The Shelter Stone

Last week the vegan cook Derek Sarno published a short video on YouTube with a simple dip recipe.

Each year the Cairngorm Club traverses across, though, or over the range of mountains that gives the club its name.

An attempt at giving myself the tools for reflection and creativity when visiting the higher places.

Happy new notebook day!

Aberdeen.

It has been a month of contrasts.

For two weeks in a row Jen and I ran in Glen Tanar, a nearby remnant of the Caledonian Forest.

Two months ago, I started recovering from the illness by walking into a remote coire that I’d only ever seen on the map.

And I miss the quiet.

I’m rereading James Wood’s How Fiction Works, which I last read fifteen years ago at the tail end of my post graduation unemployment.

It’s been a rough start to the year.

Arrived today.

Tuesday 13th Jan.

A lot of people I respect write excellent roundups of their years, and 2025, has been no different.

And hot on the heels of yesterday’s entry about being at the end of one journal, today I start the new one.

I’m reaching the end of my current personal notebook which is always a weird position to be in.

Oil industry machinery in the south harbour with golfers on the clifftop golf course in front of it.

Last Friday and Saturday I went nordic skiing in the Clashindarroch Forest for the first time.

Yesterday Ryan from Third Circle Coffee in Aberdeen posted to Instagram a video clip of his new speaker and amp setup with an ambient electronic record playing.

I’ve read this once.

He ran up Broad Hill for the eighth time since it reopened two weeks ago.

Earlier today I sat in Third Circle Coffee, Aberdeen drinking batch brew, listening to Bohren & der Club of Gore, and reading the first story in Robert Chamber’s The King in Yellow: The Repairer of Reputations.

On Saturday afternoon I recaptured the intensity of writing that I’d felt between 2008 and 2011.

I had plans for this month, but they’ve been thrown out the window.

I don’t know who this is, but they clearly have good taste.

My manager assigned/recommended this book to me at the start of the year during our end of year discussion.

No thoughts, only boulder.

I will always watch a good Barkley Marathons documentary.

This is delightful.

I spent last week on call for my day job and, although I was only called out once, today I’m exceptionally tired and looking forward to having my phone off overnight.

I write fiction so infrequently these days that I fear that any ability I once had I the form has withered away.

Two hours of thoughts & no thoughts to get here then two more hours to get back to Balmoral Castle with a few diversions in the forest to make up time.

Like many, I receive far more newsletters in my inbox than I actually read.

Writer Cassidy Randall’s new book Thirty Below unearths the story of the first all-female ascent of Denali in 1970 and reveals a deeper story of ambition and teamwork.

Yesterday the mise en place for a tricky work project finally found its ideal shape and, after months of delays & frustration, I stepped into the holy state of flow while writing code and conversing with the machine spirit.

This is one of my favourite climbing films from last year.

I didn’t start the Lairig Ghru race yesterday.

It did not go well, and while I don’t want to glamorise suffering for the sake of suffering, I did learned a lot despite being in excruciating pain.

Last Sunday I wrote a short piece’s marking the end of one definition of winter and the start of spring.

A wet weekend in Glencoe at one of my favourite mountain huts.

I took the above photo on the 4th of January a few moments before boarding a coach south to Oslo.

Sunday afternoon and the rain has just set in.

Beinn a’ Ghlò above the clouds.

I bought two of these in Norway last spring.