Normal wear and tear

               The beginning of last week had us beating a track back and forth between home and the doctor’s surgery. I had already been in to take advantage of the NHS ‘Keep Well’ scheme and had a free check-up. Given my chronic fear of white coats and needles, I thought that was quite brave of me. Other than an annoying trend of putting back on most of the weight that I lost last winter, I was given a clean bill of health. This time it was Gail’s turn when she went in for a blood test. The results came back later that same day and our locum doctor was not pleased with them. He phoned up and said as much, asking Gail to haul herself back in to the surgery in the morning. She came home with yet another bag of pills. I find it incredible that that girl doesn’t rattle when she moves. Apparently she is so anaemic that I swear if she didn’t carry any spare change in her purse then she wouldn’t have any iron at all. Hopefully, a couple of supplements a day will do the trick as I dread to think how much the Guinness habit that she is keen to adopt instead would cost.

Going nowhere fast. The path of the good ship MV Tetuan.

                The weather was dreadfully pants. We didn’t actually think it was that bad as we still had a roof. It is true that a bit had flown off one of the outbuildings but the most frustrating aspects are that Easterlies blow the house name sign off its stand and Southerlies move the TV aerial so we can’t watch anything on the box. The clearest evidence that things were worse than we thought was the 6,000 tonne container ship wallowing around in the bay. I remembered the times that I used to spend interrogating the AIS maritime radar to watch the traffic weaving around each other in the Solent, so when we arrived home and got the hamster in our BT infinity box to start running around in his wheel, we logged on to find that the ship was the MV Tetuan. It is Liberian registered, but then again aren’t they all? I struggled out onto the dunes with Gail’s thirty times zoom camera to see if I could get a picture of it. 

MV Tetuan taking Orkney refuge.

It was an ordeal for two reasons. Firstly, even though it had looked pretty massive from the road half an hour earlier, it had moved off quite a way and together with the poor visibility rendered it nothing more than a faint mote on the horizon. Secondly, even crouching with my back to the wind, I was getting buffeted around so bad that keeping the ship in the viewfinder itself was a real challenge. I snapped the shutter a few times and just hoped that it would perhaps appear in one of them. I confess that you'll find better at: www.marinetraffic.com/ais/shipdetails. In fact, the gallery at the site has some amazing pictures of ships. It might just be a Teutonic thing, given that three of the four most popular viewing locations are the Kiel Canal, Hamburg and Cuxhaven, but I suspect it has a wider appeal than that really.

There's not supposed to be a door here!

                The seas got pretty wild. We could see white water in the North Ronaldsay Firth from the back of the house. Huge Atlantic rollers were coming in to break just off the headland and wash up the cobbles on the beach at Tofts Ness. The trouble with coastlines is that they aren’t fixed. We’d already had a situation where one of the only three major roads on the island was blocked by rocks and detritus. It was clear that there would need to be another clean-up operation after this little lot. As well as doing a little bit of rubbish clearance on the Bay of Lopness, I’d already started to throw back the stones that the previous storm had tossed up onto the top of the dunes. I am thankful that home lies a couple of hundred metres back from the sea. Others are not so lucky. Those finding themselves right on the front line get bombarded with all sorts. The high winds also ripped a big whole in our friend Andy’s polytunnel. He had been trapped overnight in Kirkwall due to his return sailing being cancelled and was in no position to do any more to prevent it. After all his investment in additional storm fencing around it, he was justifiably furious and got the manufacturers to send him a replacement cover for it.

                You also find that when home is only a couple of feet above sea level, it doesn’t drain very well. The notion that the foundations in the garden be turned into a big raised bed was beginning to look more and more unlikely as it began to resemble a swimming pool instead. Puddles formed and merged across the surface and when they eventually retreated, a few taps with the sole of a wellie caused liquefaction of the sand into a gloopy puddle again. It also wasn’t draining from the fishing crate raised beds either and what remained of my overwintering leeks were wilting. I had to pull them all up and blanch them. Well, not quite all of them. A good few made the shorter trip to our tummies instead. That leaves a handful of chili plants around the place, some looking decidedly unhealthy, and a few ropey cabbages dotted around the garden. The lines of spinach never appeared, or if they did the rabbits got to them before we did. Next year’s seeds are on order so we’ll get to see if I’ve learned anything from last year’s disappointing returns.

