Diamond Lillibet

What more appropriate way to begin the Queen's Birthday holiday than by watching the coverage of the Royal Pageant on the Thames to commemorate her Diamond Jubilee? Except that the BBC's commentary was so obsequious, and the weather didn't co-operate - but 1000 assorted boats, five miles, four knots, swan-uppers, watermen, a floating belfry, a million-plus spectators, goodness knows how many Union flags and miles of bunting... it was an unmissable spectacle. (Let's gloss over the fact that I could easily have been there, just popping back over the Channel last week instead of flying home from Munich. I'm perverse like that: I got to England in 1977 a scant fortnight after the Silver Jubilee.)

It was good to see the waka making fine progress along the river with all the other rowed boats, though I felt for the bros with their bare chests; and I looked away when the leisure cruisers went past. The Queen seemed delighted to board the Britannia launch again to get out to the royal barge - it's normally kept now at Leith with the Britannia since its decommission. That was the first of today's connections: Her Maj and I go right back, you know. I've been growled at by her bodyguard at Badminton, drunk her tea at Buckingham Palace, trailed around Holyrood, got the goss on the royal parsimony at Sandringham (no silver sixpence in the staff Christmas pud!) - not to mention being born the year she was crowned, so she's been a fixture all my life. In the job 60 years, still going strong at 87 (didn't sit down once!) - impressive, and well worth celebrating with such a huge spectacle.

It was fun to see Joey from War Horse prancing on top of the National Theatre - I went to see the play last month and it was brilliant (it's now on also on Broadway). I was interested too to see Tower Bridge with its bascules (bascules!) raised right to the top as her barge approached at the end. I went under it myself just last month, on a ferry along the Thames, gawping at all the sights old and new - like The Shard, almost complete (and already explored by an urban fox right up to the 72nd floor). It's a must-do, such a good way to view that great city, and  the river is always busy - though never as chokka, and as colourful despite the dreary weather, as it was during the pageant today.

Copywrongs

I was intrigued to discover that I'd had a little rush - une petite avalanche - of visitors from France overnight, all landing on my post about the Falkirk Wheel in Scotland, so I followed their links backwards to a French science and technology website and found myself looking at this mystery photograph - une photo mysterieuse - where the game was to identify the subject of my photo from that post, cropped to show just a section of the horse's neck and mane, and the tip of the Wheel. There were lots of guesses: a machine for destroying secret documents, a rotating wire brush, a young man's spiky hair and, my personal favourite, a rat's bottom, but amazingly someone was able to identify it.

I suppose the guy setting up the game, rather than randomly happening upon that post, thought of the Wheel first and just googled for a photo - but it's still amazing to me though that some French science nerd found his way to my blog. Even if he then pillaged it (only the winner had the courtesy to include the link to the post after, ahem, filching the entire photo to prove his claim).

It's an interesting, if dispiriting, exercise, to google myself or the opening words of a story, and see just how far my work has gone around the world - totally without my permission or of course any payment for its use. I've found my stuff on newspaper websites in India, South Africa, the UK, Singapore, Australia... So far it has at least always been under my name, small comfort that that is, so nobody else is stealing my stories and being paid for them. Still, it's kind of depressing to work hard on a story, wringing out the words sometimes, be paid if I'm lucky 40c a word (a rate that hasn't changed here for 30 years, I'm told - back then writers must actually have been able to make a living from their work) or more likely a package rate for words+images; and then see it popping up all over the place for free. It's becoming harder and harder to get a second sale out of a story, when it now doesn't just appear in a newspaper, say, and then disappears from the records, wrapped around the next day's fish 'n chips, but is also automatically uploaded to the paper's website to remain there forever after, for no extra payment. It all makes me look upon moon-faced Kim Dotcom with even less favour.

On the plus side, it's been fun to picture all those French techies trying to figure out the title of that post: they may be hot at identifying machines, but working out a lumbering English-Scottish pun? No chance!

Connecting

[By the way, next time you're slumped glumly in your armchair while your favourite TV programme keeps breaking up into its constituent pixels and disappearing off the screen, don't sit there passively, and unscientifically, thinking "Well, I knew rain wrecked the satellite signal, but what's with this gale? Is is blowing the rays around the sky, or what?" Get up and go outside and remove the wayward branch of rose bush that's waving in front of the sensor, and save yourself a $90 technician call-out fee.]

