Beginnings

Whilst not quite in The Twilight Years, I am now at the stage where the local barber insists on the concession rate applying.  I counter with confirmation that I am still working, and yet to receive my state pension (though I'll own to counting down the months).  Although I still pay full fare at the football, for home matches, I have no qualms of using the concession gate for away games.  I'll put money into my club, but limit my funding of others.

Life in general moves on, and we begin to gaze ahead.  Looking and longing to those days when work commitments come to an end; when days can be filled with other things, put off for too long.

As the title says we are on a journey, a move from Peelhill to Portknockie.  For now we are in the transition years.  By the time the physical move is complete we will have more than 30 years at Peelhill; and have begun however many we may have left, at Portknockie.  The journey has started, a foot in both camps so to speak.

For too long I have neglected my dabblings with the written word, and become unfamiliar with the processes in putting blog posts together.  Uploading photographs, editing into articles; writing book reviews, or perhaps recipes.  However, thanks largely to the patience and the promptings of the delicious Angela Locke, I am getting ready to write again, to explore the form of words, the sounds and the colours.

And that is very much part of the thinking as we gaze ahead.  From our base at Portknockie, I hope to do a bit of cycling - it's largely flat lands along the coast, rather than the hills of Avondale.  As I trundle around I may have a camera with me, a notebook too.  I hope to slowly swap the sights and sounds of Peelhill, for those on the Moray Coast.  Farmland to cliffs and beaches; Loudoun Hill to Bow Fiddle Rock.

I may return to periodic book reviews, perhaps even attempt some poetic forms as I keep an eye on life around me.  I'll swap buzzards and jackdaws for ospreys and gannets; and sheep for dolphins.  And if I can find the right words, perhaps a picture or two, I'll try to show how it goes.

Join me, for whatever lies ahead, as we gradually move From Peelhill to Portknockie.  Treasured memories may crop up, and new discoveries are waiting to be made.  Between times there will be much reading, of course.  And much pain, for the accumulated library will not all be able to come with us.  Book-selling, painful though it is; some charities may benefit.  Reading by e-reader, as I change to collecting the right to read rather than sourcing that precious first edition.

That said my reading habits have changed in recent years.  Of course I still read travel, and nature, but crime is a much expanded genre, on the shelves and on screen.  Most of that crime comes with a travel element, following as it does my viewing habits.  Watching with sub-titles, has become reading in translation.  From Icelandic, or Scandinavian, heavily Nordic biased.  They do crime so well.  So too though, does Allan Martin, with his DI Angus Blue from his base in Oban to islands and beyond.  Scotland will always feature heavily.

In travel, on nature, and in crime.  But not in politics, which has become too depressing, so it is banned from these pages.  Unless something exciting happens.

Onwards, and into future.  As we learn to live with, and enjoy, streetlights, and neighbours.  It's been a while.  Let's see how it goes shall we.