My latest mission has everything to do with www.geograph.org.uk . It is a site that aspires to have photographs taken of every square of the Ordnance Survey map. Needless to say, some areas of the country are more popular than others. I lost count of how many pictures of HMS Warrior there were. However, remote parts of the country, such as where I find myself these days, are much less well represented. I have taken it upon myself, therefore, to fill the gaps on the map. All the highlights on the island, the war memorial, the golf course and the big rock have already made it onto the site, but I’m after everything else that other residents and visitors have missed until now. If, perchance, you are interested in looking around the old place, I can heartily recommend that you check out the site.

  © Copyright Becky Williamson and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.
(I had to borrow somebody else's photo as I haven't been here yet!)

That’s about all I can think to write. Other than watching an exciting Superbowl, visiting the mobile library, (this month I will be mostly reading ‘The monster of Florence’ by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi), driving the bus and swimming in the pool, both regularly but infrequently and never at the same time, what with the cool temperature and the short days I have to confess that it’s all been rather boring. The lapwings haven’t started their courtship aerobatics yet and the ground is still a mucky grey/brown colour. It’s as if the whole island is just holding its breath. It may be a little premature, but I get the feeling that it is under the impression that Spring is on its way. I must confess that I have my doubts and will have for many weeks to come.

Let it snow (but not too much)

Another late posting. As Douglas Adams is quoted as saying: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” I may be rubbish, but at least I am in good company.

Hands off of our equines, Silvercrest!

As someone on a limited budget, I take full note of the cautionary tale of the contents of some ‘value’ burgers that made the news the other week. I would have thought that the retailers would be pleased that their patties had so much meat in them when you’d think that they’d be mostly rusk, testicles and whatnot. So despite what were probably the most healthy and appetizing morsels ever to be dressed in that packaging, tons of perfectly edible food was withdrawn from sale and tossed away. Burgers were thankfully not on the shopping list when we hit Lidl and Tesco in Kirkwall for a few essentials. Just in case anyone is under the impression that it’s all knitting patterns and farming weekly up here, we also dropped in on the library and I’m currently reading ‘The sound of things falling’ by Juan Gabriel Vasquez. Well, there’s no ‘Dandy’ these days!

My limited means also prevented me from buying this year’s diary pages for my old Filofax while we were in town. Yes there was a shop that stocked them. This necessitated finding a free one online to download. I gave up in the end on account of me being a technophobic Luddite, however Gail found a pretty Chrysanth one. It’s sitting there on the laptop desktop, bright as a button, but I just can’t bring myself to open it up and write an entry in it. Meanwhile, my trusty Filofax is glaring at me from the shelf like I’ve betrayed it. Which, basically, is exactly what I’ve done.

Spotted during our archaeological field-walk. Whatever it is.

Sanday is absolutely peppered with archaeology. Some of it is big and bold like the Quoyness chambered cairn, but some of it is small and threatened by being erased from history by wind, tide, flora and fauna. The SCAPE trust aims to identify archaeological sites at risk from erosion and have a project to update its records by having field-walkers complete status report forms and lodge their findings and photographs online. It is also possible to register new sites that hadn’t been identified before. On Sunday, an islander who just so happens to be a field manager lead a small group of amateurs to explore half a dozen sites near Stove. We found two burial mounds, one with a navigation beacon built on it and the other robbed out, some kelp beds and plenty of other evidence of ancient occupation. Some of it is quite tenuous, like changes in soil colour and stones lying at jaunty, unnatural angles. It was cold and the terrain was hellish so I’m amazed that with all my gawping around at the scenery/evidence that I didn’t fall flat on my face in the mud.

I learned from Facebook pretty early on that much of the country had got quite a bit of snow over the following days. Everywhere, that is, but Peterborough, apparently. As is often the way, it caused quite a bit of disruption, closing airports and stuff, the infrastructure unprepared even though it happens every year. It always seems to be either too dry in summer, to wet in spring and autumn and shock horror it gets cold in winter. The Northern isles were not so affected. Up to that point, our little pond had only frozen over twice. Slowly, however, the snow marched relentlessly in our general direction and soon it was predicted to arrive.