Because of breaks in the programme (see above) I missed David Attenborough's introduction to the footage of a bird eating flowers on some sort of bush, but then he said "currawong" and I thought, "Currawong! Australian crow-type bird! I remember seeing one in Tasmania, when I was walking around Dove Lake in the unexpected snow, in my smooth-soled sneakers, and there was a man eating his lunchtime sandwich by the water, and suddenly a currawong swooped down and snatched it from his fingers right as he was going to bite it, and he didn't know whether he was more shocked or hungry!" And then the close-up was swapped for a wide shot, and there was Cradle Mountain and Dove Lake. I love it when that happens.

Then we watched 'Buildings that Shaped the World' which is much more interesting than it sounds, about city planning this time, and shouted "Bath! Edinburgh! York! London!" all the way through as the pictures came up on the screen. It's just as well we were on our own. When other people do that sort of thing, it's simply indefensible, don't you think?

Travelling with Pollyanna

I've been reading a pile of submissions to a travel writing competition that I'm judging for a writers' group and, as an English teacher trained in the mid-'70s, I have to say that all those "Of course, they didn't teach grammar in those days" comments we've been getting ever since were misdirected. Most of these hopefuls are ladies in their 60s and 70s, at school when the syllabus was much more prescriptive and yet - the dangling participles! The missing main verbs! Mixed tenses! Random Capital Letters! Swarms, of commas, and exclamation marks!!!

It's great that they're trying, I know, and all of them have something to say that's worth reading, but it's a hard row for my inner pedant to hoe, and I now have great sympathy for the travel editor of the NZ Herald, who says he gets 300 unsolicited submissions a week. Most of them would be like these ones, I'm guessing: either What I Did on My Holidays or Listen to this Funny/Scary/Horrifying Anecdote from my trip twenty years ago. Diverting enough, but not really travel stories.

And so many of them have wasted material: an attempted mugging on the Trans-Siberian dismissed in a couple of sentences, while there are paragraphs about tinned fish and hard-boiled eggs; getting trapped in a gondola on Mt Etna in a high wind ditto, with all the attention given to finding their hotel. What were they thinking?

It seems obvious to me that to draw and keep the reader's attention, you choose the most exciting/funny/scary moment of a trip and build the story around that. From a travel writing perspective, the more a trip goes wrong, absolutely the better (as long as you actually survive to tell the tale). So getting lost in Lima, dropping my camera down a scree slope on Skye, having jewellery snatched in Santiago? All gifts.

Preferable to 'iron in HIS soul'

Back home after a cruelly short night to sunrise on a crisper but still lovely day here in Auckland, and the pleasure of seeing another of my photos on the cover of the Herald on Sunday, and a story inside about a mere five of Scotland's engineering marvels.

The photo is of the Glenfinnan Viaduct over in the west near Loch Shiel: it's a remarkable curved span of 21 arches, the first ever construction of its type in concrete. To get the photo, my friend and I had to wade through wet thigh-deep heather up a hillside, and then wait for half an hour to hear the distant chuff-chuff of the train approaching. Earlier we had scoffed at some upper-class twits who turned up to breakfast in our lovely old hotel in their tweed plus-fours - but they would have had the last laugh (a Public School nasal bray) if they'd seen us return with our shoes sodden and muddy, and our jeans soaked through.

There was another lesson in not judging by appearances in the foyer, where a quartet of elderly people were having afternoon tea by the fire - "Och, I'll take a wee spot of milk in my tea" - and I was thinking they looked just like characters straight out of Dr Finlay's Casebook, when their conversation moved on to the Rod Stewart concert they'd recently attended.

My story's appearance was well-timed, because today I went to a Tea Royale at the Langham in honour of the visiting VisitBritain CEO, and as a nod to the upcoming nuptials of Wills and Kate (when he travelled to NZ recently on Cathay Pacific, it was under the name of Mr Dove) and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee next year. Never were fancies so fancy!

