Since I reported last summer that I’d accepted a job offer with Automattic I’ve
been writing about my experience of joining and working with Automattic on a nice, round 128-day schedule.
My first post covered the first 128 days: starting from the day I decided (after 15 years of
watching-from-afar) that I should apply to work there through to 51 days before my start date. It described my recruitment process, which is famously comprehensive and intensive. For me
this alone was hugely broadening! My first post spanned the period up until I started getting access to Automattic’s internal systems, a month and a half before my start date. If you’re
interested in my experience of recruitment at Automattic, you should go and read that post. This post, though, focusses on my induction,
onboarding, and work during my first two months.
I could possibly do with a little more desk space, or at least a little better desk arrangement, after the house move.
With a month to go before I started, I thought it time to start setting up my new “office” for my teleworking. Automattic offered to buy me a new desk and chair, but I’m not ready to
take them up on that yet: but I’m waiting until after my (hopefully-)upcoming house move so I know how much space I’ve got to work with/what I need! There’s still plenty for a new
developer to do, though: plugging in and testing my new laptop, monitor, and accessories, and doing all of the opinionated tweaks that make one’s digital environment one’s own –
preferred text editor, browser, plugins, shell, tab width, mouse sensitivity, cursor blink rate… important stuff like that.
For me, this was the cause of the first of many learning experiences, because nowadays I’m working on a MacBook! Automattic doesn’t
require you to use a Mac, but a large proportion of the company does and I figured that learning to use a Mac effectively would be easier than learning my new codebase on a
different architecture than most of my colleagues.
Working on location, showing some Automattic pride. You can’t really make out my WordPress “Christmas jumper”, hanging on the back of the sofa, but I promise that’s what it is.
I’ve owned a couple of Intel Macs (and a couple of Hackintoshes) but I’ve never gotten on with them well enough to warrant
becoming an advanced user, until now. I’ll probably write in the future about my experience of making serious use of a Mac after a history of mostly *nix and Windows machines.
Automattic also encouraged me to kit myself up with a stack of freebies to show off my affiliation, so I’ve got a wardrobe-load of new t-shirts and stickers too. It’s hard to argue that
we’re a company and not a cult when we’re all dressed alike, and that’s not even mentioning a colleague of mine with two WordPress-related tattoos, but there we have it.
Totally not a cult. Now let me have another swig of Kool-Aid…
Role and Company
I should take a moment to say what I do. The very simple version, which I came up with to very briefly describe my new job to JTA‘s mother, is: I write software that powers an online shop that sells software that powers online shops.
It’s eCommerce all the way down. Thanks, Xzibit.
You want the long version? I’m a Code Magician (you may say it’s a silly job title,
I say it’s beautiful… but I don’t necessarily disagree that it’s silly too) with Team Alpha at Automattic. We’re the engineering team behind WooCommerce.com, which provides downloads of the Web’s most-popular eCommerce platform… plus hundreds of
free and premium extensions.
There’s a lot of stuff I’d love to tell you about my role and my new employer, but there’s enough to say here about my induction so I’ll be saving following topics for a future
post:
Chaos: how Automattic produces order out of entropy, seemingly against all odds,
Transparency and communication: what it’s like to work in an environment of radical communication and a focus on transparency,
People and culture: my co-workers, our distributed team, and what is lost by not being able to “meet around the coffee machine” (and how we work to artificially
recreate that kind of experience),
Distributed working: this is my second foray into a nearly-100% remote-working environment; how’s it different to before?
To be continued, then.
I’m not the only member of my family to benefit from a free t-shirt.
Onboarding (days 1 through 12)
I wasn’t sure how my onboarding at Automattic could compare to that which I got when I started at the Bodleian. There, my then-line manager Alison‘s obsession with preparation had me arrive to a
thoroughly-planned breakdown of everything I needed to know and everybody I needed to meet over the course of my first few weeks. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it
leaves little breathing room in an already intense period!
What it felt like to receive an induction from the first boss I had at the Bod.
By comparison, my induction at Automattic was far more self-guided: each day in my first fortnight saw me tackling an agenda of things to work on and – in a pleasing touch I’ve seen
nowhere else – a list of expectations resulting from that day. Defined expectations day-by-day are an especially good as a tool for gauging one’s progress and it’s a nice touch that
I’ll be adapting should I ever have to write another induction plan for a somebody else.
