Illyria

I stopped as usual at the Ballinluig Motor Grill last Friday for my sausage, egg and chips with a mug of tea, and the rather substantial portions cost less than a portion of tea and cake at House of Bruar. The food is simple but good, I love the way everyone is friendly, and you can have a very pleasant conversation about the merits of the five different routes to Elgin with anyone. Don’t even bother trying to stop anywhere else, unless you take your own sandwiches to The Hermitage - a little slice of Middle Earth.
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The A9 has a symbolic value - it has always been a journey of the soul and spirit as well as the physical for me. It has always connected family to family, and I’ve been travelling it since before I was born. It can be very beautiful -when the sun is out. I am not a huge rain fan.

I am expanding my vocabulary of the Glasgow vernacular - not-so-recent additions have been ’solid’ and ‘fresh’, frequently prefaced by the modifier ‘pure’. Also, I now know what an Emo is.
However, when I got to ‘noob’, I and my colleagues were stumped. It sounded pithy, but with little obvious derivational quality. Here is a helpful section from Wikipedia.

Newb vs. noob

Newb and noob may have somewhat different connotations. Newbs are simply newcomers—noob and n00b, on the other hand, generally means someone who is obnoxious, annoying, or breaks the rules; whether they are actual newcomers or not is mostly irrelevant. Therefore, a noob may be someone who has been around for a long time but still engages in behavior that he or she should have learned is unacceptable. Noobs are generally confident in what they are doing, but in reality are annoying others. “Newb” is not necessarily an insulting word, but “noob” usually is.

Apparently it is also classed as a sort of swear word, so apologies.

I will send a special prize to the best caption for this lurverly picture of Dinoman! This was taken yesterday at our first barbeque of the year.