First ‘community’ Christmas tree of 2025 is from Baillieston, and I may not collect many this year as it looks as if my travel is restricted.
It was lucky I grabbed a camera as I headed to the shops, and spotted the top of the tree with its light on as I looked along the road.
Interesting to see they’ve shelved their coloured LEDs of recent years, and have now gone with all white.
Thank goodness they’ve gone with draping the lights around the tree.
I was beginning to think everyone was stuck with the straight lines of lights running from the top of the tree to the bottom.
I made a point of including ‘trees’ in the title because the ‘Christmas tree’ I recently spotted planted in the grassy area is still there, but is NOT the tree with the lights. The council is still bringing one in for that job.
This pic shows both trees, with the lit one on the left, and the ‘natural’ on the right.
Maybe they’re waiting for it to grow up into a big strong tree, that can hold up those heavy lights all on its own 🎄
Sorry
I left the main image too big, and it ended up noisy after it was compressed to reduce its file size ☹
Easy trap to fall into when the original comes out fairly well, and you forget what can STILL go wrong afterwards.
I noted that the majority of the scaffolding etc seen here had gone, leaving mostly internal work continuing on the ground floor shops.
I hadn’t expected an unplanned curtailment of random visits to Ayr, so made the mistake of not grabbing an interim pic – now I can’t, at least not until things improve.
The shop works will probably be finished the next time I get a chance to look.
I expect that, by the time I get another look, everything will be gone, and there will just be a nice new shiny ‘To Let’ sign, like the nearby offerings.
Thanks to enquiries about the Secret Scotland Wiki, enough motivation was generated for me to finally recover it.
For some time, it had been disappointing to see how much of the code behind it was being deprecated as various features it depended upon were slowly abandoned by the people who had created them, and numerous features which added various useful functions were lost.
While this had been a pain, it did at least remain accessible, if less than fully functional.
Unfortunately, it died completely during a core upgrade, which needed the help of our ISP to identify.
While I hadn’t actually done anything wrong, or even broken anything, it seems that numerous functions had been deprecated as PHP was upgraded, and while they had failed silently in past versions, now failed destructively, caused the code to stop executing.
While the ISP could fix the PHP versioning, I still had to work through numerous lines of code and error messages to identify the offending sections, and remove them.
While that has been completed, and restored the Wiki, it has also removed many of the useful functions that formatted the content, and added various functions.
We have no Contents List
Probably the worst loss is the Contents Page, which used to list all the subjects which had pages in the Wiki.
Now, the only way to find an item is to enter it into the Search Box, and see if any pages are listed in the result.
That’s followed by the lack of images, which we lost way back in the days of the Great PhotoBucket Disaster.
While we still have all the images, I think they total close to 3,000 and rewriting all the pages that use them is obviously a major undertaking. I had hoped to do this programmatically, but the page rewrite function is one of those that has been lost, so I can’t really look at that until I can determine if that can be updated and reinstated.
But, the maps
The greatest loss has been the maps, which was really disappointing as I had a tiny part to play in the creation of the code that added them.
Depressingly, Google changes to the map code over the years eventually broke the code to the extent that it wasn’t rewritable (by modifying existing code), and would need to have been completely scrapped and rewritten, something the original creators weren’t interested in doing by then.
There have been later efforts, but none had any sort of compatibility with our existing method including lat/lon pairs on every page so, like the pics, restoring the maps is also a major task.
It’s not something I can see an easy solution to.
While it may only need the addition of a line or two of markup on a page, and the inclusion of the lat/lon pair, there’s potentially 1,000 pages that would need updating PLUS many of those had the location of numerous related features picked out by markers on the maps, so multiplying that number many times.
The Long Haul
I’ve no idea if this will ever get done, as it took some time (years) to find and write up the items in the Wiki.
There were also a few more eyes and hands involved – I’m afraid I’m the only active one of those left now.
I really hadn’t expected upgrades to do the damage they did, and things were fine for a long time, then everything seemed to get trashed at once.
It seems to have been ages since I tripped over any old bricks, so it seems a handy opportunity to clear off this trio I found on a local wander.
By chance, I’d come across an old map showing Shettleston Works (Chemical) on some now derelict land, behind a large modern industrial unit (a shipping depot), and thought it worth a look. It looks as if there was also a mine there at one time, but that’s really gone.
Although the works was obviously long gone, there were still a number of features left in the ground, and I really should get them into a post one day, Notably, the place is NOT listed in any online archives, or maps showing old sites, which is disappointing. The name seems to be too general to find anything specific.
Part of the reason this collection has been forgotten is the lack of info – I like to identify what I post, but the only source I seem to have for info is old OS maps, and they don’t give a company name for either site, the Chemical Works or the mine (I’d guess coal as there were quite a few in the area, but there were others).
If you’re curious, look here:
latlng
55.85299 -4.14097
grid
NS6607264272
Although it seems likely the bricks I came across came from that works, nowadays, it’s equally likely some cowboy builder tossed them there from a site miles away, so other than noting the fairly local names on the bricks, there’s little else useful.
