, but by the time I had climbed up Coilessan glen, I found myself approaching a featureless white plateau in total white-out, looking (according to the directions) for white marker posts! Not surprisingly, I didn't see any, but headed easterly, found the cairn and descended to pick up (with some relief) the line of a fence which, after some time turned out to be roughly the right route after all. Our rendezvous worked just fine and, even better, Rob and Di (with dogs) had kindly hiked and photographed the Ardgartan/Arrochar section for me. So they kindly ran me back to Strachur to retrieve my car and we celebrated the success of my four-day hike with a decent meal and a stiff drink.

But still I had this nagging feeling. I couldn't pass the proofs without checking out the white marker posts, so I went back today to look for them. The snow was still lying, but this time the visibility was superb, albeit the wind chill factor breathtaking. And, happily, neighbour Malcolm decided to join me as I hiked up from Ardgartan to the cairn. That meant that two of us tramped all over that plateau for an hour, but neither of us saw a single marker post! It turns out they were removed some years ago, so I just deleted them also from the route description. And although it demanded an extra expedition just to be sure, I'm not sorry I returned to the cairn. Here's looking west toward Beinn Bheula, across the frozen lochan:

Yesterday I finally cashed in my voucher for a microlight flight from East Fortune with East of Scotland Microlights. This was a generous birthday present from son Sandy, who runs Experience Ecosse which issued the voucher. Sandy is also training to pilot one, and last Sunday he was listed at number 31 in the Scotland on Sunday Hot 100 eligible men. I was hoping to see him fly.

It had taken us a while to sort out a date, partly diary problems but also weather constraints (too much crosswind is a showstopper). It was well worth the wait. The visibility was great, a dusting of snow on the Pentlands and with Gordon Douglas at the controls I had never a moment's nervousness. He even let me do some simple turns and a bit of descent toward the airfield, although from the back seat it's hard to see where you're going.

I have a satisfying souvenir in the shape of some decent photographs (I had my new Lumix G1 round my neck) of the Bass Rock, Tantallon Castle, Gosford House and North Berwick Harbour. Another time I'd try for an even faster shutter speed: the helmet visor meant I couldn't use the viewfinder and it was too bright to change settings, but I'm trying to put perfectionism aside and just enjoy them as they are. After a quick lunch, there was time to watch Sandy doing take-offs and landings (Gordon in the back seat). This put both him and the microlight in a new perspective: the image was suddenly of a flimsy contraption, heavier than air yet impossibly vulnerable in flight. As he disappeared into the wide blue yonder, I turned away to drive home, lump in throat, suddenly reminded of what enormous strides he has taken in recent years.

Here's a selection of what I saw: Sandy flying past the airfield, then Queen Margaret University (which I took for husband Keir who is Vice-chair of its Court), then Gosford House and (my favourite) the sands of Gosford Bay. Things look refreshingly different from up there!

Yesterday was Day One of Book Fair, so I arrived keen to see if the books we sent months ago are actually on the stand, and to discover if the shelf is buried in obscurity or near to eye level. Once again, the Independent Publishers Guild stand was prominent and effective. I even forgot to take a photo of our shelf of Rucksack Readers. Next year we'll be 10 years old, which seems amazing.

One of the joys of Book Fair is being able to sit and talk to our partners from all over the world: Derek and Wayne of Hong Kong Graphics and Printing who make all our books these days, Craenen of Belgium who distribute in Europe and Interlink Publishing, Massachusetts, who distribute for us in North America. In fact it was this time last year that the idea of going back up Kilimanjaro by the Lemosho route was conceived at Book Fair in a conversation with Michel (who set up Interlink in 1987). Last June we all summited, and he and his partner Hildi have even created a gift book drawing entirely on this trip. I'd be truly delighted about that if it weren't for the fact that their book is likely to be out before my own, overdue guidebook, which keeps getting sidelined!

