Moth collection

I've been travelling for the past three months - and I'm sorry to admit that this involved making nine flights. There is no defence other than I hadn't been on a plane for 10 years so had a few carbon credits in hand. PIc is of Nell, me, Lola and two Solomon Island guides - Ofani and David - who had just taken us for a very long walk to see this amazing map, the Kolombangara stone.

But now I'm back at home. The first thing I noticed was that the kitchen seemed to have shrunk after the experience of living without windows, or clutter, while we were in Solomon Islands for two months. The next was the plague of moths.

Confession#2
Clothes moths drive me crazy - they've followed me around London to a range of different houses and their caterpillars have destroyed far too many of my clothes. They chew rugs, carpets, dresses, silk, jumpers, curtains even. I'm told they can even take over sheeps' wool insulation. They get into the food jars, and once the kids were sent home from school with a vicious note from the lunch supervisor telling me not to send them to school with maggoty fruit bars. When I protested that these were moth larvaes the teachers were even less sympathetic.

The result is that I am willing to kill these poor moths, and do so with a pheremone trap, ie, it's laced to stop the male tineola bisseliella mate with the female.

Unlike most of the world's 160,000 moth species, clothes moths (tineola bisselliella) like dim light. As everyone knows, most moths are drawn to bright lights, so they've done a clever bit of adaptation. In fact I admit to freaking out, just once during our three month travels, and it was over moths chaotically fighting to kill themselves on the kerosene light. We had to leave at 5am, ie, it was going to be dark in the morning, and was already dark, so I had to pack. Easy! But the torrential rain seemed to make hanging around the kerosene light even more attractive to the moths. There were 100s, maybe more, anyway enough to darken the lamp and to reduce me to a weeping lump lying on the dark wooden floor of the very special eco-lodge, Imbu Rano, Kolombangara, Solomon Islands.

I literally couldn't see for moths. 

Moth worries aside Imbu Rano is the place to base yourself if you ever want to take a walk through montane rainforest on a dormant volcano (the equivalent in the UK would be wooded parts of the Malvern Hills, or imagine the woods on Arthur's Seat or the Lake District). The eco-lodge has the world's most lovely view, read more about it here. There are some good pix here too. And by the way we stayed two nights and moths weren't a problem on the first night - it must have been the weather or the moon, or some other natural phenomenon.

DIY moth removal
Finding moth pheremone refills for the plastic traps isn't easy. But at the fourth hardware shop I visited (ironically the one I first stumbled across moth traps) had some for sale. A pack of 10 refills is £17.50, or buy one for just £2.

"Are you selling a lot of these?" I asked, and got a laugh for a reply at SX Wallpapers, 113 Essex Road, London, N1.

"We've sold 3,000 refills this summer. I've been saying we could turn the upstairs into a moth refill showroom and show people how best to swat them!" he added.

I'm sharing this with you so you can keep your clothes in a decent state, ensuring you have a little more cash available for travel around Britain without a plane...

Athens of the north: battlefields and poppies

We've been to Edinburgh before, but never up Calton Hill with it's fantastic views of the Castle, Arthur's Seat - and the Firth of Forth. And once you've had a picnic there's the memorials. The Parthenon copy (still with scaffolding!) was a war memorial to fallen soldiers at Waterloo and the construction that led to the city being dubbed "the Athens of the North". This post is from Nicola Baird



Scotland is proud of its war contribution (even if colonisation has been air brushed out of history up at its national museum), with memorials of generals and "the fallen" in all the best places.





Up at Edinburgh Castle there's Ensign Ewart's marble block which marks the "lucky" solider who grabbed the French eagle for our forces. Impressive as this was the memorial didn't go up until 1938. But it did spawn 1,000 demands for large golden mirrors encircled by a cowed eagle - something still very on trend. There were two in the appartment we borrowed!



War still seems very distant even if there's never yet been a whole day of peace in the world I've lived in. See more about how to resolve this at War Child here. Meanwhile Lola is learning about the second World War and perhaps understanding how the first World War carnage (from 1914-1918) helped lead nations into another six years of war in 1939.