Déjà vu - mais non jamais mangé

It's a bit dislocating to discover a parallel universe so close to home. I've just read a story about Glasgow in the paper by an Auckland travel writer called Pam (whose daughter named A. is a reporter for the Herald) and the opening paragraph features the legendary deep-fried Mars bar - but it's not me and it isn't my story.

The main thrust of Other Pam's story is that Glasgow cuisine is much maligned and that you can eat there very well; however she does rather undermine her own message by citing examples such as macaroni cheese pie and chips, and haggis vindaloo, and quotes a primary school teacher who claims that takeaway Indian curries are the only vegetables her students get to eat.

Both our stories actually draw a blank as far as the battered Mars bar is concerned: I stopped at every takeaway I came to in Glasgow and scrutinised their menu boards and never saw it listed (the only time I've ever found it was here in NZ). I did though find a new and unsuspected horror: the deep-fried pizza. Apparently you can get it battered or bare; and the connoisseurs prefer cheap generic pizza because the thick base soaks up more fat. Augh.

Haggis, though. I felt obliged to try it while I was in Scotland despite, oddly, not being attracted by the idea of offal mixed with oats cooked inside a sheep's stomach. I put it off for a while, but eventually gritted my teeth and ordered it as a starter in a friendly restaurant in Pitlochry, an appealing little spa town in the Trossachs. Visions of a pale, steaming bag of minced heart, liver and lungs stabbed with a knife so the contents poured out like lava didn't get my mouth watering while I waited - but when it came, it was a delight.

It was served modern-fashion, as a small stack on a base of bashed neeps and tatties (mashed swede and potato), and was dark, tender and so very tasty that I honestly regretted not having ordered it as a main. I would gladly eat it again.

The other memorable thing about that evening was the lovely couple at the next table: from Ayrshire, in their 70s, married 55 years, he a retired coal-miner, she a retired nurse, both having fun on a touring holiday and thrilled to have a four-poster bed with tartan curtains in their B&B. "It's our very first time! What a shame we won't be putting it to its proper use..." Sweet.

(I haven't any photos of these places because I dropped my camera over a cliff on Skye, so this is the best I can do.)

Building bridges. No, really.

We've got the painter in: just one man in white overalls with a ladder, a trestle and a handful of brushes. He's scraping and sanding away as I write, a noise that will be background for the next month or so as he works his way around the outside of our long wooden house. It's hardly the Forth Bridge, but it's a big job, which is why it's been put off for so many years - during which, of course, it's become an even bigger job.

"Like painting the Forth Bridge" is shorthand for a never-ending job, but I recently discovered that modern paints have made that saying redundant: the latest coating is expected to last 20 years. And, given the famous vagaries of Scottish weather, apparently even with the old paints, there were never more than about 90 days in a year when the painters were actually able to work on the bridge. So as cliches go, it was a lot less true than most.

It's an impressive bit of engineering though: massively sturdy, carrying trains over the Forth River since 1890 on its three double cantilevers which hold hands across 2.5km. I'm forever impressed by the energy and confidence of the Victorians - they were not only incredibly busy, but they thought so BIG. The Forth Rail Bridge is made up of 54,000 tonnes of steel held together by 6.5 million rivets (the final one gold-plated and hammered home by Edward, Prince of Wales). It helped, of course, to have cheap labour and no OSH to worry about: at the peak of construction 4,000 men were working on the bridge and 98 of them died doing it.

Still, nothing like it had ever been built before, and they did such a good job that even today it's the main rail crossing of the river, and 200 trains rattle across it daily. It makes the nearby road bridge, built in 1964, look positively anorexic. It's a rather boring suspension bridge, which seems a wasted opportunity. I think engineers usually love the creative opportunity of building a bridge: there are certainly some beauties around, ancient and modern too. One day I'd love to go and see that wonderful one in France, the Millau Viaduct. Tells you all you need to know, that Googling 'France bridge' takes you straight to it.

(Copyleft photo from francethisway.com)

Hairy!

There's a farmer in Auckland hospital tonight after a run-in with a Highland cow which took exception to being loaded onto a truck, and attempted to gore him. He only managed to avoid being stabbed by hanging on to her horns while she did her best to smear him into the grass, crushing his chest and leaving him with "considerable injuries".