Tuesday dawned chilly and calm. We planned a little drive to Kettletoft Post Office, then to Heilsa Fjold to avail ourselves of their wi-fi, a brief visit to Lady roadside shop for a few groceries before finally heading home. We trudged up the garden to the car and noticed the gritter/plough go past. We thought it rather superfluous as the road outside the gate was clear, without even a frost on it. I had no reservations about venturing out. A couple of miles up the road though, where we were away from the sea, around the Plain of Fidge, conditions changed. There was plenty of white stuff here and the bends were suspiciously treacherous. Lady was covered in snow and despite the plough, it sat on the road itself, an inch or two thick. Also, where most of the traffic had turned right at the war memorial, a high bank of snow lay across the route directly ahead. I often boast that my Skoda benefits from a rally heritage, and I was grateful that it did when it crashed through the pile and on over the less used way. 

Told you. Thanks Google Images.

This was interesting. As we got to the old harbour it thinned again but got even worse heading back into the middle of the island. Hot soup was the order of the day and I was keen to ask Kelly, the bus driver, how she had fared that morning as her Tuesday shopping route pulled in for a bite of lunch. Her neck of the ‘woods’ had been worst affected but by far her scariest moment had been ascending a steep road called ‘the branch’ almost sideways. The cars behind her had waited around the corner at the bottom just in case gravity had won and brought the transit sliding back down to meet them. It is a precipitous bit of tarmac that scares me on a good day, so I filed her account of the ordeal in the old grey cells for when I was to take the bus in a few days. When the current version of i-tunes had finished installing on the laptop, we left for home and found it as clear as it had been when we’d left. I don’t see what all the fuss is all about to be honest.

I was promised that it would all have thawed by Thursday. I went to bed on Wednesday night, with a hot water bottle admittedly, in good faith but just as I was wishing the sky a good night, I noticed that it was very bright outside. It had arrived and there was plenty of it. I hardly slept. A late booking already made my trip to the pier a hurried one and now that conditions had turned pants, I doubted it was even possible. The first pick-up of the morning was one of the bosses. He’d know if we were going to make it or not. When he had finished being amused by my reluctance to run over any bunnies he assured me that we’d make it in good time. I tore the length and breadth of the island and collected my last fare in Kettletoft just as the ferry was due to arrive. The trouble was that it was arriving at Loth, eight convoluted and treacherous miles away. There was no way we were going to make it before it had turned around. “They won’t leave without us.” Gareth insisted.

The boat that Andy nearly missed.

He was right. The last few trucks were being loaded as I swept down the last hill, swung through the car-park and hurtled toward the dock. “They don’t grit the pier!” my passengers exclaimed, just in time. In stark contrast to the preceding miles, I cautiously made my way to the bus stop at the pier’s end. Gareth had kindly managed the ticket machine for me so I could leap out, unload their luggage and wish a bon voyage to my customers. At 07:58, the 07:45 sailing departed for Kirkwall, a mere five minutes after I’d turned up at the scene. After such a stressful ordeal, and I do not presume to have been the only one on the bus who felt that way, I sat counting my lucky stars before a leisurely drive home, stopping often take pictures. My favourite, though, I didn’t stop for. I just aimed Gail’s Bloggie camera at the windscreen as I barrelled along ‘Fidge’.

A wise man tells me that this photo has 'album cover' written all over it.

In order to drive away the Winter chill and rather inspired by Italy Unpacked on BBC2, we checked out Rightmove overseas to check out property in warmer climes. All at once, our stiff joints and frostbitten appendages were forgotten as we recalled our holiday in Belaggio beside Lake Como. I have to face the truth that I am not man enough for the Northern Islands. I thought that I was bullet-proof, but I need to acknowledge that I am nothing more than a soft Sassenach. Without investment that we don’t have, the house will always be a hovel. Without a polytunnel, we will never be able to produce enough greens and our reluctance to keep livestock or even fish means that we’ve hamstrung ourselves with our own ideology. We are never going to be able to live ‘the good life’ with our delicate sensibilities, not to mention our darn-right laziness. Sorry. It got a bit melancholy just then. I’ll be alright again in a few months. If you thought that was miserable, you should have seen how forlorn I was last winter. In comparison, that was me being cheerful!

Taking 'retirement' way too literally.

