Thursday 5 February 2009

P.S.

I forgot my gratuitous photographic boast of the day.

"Nay!" I hear you cry "Sacre Bleu, what is the world coming to? ". Well fear ye not. Here it comes.

I'm thinking happy, light, airy, feelgood-

skywalk

... it's the skywalk in Toronto!

(oh you lucky ducks)

More anon.

Excitement!!

Ohhh, I'm so excited.

2 things.

1. I've booked a holiday!

Yesssss. Get paid, spend it all on a holiday: that's my mantra. Actually, technically my friends booked it for me, but we includes me, so yey! It is one whole week in March, snowboarding in the french alps- Chamrousse à precision! Boy do I wanna be slipsliding down those slopes, right right now! Plus, I'm really looking forward to seeing my pals since it's been too bloody long!

Cause for excitement, I think you'll agree. Ouis?

But maybe even more exciting is....

2. I've fallen in Love!

...with a diary. My diary. :)

Don't look at me like that- this is the genuine article! And don't you get jealous, oh blog of mine, this is the appointement recording type, you are not being userped as my thought recorder, so settle ye down.

It's A5. Black. Slim. Soft. MOLESKIN- oh yes, you're reading me right! Their monthly planner in point of fact. There's always something quite thrilling about a new diary, and it's taken me quite sometime to meet "the one" this year, but after long deliberation I have taken the plunge into a long term relationship with my handsome, moleskin planner. And the novelty of a monthly layout rather than weekly or daily, and the notion of a whole year of turning its thick cream pages, and endlessly scrawling miscellaneous notes in its perfect, intermittant lined pages is... nearly enough to send me over the edge!

So you see I have much to be gleeful about!

Imagine the pleasure I'm about to incur by writing my holiday details into my new diary....

!

More anon.

Sunday 1 February 2009

Twitching

TWITCH \ˈtwich\:
"a bodily or mental twinge, as of pain, conscience, etc.; pang." or,
"in birdwatching, to pursue and observe a rare bird"
Interesting how that second term has come to pass, wikipedia explains it as referring to the behaviour of a nervous British birdwatcher, Howard Medhurst.

The fact is I have been doing both of late.

As a closet twitcher I am now outing myself. Possibly not a genuine twitcher, down to the strictest definition, I love to run off looking for birds I haven't seen before, so they needn't really be rare. However, my current "twitch for a twitch" is genuinely rare bird driven. I have joined a couple of birdwatching sites who issue alerts to this effect, and what has taken my fancy is the notion of a King Eider Somateria spectabilis Somateria spectabilis. A genuinely beautiful bird (which also satisfies my penchant for photography), one has been spotted bobbing around the south coast of fife, at Kincraig Point.

A small hitch has come into play however. The car is in the garage for a gear box repair and may be in there all week. So my antsing to get out there and pursue the chase is going to have to be shelved until the means is re-established. Thus one of my reasons for feeling "twitchy", in the former sense of the word.

My other reason for feeling twitchy requires a little back story. I have very recently extracted myself from London residency. Having moved to London for a masters degree at Imperial College, I stayed on with a hope of starting into a career of sorts, not really knowing what else to do.

Fast forward to now and I have turned into a Londonphobe of sorts. That's probably an inappropriate term, as I don't so much have a fear of the city as just a general loathing.

Being a nature lover (something you may gather from the aforementioned bird chasing admission), the complete lack of wilderness beyond the most groomed and populous royal parks of London is a major factor. You cannot find a hill worth anything (bare in mind I'm a Scot and have been treated to a mountain filled up-bringing, not to mention the regular view of the beautiful Arthur's Seat which dominates the skyline of my hometown, Edinburgh). So I found myself getting increasingly down. Add to that a disillusionment with my career choice (TV production- cut-throat, ego filled, industry extraordinaire), increasingly few jobs (I was freelance), commutes of an hr and half each way to my last job, the overly private (read lonely) nature of living in a super busy metropolis, and a (albeit lovely) flatmate who worked abroad for 2weeks in every 8, and went home for a further one, leaving her super hyper Bengal cat, Chester, bounding around me in a most attention seeking manner- and you get a recipe for a not so happy Bex.

So now I am back in Edinburgh. Some other time I may expound further on a number of digressions which add to my unhappiness of the moment, but the fact is I am stuck, back at home with my parents, penniless, effectively social-life-less and jobless. And, having been here, sorting out my junk, clearing out the attic for some space and generally not existing in the real world, my other source of twitchiness is a need to get out there and do something at all worthwhile.

Conclusion.

My mission for the next week is to drum up a CV(or two) and start pursuing some form of work which will at least bring me back to life. So far I have earmarked 3 temping agencies for potential mundane but money making work, though I hear the temping market is fairly dry at the moment, and a couple of organisations whom I fancy trying to get something more interesting out of.

Objective one is probably the MSC. The Marine Stewardship Council are the ones who put those blue sickers on sustainably produced seafood and whose mission is to improve and make known the sustainability of commercial fishing worldwide. You know, boat to table transparancy and all that.

This is an area I have an interest in.

Thus their office on Rose Street shall be visited pronto with the hope of finding something, anything, to start sniffing around in this world of work. Their website says they accept interns sometimes, part or full time, so I shall offer myself to them in whatever manner they can possibly manage to take me and with any luck cast myself a rope ladder out of my ugly, stale rut.

OK, I shall end with the fruits of a couple of recent phototwitching trips.

First the Black Redstart, spotted half way up Berwick Law, North Berwick, Scotland. Now fondly known as "Liz".(below)

Redstart

Second, the Fieldfare. A bird apparently common but not one I have come across before. This one was at Aberlady Bay, East Lothian, Scotland. (below)

Fieldfare in a Thicket

And (as I admitted from my first post) since this blog is partly about showing off, I shall also stick in a picture taken in North Uist in august 2007. This one of a (flipping stunning) short eared owl mooching about in a field. (below)

short-eared owl

The expensive product of all of these twitching missions is a longing for a bigger lens for my camera. One can but dream!

Meanwhile I'll just have to make do with twitching.

More anon.