After a pleasant weekend in Yorkshire, Andrew, Triar and I returned to Dumfries last Sunday, but I didn’t stay there long. I had booked a trip to Ayr to go out on a welfare cross-compliance visit with a colleague who needed support. I drove up and we worked on the paperwork together on Monday. The visit was planned for Tuesday and I wanted to have plenty of time to go through everything, but it was also good to catch up with some other Animal Health Officer colleagues I had worked with before in Stranraer.

I stayed in the Mercure Hotel, which was clean enough and had a decent breakfast, though the bed and pillow were so hard that I was surprised that I managed to get a reasonable night’s sleep. The British obsession with hard mattresses stopped making sense after a few years in Norway, where the mattresses are all soft and it feels like you are sleeping on a cloud.

I awoke in the morning to a cloudy day and a rather noisy friend outside my bedroom window. I confess I had been quite amused the night before to see a discarded half bottle of some unknown liquor on the flat roof outside my room. It’s so very Scottish to see that. With apologies to my Scottish friends, Scotland really does have a litter problem, as well as a huge penchant for drinking. The streaking of my window with bird poo might have been a hint, but I hadn’t really expected such a close encounter with a seagull.

This was just before I was about to go downstairs and I toyed with the idea of bringing back a slice of toast for the interloper, but out of respect for the hotel windows, I decided any more encouragement was not a good plan.

As this was also my second week on the Second Nature plan and I had pledged to do fifteen minutes exercise each morning, I decided to take a walk before breakfast. Though it’s not obvious from the photo above, if you squint at the area, over the rooftops, to the left of the tree my room did technically have a sea view, so I thought I would walk in that direction.

Wandering the town near the hotel to find a restaurant, the night before, I had been rather put off Ayr. The place had a run down air, though the Tempura restaurant (which Donna had recommended) was very nice, with lovely friendly staff. As I walked down towards the beach, I saw another side to it. While still run down, it was obvious as I walked down the wide street, with its substantial, terraced townhouses, now converted into solicitor’s offices and charity headquarters, that this had once been an attractive and prosperous place.

As I cleared the end of the houses, I saw a building that I knew, before I rounded the end of it to see the signs, that it would be called The Pavilion.

To my left, there was a huge swathe of flat green land with pathways crossing it. I thought of Triar and wished he was there.

The Scoopalicious Ice Cream company was another nudging reminder of the golden age of Scottish seaside, west coast towns. An ice cream shop run by an Italian family was another staple in all the resorts that the people of Glasgow escaped to.

There was a pleasant sunken garden…

And a fountain, complete with a fairly traditional traffic cone.

Though the sky was filled with clouds, the mountains of Arran were visible across the water of the wide bay as a reached the sea. To my left and right, there stretched a broad, sandy beach, and again, I found myself wishing Triar was here as he would love to run free across that vast expanse of sand.

I was tempted to venture down onto the sand, but time was limited. Turning back, I was unsurprised to see that The Pavilion was indeed called The Pavilion and was fronted with another southern, Scottish west coast tradition, some rather tired looking palm trees.

As I walked back up the road, I felt that odd sense of sadness and nostalgia such places bring me. Ayr and Largs were not part of my childhood, but many of those my age from Glasgow and other smaller west coast towns can remember visiting those places as children, when they were still popular holiday destinations. I found myself thinking I might come back sometime, for a weekend, and set Triar free on that beach to run.

The rest of my day was taken up with work. The welfare visit went well and I hope I left my colleague with a clearer view of how to carry out an inspection. Back in Dumfries, I have spent the rest of the week catching up with cases. I have written the first draft of a witness statement for a welfare case that might go to court and carried out a disease and cost risk assessment to allow one of my farmers with a TB breakdown to bring a new bull onto the farm.

We can’t go to Yorkshire this weekend as tomorrow, I will be working at the Highland Show. I spent yesterday reading the contingency plan for what we would do in the event of an outbreak of serious disease in the animals at the show. I understood the plans, but found myself hoping we wouldn’t have to implement them as it would be a huge undertaking, trying to sort animals, people and vehicles into groups that could leave and groups that couldn’t, with various stages in between involving gallons of disinfectant and chaotic queues.

I will finish with some photos from Blackbird Lane. There are cows in the fields now and different wildflowers growing in the hedges. The hawthorn bushes have lost their spiky, white blossom and are beginning to form berries, that for now are a muted, brownish red, but will become bright and red as the autumn nears.

Have a good week all.