beautiful dive

Looking across the loch to Inveraray from St. Catherine's

Went on a fantastic diving trip to Loch Fyne yesterday. Weather was fantastic (if a little cold) but more importantly the visibility underwater was excellent (well over 10 metres, which is very good for a sea loch). Took several photos with my Sony DSC-P10 digital camera in its marine case. The results are better than I initially expected, especially as I am not using a strobe light. More examples have been uploaded to my web site.

Looks as if this squat lobster is entertaining a hermit crab in its garden!

number one

Got to start somewhere I suppose. It's been quite a busy few weeks, not only with family & work stuff but quite unusually with socialising including several rock concerts. We were lucky enough to catch Simple Minds twice recently on their latest tour to support their new album Black and White 050505.

The gigs (in Aberdeen & Glasgow) were fantastic: really strong set lists not only including classic songs but also the majority of the new album: good to see that they have confidence in their new body of work. Rightly so in my opinion. Managed to capture some video footage with the trusty digital camera, although it involved running the gauntlet with security guards in Glasgow, as we managed to get ourselves positioned in the front row - great for the view but directly in front of the bouncers!

Have also been lucky enough to catch performances by A Few Good Men which contains original members of Simple Minds, Big Country and H2O. They put on some great shows, I particularly enjoyed their charity gig in Callander last Tuesday. They played a good selection of their own material (i.e. from their original bands) as well as some covers. A performance of Bowie's 'Starman' really stood out with Derek Forbes providing both excellent acoustic guitar accompaniment and solid backing vocals.

Have a couple of excellent recent CDs to highly recommend. Before All Of This by Ian McNabb is a fantastic collection of new compositions by the singer songwriter previously of the Icicle Works. I've admired Ian's work for quite a few years now, having first come across the Icicle Works when the video of Love is a Wonderful Colour was played on the ITV Chart Show one Saturday back in 1992 to support their Best of album. I was captivated by this song and hunted out the CD as soon as I could, not to be disappointed by the quality contained. No doubt I'll come back to discussing Ian in the future, but suffice to say, I think his new album is a masterpiece! I'll leave my second recommendation for now: better keep something for future posts.

So that's it, first blog completed. So what if nobody ever reads it, that's not really the point. It's quite an enjoyable process really!