Both an agenda and a list of expectations for the day? That’s awesome and intimidating in equal measure.
Skipping the usual induction topics of where the fire escapes and toilets are (it’s your house; you tell us!), how to dial an outside line (yeah, we don’t really do that here),
what to do to get a key to the bike shed and so on saves time, of course! But it also removes an avenue for more-casual interpersonal contact (“So how long’ve you been working here?”)
and ad-hoc learning (“So I use that login on this system, right?”). Automattic’s aware of this and has an entire culture about making information accessible, but it
takes additional work on the part of a new hire to proactively seek out the answers they need, when they need them: searching the relevant resources, or else finding out who to ask… and
being sure to check their timezone before expecting an immediate response.
Onboarding at Automattic is necessarily at least somewhat self-driven, and it’s clear in hindsight that the recruitment process is geared towards selection of individuals who can work
in this way because it’s an essential part of how we work in general. I appreciated the freedom to carve my own path as I learned the ropes, but it took me a little while to
get over my initial intimidation about pinging a stranger to ask for a video/voice chat to talk through something!
Meetup (days 14 through 21)
How cool is South African currency? This note’s got a lion on it!
I’d tried to arrange my migration to Automattic to occur just before their 2019 Grand Meetup, when virtually the entire company gets together in one place for an infrequent but important gathering, but I couldn’t make it work and just barely missed it. Luckily, though, my team had
planned a smaller get-together in South Africa which coincided with my second/third week, so I jetted off to get some
facetime with my colleagues.
When they say that Automatticians can work from anywhere, there might nonetheless be practical limits.
My colleague and fellow newbie Berislav‘s contract started a few hours after he landed in Cape Town, and it was helpful to my
journey to see how far I’d come over the last fortnight through his eyes! He was, after all, on the same adventure as me, only a couple of weeks behind, and it was reassuring
to see that I’d already learned so much as well as to be able to join in with helping him get up-to-speed, too.
The meetup wasn’t all work. I also got to meet penguins and get attacked by one of the little buggers.
By the time I left the meetup I’d learned as much again as I had in the two weeks prior about my new role and my place in the team. I’d also
learned that I’m pretty terrible at surfing, but luckily that’s not among the skills I have to master in order to become a valuable
developer to Automattic.
Happiness Rotation (days 23 through 35)
A quirk of Automattic – and indeed something that attracted me to them, philosophically – is that everybody spends two weeks early in their first year and a week in every subsequent
year working on the Happiness Team. Happiness at Automattic is what almost any other company would call “tech support”, because Automattic’s full of job titles and team names that are,
frankly, a bit silly flipping awesome. I like this “Happiness Rotation” as a concept because it keeps the entire company focussed on customer issues and the things that
really matter at the coal face. It also fosters a broader understanding of our products and how they’re used in the real world, which is particularly valuable to us developers who can
otherwise sometimes forget that the things we produce have to be usable by real people with real needs!
Once I’d gotten the hang of answering tickets I got to try my hand at Live Chat, which was a whole new level of terrifying.
One of the things that made my Happiness Rotation the hardest was also one of the things that made it the most-rewarding: that I didn’t really know most of the products I was
supporting! This was a valuable experience because I was able to learn as-I-went-along, working alongside my (amazingly supportive and understanding) Happiness Team co-workers: the
people who do this stuff all the time. But simultaneously, it was immensely challenging! My background in WordPress in general, plenty of tech support practice at Three Rings, and even my experience of email support at Samaritans put me in a strong position in-general…
but I found that I could very-quickly find myself out of my depth when helping somebody with the nitty-gritty of a problem with a specific WooCommerce extension.
Portering and getting DRI (days 60 through 67)
I’ve also had the opportunity during my brief time so far with Automattic to take on a few extra responsibilities within my team. My team rotates weekly responsibility for what they
call the Porter role. The Porter is responsible for triaging pull requests and monitoring blocking issues and acting as a first point-of-call to stakeholders: you know, the
stuff that’s important for developer velocity but that few developers want to do all the time. Starting to find my feet in my team by now, I made it my mission during my first
shift as Porter to get my team to experiment with an approach for keeping momentum on long-running issues, with moderate success (as a proper continuous-integration shop, velocity is
important and measurable). It’s pleased me so far to feel like I’m part of a team where my opinion matters, even though I’m “the new guy”.