Something a little different this time, and an interesting way to get a 4-letter name on a plate.
PAU 188A slightly reorganised on a white 2017 Ford Transit 350 dropside truck plate.
For the observant, the registration document says it’s white. Your eyes are fine.
It’s an interesting dodge, which I don’t think I’ve come across like this before (but with my memory), and one I’m not sure my ADHD/OCD etc would allow me to live with (luckily I can get my name on a plate legitimately, or I’d probably never get any sleep).
It’s a pity I didn’t remember some pics I took back in 2016 (when our hero would have been closer to a mere 74), caught during a walk to Uddingston, when I came across a lorry complete with a ‘Big Yin’ mural on the side of the cab.
It really was one of those ‘Look Twice’ moments, as it wasn’t something I expected to see.
Not sure what diverted me and led to it being ‘Filed and Forgotten’, but it might have been down to having a lot of pics at the time, as there’s a load of pics, unused, along with these.
A few days late, but still a nice little tribute.
Since this was 2016, I wonder when it was originally painted?
Flicking through some pics from a while ago, I was a little surprised to see this one, looking as if it could have been taken yesterday – for reference, our weather has just gone from below freezing with frost on the ground to +15℃ OVERNIGHT!
Well, you know what they say about Scottish weather 😂
It’s also extremely soggy, with everything below the dew point as the temperature rises and the rain returns, everything that’s still cold is covered with running condensation.
But, back to these pics I took of some ducks and swans in and around the pond of Glasgow’s Richmond Park.
It may look a bit grey and grim in the pic, but the pics actually come from the middle of JULY!
Just looking at these pics makes me feel cold 🥶
It might be thought by now I would be able to cope with replacing the batteries in my remote weather station’s sensor module.
But, no – it seems that this simple, predictable event comes as a surprise every time.
It’s just unfortunate that it now seems to coincide with the first PROPER cold spell, which is probably just enough to push the batteries below the voltage the sensors need to work reliably.
The temperature and (external) humidity sensors appear to die, which I assume is down to the electronics they need to process their transducers.
I don’t realise they’re dead for a few days, since the purely electrical (using switches) sensors for wind speed and direction, and rainfall, just keep on working.
If I paid more attention to the graphs, I’d have noticed sooner.
Obvious, isn’t it?
Inside temperature sensing is, of course, completely separate.
The real pain is the barometer – it doesn’t have non-volatile memory to preserve its correction.
This means I have to get a local barometric pressure reading, admittedly not too hard to get an accurate reading for, with Glasgow Airport just along the road, but it is a pain having to do it every time there’s an interruption.
I wasn’t sure if it really was the batteries – although I don’t really watch them, I thought they had months to go, but I was wrong.
One was down to 0.9 V, while the other was at 1.1 V (at least it can go in a clock).
It looks as if the local community centre has someone who cares enough about the Christmas lights to pack them away carefully, and get them out working next time they’re needed.
I think that although they’re the same, they’re also different.
It looks as if we gained some flower boxes and seating where the light hang, so they had to be rearranged slightly. Previously, they just hung flat against the wall.
Unusually for me, I passed while there was something going on in the centre, so the place was lit, and I tried including it in the pic.
Not a great idea – the hall lighting comprises a load of radially mounted fluorescent (well, they were originally, who knows now) tubes in the centre of the ceiling, making for a very bright hot spot in the pic, which is really meant to be low light.
The central glare was massive, and hard to reduce without affecting the rest of the pic.
But for that central overly bright area, I think this would have come out quite well, and shown the ceiling’s detail.
It’s funny how visiting a place at different times can produce different results.
I can’t say I was pleased when I came out of the bus station a few years back, stepped into Sandgate, and was faced by the shell of the former newsagent and souvenir shop – closed since I was last there, and being replaced by something new.
It was a bit of a shock, as I had come to think of it as a permanent fixture, while just about every other place I knew had gone.
Seriously, I can’t go anywhere or make a nostalgic visit to any favourite haunt, and every place I was taken to for a meal has gone – all the way up to the Bell Isle Hotel, now a shell having been burnt down after it closed some years ago.
I think the only constant is the Golden Disc Amusements, but all the REAL fun stuff from my day has gone, and it looks like loads of slots.
Bear in mind I’m about to make an observation, not pass an opinion.
My revised schedule this year meant I ended up waiting at the bus station on numerous occasions, and I killed time by wandering into Sandgate, rather than stare at the stances.
This brought me close to quite a few groups of older people, possibly there on a day trip for the first time in years, and many of them commented on the loss of the long-standing newsagents shop.
What some of them said about the new shop was sometimes not very nice – and I’ll leave it at that.
Unfortunately, shops close, owners retire, or pass away.
But the new arrival is not usually responsible.
I featured it before, but I think it should get another look, just to make up.
Secret Scotland 