Today's main joy was listening to great novellists. I began with Umberto Eco, who is one of my favourites. A new novel from Eco is a rare event, about once in 8 years, and hearing about his full career as an academic historian, philosopher and teacher of semiotics and essayist, no wonder. Unlike most authors, he wasn't here to promote a new book, but to present an award to his editor. He spoke freely about the passionate battles between his editor and translators, sometimes days and weeks debating a single mot juste. Happily he scotched the rumour (spread in Wikipedia) that he would never write another novel, though he conceded he might be slowing down a little. Now in his late 70s, he seemed much younger, more energetic and full of humour as well as wisdom and patience.

Later I caught up with William Boyd talking about an unusual source of ideas for his novels. He lives beside the Thames, and had been struck by the little-known fact that over 50 bodies a week are recovered from its waters. How many of us could turn that into a best-seller? Sadly my business meetings that clashed with Vikram Seth, speaking this afternoon, whose novels "A Suitable Boy" and "An Equal Music" are some of my favourites.

I arrived at Book Fair yesterday unsure what to expect of the Mayor's keynote speech. So often, TV "personalities" are disappointing in the flesh. And Boris Johnson is strongly identified with the London Transport that let me down so badly on my journey to hear him: Victoria Line cancellation (strike action) discovered from notices at Brixton tube where I arrived with heavy luggage. After walking to the rail station, more stairs with luggage because of Penalty Fare notices demanding a new rail ticket. (My pre-pay Oyster card beats paying £4 for single journeys, but why can't it be valid on ALL forms of transport within the London area, especially after strike action closes the bit you need?) And the non-Victoria tube lines were even more crowded than usual because of the overspill, so it was an unpleasant journey.

But I needn't have worried about being late, as Boris was even later. Perhaps there was extra traffic on his bike journey from Islington. Once he started to talk, however, we forgave him everything. He was articulate, interesting and witty, a self-confessed "fogey" on the subject of Playstations and his sons, and although he had prepared his "keynote" he never read from a script and I suspect departed from his brief. The chairman wisely didn't attempt to summarise an address that ranged ecelectically over London's literary advantages. These included having twice as many bookshops as New York, being rich in libraries (363 of them), being custodians of the English language with its 500,000 words and (bizarrely, because of the weak pound) having the world's cheapest Big Mac (cheaper than the Ukraine and Brazil).

Boris's talk was well-informed, intelligent and good fun. As an author, he spoke to this LBF audience in its own language, starting with a witty aside about his agent getting the title of his novel wrong (by alluding to "42 virgins" - in place of 72 - the agent was reflecting deep discounting in the book trade.) He made much of birthdays – today is allegedly the day for both Shakespeare and St George – but it was his handling of questions that impressed me most. The first was a left-fielder from a Danish chap who wanted to know how Boris would combine proper celebrations of the Charles Dickens' bicentennial with the Olympics. Boris was understandably taken aback, but barely hesitated before confirming Dickens' dates as 1812-70, and spinning a brilliant fantasy of the Olympic opening ceremony as a Dickensian pageant. The audience loved it, the Dane was baffled.

Stripped of the glamour of TV, despite his heavily Eton/Balliol accent and persona, he came across as a genuine and approachable bloke. If I lived in London, I can even imagine voting for him. Although I've never yet voted Conservative, there are some politicians who seem to rise above party prejudices and to leave the baggage behind. Besides, the man has charisma. If Boris were a dog, he'd be a yellow labrador.

Photo © www.contactmusic.com, with thanks

Glendaruel Village Hall was the centre of an amazing range of activities yesterday: guided walks, primary children's displays, walking theatre, home baking and a very generous launch for our Cowal Way guidebook by government Minister Mike Russell.

He congratulated the authors and the whole community on the completion of this project, and it is remarkable how strong is the sense of community in Cowal, where he also lives. He spoke of the power of a long-distance route to funnel people into the peninsula, to provide a shop window on Cowal's scenery and wildlife, and to form a building block in the development of local tourism. I was pleased at how enthusiastic he seemed about the route, including its role as the missing link that joins the Kintyre Way to the West Highland Way.

The event was well supported by local residents, who not only attended but also bought books. Some of us went on the Walking Theatre event, in which actors appeared in costume and involved the walkers in various activities. It almost worked, I felt, but our "willing suspension of disbelief" was pole-axed at the start by standing around while one of those daft Health and Safety ticklists had to be completed. However, I was delighted and amazed to find that a fellow-walker was someone I hadn't seen since schooldays in London (over 40 years ago) where I knew her as Julia Martin. Since she lives in Western Australia and was in Cowal only temporarily, it seemed quite a coincidence.