“Here, I found these things we need to be working on.” Pretty much how I see the Porter role.
I also took on my first project as a Directly Responsible Individual, which is our fancy term for the person who makes sure the project runs to schedule, reports on progress etc.
Because Automattic more strongly than any other place I’ve ever worked subscribes to a dogfooding strategy, the
woocommerce.com online store for which I share responsibility runs on – you guessed it – WooCommerce! And so the first project for which I’m directly responsible is the upgrade of woocommerce.com to the latest version of
WooCommerce, which went into beta last month. Fingers crossed for a smooth deployment.
There’s so much I’d love to say about Automattic’s culture, approach to development, people, products, philosophy, and creed, but that’ll
have to wait for another time. For now, suffice to say that I’m enjoying this exciting and challenging new environment and I’m looking forward to reporting on them in another 128 days
or so.
An easy find while out for a walk an the waterfront with some of my fellow Team Alpha Automatticians. Beautiful view and we got the best possible weather too. TFTC!
This adventure took a lot of planning. It’s 350 miles from where I live to Glasgow. I have a Honda CG 125cc, and my maximum range in one day is around 200 miles – if I have the full
day for travelling, which I wouldn’t have, most days. I figured if I was going to have a road trip, I’d have to make stop offs at various parts of the UK, to break it up. This
actually worked out really well, as there are lots of parts of the UK that I wanted to visit.
…
After booking the series of hotel rooms, I started to think about the actual riding. It was two weeks before the trip. I didn’t have enough thermals, or a bike suit that was
protective enough. I also didn’t have a way of storing luggage on my bike, or keeping it dry (and two laptops would be in the bags). There was also an issue with the chain on my
bike that needed fixing. Not exactly a trivial to do list! So the next two weeks turned into a bit of an eBay and Amazon frenzy, with a trip down to see my dad in Kent to get the
bike chain fixed, and rummage around for my old waterproofs in my grandparent’s attic. It was pretty close: the final item arrived the day before the trip. I got ridiculously lucky
on eBay with my new, more visible, better padded, comfy bike suit though, which I love to bits. In hindsight, more time for all of this would have been helpful!
…
My friend Bev wrote about their motorcycling adventure up and down the UK; it’s pretty awesome.
We might never have been very good at keeping track of the exact date our relationship began in Edinburgh twelve years ago, but that doesn’t
stop Ruth and I from celebrating it, often with a trip away very-approximately in the summer. This year, we marked the occasion with a return to Scotland, cycling our way around and between Glasgow and Edinburgh.
We got rained on quite a lot, early in our trip, but that didn’t slow our exploration.
Even sharing a lightweight conventional bike and a powerful e-bike, travelling under your own steam makes you pack lightly. We were able to get everything we needed – including packing
for the diversity of weather we’d been told to expect – in a couple of pannier bags and a backpack, and pedalled our way down to Oxford Parkway station to start our journey.
And because we’re oh-so-classy when we go on an anniversary break, I brought a four-pack for us to drink while we waited for the train.
In anticipation of our trip and as a gift to me, Ruth had arranged for tickets on the Caledonian Sleeper train from London
to Glasgow and returning from Edinburgh to London to bookend our adventure. A previous sleeper train ticket she’d purchased, for Robin as part of
Challenge Robin II, had lead to enormous difficulties when the train got cancelled… but how often can sleeper trains get cancelled, anyway?
Well this can’t be good.
Turns out… more-often than you’d think. We cycled across London and got to Euston Station just in time to order dinner and pour a glass of wine before we received an email to let
us know that our train had been cancelled.
Station staff advised us that instead of a nice fast train full of beds they’d arranged for a grotty slow bus full of disappointment. It took quite a bit of standing-around and waiting
to speak to the right people before anybody could even confirm that we’d be able to stow our bikes on the bus, without which our plans would have been completely scuppered. Not a great
start!
Hey look, a bag full of apologies in the form of snacks.
Eight uncomfortable hours of tedious motorway (and the opportunity to wave at Oxford as we went back past it) and two service stations later, we finally reached Glasgow.