<<>Mervyn James Hamilton, a soldier who died in November 1914 from his wounds. Phoebe (we know her as Gebe and Lola was old enough to have several Christmases with her and also went to her funeral) never knew her dad. She was yet another generation raised by single mothers.



<< href="http://www.gordonhighlanders.com/">Gordon Highlanders at Scotland's National War Memorial, within the grounds of Edinburgh Castle, see more here. I don't think we were meant to take pictures, so many apologies.

Nell had a good word for war memorabilia: on a sunny day the cannons provide the best seat for views across to the Firth of Forth and beyond...

And then Lola <<>I believe in Yesterday (Jonathan Cape) and look for the battle scenes.

My conclusion is that we all left our attempt at remembrance a little confused.

All change

Trams may be admired in Amsterdam but at the installation stage it’s just chaos. This post is from Nicola Baird.

Edinburgh’s transport chief, Neil Renilson, is to take early retirement at the end of this year (2008). At just 52 you could see this as an exciting move for a bearded man who’s worked on the buses for a lifetime. Here’s his chance to do other things close to his heart: golf? Walking? Time with his family? Etcetera.

But like Renilson’s decision to back the tram, his news has not been met with enthusiasm. People are furious that Edinburgh is currently a miasma of alternative routes, traffic cones and white-hatted, drill-wielding workers digging up all the grand streets.

“I’m sorry you’re seeing Edinburgh looking such a mess,” was the first thing our taxi driver said to us as we got off the sleeper train at a distinctly chilly Waverley Station.

In London someone’s always digging up the roads – usually to sort out Victorian drains or water pipes. Or to lay cables. Or just for the end of the budget year hell of it. So diversions seem normal. But it is true that Edinburgh is not looking herself. The imposing grey stone parades are cluttered with orange and white cones, ticker tape and steel cage fencing that looks like it ought to be in use down at the zoo.

"It's a disaster. I never go in town now," was Maureen's opinion as she served us fudge from HMY Britannia down at Ocean Terminal.

I’m all for trams. I enjoyed watching the progress at Nottingham, have long admired the Amsterdam routes and think Edinburgh a real leader. They had the first car club (see pic above of one of the vehicles parked in a bank of four just off the Royal Mile. And now they’re using the tram to future proof the city against the oil price shocks that will rock all conurbations once peak oil passes. Trams are powered by electricity which can be generated from renewable sources.

Tram building is disruptive, easy to criticise and the schedule is slipping. It was due to open in Feb 2011 but is more likely to start in July 2011 (just before the festival) which looks set to add to the £512 million bill. My hunch is that Renilson expected to be the fall guy. So when we come back in three years time to be whizzed around by a tram that could finally sort out gridlock and make a Georgian city a carbon neutral place to travel around again I’ll be raising my whisky glass to him. Cheers.

Edinburgh food miles

When I’m at home there’s chard (well, mostly just chard) less than two metres from our kitchen table. So how can cities that seem even less green than London shorten the distances food is transported from farm to plate? This post is from Nicola Baird.

Around Edinburgh the food is good. We’ve had pumpkin broth, baked potato with chickpea salad, local beers and the promise of fair trade or locally sourced ingredients at many cafes. But I can’t help noticing that there aren’t many places to grow for the people living in the big apartments that make up the New Town (even if grass rooves have been spotted, see pic above, in the Old Town area). As a result every grassy square (or more usually circle) we stroll past I imagine being turned into allotments.

It turns out I’m not dreaming alone. Energetic MA art student, Helen Johnson, has transformed the quadrangle at Edinburgh College of Art into an 18ft diameter veg plot between work on her final, weaving sea kelp. The plot has three raised beds, is already producing spinach and leeks and has a contract to supply the college canteen. Helen says it was inspired by the work of Joseph Beuys – the famous German sculptor with a colourful past, including a lucky escape from his crashed plane and the birth of the Green party.

