Midway through a detox week:

holy heck. Possibly I am an alcoholic. True, after last night's old skool Tiny Monkey practise chez moi, Martin and I did have 2 (two) pints but I'm going to discount them because I want more. Supposed to be going to a party on Saturday night - it'll be interesting getting through that one without throwing sobriety and propriety to the wind.

On Sunday night Ruth and I and a couple of her mates went along to Inverleith Park to watch the illuminated fog above the castle marking the end of the festival. We stood in a 20,000-strong sea of neds and watched a large amount of money being used to light up a bank of cloud to classical music, and went home.

...and then went back out, independently, to meet our respective chums at The Outhouse for a couple of drinks. The combined chat was good, the night was just cold enough to make it feel like autumn and it was a pleasant way to wind down after a hectic but otherwise top weekend.

Now, though, I'm making a conscious effort to get back into training in advance of the run on Sunday, so I played badminton on Monday night - rather badly, to be honest - and went for a run on Tuesday night. My good intentions to go running three times a week have suffered at the hands of rock n' roll living for the past fortnight or so, and at the moment I tend towards wheezing collapse rather quicker than is useful when required to run 10,000m.

Bring on Sunday, I say. Not for the run, clearly, but for the street-long row of pubs that awaits at the finish line.

P.S. Michelle was in Kyoto a while back as part of a work trip to Japan. She visited the same temple on the mountainside outside the city as I did when I was a kid, and she's just posted a load of photos of it. It's an incredible place: pagodas sticking up through a steep, green forest covering the hillside and all connected by shadowed walkways, gardens and staircases.

Barnaby also has a few shots from another work visit to Japan, taken with his bizarro hippie Lomo camera.