Despite being tired and in spite of the threatening stormclouds gathering above, we pushed on with our plans to explore Glasgow. We opted to put our trust into random exploration –
aided by responses to weirdly-phrased questions to Google Assistant about what we should see or do – to deliver us serendipitous discoveries, and this plan worked well for us. Glasgow’s
network of cycle paths and routes seems to be effectively-managed and sprawls across the city, and getting around was incredibly easy (although it’s hilly enough that I found plenty of
opportunities to require the lowest gears my bike could offer).
Nothing else yet being open in Glasgow, we started our journey where many tens of thousands of Victorian-era Glaswegians finished theirs.
We kicked off by marvelling at the extravagance of the memorials at Glasgow Necropolis, a sprawling 19th-century cemetery covering an
entire hill near the city’s cathedral. Especially towards the top of the hill the crypts and monuments give the impression that the dead were competing as to who could leave the
most-conspicuous marker behind, but there are gems of subtler and more-attractive Gothic architecture to be seen, too. Finding a convenient nearby geocache completed the experience.
I learned that Wee Willie Winkie wasn’t the anonymously-authored folk rhyme that I’d assumed but was written by
a man called William Miller. Who knew?
Pushing on, we headed downriver in search of further adventure… and breakfast. The latter was provided by the delightful Meat Up Deli, who make a spectacularly-good omelette. There, in
the shadow of Partick Station, Ruth expressed surprise at the prevalence of railway stations in Glasgow; she, like many folks, hadn’t known that Glasgow is served by an underground train network, But I too would get to learn things I hadn’t known about the subway at our next destination.
The River Clyde is served by an excellent cycle path and runs through the former industrial heart of the city.
We visited the Riverside Museum, whose exhibitions are dedicated to the history of transport and industry,
with a strong local focus. It’s a terrifically-engaging museum which does a better-than-usual job of bringing history to life through carefully-constructed experiences. We spent much of
the time remarking on how much the kids would love it… but then remembering that the fact that we were able to enjoy stopping and read the interpretative signage and not just have to
sprint around after the tiny terrors was mostly thanks to their absence! It’s worth visiting twice, if we find ourselves up here in future with the little tykes.
“Coronation” Tram #1173 was worth a visit, but – as my smile shows – huge tram-fan Ruth had made me board a lot of restored trams by this point. And yes, observant reader: I
am still wearing yesterday’s t-shirt, having been so-far unable to find somewhere sensible to change since the motorway journey.
It’s also where I learned something new about the Glasgow Subway: its original implementation – in effect until 1935 – was cable-driven! A steam engine on the South side of the circular
network drove a pair of cables – one clockwise, one anticlockwise, each 6½ miles long – around the loop, between the tracks. To start the train, a driver would pull a lever which would
cause a clamp to “grab” the continuously-running cable (gently, to prevent jerking forwards!); to stop, he’d release the clamp and apply the brakes. This solution resulted in
mechanically-simple subway trains: the system’s similar to that used for some of the surviving parts of San Franciso’s original tram network.
We noticed “no spitting” signs all over all of the replica public transport at the museum. Turns out Glasgow had perhaps the worst tuberculosis outbreak in the UK, so encouraging
people to keep their fluids to themselves was a big deal.
Equally impressive as the Riverside Museum is The Tall Ship accompanying it, comprising the barque Glenlee converted into a floating museum about
itself and about the maritime history of its age.
I tried my hand at being helmsman of the Glenlee, but the staff wouldn’t let me unmoor her from the dock so we didn’t get very far. Also, I have no idea how to sail a ship. I can
capsize a windsurfer; that’s got to be similar, right?
This, again, was an incredibly well-managed bit of culture, with virtually the entire ship accessible to visitors, right down into the hold and engine room, and with a great amount of
effort put into producing an engaging experience supported by a mixture of interactive replicas (Ruth particularly enjoyed loading cargo into a hoist, which I’m pretty sure was designed
for children), video, audio, historical sets, contemporary accounts, and all the workings of a real, functional sailing vessel.
Plus, you can ring the ship’s bell!