Well, that didn’t work. I made a resolution to write every second Friday, but I’ve messed that up already. Whether I can forgive myself and give it another chance in a fortnight we will see. At least all that festive season nonsense has now passed and the days are already getting longer, so spirits are on the up. Now where was I?

A consequence of attending the Sanday Development Trust AGM is that we are now members of said trust. There was a tiny monetary commitment, comprising a whole pound, which will disappear into the ether if the trust is ever wound up, but I think it’s worth the risk. The trust effectively runs the island, other than core services operated by Orkney Council, by committing grants and subsidies, not to mention quite a tidy sum from the small wind-farm at Spurness near Loth pier, to community based projects. For example, the croft and the heritage centre are run by the trust and their trading arm runs the bus service. I cannot imagine that there will be so much money in the kitty in the near future as austerity driven budget cuts kick in, but we’ll now have some small say in where it goes.

The old Spurness windfarm
© Copyright hayley green and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence 

Within days, a cold bug took a holiday to visit us and it goes without saying that I thought I was dying. You know what boys are like. On my way back from a meeting about the bus service (the drivers were invited to attend so we did) I dropped in at the doctor’s surgery to see if they had a bottle of Night Nurse. No such luck. As there are no dispensing chemists on the island, I had to resort to half a sleeping tablet, dispensed by the missus, to help me to get to sleep. I woke up in the morning about an hour before my cold so I managed the morning drive to Loth pier before the symptoms returned. The afternoon run was like looking through beer-bottle spectacles, but my reading of the islands roads, even after dark, is coming on nicely. If it wasn’t for the animals, both wild and domesticated, roaming across them then it would be an absolute breeze.

Talking of breezes, a strong Southerly pushed Gail’s ‘Jodrell Bank’ TV aerial out of alignment. Neither of us fancied braving the elements, especially when a friend reminded us of Rod Hull’s untimely demise, so we settled down to some of our favourite DVDs. Gail kicked off the ‘Harry Potter’ season and put on Philosopher’s Stone while I cooked my signature dish haricot and olive bake for dinner. For those asking the question, yes it does take me two hours to prepare a meal. I have to make sure that I have all the clean utensils to hand, the myriad ingredients are weighed out into bowls, the oven’s to heat and that I have a list of all the expletives I know that I am guaranteed to have exhausted before it’s time to plate up. During dinner we watched episodes of Firefly.

The poor weather continued for a few days, prompting Kirkwall Grammar School to advise their students from the other islands that they start their weekend early as there was a real possibility that ferry sailings would be cancelled on Friday. Consequently, the Thursday afternoon bus run from the boat was positively heaving. Lucky skunks. With this increase in passenger numbers, this meant that I had to drive down a few roads that I had previously only seen on Google streetview. It wasn’t quite the same. It’s much easier to hang a ‘U’ on the laptop than it is in a twelve-seater Transit.

The road to Stove. The only way out is the same way you came in.
  © Copyright Rob Burke and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

When it calmed down at the beginning of the next week, rather than doing any outdoor work, I took the bike out for a twenty three mile ride instead. I had never been to the very top of the island before, even in the car. There’s not much up there past the Angora shop, just fields with what you’d swear was a Roman road cutting between them. It was so remote that an opportunistic black-winged seagull started circling above me in the hope that I’d crash into a ditch and be carrion for him. At the end of the road is Whitemill Bay. A reasonably high dune gives a splendid view of North Ronaldsay and a fine sandy beach runs Westward and, the other way, heads around the corner to the South. A skerry, called ‘The Riv’ heads off straight out ahead and terminates at an outcropping about 1500m from the beach and on which a marker stands. The tide was in so there was only a tumult of colliding waves between the two, whereas the Ordnance Survey map suggests that, at low tide, a causeway is revealed that runs the full length.  I’m already planning to test the theory as soon as tide and season permits. I’ll take a big packed lunch in case I get stranded at the marker and have to sit out high water. If it’s going to happen to anyone then I fully expect it to be me. On the way back home, I stopped in at Heilsa Fjold for a warming soup and a cup of tea. A very welcome treat they were too.  I availed myself of their PC and posted on Facebook what I’d been up to, thus clueing Gail in on what I was up to. I must learn to be a little more discreet.