If I'd known they could be so savage, I wouldn't have been quite so relaxed with the herd of 'hairy coos' we came across in Scotland. We'd been poking around the Trossachs and followed a winding lane to Balquhidder to find the grave of Rob Roy ('MacGregor despite them' on the stone) when we spotted a herd of these cattle in a paddock beside a loch.

We asked if we could go and photograph them and the man (who, I now realise, probably wasn't the farmer, just a workman busy repointing the barn - and not a stockman at all) said we could, so we blithely trotted off and spent about thirty minutes snapping away at these cows with their calves. It was probably a bit dumb, and we were lucky not to be trampled by several dozen over-protective mothers - but boy, those calves were cute!

Teddy bears - through and through. Who knew their mothers could be more like grizzly bears?

Cider inside her

Busy day with Katherine yesterday in Bendigo, which has the architecture of a much larger city. Quite which one, I wouldn't like to say: its main street is called Pall Mall, but at Charing Cross there's a mini-Cenotaph that's a scale model of the Whitehall original which gives a disconcerting Disneyland feel. Then our hotel, the PO building and the Law Courts reminded me of Edinburgh, itself a very European city, with their tiled mansard rooflines (especially invoking cliche Scottish parsimony, Shamrock Hotel, charging $20 for 12 hours of internet: BIG black mark!) And everywhere there are verandahs with iron lace that are quintessentially Australian. So never mind comparisons, it's Bendigo, and that's good enough.

I was back underground for part of the day at the Central Deborah Gold Mine, in most unsuitable shoes, getting a great tour from Darryl whose grandfather worked there before it closed. It was pretty chilling, and not just because it was cold and damp from all the rain they've had recently: mining is such a hard, hard job, so exhausting and damaging and dangerous and unnatural. And all to win a metal that's going to end up, most of it, underground again in some bank vault, all its gleaming glory gone to waste.

There was more wine at Balgownie Estate, just a few minutes from the town centre but feeling right in the country, where our tasting lunch, food and wine, ended at 3.30pm. Very civilised, I call that.

And today we've driven to Castlemaine, home of XXXX but made here no more - instead we went to Henry of Harcourt, a cidery where chooks with chicks were wandering about, and tried a range of ciders: so much more my sort of thing than all those wines. There was a lot of leisurely mooching today, around both Castlemaine and Maldon, which are pretty and unspoilt gold-mining towns with streets of heritage buildings taken over by bookshops, collectibles and antiques; plus some really individual enterprises, like the ones that make chocolate shoes, and antique button jewellery, and mint mice.

And tonight we're at the Empyre Boutique Hotel where the theme is French antiques, with lovely carved wooden furniture - and free internet. These people know how to treat their guests.

Waity Katie no longer

Not that I really care, but Prince William finally announced his engagement to Kate today. Good luck to them: they'll need it, especially risking being jinxed by Diana's ring - but maybe since they won't be able to spend their honeymoon on board the royal yacht Britannia, they'll do better than the previous generation who did, and all ended up divorced.

Britannia was decommissioned in 1997 - one of the few times the Queen has ever been seen in public to shed a tear - and is open to the public at Leith, just outside Edinburgh. It's really interesting, in a nosy kind of way, to look over the ship and get a glimpse into the Royal Family's off-duty life. The Queen, rather endearingly, is a frugal type who recycled Victoria's monogrammed sheets on her hard-looking single bed. Apparently she likes a deep turn-down, which sounds treasonously personal, but only refers to the amount of sheet folded back over the blanket. The Duke, on the other hand, likes his bed much more Spartan and won't have anything to do with lace on his pillow-cases - and quite right too, navy type that he is.

There's a country-house type of drawing room with squashy sofas and floral wallpaper - the Queen wanted a proper fireplace, but had to make do with a fake gas one - with a baby grand whose ivories were once tinkled by Noel Coward.

The crew had to play statues whenever a Royal Personage hove into sight, standing silently until the Presence had passed - and they used hand signals amongst themselves to avoid being intrusive. They sometimes got through several uniforms a day, all laundered on board 24/7: the laundry washed a standard 600 shirts every day.

