The highlight for me was a girl in the queue waiting to get in eating a McDonald’s.

I have just discovered that nva will stage their next major event – Half Life – in Mid Argyll (not a million miles from Oban).

Kilmartin and North Knapdale are home to an unbelievable concentration of standing stones, burial cairns, henges, duns, mills and earlier Neolithic cup and ring marked rocks. With the Corrievreckan, the third largest whirlpool in the world, guarding the entrance to Crinan Moss and Dunadd the earliest seat of the Scottish Kings, it carries an importance that spans 5,000 years of human development.

The production has two dynamic elements. An audience of up to 10,000 will be invited to freely explore a specifically selected range of iconic locations throughout the day, using a specially designed guide. By night, they will be transported to a forest for an outdoor production, above the ancient fort of Dunadd, the birthplace of Scotland. Here they will enter a vast set constructed out of thousands of cut logs spreading across the recently deforested landscape.

If that doesn’t sound almighty, I don’t know what does.

an environmental animation, staged at night, using the old man of storr on the eastern side of the isle of skye. the original blurb was something along the lines of ‘the route, walked at night, will reveal accumulated perspectives on radical geology, culture and belief, presented on a monumental scale’. excited? you should be.

tickets are available NOW and my gut feeling is they will sell fast. i’ve got mine (20 august), have you? you can buy them from www.thebooth.co.uk (unless you are a mac user, in which case their web site is incompatible with your computer, in fact it might look a bit like this).

when it arrived, it was badged ‘WH Smiths’. odd.

upon trying to open it, it appeared to be locked by the badge. I suggested it would have been sold to them by a distributor and returned under a distribution agreement, but WH Smiths neglected to remove their security tag, the distributor failed to notice and then resold it to Amazon, who then sold it, also without noticing.

as I don’t buy DVDs, I’ve never seen one of these security mechanisms before. this is a bad picture of the contraption:

and this is the DVD, still stuck in the case after being half destroyed.

we did manage to get it out in the end. but it was a struggle.