Another evening at Pilates, another well stretched me.

We had a very interesting weekend with our friend Rieko, from Tokyo.

Saturday: National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; Meadows walk; Burrell Collection, Pollok Park, Glasgow; then home for a gourmet Japanese meal.

Sunday: The Kelpies, Falkirk; the new exhibition at the field of the Battle of Bannockburn; Waitrose then home again for cod and samphire.  I love the word samphire, it makes it one of my favourite vegetables .  I always think of foggy fenland at night time,  with marsh gas igniting in the distance, as featured in mystery stories in the Bunty.   (Knowing these to be localised landburps of methane does not lessen the romance. )

Poem below is written in metal, in the granite by the canal footpath, in the Helix park, near the Kelpies.  Is quicker to go there than to read that sentence.

Echo the great beasts that work among us

Unbridled in this kingdom between canal and firth

Here to harness the river

Carry each weary traveller

Bow down your strong heads to taste the water

Stretch up your long necks to face the sun

Jim Carruth

Duke and Barron, the horses on which the Kelpies were modelled, lived in Pollok Park, where we went for the Parkinson’s UK sponsored walk and where the Burrell Collection is housed.