And the ship is the only one on the oceans not displaying a name or number on the hull: if you have to ask, you don't need to know, I suppose. 

Super Value

Big week. Back from America, straight into a whirl of teaching, deadlines and celebrations, all adding up to a jumble of countries and memories.

The First-Born turned 21, and her slide show was a mix of photos from England, New Zealand, Australia and France: so many lovely moments, so long ago - apparently - but all still so familiar. School is French and German and Latin (Video, puellae, in me omnium vestrum ora atque oculos esse conversos... I knew that sentence would come in handy one day). And the deadlines were Queensland and Glasgow. Oh, and I had a birthday in there somewhere too.

What with all that, the late nights and the jet lag, it's a triumph that I still know which way is up.

Tingle = little thrill

My forefinger's tingling again. It does that now, from time to time, ever since I stupidly poked it into a parrot's cage at Cooberrie Park in Queensland, and the blasted bird bit me. The wound has healed, but it's left some nerve damage, obviously, that causes this intermittent tingle.

It was buzzing silently all the way to work this morning, and made me think about the bird that did it: an eclectus parrot, a vision in green and red, that I'd only ever come across once before. That was also in a cage, also in Australia - in Broome, which I always remember in vivid shades of red, blue and orange. It's a great place to visit, interesting and quirky and in a gloriously beautiful part of the country.

Our hotel was interesting and quirky, too. McAlpine House, 100 years old, is a classic tropical Master Pearler's house with wide eaves, spacious shady verandas with white-painted trellis, leisurely ceiling fans, wide old timbers on the floors, dim woody library, a swimming pool under a sun-shade, lots of big armchairs scattered about, and more loungers out on the deck beneath a huge mango tree. It's very relaxing and welcoming and we loved staying there. There was an aviary with a pair of eclectus parrots on the deck, which fitted well with the general ambience of idiosyncratic luxury.

Lord Alistair McAlpine, who built it, was the 10th richest man in Britain at the time, thanks to the famous McAlpine construction company. The firm was founded by his grandfather Sir Robert McAlpine, also known as Concrete Bob, who built, amongst many other Scottish landmarks, the wonderful Glenfinnan Viaduct in the west. It has 21 arches, is built on a curve, and is well-known to all Harry Potter fans from the scenes in the movie where the Hogwarts Express crosses it. The train is actually The Jacobite, a classic black, brass and maroon steam train that takes tourists from Fort William to the coast.

I haven't ridden it, but I did stand thigh-deep in wet heather once to take a photo of it, and it was a great sight - and sound. Another sort of tingle entirely. Gosh, I love it when stuff joins up like this: it's almost worth not being young any more.

Unnatural selection

I see there's another proposal being made to reintroduce thousands of wolves to places like New England, California, the Great Plains and the desert West. Having walked through the woods in the first two places, it was enough for me to cope with the possibility of bears, without having to listen out for a pack of wolves creeping up on me. Biologists, though, march to the beat of a different drum - and you mess with them at your peril:

UNNATURAL SELECTION

Have you heard Darwin’s joke about evolution? No, me neither. Outside the border of a Gary Larson cartoon, scientists are not much associated with humour, which is why my name has become a dirty word among conservationists.

It’s rather surprising, that I, who keep chickens and a worm farm and whose compost heap is a miracle of organic recycling should find myself pilloried by such an august institution as the NZ National Parks and Conservation Foundation; and all because I once frivolously suggested that as our native birds are as a rule both tone-deaf and drab, it would make the dawn chorus a much jollier affair if we allowed English robins to join in. Hooray for the tuneful songs of the blackbirds and thrushes, I cheered, and boo to the boring tui and grey warbler. Let’s have gaudy flights of multi-coloured budgies, I fantasised, and jewelled hummingbirds hovering in the kowhai.

Unfortunately for me, there was a brace of humourless British biological scientists visiting at the time, who took great exception to my admiration for blackbirds and other jack-booting exotics, and denounced as silly and irresponsible my proposal for free entry to New Zealand for all colourful birds who can hold a tune. Their intelligent, informed and, ultimately, dull and predictable argument with what was simply a flight of fancy is just what you would expect from such earnest, blinkered types. In their ideal world, there would be no give-and-take between countries of either flora or fauna, and each would remain biologically pure, distinct and unique.