View from Whitemill Bay to the marker at the end of 'The Riv'

Winter is the ideal time to set up the raclette on the kitchen table. I think that spotting new ones for sale in Didldidi may have put the notion into our heads. A timely reminder it was too. Cue the writing of a shopping list comprising lots of fresh vegetables and a cheese that nobody stocks. In the circumstances Gouda and Edamer had to suffice. I also dug up a handful of leeks that I have left to overwinter in a raised bed in the garden. They may be small but they certainly pack a punch. It takes a while for the granite slab top to be warmed through from the grill elements below. By which time the shed is nice and warm all around. It must be said that, other than for a couple of mornings at the start, December has been quite mild, so I fully expect that it’ll be dragged out again early in the new year. Spring won’t reach us until June, so there’ll be plenty of opportunity.

Nosy neighbours. Came as a bit of a shock at the time.

You may have gathered by now that things have been pretty slow on the home improvement and gardening front. I must confess that other than cutting lengths of garden hose to make cloches at some time in the near future, continuing to make paper briquettes to burn on a fire we don’t even have and writing a shopping list of items required to put a ceiling up in the storeroom, things have been pedestrian to say the least. It doesn’t help that I’m a lazy git and nice days are at a premium, nor that there are a million and one things that I’d rather be doing when the conditions outside are conducive to more relaxing pursuits. The prospect of visitors in the summer, I hope, will be the catalyst for me to metamorphose into a whirling dervish in order to get things hospitable for our guests. For the moment I’ll continue to act like a complete tourist. At least the photographs will be more interesting, I hope, and I can maintain a certain mystique about my practical skills. So far, the number of people aware of the danger that I, armed with a hammer, pose to world peace are thankfully few in number. I don’t think that I need to compound my faux pas by providing evidence of my incompetence to a wider audience. So, with that in mind, when asked to repair a hole in the wall in the smallest room in the house, see if you can guess what I did.

Cata Sand through the grass

Yep! I grabbed the camera and went out for a ride. 

A ruin at Cleat and reflection. 

Happy 2013 to all my reader.  

As the days are getting shorter

            I hate writing a blog. No, that’s not true at all. What I hate is myself for not writing them more regularly. The problem is that I won’t have any truck with a regimen for anything I do. I like to think that it’s spontaneity, but if I am being honest, it is just chaos. Hence, when I do sit myself down to bash out fifteen hundred words by stabbing the keypad of Gail’s laptop with my two index fingers, I find without fail that I need to review my diary, photograph album and my Facebook posts to remind myself what the hell it is that I’ve been up to since I last posted. Quite often I find out that I have completely forgotten whole adventures and have to remind myself that this isn’t fiction. If it was, the hero would be smart, brave, funny and handsome, unlike me. (And probably a girl! The jury is still out on that one.)

So how far did I get last time?

Did I mention Backaskaill ( http://www.bedandbreakfastsandayorkney.com ) where we went for dinner to celebrate twenty two years of marital bliss? No? Well, we did and it was very good indeed. Not so good for the duck I had, but if it’s any consolation to it, he or she tasted delicious. The very next morning, however, it was back to our friend Andy’s place for me to help him to finish the fence around his polytunnel. (Andy has already posted on the ‘Downsizer’ website that he was actually due to attend a hospital appointment that morning but when he went to put his ferry boarding pass into his wallet, he realized that he had forgotten it, so he handed his boarding pass back and drove home!) This time it was to nail up the black, polyester windbreak fencing to those massive posts. Each of the twenty horizontal strips needed stretching and then fixing into place with large wire staples. I tried really hard not to do too much damage with a hammer and still have all my fingers left at the end of it. When we’d finished, it was time to lop off the tops of the posts with a chainsaw. Like a fool, Andy offered to let me have a go. As someone capable of incredible feats of stupidity, I just laughed at him and I think he understood. Instead, I held the ladder for him as he wielded ‘Excalibur’ over my head, covering me in sawdust, and tried to deflect the chunks of lumber he’d removed. The one that he missed tumbled down the steps and twatted me on the knee. So I limped for a few days, but the sense of manliness more than made up for it.

The only things missing now are searchlights, guard towers and a staff car.

A lot like Grand Theft Auto. Only with much more roadkill.