Yesterday was the culmination of months of work at Rucksack Readers, but that's nothing compared with co-author Jim McLuckie's decade of work in developing and waymarking the route. My own contribution had gone somewhat beyond the normal role of publisher: see my blog entry for 6 February. However, that trip proved that even I could hike the Cowal Way in deep snow, over sodden ground, inside 4-5 days in January. So I'm fairly confident that it's feasible for normal walkers over that schedule year-round.

Being country bumkins, and pensioners besides, we don't often get out on a Saturday evening. Yesterday was different: we took the train to Edinburgh to celebrate Experience Ecosse, Sandy's gift experience company, which was 5 years old. He threw a wonderful party at the Hawke and Hunter, Picardy Place, where the Prosecco flowed freely and the 60-100 guests included his suppliers, office staff, friends and family. Husband Keir and I went to it, along with long-standing friends Nick and Margaret Walshaw, but sadly minus grand-daughter Amy who was banned by the byzantine licensing laws, thus also preventing her mother Helen from sharing the event. Amy, watching everybody getting ready, was asking why she couldn't come to Uncle Sandy's party too, and we couldn't really explain.

Anyway, if you've ever had to think up a present for somebody who seems to have everything, the answer is easy: give them an experience voucher - from tank driving to cook school, hot air ballooning to wine tasting, speedboat to pampering. Sandy's website shows the locations nearly all over Scotland and tells you more. For the last nine months he's been assisted by the highly personable and capable Claire Maasch, but Claire is returning home to South Africa this week. Still, I doubt if we've heard the last of her!

Here is Sandy cutting the "Experience Ecosse" birthday cake, with Claire in the background. The cake was kindly created by friends Sheila and Celia, who also provided the photograph:

Yesterday we had a very special treat: Keir and I went up in a hot air balloon from Bush House, south of Edinburgh, and floated south-west for about 8 miles, broadly parallel to the A702, at heights ranging from tree-tops to 3000 feet. Each of us had been given an Experience Ecosse voucher as a present for a past birthday by son Sandy. Since ballooning demands still, dry weathe, it naturally took several bookings to get on a flight that went ahead. Our pilot was Pete Foster of Alba Ballooning, ably assisted by pursuit driver Tam. (Tam also has the delicate task of negotiating access to retrieve the balloon with whichever farmer's field is used for landing.) Pete is highly professional, refreshingly concise and calm in his safety briefings, and, as you can see, utterly dwarfed by his balloon:

A feature of the experience is that everybody helps to manhandle, blow up and, later, douse the balloon. This gives you a much more hands-on sense of the scale and weight of this extraordinarily 19th-century form of transport by wicker basket. The pilot has no steering, only the ability to control altitude and hence perhaps to benefit from a different wind direction. Here is Keir, wearing thermal gloves and holding the mouth open while burners are blasting very hot air into it:

Our 7 fellow passengers included another person on a birthday treat - his eighth. He did seem to enjoy the flight, but I found myself wondering what his mother, who came along sporting her D&G handbag and fashion shoes, will find to give him for his ninth. Keir and I were celebrating birthdays totalling 121 years, and I don't mean to suggest that makes us any more deserving than an 8-year old, but at least we could see out over the basket.

We also enjoyed watching the balloon's effect on the astonishing range of people and animals whom we overflew. It's difficult not to feel elevated when looking down over barking dogs, cantering horses and waving children. We were also buzzed by some microlite enthusiasts. Fortunately, in the air as at sea, motorised transport gives way to sail. Here's one of them:

We all enjoyed the eerily silent smooth take-off and at dusk had an exciting, but well-controlled landing: just a few bounces and the basket landed on its side. The departure from the basket was orderly and surprisingly trouble-free given that some folk had to climb down from the upper deck. The flight was rounded off by a glass of bubbly, and we returned to Landrick both elated and soothed. Brilliant!