This is dangerous ground, I think, trodden most notoriously by Adolf Hitler – and the fact that my computer’s spell-check has just refused to recognise his first name is a fair indication of the regard in which he is held these days. Because if immigration and miscegenation in the plant and animal worlds are rigorously banned, wouldn’t that encourage the view that human populations should be equally pure?

It’s a matter of where you draw the line – and, equally importantly, when. The scientists trotted out the argument that tourists come here to enjoy New Zealand’s beautiful and uncontaminated environment. Tourists come also, however, to experience and appreciate the Maori culture. Maori got here about 850 years before the blackbird: so, if you’ll pardon the pun, is it simply a race, to qualify as a native? Or do the scientists think New Zealand would be richer, if the people had stayed away and left the moa, huia and other now-extinct species to thrive unmolested?

And what if they allowed people to come in, but not sheep and cattle, which are responsible for the loss of vast tracts of native habitat: where would our economy be then? Or are farm animals okay, but not the cats and dogs which enhance and aid the lives of their owners? There are certainly some hard-line biologists who raise their heads above the parapet with that argument from time to time, but the fact that they have got no further shows how out-of-touch they are with the real world.

We all know about scientists and their jars of formaldehyde and trays of pinioned insects: but you can’t enclose an entire country in a glass case. Change will occur, both naturally and through outside agents, some of it good and some of it regrettable. That’s life, by definition. There are good reasons for arguing that trying to preserve creatures like the kakapo, whose finickingly fussy way of life seems designed to bring about its own extinction, is flying in the face of nature. Some of these animals – and no-one is sorrier about this than I am – are just born losers. Natural selection is, after all, a continuing process.

Unnatural selection, on the other hand, is apparently all right if it is scientists, rather than mere columnists, doing the selecting. Americans, as we know, think big; and a report in the latest issue of the scientific journal Nature dwarfs my modest robin joke. Some biologists from Cornell University are seriously proposing the introduction of elephants and lions into the Great Plains of the United States in an attempt both to give these animals a better shot at survival than they currently have in their native African habitats, and to restore to America modern descendants of animals that were wiped out there more than 10,000 years ago. Someone in Britain is also lobbying to reintroduce bears and wolves into the Scottish Highlands.

Well, pardon me for not grasping the big picture here, but if I were a cattle rancher in Montana, or a Scottish crofter with a valued flock of sheep, I don’t think I would welcome a whole new level of predators in my environment. And I would worry that there could be a trend developing. What’s next: Jurassic Park?

[Pub. Waikato Times 27/8/05]

Not the face of a hard-hearted survival-of-the-fittest zealot, honest - no-one would be happier than me to get to Mauritius next week and find the place still swarming with dim-but-friendly dodos.

Och aye the new

Heaven forfend that I should get sucked into the offensive laziness that is national stereotypes - but it does seem appropriate that I've just managed to squeeze another story out of my trip to Scotland three years ago. Nothing wrong with a bit of frugality, it's how I was brought up, and there isn't any Scottish heritage in my ancestry - that I'm aware of, though they did scatter far and wide, thanks to the auld enemy south of the border, in its upper-class landowner incarnation.

Anyway, one of the things in the story was the Falkirk Wheel, which I visited on the recommendation of a Burke-sympathiser in the Surgeon's Museum in Edinburgh (he thought grave-robber/murderer Burke had suffered from bad press). "It's the 8th Wonder of the World!" he claimed, so off I duly trotted, getting snarled up in a horrendous town by-pass system that had more roundabouts than you could shake a stick at. I swear I went at least seven sides of an octagon to get there.

But it was worth it: an astonishing piece of modern engineering built to rescue an old one. The Union Canal, finished in 1822, was designed to follow one contour all the way from Edinburgh to Falkirk, using aqueducts and tunnels to keep level so that no time-consuming locks would be necessary. But then the railways took over and the canal system languished for a hundred years till recreational boaties came along.