After a few days, by which time I had fully regained my usual mobility, I got a call from the manager of the bus operator who asked if I was available to take over the driver duties for one day a week in order to give the regular driver, Kelly, a regular day off. After checking my appointments calendar and confirming with my erstwhile social secretary, I said that it would be a pleasure. The gig involves me taking the bus out every Thursday and making two trips to Loth pier to drop off and pick up passengers to compliment the ferry timetable. There is only one road from the pier to the middle of the island, but then it’s a bit of a run-around, picking up and dropping off at homes all over the place. It certainly is an excellent way to learn about the island and the folk on it. There are a few helpful tools to assist me. My site-centred, large scale Ordnance Survey map is pretty good, but it would seem that you are nobody without a copy of ‘Naggles O Piapittem’, a volume of hand-drawn maps of Sanday with every single house, bothy, bog, stream and field named and numbered for easy reference. Unfortunately, as it is currently out of print, copies are available online only for obscene amounts of lucre. I would draw your attention to http://www.amazon.co.uk/Naggles-Piapittem-Place-Sanday-Orkney/dp/0951344331 if you don’t believe me. It looks as if I’ll have to learn the old fashioned way, by getting out there, on four, two or no wheels, and discovering the place in my own inimitable style. The book’s out of date anyway. Our house isn’t on it for a start, but then it would not be too unreasonable to conclude that the shed didn’t qualify as a landmark of any note-worthy consequence. (Cue author being hit over the head with an M. C. Beaton novel borrowed from Orkney Library.)

One of my passengers is the wife of the captain of the golf club. As I dropped Ruth off at the gate, Ean asked me if I was available to help in repairing the fences around the greens on the course at the weekend. No problem, despite my aversion to sharp objects. The course is a farmer’s field, on which he grazes cattle or sheep depending on the time of year. During the summer, when the season is in full swing, there are no livestock grazing on it, so the fences are partially removed. At the end of the year, however, it’s time to put cows back onto the land, so the fences need to go back up and an additional, waist-high course of barbed wire needs to be strung. Some posts required hammering in and some of the existing ones needed support. If the animals don’t push them over, it is guaranteed that the elements will. Then it was a case of fixing the wire with more of those bloody wire staple things. The barbs tore my gardening gloves to ribbons during the afternoon. They were clearly not up to the job, but did enough to spare me from any bloody wounds, which likely would have had me fainting at the sight and further damaging any credibility I think that I may have with the locals. The course barely took a couple of hours to finish. It often takes me about that long just to play a round, in which time a small team of eight guys had completely re-fenced all nine holes.

Ancestry.co.uk was offering a free glimpse of WW1 records so I busied myself inspecting those this month. It was nice that I was able to find that granddad and Uncle Chris both served. The effect it had on them both I can only imagine, but it was interesting to view their records anyway. Imagine my delight to find that both had reprimands for minor offences. Granddad Arthur had turned up for ceremonial parade sporting a youthful beard and got canned for that. I wonder if it was quite as bad as the grief that I get from Gail when I don't bother to shave? I doubt it. My uncle on the other hand had made more of his home leave than was strictly allowed and forfeited some pay accordingly. I should imagine that it brought him no shortage of earache as well. As a pacifist as well as having just read a number of battlefield accounts recently, it’s about as much knowledge as I can comfortably tolerate. I can appreciate the torment, even of those that came home physically unscathed. The fact that we perpetuate, as a species, such horrors continues to appal me.

Don't you just hate nosy neighbours?

It's too dark for shots of the moon or aurora, but we get millions of these things.

It has been a month of firsts in the vista department. I’d never really noticed moon-bows before, but now I have I can saw that they are very beautiful indeed. I’ve seen a lot of moon-rings, the moonlight being refracted by thin, low cloud. The one the other night was unusual because the ring was a long way away from the moon itself. So far, in fact, that it took Gail an age to find it. What I had never witnessed before is the light of the moon-ring so dispersed that all the colours of the rainbow were visible. The red and orange were spectacular enough, but after a while it was clear that the yellow, green and blue were there too. Then, just a day or so later, I was sticking my head out of the door to wish the stars a good night, when I noticed that the clouds to the North were glowing green. The aurora itself was obscured, but it shone around the cloud very brightly. It was a tough decision to make, whether or not to wake Gail up and face the possibility of personal injury if it turned out to be the wrong thing to do, but so excited was she by our first glimpse of the Northern Lights that she ended up walking around the house in her pyjamas for a better view. A week or so later, we were due to attend the Sanday Development Trust annual general meeting and nearly missed it. We arrived in good time but found ourselves, instead, stood in the car park just gawping at an unobscured aurora, our first. We did make it to the meeting eventually, but it was a close call for a moment there.  Solar radiation is not something that you can easily turn your back to when it’s putting on a show for you!  

