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Boat Yard, Lochwinnoch
Soft music pipes me aboard as I pass through the immaculate airlock into Boat Yard. Yes, here there is no definite article. It’s just Boat Yard. Once inside, an aura of unnatural calm and extreme cleanliness envelops me. I feel unsure if I am in a high-end OAP home, an I.C.U. or a weird cruising…
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Coffee Kiln Café, the Pottery Shop, Buchlyvie
Having been somewhat unfairly likened to a Philistine bull let loose in a china shop by my long-suffering and oft-frowning van companion Sancho, it was not without trepidation that I approached the world of Art and Crafts via the portal of the Pottery Shop, Buchlyvie. I decided to test its Coffee Kiln Café alone, and…
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Real Food Cafe, Tyndrum
In the long-held mirage scene in Lawrence of Arabia, Omar Sharif slowly materialises out of the desert to confront Peter O’Toole. Sharif shoots down O’Toole’s guide who has drunk water at Sharif’s well without permission. When O’Toole says, ‘I have drunk from it,’ Sharif tells O’Toole, ‘You are welcome.’ This sums up my feelings about the Real Food…
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FlavourBomb Kitchen, Glasgow Climbing Centre, Paisley Road West, Glasgow
If one wants an unusual experience to satisfy a jaded café palate, this place is jolly well it. Outside is a magnificent gothic Ibrox church. Inside is the long-established and always busy Glasgow Climbing Centre. Walking up the stairs and through the arched doorway opens up an idiosyncratic vista of activity on the multiple climbing…
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Brooklyn Cafe, Shawlands, Glasgow
All that a deluded, somewhat delirious knight of the road and his loyal sidekick Sancho sometimes require is comfort. When I say delirious I mean hung over. The last time we were at the Brooklyn cafe was at the fag-end of the morning-after-the-night-before. Sancho and I were discussing our needs for vittles with the waiter,…
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Simply Scottish, Jedburgh
Jedburgh Abbey is a stunning ruin. A monument to an advanced, organised, well-developed and intelligent system which functioned to the benefit of most of local society. Until it was laid waste to by revengeful single-issue small-minded English vandals on a regular basis in the 14th Century. I cannot conceive of this sort of thing ever happening…
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Elderslie Coffee Co. Stoddard Square, Elderslie, Johnstone
Cutting thorough the outlying Glasgow feeder towns can turn up the odd establishment of great functionality to us, my PMiaV contingent. In a small rank of shops with a handy free carpark is the Elderslie Coffee Company, with its own adjacent Butcher’s shop. What a find. The coffee shop opens at 6am apparently too. At…
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Coast, Langbank, Port Glasgow
Trundling to Port Glasgow in the wagon I noted the jaunty nautical portholes of Coast from the A8. I later returned to Langbank, the Riviera of Port Glasgow, where I enjoyed a choice of free parking. I savoured the view across the Clyde to Dumbarton Rock, rather than actually having to be in Dumbarton. Coast…
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West Oxon coffee safari: Aston Pottery. Linwood & Co. – Bampton/Witney/Moreton-in-Marsh. Blake’s Kitchen, Clanfield. The Lotus Retreat, Faringdon.
Returning to the earliest of one’s ancestral stomping grounds can be a salutary experience. Especially walking a familial hound around the cemetery. One just seems to recognise so many surnames on the headstones. Sorry about all that. On with the light (commercial van-based) comedy. An extended safari south of the border, far south, has a…
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Spitfire Espresso, High Street, Glasgow
What must ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,’ (and sisters, indeed any intelligent life-forms capable of driving an L3H2 Transit van and being creative about double-parking) struggle against in a dystopian world of generic coffee consumption? My undeniable answer is dire, soulless Costa Coffee franchises. Other café corporations spreading mediocrity and peddling…