The Wheel is designed to lift a boat and the water it's floating on up 35 metres to where the Forth and Clyde canal stops in mid-air, where with some whirring and clanking it's able to transfer, while another boat on the other side does the opposite. It's crazy, ingenious and impressive - and also surprisingly economical (if you discount the £17.5 million it cost to build). In what always seems to me a sweet and typically British shorthand, each rotation of the wheel uses only the power that it would take to boil 8 tea-kettles.

And besides the engineering marvel, there are also a couple of fabulous artworks of Kelpies - mythical water-horses - that one day, Lotto funds willing, will be incorporated on a much larger scale (30 metres high) into the Wheel itself.

Worth seeing: go there. Falkirk is halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow. 

The movie's real stars

Last night I squandered a couple of hours of my life that I'll never get back watching the movie 'Stardust', a silly although honestly-intentioned fairy story about witches and princes, simply because I wanted to spot the locations it was filmed at. It did look pretty spectacular - or, pretty and spectacular - as scenery in England, Wales and Scotland panned past behind the actors.

My greatest triumph was spotting the Quiraing, on the Isle of Skye, above, where Michelle Pfeiffer as a wrinked crone frowned into the distance. Skye isn't a huge place, but it has some deeply impressive moors and mountains, down the side of one of which I watched my Canon DSLR cartwheel in slow-motion after someone sneakily dialled up the gravity and my bag suddenly slid away from where it had been lying for 10 minutes at my feet. It was only when it reached the scree slope that the camera flew out of the open top, sigh.

So this was one of the last photos I took with it: it was a sorry sight when we scrambled down the slope to retrieve it.

Another location was Pen y Fan, a steep, bare peak of over 800 metres in the Brecon Beacons, the highest in South Wales and the big expedition on the annual camp for third-years at Newent Community School where I taught for a while. I was astonished at how some of these country girls collapsed by the path in the early stages, crying and frightened by how their legs were hurting - apparently, they'd never tackled anything more challenging than a flight of stairs, and had never felt the burn before - and this back when Jane Fonda was aerobics queen! (But my scorn came back to bite me on the descent, when I copped wind-blown grit under both contact lenses and ended up frozen to the spot, both eyes clamped shut.)

And then there was this place, Arlington Row in Bibury, in the Cotswolds, where I last went just a few months ago: perfectly pretty and, so the sign claims, England's most-photographed view. No surprises there.

No, I didn't order fush and chups

Watching an old episode of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' last night, I was thrown by Lucy Lawless appearing as herself and speaking in her own Newzild accent. Even though I'm getting used to Aussies in mainstream American programmes like 'House' and 'ER', it's still odd to come across Kiwis speaking in our accent over there: it kind of destroys the fourth wall (though of course it was one of the many joys of 'Flight of the Conchords').

Accents can lead to some dislocating moments: like when I was in Scotland - home to some pretty impenetrable accents itself - and in a pub in Bonnyrigg outside Edinburgh, our waitress seemed to have none at all. Turned out she was from Christchurch - probably the only non-Polish waitress in the whole of Scotland. I was so busy asking her about what she was doing there that I completely forgot to request an explanation of this banner on the wall outside, which still has me foxed.

And my English sister-in-law, despite having already spent some days with us on our recent visit, was still sufficiently caught out by my accent when I was talking about a service in Dublin Cathedral, to say in astonishment, "A circus? In the cathedral?"

Location, Location, Location

Gidday! And welcome to the first post in my new blog which, as the title indicates, is an excuse to revisit places I've been and enjoy them all over again. Yes, there will be boasting, but I'll try to keep it to a minimum - really I'm just wanting to share.

About six years ago I started pretending to be a travel writer, and now I really am one (with prizes, no less! See my website www.pamelawade.co.nz) but here the plan is to write on-the-spot blogs while I'm travelling, and when I'm back home to pick random memories that are prompted by something happening that day. So here we go:

Today I went with my daughters to see the latest Harry Potter movie - The Half-Blood Prince. We're an HP family - in on the phenomenon almost from the start, when my girls were the same age as Harry, and every new book was a huge event for us. I read them all aloud, so we could enjoy them together, and no-one had to wait to find out what happened. It wasn't quite so cosy today, to be honest - as soon as it was over, they were rushing off to re-connect with their own lives, even forgetting to say Thanks for taking us. Teenagers. Sigh.