We had expected to have son, daughter and grand-daughter staying overnight, but for various reasons they had other plans and we ended up alone last night. So this morning I had the luxury of deciding to go up Dumyat – which I've neglected for too long. I'm hoping that Bramble will manage 12 miles when we take part in the Rotary Club of Stirling hike of the West Highland Way in July, so it seems timely to find out if this is over-ambitious. She was 13 years old last month, so in canine terms she's an even older lady than me. Nevertheless, we both made it and thanks to some kind hikers, we even have a "summit photograph":

Recently, Bramble has been having Cartrophen injections for her arthritis, and if today is a reliable guide I'd say she is walking as well as she did 3-5 years ago. We have also been consciously cutting back on her food, and the combination has created a lighter, livelier, younger-seeming dog who was scampering, not plodding, up steepish slopes. (I wish I could have kept up with her.) The problem was the well-meaning group who were feeding her on the summit. She had been under close control off the lead all the way up, but I hadn't reckoned on her mooching technique at the top. Heaven knows what else they had given her, but I certainly saw a whole Maryland cookie – the kind of treat she never normally get. I fear that her Dumyat climb ended as a net calorific gain.

And since today is our wedding anniversary, Keir and I are just heading for Cromlix House for dinner, so doubtless my day will also end in a net calorific gain. This wouldn't matter so much if I hadn't just booked up to return to Nepal in September, so some serious weight loss and fitness training is badly needed. But not today!

We had various arrivals at Landrick on Saturday: one was the HD box that will enable Keir to watch tennis in high definition. This was set up just in time for us to see Andy Murray beat James Blake in two convincing sets at Queen's yesterday. The hi-res picture makes it noticeably easier to follow the ball, even when Andy serves at 135+ mph! This should be a great asset for Wimbledon viewing.

But the box which really made my Saturday was the arrival from York Camera Mart of the long-awaited wide-angle zoom lens for my Lumix G1. Unless you are into cameras, you may find it hard to share my excitement, but if you glance at the images below, you may get the gist. This lens picks up from where most "wide-angles" run out of steam. In the old film-based camera world, "wide-angle" might mean a focal length of 35 or 28mm – if you are very lucky, perhaps 24 or even 20mm. But this new lens has focal lengths ranging from the equivalent of 14 to 28mm. I can't wait to try it out on landscapes, where it should raise the standard of photography in our guidebooks.

Since there was no time to get up a hill today, instead I took it with me to a lunchtime meeting with Rucksack Readers' wonderful web designer Dan Champion in the dignified context of Inglewood House, Alloa. Here is its splendid exterior:

Now compare these two snaps of its entrance hall, taken from both extremes of the wide-angle zoom range:

This has been an interesting week with many journeys, both short and long. After Monday's trips to Aberfoyle and to Alloa (the latter to discuss how to bring our existing website fully into the 21st century), I visited Edinburgh on Tuesday. Mainly this was to meet the team at Seol, the repping cousin of Edinburgh publisher Birlinn. Since February, Seol has been repping our list in Scotland and it was great to meet them at last, and get some feedback from the retailing viewpoint. I managed a quick visit to the National Galleries before it was time to walk down to son Sandy's new flat in East London Street. This is a lovely modern development, with light, spacious rooms and it's great to see him settled there. Even better, he cooked a lovely seared tuna salad for us which we ate at an elegant glass table – in his previous flat, it was more a question of balancing a plate on your knees on the sofa-bed.

Wednesday's visit to Aberfeldy was to meet Richard Struthers of Safe Journeys, who has been leading trips to Nepal for 16 years and with whom I have booked an Everest Base Camp trek in September. I'm hoping to get a fair crack at Kala Pattar this time, and also to return via the Cho La pass (5450m/18,000ft) to Gokyo Lakes, and climb Gokyo Ri. Richard thinks that heavy snowfall is the main hazard that might prevent this, but at present, I suspect that it's my own lack of preparation that would create the challenge.

Thursday was my trip to London, on two publishing visits connected with my IPG membership. The first was a session with Susie Dunlop of Allison & Busby, who is kindly acting as my mentor, and she is proving incredibly helpful. Being a somewhat maverick publisher, based out on a limb in Dunblane, it's all too easy for me to sail on blithely unaware of things we should be doing, or doing differently. Supportive advice from an experienced publisher is a fantastic resource, and I intend to make the most of it.

