Good afternoon from the shores of Loch Oich, where we reside in only slightly faded splendour, at the kind of hotel which feels like a boarding school, with stuffed animals, after dinner coffee in the library, and a big oaken door with a brass plaque on it inscribed 'internet'. And hey, wifi too. I may have the smoked mackerel this evening. As those who read the Twitter feed know, I've been busy falling into several different Scottish rivers, out of several different whitewater craft. This was our third time rafting, and we found to our surprise that our current guide, a Kiwi (not literally), had known the guide on our first such experience, on the Tongariro River in New Zealand. She was called Viv, and we'd kept her memory with us as a kind of measure of life-loving energy and fearlessness. Our current guide told us she'd passed away. 'Oh,' I said, 'what happened?' imagining some leap for a too-distant handhold. 'Suicide,' he said. He went on to say that that was surprisingly common among raft guides, and hearing him talk later of how he'd spent 'six years of summer', from hemisphere to hemisphere, I connected it to the extraordinary depression and suicide rates among professional cricketers, for whom seasonal change is a very personal thing. So to find myself suddenly out of the boat when going down a waterfall, with everyone else, and then managing to get back to it after a lengthy separation and a few bashes to the hindquarters, and follow the rules to get back in, with a lot of laughing and very little drama... well, that felt even better than experiencing something feared and finding it to be okay normally would. Leaving a kayak mind you: not nearly so life-affirming. I had to let myself drift downstream after that mentally keeping a Beatles track in mind, as I told Twitter. ('Tomorrow Never Knows', with its refrain of 'turn off your mind, relax and float downstream... it is not dying' and not, as some suggested, 'Help!' or (unkindly, I thought) 'I Am the Walrus'.

We've been walking a lot. We've seen a brilliant German archaeologist called Dirk make fire in a crannog (a lake dwelling) and then keep it in a tree fungus, for up to twenty-four hours. We've seen a bat detector working on the grounds of Blair Castle (and where else but a Scottish estate would you find signage indicating how inexpensive a statue of Hercules was to build? Less than £25!) Today we walked near Corrimony Chambered Cairn, a round barrow with stones for a ceiling, which had been open (like a lot of the Wiltshire barrows), as if one could thus visit the ancestors, but had been closed off when people started building stone circles (just like in Wiltshire), in this case around it. I think that must mark a change in worship, possibly from ancestral to sky-watching, and with circular 'cup markings' on the biggest stone and a fougou passage element, in that you needed to crawl to get into the barrow, this one really had it all.

I'll just quickly add that Drumnadrochit, which has taken upon itself the mantle of being 'the town where Loch Ness is' is pretty horribly infested with sheer tat. But shining amongst that is the Loch Ness Exhibition Centre (there are a couple of others, I think, with similar names, so if you go seeking, be precise). It's quite surprising to follow an audio and video tour, in a town that relies on the Loch Ness Monster for its tourism, that, having rehearsed all the details of Fortean interest, with side trips and angles I didn't know about, sifts through the data and how it was unconvered, and pretty solidly comes to the conclusion that there is no monster. It's also refreshing to come out of such a tour feeling that, hmm, that all went a bit fast, I was a little overwhelmed by the detail of the hypothesis there at times, what was that he said about diatoms? Excellent stuff to perk up the jaded Fortean, and you sceptics would have a wild time.

Anyway, it's back to my desk tomorrow, having not really relaxed to the putty-like state I normally seek on holidays, but with loads of exciting stuff coming up, more having girded my loins. Talking of which, I'll be blogging again in a moment, with the Marvel/Disney news, and Bernice stuff. So I'll see you in a moment. Cheerio!