Catching up with the rest of October

                 I had an amazing wildlife experience while walking along the beach at Bay of Lopness. After strolling for about half a mile West toward Newark, I turned around and saw an animal of some kind making its way along at the water’s edge toward me. My first thought was that it was perhaps Vicki, our neighbour’s dog, so I scanned the dunes for her either Barry or Sheila, but there was nobody there. Then I reached the conclusion that it was a cat, judging by the way it was bounding along. Not wanting to risk scaring it up towards the road, I headed to the dunes and sat down to wait. I took Gail’s Bloggie camera out from my pocket and snapped away. Then the penny dropped. “Stone me! It’s a bloody otter!” I pressed the video button on the Bloggie, but I forgot to press record. Idiot! The otter carried on, occasionally stooping to rub its chest in the sand, and reached where I had been standing only moments before. It stopped barely ten yards from where I was now sitting, completely oblivious to my presence. I could not stop myself from saying hello to it. Now fully aware of me, but quite casually, the otter trotted down to the water to complete the rest of his journey, where-ever it was he was off to. I had hoped to see an otter in the wild, but I never for a moment imagined it so close.

Some days the beach can get really crowded.

                Another animal with which we continue to have close encounters is the visiting Siamese. I had spent ten minutes playing with him on our doorstop just before my otter walk. He was back again the next day when we received a phone call from a lady living just down the road. She was asking if we had, by any chance, seen her missing cat who was overdue for his medicine. Not only had we seen him but we were looking at him right now! She asked whether we could keep him entertained while she drove around to collect him. We chatted to Ruth for quite a while, as her quarry, Leo, clearly unhappy at being imprisoned, shredded the newspaper lining his cage. It came as a relief that the handsome wee fellow wasn’t a homeless feral and had such a loving home to go back to. So can someone please explain why he was back again before the week was out? He arrived with blood around his mouth. Concerned that it might have been his own, I wiped his chops for him and found that it was not. He was scrounging for biscuits having just had his face buried in a rabbit carcass, the freeloading bastard! Since then, he has been a common sight on our ‘estate’, hunting high and low for his next wild meal. He has often been loitering right at our door as well, much to Smokey’s frustration as he often appears there just when I am about to let her outside. Only today, I saw him making his way away from the house toward the loch yet only a few minutes later when I opened the door to let madam out, there he was. Some hissing and spitting ensued before I could shut the door again. After an hour or so, she did get outside. She’d been out for about ten minutes before she went tearing off down the garden toward the road. Leo had returned again, as if he had an elasticated collar caught on our door-handle. Fortunately, there was no rough stuff and Smokey came back when she was called. Personally, I attribute her compliance to the fact that Leo didn’t seem at all intimidated by her, a reaction, or rather lack of one, I don’t believe she has ever experienced before. She frightens the bejesus out of me all the time.

                As the cold weather returns, the temptation to stay in bed for far too long becomes irresistible. And with the house constantly creaking, not to mention birdlife trotting noisily across the metal roof, it is too easy to not hear the odd knock at the door. Less easy to miss the ensuing phone call from the cavity wall insulation guy calling from the top of the driveway. Fortunately, he had another home visit to make just up the road, giving us time to make ourselves presentable. He was back though within five minutes. His other ‘client’ had gone shopping to Kirkwall for the day. I had to break it to him that the appointments that he was keeping were secrets known only to him and his co-ordinator, as they had clearly been made without any consultation with his proposed hosts at all. Gail had phoned them about having the walls insulated, but had heard nothing in reply to her enquiry for many months until a call out of the blue the week before. Provisionally they stated that an engineer was due onto the island on the Wednesday but failed to confirm the date or a time. That is, until this very moment. I barely had time to fetch him our ladder so he could check the walls out, when the phone rang again. Our friend Andy who lives between Kettletoft and Lady was looking to erect a windbreak fence around his poly-tunnel. I’d already helped him dig some of the post holes and today, in quite glorious weather, was the day he had chosen to set the posts in concrete and was I available? Gail assured me that she could deal with current visitor, so I got on my bike for the three mile ride to Silverhall.