After lunch at the museum’s cafe, we doubled-back along the dockside to a distillery we’d spotted on the way past. The Clydeside Distillery
is a relative newcomer to the world of whisky – starting in 2017, their first casks are still several years’ aging away from being ready for consumption, but that’s not stopping them
from performing tours covering the history of their building (it’s an old pumphouse that used to operate the swingbridge over the now-filled-in Queen’s Dock) and distillery, cumulating
in a whisky tasting session (although not yet including their own single malt, of course).
“Still” working on the finished product.
This was the first time Ruth and I had attended a professionally-organised whisky-tasting together since 2012, when we did so not once
but twice in the same week. Fortunately, it turns out that we hadn’t forgotten how to drink whisky; we’d both kept our hand in in the meantime.
<hic> Oh, and we got to keep our tasting-glasses as souvenirs, which was a nice touch.
Thus far we’d been lucky that the rain had mostly held-off, at least while we’d been outdoors. But as we wrapped up in Glasgow and began our cycle ride down the towpath of the Forth & Clyde Canal, the weather turned quickly through bleak to ugly to downright atrocious. The amber flood warning we’d been given gave way to what forecasters and the media called a “weather bomb”: an hours-long torrential downpour that limited visibility and soaked everything
left out in it.
You know: things like us.
Our journey from Glasgow took us along the Forth & Clyde Canal towpath to Milton of Campsie, near Kirkintilloch. Download GPX tracklog.
Our bags held up against the storm, thankfully, but despite an allegedly-waterproof covering Ruth and I both got thoroughly drenched. By the time we reached our destination of Kincaid House Hotel we were both exhausted (not helped by a lack of sleep the previous night during our rail-replacement-bus journey) and soaking wet
right through to our skin. My boots squelched with every step as we shuffled uncomfortably like drowned rats into a hotel foyer way too-fancy for bedraggled waifs like us.
I don’t have any photos from this leg of the journey because it was too wet to use a camera. Just imagine a picture of me underwater and you’ll get the idea. Instead, then, here’s a
photo of my boots drying on a radiator.
We didn’t even have the energy to make it down to dinner, instead having room service delivered to the room while we took turns at warming up with the help of a piping hot bath. If I
can sing the praises of Kincaid House in just one way, though, it’s that the food provided by room service was absolutely on-par with what I’d expect from their restaurant: none of the
half-hearted approach I’ve experienced elsewhere to guests who happen to be too knackered (and in my case: lacking appropriate footwear that’s not filled with water) to drag themselves
to a meal.
When we finally got to see it outside of the pouring rain, it turns out that the hotel was quite pretty. Our room is in the top right (including a nook extending into the turret). If
you look closely you’ll see that the third, fifth, and seventh windows on the upper floor are fake: they cover areas that have since their original construction been converted to
en suite bathrooms.
Our second day of cycling was to be our longest, covering the 87½ km (54½ mile) stretch of riverside and towpath between Milton of Campsie and our next night’s accommodation on the
South side of Edinburgh. We were wonderfully relieved to discover that the previous day’s epic dump of rain had used-up the clouds’ supply in a single day and the forecast was far more
agreeable: cycling 55 miles during a downpour did not sound like a fun idea for either of us!
The longest day’s cycling of our trip had intimidated me right from the planning stage, but a steady pace – and an improvement in the weather – put it well within our grasp. Download GPX tracklog.
Kicking off by following the Strathkelvin Railway Path, Ruth and I were able to enjoy verdant
countryside alongside a beautiful brook. The signs of the area’s industrial past are increasingly well-concealed – a rotting fence made of old railway sleepers here; the remains of a
long-dead stone bridge there – and nature has reclaimed the land dividing this former-railway-now-cycleway from the farmland surrounding it. Stopping briefly for another geocache we made good progress down to Barleybank where we were able to rejoin the canal towpath.
Our day’s journey began following Glazert Water towards its confluence with the River Kelvin. It’s really quite pretty around
here.
This is where we began to appreciate the real beauty of the Scottish lowlands. I’m a big fan of a mountain, but there’s also a real charm to the rolling wet countryside of the
Lanarkshire valleys. The Forth & Clyde towpath is wonderfully maintained – perhaps even better than the canal itself, which is suffering in patches from a bloom of spring reeds – and
makes for easy cycling.
Downstream from Kilsyth the Kelvin is fed by a crisscrossing network of burns rolling down the hills and through a marsh.