Then it was time to hasten to the IPG's Meet the Buyers event at which publishers meet buyers from key wholesalers and retailers, both online and bricks-and-mortar, and discover how to try to make them aware of our offer. The answer turns out to be different in almost every case, so it's lots of work but definitely worth knowing how to go about it better. It was held in the recently refurbished Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, a superb blend of modern and traditional. The briefing was held in the Library:

After arriving late at my sister's house in Dulwich, I had a lovely lazy start next day in the wonderful garden that brother-in-law Nick and sister Lindsay are just completing. Here are some photos of its swimming pond with beach hut: no chemicals, with water kept clean by ecological means. It's a beautiful feature, and this time was an island of tranquillity before an intense session of follow-up by wi-fi on the busy train home to Dunblane:

Last Sunday was the day of our Rotary Club's sponsored walk of the West Highland Way. President Alan Skilling had organised it to raise funds for the Craighalbert Centre in Cumbernauld which does conductive education with children with profound conditions such as cerebral palsy. It looks like we'll have raised over £2000, but I'll update this with the final figure once we know. The date was fixed long ago, independently of men's finals day at Wimbledon. However, by leaving Landrick very early, our team completed the driving/car-dropping, hiking 12 miles from Tyndrum to Inverarnan and retrieving the car from Tyndrum, and still got home in time to watch most of that wonderful match. My heart really warmed to Andy Roddick in his protracted and gutsy challenge to Federer. His post-match comments were a model of generosity and restraint, and I do hope his turn comes soon.

Anyway, our team comprised three people and two dogs: neighbours Malcolm and Calum Johnson with their dog Laochan, plus me and Bramble. Here they are, in the woods west of Crianlarich, with Bramble waiting for me to catch up:

Here's the view from our early lunch stop, with Ben More, Stob Binnein and Cruach Ardrain in the distance:

And once Laochan discovered the River Falloch, even Bramble (a non-swimming labrador) was tempted to join in:

Walking from north to south, against the flow, means you meet more people. One group of hikers included a woman from Ontario who recognised me from the long profile in Scots magazine that by chance she'd read the night before. Her companion promptly asked me to autograph her copy of my guidebook. I was thrilled to see it was open at the page, and slightly dog-eared from heavy use. They seemed pleased with this chance encounter, but it was their reaction that made my day!

My husband is all over the Times, today, under the misleading headline above. He is quoted extensively by Lindsay McIntosh on the front page, with a photo and more on p13, where there's also a commentary by Magnus Linklater. Keir was part of the team which wrote the original document nearly 5 years ago, and what he was criticising was its lamentable implementation, not the vision.

And what he called "pretentious" (not "complete") nonsense was the official definition of literacy (but "pretentious" wouldn't have fitted the broadsheet headline). Officially,

Literacy is the set of skills which allows an individual to engage fully in society and in learning, through the different forms of language, and the range of texts which society values and finds useful.

Keir's "pretentious nonsense" comment referred to the above mumbo-jumbo, of which he said:

No it's not. It's about how to read and write.

The Times goes on to predict "His comments will not be welcomed by Fiona Hyslop, the Education Secretary." Keir's combination of incisive thinking and plain speaking has never endeared him to the Scottish educational establishment. So what?

The online version of the Times piece had already attracted comment by this morning.
"Mr Bloomer's definition of the word literacy is correct" says Des, from Edinburgh. "Well done Keir Bloomer. It's time someone from the education establishment came out and said what classroom teachers have been saying for long enough: CfE is a worthy cause but the implementation has been done without any real engagement with the "chalk face" . The result is educational mince!" says Peter, also from Edinburgh. Hooray for sanity and plain English.

The pebble thrown in the pond was the front page of yesterday's Times, featuring Keir's attack on the implementation of Curriculum for Excellence. The ripples started to spread later in the day. First the BBC were in touch, looking for an extended radio interview with him, then the Scotsman asked him for a short article.

