Uphill Battle

A week ago I was here, at the tail end of two days of cycling in the Highlands with my son before he headed back to uni. This is a fiendish stretch of the A832 from Kinlochewe to Achnasheen, where I was cycling uphill for miles to reach the branch line from Inverness to Kyle of Localsh to take me back to where we’d parked the car the previous day. (He was joining a friend at a campsite on the coast and would come back a few days later.) It’s another trip around the Highlands that needs more words and photos than this, so I’m posting this now to get myself moving on both. I’ve swung from prodigious posting in the first half of the year to next to nothing in recent weeks. The scale of what I want to write is daunting, especially in an age of so much AI-extruded textual filler; it gets harder and harder to see the point of all that effort only for it to be scraped by robot kleptomaniacs and tossed into the digital blender. Instead, I’ve been writing job applications, and in the past few…