Outside of moorings at the odd village we’d pass, we saw no boats along most of the inland parts of the Forth & Clyde canal. We didn’t see many joggers, or dog-walkers, or indeed
anybody for long stretches.
The sun climbed into the sky and we found ourselves alone on the towpath for miles at a time.
The canal was also teeming with wildlife. We had to circumnavigate a swarm of frogs, spotted varied waterfowl including a heron who’d decided that atop a footbridge was the perfect
place to stand and a siskin that made itself scarce as soon as it spotted us, and saw evidence of water voles in the vicinity. The rushes and woodland all around but especially on the
non-towpath side of the canal seemed especially popular with the local fauna as a place broadly left alone by humans.
We only had a few seconds to take pictures of this swan family before the parents put themselves between us and the cygnets and started moving more-aggressively towards us.
The canal meanders peacefully, flat and lock-free, around the contours of the Kelvin valley all the way up to the end of the river. There, it drops through Wyndford Lock into the valley
of Bonny Water, from which the rivers flow into the Forth. From a hydrogeological perspective, this is the half-way point between Edinburgh and Glasgow.
We stopped for a moment to look at Wyndford Lock, where a Scottish Canals worker was using the gates to adjust the water levels following the previous day’s floods.
Seven years ago, I got the chance to visit the Falkirk Wheel, but Ruth had never
been so we took the opportunity to visit again. The Wheel is a very unusual design of boat lift: a pair of counterbalanced rotating arms swap places to move entire sections of the canal
from the lower to upper level, and vice-versa. It’s significantly faster to navigate than a flight of locks (indeed, there used to be a massive flight of eleven locks a little
way to the East, until they were filled in and replaced with parts of the Wester Hailes estate of Falkirk), wastes no water, and – because it’s always in a state of balance – uses next
to no energy to operate: the hydraulics which push it oppose only air resistance and friction.
A photo can’t really do justice to the size of the Falkirk Wheel: by the time you’re close enough to appreciate what it is, you’re too close to fit it into frame.
So naturally, we took a boat ride up and down the wheel, recharged our batteries (metaphorically; the e-bike’s battery would get a top-up later in the day) at the visitor centre cafe,
and enjoyed listening-in to conversations to hear the “oh, I get it” moments of people – mostly from parts of the world without a significant operating canal network, in their defence –
learning how a pound lock works for the first time. It’s a “lucky 10,000” thing.
Looking East from the top of the Falkirk Wheel we could make out Grangemouth, the Kelpies, and – in the distance –
Edinburgh: our destination!
Pressing on, we cycled up the hill. We felt a bit cheated, given that we’d just been up and down pedal-free on the boat tour, and this back-and-forth manoeuvrer confused my GPSr – which was already having difficulty with our insistence on sticking to the towpath despite all the road-based
“shortcuts” it was suggesting – no end!
The first of our afternoon tunnels began right at the top of the Falkirk Wheel. Echo… cho… ho… o…
From the top of the Wheel we passed through Rough Castle Tunnel and up onto the towpath of the Union Canal. This took us right underneath the remains of the Antonine Wall, the lesser-known sibling of Hadrian’s Wall and the absolute furthest extent, albeit short-lived, of the Roman Empire on
this island. (It only took the Romans eight years to realise that holding back the Caledonian Confederacy was a lot harder work than their replacement plan: giving most of what is now
Southern Scotland to the Brythonic Celts and making the defence of the Northern border into their problem.)
The Union Canal is higher, narrower, and windier than the Forth & Clyde.
A particular joy of this section of waterway was the Falkirk Tunnel, a very long tunnel broad enough that the towpath follows through it, comprised of a mixture of hewn rock and masonry
arches and very variable in height (during construction, unstable parts of what would have been the ceiling had to be dug away, making it far roomier than most narrowboat canal
tunnels).
Don’t be fooled by the green light: this tunnel is unmanaged and the light is alternating between red and green to tell boaters to use their own damn common sense.
Wet, cold, slippery, narrow, and cobblestoned for the benefit of the horses that no-longer pull boats through this passage, we needed to dismount and push our bikes through. This proved
especially challenging when we met other cyclists coming in the other direction, especially as our e-bike (as the designated “cargo bike”) was configured in what we came to lovingly
call “fat ass” configuration: with pannier bags sticking out widely and awkwardly on both sides.
