steve's Journal

Flipside of Travelling, Intimations of Mortality
Travelling alone avoids almost all the hassles of travelling in a group, but it's no fun when you suddenly start missing people. There's a very strong temptation to truncate the holiday and come home (this also flares up during attacks of tourist paranoia), but I've been envying people who've done this sort of trip for decades, and I'm damn well going to extract every last bit of experience (benign or bitter) from it.

It doesn't help that there's likely to be fuck all work to go back to, either.

Oh, and David Murray from the Fisherrow Brewery died over the weekend. Okay, he'd had a stroke before, and lived a very high-stress life, but he was younger than me, dammit! When I was spending time between Edinburgh and London, I'd occasionally get a phone call from him if he was delivering Fisherrow beer "dahn sahf" and we'd meet for a pint or two and maybe a chinese.

Actually, come to think of it, I knew him before then: when I returned to Edinburgh in 1994, I met him at a CAMRA do or two (I bloody well hope someone in the Edinburgh branch is doing him a decent write-up), and it turned out that not only was he a year or two after me in Chemistry at Edinburgh, but we both did the Chemical Pharmacology option in third year, run by the inestimable Norrie Wilson and Jameson Walker (I think the tag "whisky by name, frisky by nature" for the latter gentleman was one of David's).

Fuck. I think tonight I'm going to try and do a David Murray Memorial Pubcrawl...

Current Mood: melancholy
Current Music: Bouncy Czech stuff