Today's paper has Fiona Macleod's news story which develops the theme of "pressure growing on the Scottish Government after a leading education figure joined mounting criticism" and trails Keir's article. She quotes various politicians' comments, including both Labour (Rhona Brankin), who described the literacy section as "complete gobbledegook", and Conservative (Liz Smith) who confirmed "the entire structure behind implementing the curriculum is in disarray".

A government spokesman (anonymous) said something complacent about "Scotland already performed well on the world education stage" and something insincere: "Keir Bloomer is an important educational thinker, and we will always listen with interest to his views". Aye, right!

Keir's article is inside the Scotsman. Educational innovation is notorious for its failure to translate rhetoric into reality, and CfE has been subverted, emasculated and buried under thousands of tonnes of paper. Yet many of the Experiences and Outcomes aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

The slogans "successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens" are on every classroom wall. But

Ask a dozen teachers (or a dozen directors of education for that matter) to define the new curriculum in two clear sentences and you will get a dozen different answers.

I had a lovely email out of the blue from Alistair Mooney, an Assistant Producer who contributes to the BBC Scotland Learning blog. He had picked up Keir's interview with Shereen about CfE and linked to it here. After it was recorded back in mid-July, we had forgotten all about it, and it was news to us that it had been transmitted. Be warned: it runs for 11 minutes, so is not for the faint-hearted, but it also includes discussion afterwards from Sarah Oates (Glasgow Uni), Paul McNamee (The Big Issue in Scotland), and Bill Leckie (The Sun).

Keir made a significant point strongly:

If you put your faith in teachers, they will deliver a great deal, but if you want change, the plan has to be one that genuinely inspires them.

Although once an educator by profession, nowadays I am an occasional observer at Tapestry Partnership events. Their most obvious feature might appear to be the galaxy of visiting speakers, including Howard Gardner, Robert Winston and Jerome Bruner. In fact, the most impressive aspect is around the coffee breaks, where there's a real buzz among teachers fired up by new ideas, genuinely inspired to go back to their classrooms and make changes.

What support do they need to help make this happen? Not more piles of bumf with experiences and outcomes. Not more prescription and guidance, but less. Not more tick-lists or other attempts to micro-manage classrooms. Stop checking up on them and their pupils.

In the 1970s when I taught at Jordanhill College and Concordia University, we promoted active learning methods such as simulation and gaming – not by talking or writing about them, but by putting teachers through the very same experiences as we wanted for the pupils. The levels of activity, excitement and laughter were unprecedented. Afterwards, the teachers went away not to write essays or with piles of handouts, but to create and adapt simulation games that they used in their classrooms. Experiential learning works.

Depressingly, Fiona Hyslop's exhortation piece on CfE in today's Times Educational Supplement Scotland claims that Building the Curriculum 3 "provides the clarity that teachers have been seeking". Complacently, she claims that "we have the chance to set standards that will inspire our neighbours and those around the globe". The rhetoric of her "new way of teaching and learning which thrives on freedom, flexiblity and creativity" sounds fine, but what the CfE implementation lacks is reality. After nearly five years, that isn't good enough.

The 2009 festival was perhaps our most exciting yet. It began on 18 August with Mendelssohn’s Elijah, a work that I had performed while still a member of the Stirling University chorus, so I found it particularly engaging. And it ended on Saturday night with Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, a sublime and dramatic performance conducted by Mark Elder with the Hallé Orchestra, Edinburgh Festival Chorus and splendid soloists. 24 hours later, after the pressure of packing and preparing for Nepal, I’m sitting here at Heathrow typing this with Alice Coote’s sublime interpretation of the Angel still going around in my head singing her “Softly and gently”. These two choral works stand like colossuses, marking the beginning and end of our 2009 Festival experience.

In between, two days stand out a mile. The first was a week ago, when we journeyed to the Queen’s Hall for an important reason: the premiere of a work by Nigel Osborne on 31 August. Looking with mounting desperation at the piles of unfinished work and production issues around the Rucksack Readers office, I came close to resenting giving up most of a working day to this concert. But it was wholly extraordinary, truly a revelation. The Arditti Quartet played a late Beethoven quartet (op 85) and a Berg which was challenging but not offputting. After the interval followed the world premiere of Nigel’s Tiree, commissioned by EIF specially for these players, augmented by the shimmering live sounds of the metal plate loudspeaker installation (controlled by a Mac, naturally). This recreated the sounds made by Tiree’s famous stones, and added a wholly fresh, new dimension to the tones and timbre of the string quartet.