Water pours in through the ceiling of the Falkirk Tunnel through a combination of man-made (ventilation) and eroded shafts.
This is probably the oldest tunnel in Scotland, known with certainty to predate any of the nation’s railway tunnels. The handrail was added far later (obviously, as it would interfere
with the reins of a horse), as were the mounted electric lights. As such, this must have been a genuinely challenging navigation hazard for the horse-drawn narrowboats it was built to
accommodate!
I had a few tries at getting a photo of the pair of us where neither of us looked silly, but failed. So here’s one where only Ruth looks silly (albeit clearly delighted at where she
is).
On the other side the canal passes over mighty aqueducts spanning a series of wooded valleys, and also providing us with yet another geocaching opportunity. We were very selective about our geocache stops on this trip; there
were so many candidates but we needed to make progress to ensure that we made it to Edinburgh in good time.
We took lunch and shandy at Bridge 49 where we also bought a painting depicting one of the bridges on the Union Canal and negotiated with the
proprietor an arrangement to post it to us (as we certainly didn’t have space for it in our bags!), continuing a family tradition of us buying art from and of places we take holidays
to. They let us recharge our batteries (literal this time: we plugged the e-bike in to ensure it’d have enough charge to make it the rest of the way without excessive rationing of
power). Eventually, our bodies and bikes refuelled, we pressed on into the afternoon.
One aqueduct spanned the River Almond, which Three Ringers might recognise by its Gaelic name, Amain.
For all that we might scoff at the overly-ornate, sometimes gaudy architecture of the Victorian era – like the often-ostentatious monuments of the Necropolis we visited early in our
adventure – it’s still awe-inspiring to see their engineering ingenuity. When you stand on a 200-year-old aqueduct that’s still standing, still functional, and still objectively
beautiful, it’s easy to draw unflattering comparisons to the things we build today in our short-term-thinking, “throwaway” culture. Even the design of the Falkirk Wheel’s, whose fate is
directly linked to these duocentenarian marvels, only called for a 120-year lifespan. How old is your house? How long can your car be kept functioning? Long-term thinking has given way
to short-term solutions, and I’m not convinced that it’s for the better.
Like the Falkirk Wheel, it’s hard to convey the scale of these aqueducts in pictures, especially those taken on their span! They’re especially impressive when you remember
that they were built over two centuries ago, without the benefits of many modern facilities.
Eventually, and one further (especially sneaky) geocache later, a total of around 66 “canal miles”, one monsoon, and one sleep
from the Glasgow station where we dismounted our bus, we reached the end of the Union Canal in Edinburgh.
There we checked in to the highly-recommendable 94DR guest house where our host Paul and his dog Molly demonstrated their ability to instantly-befriend
just-about anybody.
We figured that a “sharer” cocktail at the Salisbury Arms would be about the right amount for two people, but were pleasantly (?) surprised when what turned up was a punchbowl.
We went out for food and drinks at a local gastropub, and took a brief amble part-way up Arthur’s Seat (but not too far… we had just cycled fifty-something miles), of which our
hotel room enjoyed a wonderful view, and went to bed.
For some reason I felt the need to look like I was performing some kind of interpretive dance while presenting our hotel room at 94DR to Ruth.
The following morning we cycled out to Craigmillar Castle: Edinburgh’s other castle,
and a fantastic (and surprisingly-intact) example of late medieval castle-building.
We covered about 20km (12½ miles) while exploring Edinburgh, but at least it was punctuated by lots of activities. Download GPX tracklog.
This place is a sprawling warren of chambers and dungeons with a wonderful and complicated history. I feel almost ashamed to not have even known that it existed before now:
I’ve been to Edinburgh enough times that I feel like I ought to have visited, and I’m glad that I’ve finally had the chance to discover and explore it.
Does this picture give you Knightmare vibes? It gives me Knightmare vibes. “Take three steps forwards… it’s
okay, there’s nothing to fall off of.”
Edinburgh’s a remarkable city: it feels like it gives way swiftly, but not abruptly, to the surrounding countryside, and – thanks to the hills and forests – once you’re outside of
suburbia you could easily forget how close you are to Scotland’s capital.
