Blogging to Banchory

Unlike the effortless recluse I am today I was consumed with excitement as I was setting off on a bus journey to Banchory. I dressed in my best funereal black and down the hill I went passed the stragglers going to Primary School. The 201 came along and so I set of on my journey to the west, breathing in the air of freedom-i left behind the dirt and dishes and the cats and the computer- and feel so light, dare I say it happy.

Now we are near Crathes with it's long, seemingly life long road up to the Castle. I recall last autumn a group of us kicked through the snowdrifts and mini-Murdo's of leaves on our even longer road through the woods up to the Castle.

The bus is speeding nauseatingly fast, the River Dee unseen today, but only a few fields of grass away. Yellow and black railway engines sit idly at the start of a couple of miles of freshly laid tracks, that will reach Banchory sometime soon some say. The bus has paused, there is a deep redness on the trees at the side of the road, for a while it seems almost autumn, but the next stop reveals a sandpit of a new housing estate. Now a deep corner and we slide down a soft slope through the rain towards the Town Centre, I could almost taste the coffee and bacon roll, I would eat before taking on the Charity Shops. Found a new bookshop, empty, but for the owner, she said they'd been open two and a half years. A shelf of poetry books, for some reason I was disapointed there were no Sylvia Plath books. Perhaps I would return, on another day finding freedom, I thought as I left empty handed.

If it wasn't raining I could go for a walk to a bridge over the Feugh where the salmon jump and take some pictures, but pangs of homesickness arose as the rain intensified and I didn't have to wait long at the bus stop.

Now I am returning, down toward the river, home and I am glad.