Nigel, who is a friend and colleague of Keir’s, joined us after the concert for a beer. I wasn‘t surprised to learn that he had deputised for Ligeti (whose String Quartet no 2 followed Tiree) but when the conversation drifted to fractal geometry (talking to Nigel is full of such hazards) it turned out that he knew and had worked with Mandelbrot at a conference about art, music and maths. Having studied sums long ago at Cambridge, Mandelbrot was a famous name to me, but Nigel is innocent of all pretension when he drops such names. Fractal geometry of the Scottish coastline is grist to his mill as a composer, as is Tiree’s best-known folksong. Nigel is a very rare example of a 21st century polymath: he also speaks about 19 languages. It's just as well he is so modest, or he might be very daunting, or even quite annoying. Anyway, I was fired up enough to ask him to sign my programme, which he did without a murmur. I wonder what he thought of the review I just read on the plane (in Scotland on Sunday, 6.9.09) which described the work as “an ethereal miasma of folk tunes and harmonic expansiveness”. Hmmm.

The other outstanding day was last Friday, which also began with String Quartets: the Emerson were playing Beethoven and two Mendelssohn quartets, one early and the other written in the year he died. We went straight on to Oloroso, to take son Sandy for a birthday lunch. Afterwards, we just had time for the National Gallery of Scotland exhibition on Spain and Scotland (Spain had all the world-class artists) before Brian Friel’s extraordinary “Yalta Game” at the King’s – an unbroken hour of pyrotechnic theatre with shades of Bennett and Stoppard full of teasing ambiguity and tensions between reality, imagination and yearning.

Finally, after several cups of coffee we were off to another world premiere from Scottish Ballet with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the Playhouse. The first Stravinsky (Scènes de ballet) was choreographed by Frederick Ashton, followed by Workwithinwork set to Berio. But beyond question, what set the evening apart was the stunningly fresh, modern and fluid Petrushka choreographed by Ian Spink. By setting the story in Russia of the 1990s (instead of Tsarist St Petersburg) it gained a whole new lease of life. Scottish Ballet created a spectacle of energy, drama, full of innovation, and it was good to see the programme give credits for specialist coaching in breakdancing and pole-dancing. The satging was brilliant, showing the love triangle portrayed in the “show” performed in a lorry trailer and "for real" in the chaotic, and finally violent, street scene. It was breathtaking.

I returned from Nepal last Monday afternoon to the usual mountain of email, post and messages. Being somewhat sleep-starved and travel-weary, dealing with it would probably have occupied most of my week. But on Tuesday morning, an overladen tractor on our hill took out the phone wires, which mean no phone, no email and no web-surfing all week.

BT sent engineers out daily, to communicate, to survey the damage and to plan the repair. By Friday afternoon they had replaced two telegraph poles and a long section of cable, which seemed rather efficient, and we were back online. Meantime I had realised that my most important task was to write up the Everest trekking route description while it was fresh in my mind. Have broken the back of that task without online distraction, I now think the tractor did me a favour, although it didn't feel that way at the time.

It's so tempting to let the small, easy tasks (like replying to email) squeeze out the large important ones (like writing a book). Next time I am tempted by displacement activity, I shall try to remember the tractor – albeit unplugging my ethernet cable is an easier step to undo.

I’m in Val Claret for the week, the ski resort just above Tignes where I have been coming for 20+ years for a pre-Christmas boost of unrepentant, politically incorrect downhill ski-ing. I keep thinking I should grow out of this, but I constantly rediscover that I am still addicted.

Most lunchtime stops are a bowl of soup in a mountain restaurant, but today was different. I had decided to try ice-diving under Lac de Tignes, with Evolution 2 and it was completely unlike anything I have ever experienced. I mean, I have dived before, but in warm water and maybe a wet suit, not under an ice ceiling in a dry suit having arrived on skis and departing shortly after, also on skis, but winded: because of the high altitude (2100m/7000ft) and low temperature, the regulator delivers less air than you expect, and would freeze if turned up to a normal setting. So you suck air, greedily. And wear blue rubber gloves that are locked on at the wrists.