From atop Craigmillar Castle it was hard to imagine a time at which there’d have been little but moorland and fields spanning the league between there and the capital.
In addition to a wonderful touch with history and a virtual geocache, Craigmillar Castle also provided with a
delightful route back to the city centre. “The Innocent Railway” – an 1830s stretch
of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway which retained a tradition of horse-drawn carriages long after they’d gone out of fashion elsewhere – once connected Craigmillar to Holyrood Park
Road along the edge of what is now Bawsinch and Duddington Nature Reserve, and has long since been converted into a cycleway.
The 520-metre long Innocent Tunnel may have been the first public railway tunnel in Britain. Since 1994, it’s been a cycle path.
Making the most of our time in the city, we hit up a spa (that Ruth had secretly booked as a surprise for me) in the afternoon followed by an escape room – The Tesla Cube – in the evening. The former involved a relaxing soak, a stress-busting massage, and a chill lounge in a
rooftop pool. The latter undid all of the good of this by comprising of us running around frantically barking updates at one another and eventually rocking the week’s highscore for the
game. Turns out we make a pretty good pair at escape rooms.
If we look pretty tired at this point, it’s because we are. (Fun fact, my phone insisted that we ought to take this picture again because, as it said “somebody blinked”.)
After a light dinner at the excellent vegan cafe Holy Cow (who somehow sell a banana bread that is vegan, gluten-free, and sugar-free: by the
time you add no eggs, dairy, flour or sugar, isn’t banana bread just a mashed banana?) and a quick trip to buy some supplies, we rode to Waverley Station to find out if we’d at least be
able to get a sleeper train home and hoping for not-another-bus.
I had their kidney-bean burger. It was delicious.
We got a train this time, at least, but the journey wasn’t without its (unnecessary) stresses. We were allowed past the check-in gates and to queue to load our bikes into their
designated storage space but only after waiting for this to become available (for some reason it wasn’t immediately, even though the door was open and crew were standing there) were we
told that our tickets needed to be taken back to the check-in gates (which had now developed a queue of their own) and something done to them before they could be accepted. Then they
reprogrammed the train’s digital displays incorrectly, so we boarded coach B but then it turned into coach E once we were inside, leading to confused passengers trying to take one
another’s rooms… it later turned back into coach B, which apparently reset the digital locks on everybody’s doors so some passengers who’d already put their luggage into a room
now found that they weren’t allowed into that room…
We were surprised to discover that our sleeper from Edinburgh to London had the same crew as the one we’d not been able to get to Glasgow earlier in the week. So they got to hear us
complain at them for a second time, albeit for different reasons.
…all of which tied-up the crew and prevented them from dealing with deeper issues like the fact that the room we’d been allocated (a room with twin bunks) wasn’t what we’d paid for (a
double room). And so once their seemingly-skeleton crew had solved all of their initial technical problems they still needed to go back and rearrange us and several other customers in a
sliding-puzzle-game into one another’s rooms in order to give everybody what they’d actually booked in the first place.
In conclusion: a combination of bad signage, technical troubles, and understaffing made our train journey South only slightly less stressful than our bus journey North had been. I’ve
sort-of been put off sleeper trains.
The room itself, once we finally got it, was reasonable, although it was reminiscent of time spent in small camper vans where using one piece of furniture first means folding away a
different piece of furniture.
After a reasonable night’s sleep – certainly better than a bus! – we arrived in London, ate some breakfast, took a brief cycle around Regent’s Park, and then found our way to Marylebone
to catch a train home.
Getting our bikes onto the train back to Oxford from London was, amazingly, easier than getting them onto the sleeper train on which we’d specifically booked a space for them.
All in all it was a spectacular and highly-memorable adventure, illustrative of the joy of leaving planning to good-luck, the perseverance of wet cyclists, the ingenuity of Victorian
engineers, the beauty of the Scottish lowlands, the cycle-friendliness of Glasgow, and – sadly – the sheer incompetence of the operators of sleeper trains.
![Digital display board: "Passengers for the Caledonian Sleeper service tonight departing at 23:30 are being advised that the Glasgow portio [sic] of this service has been cancelled. For further information please see staff on"](/_q23u/2019/06/20190623_222859-1024x498.jpg)