And in early October the Scottish Government ordered public bodies to search for extra land that could be made available for public allotments. Already 3,000 people are on the waiting list – half of them in Edinburgh where there are 1,268 plots (rented for around £48 a year). Apparently it takes seven years to get to the top of the list…

Here’s my tip for Scotland’s rural affairs secretary, Richard Lochead, turn a blind eye to gardening on the green swathes that pepper Edinburgh. The Museum of Modern Art would be a good place to start, then the grassy makeover opposite Harvey Nichols and finally bulk buy a load of containers so people can try growing food up front.

Spanish madness

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola (look to the far left of the pic to enjoy the crazy window designs on the Scottish Parliament. Pete is looking longingly towards Arthur's Seat)

Scotland's new parliament building opposite Holyrood Palace may not have many signs up, but it doesn't need them thanks to the crazy, hot, eccentric design provided by a Spanish architect.

Pacing around its fluid roofs, or even driving past in a tour bus or taxi, you know you are in the presence of a building with immense character. It's architecture, but not as most of us know it. An unmissable experience.

The building - housing the 129 SMPs (Scottish members of parliament) was hugely controversial, not least because it cost #414 million pounds, approx 400 million over budget.

Perhaps worse was its late opening (2004 instead of 2001) and the architect, Spaniard Enric Miralles dying early on in the job (July 2001) taking many secrets to the grave despite the project being taken over by his widow Benedetta Tagliabue (EMBT/RMJM Ltd).

It won the Stirling Prize for Architecture - nothing else stood a chance really. This is what the judges said about the building: "[it] manifests itself as an attempt at an organic transition between the city and the drama of the Scottish countryside surrounding it" - an effect helped by its landscaping. The ability of both the design and construction teams to realise a building of this complexity is truly remarkable."

We've only seen it from the outside as I wasn't sure that Nell could cope with another shush and listen hour (ie, a tour), but it must be even more stunning inside. She loved slithering down the railed steps at the back of the SMPs' private offices though, and later on clambering up and down the wild flower garden/park linking back to front. And after we'd climbed nearby Arthur's Seat all of us enjoyed reading Scottish truisms and mottos carved into granite on the Royal Mile side as if the building was a book, to be judged by it's cover.

So I did, and this was my favourite (from Gerard Manley Hopkins):

"What would the world be once bereft of wet and wildness?

Let them be left.

Oh let them be left.

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Kilt complex

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola.

Everywhere we go we see the Baird tartan - not so much on sale but worn by the ladies trying to flog us a bit of Scottish heritage. In the pic of the Baird (ancient) tartan it is being modelled (for a gent) in a shop specialising in selling rental outfits. I couldn't find any secondhand kilts to fit the girls so had to surprise myself by ordering each of them a new kilt.

If they enjoy wearing their new kilts as much as the naff tourist tartan pom pom hats we picked up in the Royal Mile it will be money well spent, and is of course putting some money into a specialist local industry.

Climbing Arthur's Seat

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nell

Nell: "Climbing Arthur's Seat (251m) was very fun, even though it doesn't look like a seat [or an extinct volcano]. There's a ruin (St Anthony's Chapel) at the halfway point which Lola and I enjoyed. We saw some boys climbing. At the very top it was cold; Skiddaw is even bigger but Everest has snow on it. If you drive a car up there, which I know you can't do, it would be cheating. And there's no road you just wouldn't be able to. You'd have to go over the paths.

At the top we had smarties and shortbread.

I hope everyone climbs it, because it is really fun. You can bring any sweets you like, stay in a youth hostel, have beans on toast for dinner. What's better than that?"

Athens of the North

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola

Athens of the North is how Edinburgh is fondly known. Without having Greek aspirations it is hard to be convinced, but from certain angles (eg, the descent of Arthur's Seat) you can see columns, pick out Grecian style temples and chat about Doric and Ionic columns until the Olympics arrives nearby in 2012 (admittedly to London, not Edinb).