So I don't know what they thought, but I liked it, even though it, like the book, mainly has a filling-in-the-gaps function. There was a lot of good stuff in it, and I was drawn into the story, but the traveller in me was paying attention too: to the dizzying swoop in over London, the destruction of the Millennium Bridge (which I hope to walk over in a couple of months' time), the magnificently bleak Scottish Highlands, the scenes in the cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral, the great hall at Christ Church College, Oxford, the pewter gleam of Loch Shiel below Hogwarts... all places I've been, and some of which I know well.

Then I watched a TV documentary tonight about the year of JK Rowling's life when she was finishing HP7, which opened with Edinburgh's sooty skyline, a view I had from my corner room at the Scotsman, just across North Bridge from the Balmoral, where she wrote the ending. I wrote a story on that trip about HP locations: how I stood on a soggy hillside waiting for the Jacobite train, which doubles as the Hogwarts Express, to come over the Glenfinnan Viaduct; went out on the loch and tried to imagine Hogwarts CGI'd onto a hill; drank a coffee in the Elephant Cafe where JK did a lot of her writing in her impoverished days.

But I hadn't realised that I had also visited the location where HP1 was written: the little town of Leith. I went there to look over the Royal Yacht Britannia which is now permanently moored there; and I wandered around the gentrified canal area with its swivel bridge and barges; and took photos of the picturesque Newhaven Harbour where once you could walk from side to side on the fishing boats but where now there's only one lobster boat left amongst all the pleasure craft. JK lived here in a flat which she revisited for the documentary - much nicer than I expected, and tidier than she remembered; but there was a touching moment when she spotted the HP books lined up on a shelf in what had been her bedroom, and it came to her in a rush what a fairytale it all had been.

Indeed. You couldn't write about it. Or could you...

>>> Everyone now knows the story of how the impoverished author pushed her infant daughter round the streets of the city till she fell asleep, and then went to her favourite café to write uninterrupted in the warmth while her coffee went cold on the table. The café is there: it’s called The Elephant House. ‘The birthplace of Harry Potter’ is painted across the window, and you can buy tshirts and caps with that slogan, but inside the main decorative theme is, no surprise, elephants. The back room is large, light and comfortable, and while I was there at the next table a woman with a toddler in a pushchair beside her was busily scribbling in a notebook: maybe hoping for some of the success to rub off. You wouldn’t actually come here for the coffee, which was neither hot nor very good, but I didn’t say so to the barista, who was happy to answer the question she must have heard a hundred times. “There’s no one table that J.K.Rowling sat at: she came so often that she probably used them all.”

The view from the back room windows is across the narrow and quaintly-named Candlemaker Row into the Greyfriars kirkyard. The soot-streaked tombstones there may have given Rowling some ideas for the spookier parts of her books, but people come here because of another story, that of Greyfriars Bobby. It was here that for 14 years the little Skye terrier called Bobby kept a vigil over the grave of his master, John Gray, leaving the churchyard only for his daily meal when the one o’clock gun boomed from the castle. He died in 1872, having been given the freedom of the city, and was himself buried in the churchyard. There is now an appealing statue of the little dog just down the road from the Elephant House in the street called George IV Bridge.

It’s only about four blocks from here along cobbled streets and through tunnel-like alleyways between the tall narrow buildings to where the Balmoral Hotel stands in 5-star splendour under its iconic clock-tower on the corner of Princes Street. For Jo Rowling it must have been an unimaginable journey back in her Elephant House days, but it was here, in the opulence of suite 552 on January 11th 2007 that she wrote the last sentence of the last Harry Potter book.

She also, apparently, signed an ornamental bust to that effect, but the management is not interested in encouraging fans to troop inside to view it, and it is tucked discreetly away somewhere. There is nothing, though, to stop anyone from walking past the doorman in his kilt, pushing through the revolving doors and entering the elegant lobby with its chandeliers and thick carpet, to do some imagining of their own.

Both Jo Rowling and Harry himself rose from obscurity to enormous fame, and that may not be to everyone’s taste – but aiming to visit the beautiful, fascinating and richly varied country that is Scotland is a dream anyone would be happy to realise.

[Pub. New Idea 15/03/08]