Courtesy of Evolution 2 and marinebio.com, here are a couple of pictures. They aren't actually of me, but easily could be as everybody looks the same in a dry suit and full-face mask:

The colours are extraordinary. The air bubbles trapped underneath the ice take on the curiously convex, reflective quality of mercury. Unlike when sea diving, there was no fish life nor live corals to view. I was certainly not cold, nor even faintly damp nor frightened. But it was as different from the world of lift queues, après-ski and pisted fluency as outer space.

The instructor holds on to you at first, all part of the beginner treatment, but then asks (in sign language) if you prefer him to let go. Of course I did, but it wasn’t nearly as easy as sea diving, where I am very much within my comfort zone. I found myself fighting the buoyancy and striving to stay upright. I would probably be more competent next time around, but I’m not sure if I need to do it again.

Of one thing I am certain: I will never again look at the blank surface of Lac de Tignes in quite the same incurious way. Now I know what lies beneath, there is literally a whole new dimension on the familiar mountain experience.

One of the compensations of the snow, ice and general difficulties of everyday life is that Bramble seems to be enjoying a new phase of puppyhood and silliness. Aged nearly 14 years, she really enjoys the snow at Landrick!

This photo evokes a period of four weeks in which Landrick has been effectively cut off by snow. In 17 years of living here, we'd never thought of chains before, having coped by leaving a car at the foot of the hill and hiking the last bit. After over two weeks, this was beginning to pall and we opted for Klack & Go which are self-tensioning and supposed to be easy to fit. This isn't as simple as the girl in the video makes it look! We even wondered if they would be too late to be useful. Not a bit: in the last fortnight, they have repaid their cost by letting us give lifts to people and boxes of books. As a publisher, we still have to get orders out to customers, which means meeting delivery drivers at the foot of the hill.

A compensation of the snow has been the view from the office window: snow becomes Landrick well, and our pond is a natural skating rink:

Wednesday brought a phone call from The Bookseller to ask if Rucksack Readers had been affected by the weather at all? So I told them about the snow chains and the view from the office window and was astonished to find myself quoted on page 3 of Friday's issue.

Yesterday the thaw arrived in earnest, and we removed the chains (much easier than fitting them). Our colour-starved eyes are feasting on greens and browns, the postie has resumed delivering our mail and life may be returning to normal. Perhaps washing and putting away the chains will become a feature of Januaries to come, like taking down the Christmas tree and packing up the lights.

The Bahamas have seemed very exotic to me ever since my elder sister Lindsay returned from there as a bronzed, beautiful 18 year old (nearly half a century ago). Knowing that the diving is supposed to be good, I was delighted when Keir suggested a holiday here, and we had a delightful direct flight with BA on Saturday. Thanks to timely online checkin, we had two exit row seats with more legroom than Business Class, and after only 3 movies (Amelia Earhart, An education and Golden 39) we were in Nassau with only a short transfer to the resort.

Sandals is at Cable Beach, near Nassau on New Providence Island. It's an amazing mixture: the down side is the naff pseudo-classical statues and some cringe-worthy (but optional) entertainment, but there is also the stunning natural beauty of its beaches and private island. We also like the simplicity of all-inclusive: if you've finished eating, you need not hang around for the bill, there's no need to carry valuables and no reason not to have another drink.

Anyway, the diving is included! Fortunately I visited the dive shop on arrival and got a place on yesterday's shark dive, an event that runs only if enough experienced divers sign up for it. We were encircled by dozens of Caribbean reef sharks (harmless if treated with respect, but wild animals all the same) and had magical moments watching them at very close quarters. I'll try to update this with a photo: it being my first dive I wasn't carrying my own camera, but Ricardo, the dive photographer, was in action. The water is cold enough that I went into Nassau on the bus today and bought my first wet suit, which should make a big difference for the rest of the week. It was only $10 more expensive than the rental, and can be re-used on my next dive trip in cooler waters. Some women would rather have a mink coat, but I am delighted with this extremely comfortable garment.