However we are determined to get our girls to use a Greek viewfinder and so the picture will helpfully convince them - and you.

Off to New York

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola

It's a bit of a cliche in Scotland - finding your family using an American twang - but we couldn't resist going to Gordons's bistro on Edinburgh's Royal Mile which bills itself as part New York deli and part Tuscan restaurant (good marketing) and then pretending to speak Nu Yak. This narrow, mirrored space with railway like seating - two to a side - seems to me as good as New York gets, so we were a little indulgent and pretended to go all American albeit with the help of Italian pizza and wine.

Aping the American state we managed to talk loudly, hold important opinions, chatter on the mobeys (mostly about which class the children were to be assigned when they go back to school in the new term) and generally be a tiny bit irritating restaurant customers. We did a good job...

As you can see from the pic we got there in The Tardis, conveniently parked outside the restaurant. As the kids only know about The Big Apple from a recent Dr Who episode which was set in 1930s depressed New York (the one with the pig men and daleks) it seemed entirely appropriate to make our trip this way.

The last polar bear

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola, Lola and Nell (pic reminds you that you should always let sleeping bears lie, ahh)

At last we've seen Mercedes - the last polar bear in Britain. Put another way she is the only polar bear in a UK zoo and at her Edinburgh hill top home acts as an ambassador for all the wild polar bears in the North Pole which are suffering because of climate change. We all feel very lucky to have seen a huge, white polar bear, understand more about the problems they are facing from habitat loss and climate change. And we did that without making a polluting return air trip to Hudson Bay, Canada where other polar bear lovers go. There was one dicey moment when Lola realised that her favourite animal (a polar bear) was being fed raw meat taken from her other favourite animal (horse). Luckily she's got used to the idea that not everyone is a vegetarian - or in many animals's cases can be a veggie.

Lola: "I loved her. Mercedes was a wild polar bear in Canada but she got caught three times eating garbage. She was going to be shot but the mercedes car company gave Edinburgh zoo enough money to get her to Scotland and build a cage for her. That's why she's called Mercedes."

Nell: "You should stop driving cars, and especially flying areoplanes, because if you could see how much pollution we are putting into the air you'd actually give up. Ice melts and the sea level gets higher. And the bottom of the world [the low lying coast land and low islands] might get flooded if we don't stop. That polar bear was very lucky because if she was in the North Pole she could have drowned finding her own food, because the polar bears can only swim a certain amount, but there is more sea now. They have to find food, and it's not easy. And if they have babies, and they're looking for food and they drown then the babies [cubs] will die too because they need their mum to give them food and teach them to swim. And their dad isn't very good with children. You would have thought a dad could look after a polar bear baby, but no. Their life is difference to ours. When a dad sexes with a mum polar bear the dad doesn't just stay to see the babies it goes away, not even hoping to get a glimpse of them!"

Continental breakfast

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola (pic shows the girls enjoying the youth hostel's revolving door)

Lola looks suspicious. "You mean people in France eat croissants with cheese and ham and marmalade for breakfast?" Her dad reckons that they probably swap the marmalade for peach jam, but as we are in Scotland there has to be some sort of sop to national pride. Meanwhile Nell (the family carnivore) is chewing at a piece of watermelon. "It's nice. I like the rind, bacon has rind too."

Pete and I think about past, more glamorous breakfasts where we didn't notice children, let alone have to manage ours. Both of us remember being in our late teens (inter-railing), amazed that breakfast could be more than just cereal and toast.

It is sweet that our children are a little phased by the possibilities of eating something different before they clean their teeth. After that anything is fair game - Nell even wanted to eat a chocolate pizza yesterday.

Inspired by this Franco-Scot breakfast the children start noticing that they are one of the few families (today) in Edinburgh's youth hostel that are speaking English. Within minutes we are having to hold them back from the other diners as they are ready to beg with their one perfect French phrase: "Je voudrais un bon bon sil'vous plait."

"Sweets," announces Nell "are the best way to finish a continental breakfast."