Our friends Denise & Andy's polytunnel. Rainbows are an optional extra.

And again after we'd erected Valhalla around it.

                I spent the rest of the day humping barrowfulls of concrete around Andy’s garden and tipping the contents into the footings to create a henge of stout wooden posts surrounding his ‘Eden under plastic’. Andy’s other glamorous assistant, Dean, was in charge of the mixer, turning out load after load of sloppy goo and Andy busied himself with making sure that the posts were upright and in line. Never having done a hard day’s work before in my life, it was quite a struggle. A couple of rounds of cheese and tomato sandwiches kept us going all afternoon. I didn’t fall over or spill any so I guess I did alright. I even had enough puff for the ride home. It got a bit blowy over the next couple of days but he assures me that they are all still perpendicular. It should be noted that most of those couple of days I spent at home whinging about my back aching.

                Ten months after choosing which removals boxes go into which rooms, Gail has decided that it was time to search for her sewing machine pedal. I keep trying to get her to wing off an email to the removals company just in case, but she insists that we turn the house inside out first. I was adamant that we’d actually been through them all before, but after we discovered the missing Steiff and Ikea Billy bookcase bolts, it would appear that if we did then we had done an extraordinarily crap job of doing it. With all the shelf space now available, instead of searching a great many boxes, we actually got to completely empty them. It also freed a bit of floor space that, hitherto, had been obscured. Some of my fiction paperbacks had gone a bit mouldy and required some TLC which included a spell in the window to dry off. I must admit, however, that I got a little OCD and set about reorganizing our complete book collection by subject, author and genre. Needless to say that the Gail’s original purpose had taken a back seat and, to think, that that woman used to manage staff. She has absolutely no idea how to boss me about. No carrot and no stick. She’s hopeless.

This has sod all to do with the narrative, but is cute.

                Weekends. I’m having a hard time coming to terms with the concept. It seems very decadent indeed to do nothing productive all week but still celebrate the Capitalist Sabbath at the end of it. It can be quite a challenge to think of something even more worthless to do for two days when you already do sod all for the other five. Even so, it’s still not exactly heavy industry. Hurrah for sport on the television, especially when the sport is happening in the Far East so you have to make an extra special effort to stay awake for a whole forty eight hours to make sure you catch it all, whereupon  another week of slobbing can begin. I reckon that it’ll take until Wednesday before I get my body-clock sorted out. That’s all the excuse I need.

Popping to the shops, Sanday stylie

We found that the shelves were getting a little bare the other day, and filling them again was not quite the simple exercise that it used to be. We had to get ourselves organized. The first thing that we have to do is check that the weather is not going to be foul, even before we make sure whether there is available space on the boat. If it's going to be blowing less than 20mph, a short email to those jolly helpful people at Orkney Ferries does the trick. Within twenty minutes, Margaret replies with our confirmation and it’s all systems go. I go out  remove any extraneous items from the boot of the Skoda to allow for maximum capacity, check the tyre pressures and remove the gobs of bird-shite from the windscreen. At least I don’t have to check for nests in the engine bay at this time of year. We sort out loads of shopping bags, rucksacks and put the squidgy, liquid blocks for the cool-box into the freezer overnight in the hope that we’ll remember to take them out in the morning. Lists prepared, library books packed, wallets and purses sorted, it’s time to make sure to get a good night’s sleep for an early start.

"What time d'ya call this?!!"

                I remember when we used to get up at 5:45am every weekday morning. Well, Gail used to wake up at 5:45am. I on the other hand waited until she’d brought me a cup of tea at about half past six before I even lifted my head off the pillow. Then, about five minutes before we were supposed to leave, I’d run around like a headless chicken which often meant that I’d forget something in my haste, my wallet, my keys or more likely my brain. It’s a habit that has lapsed almost completely these days, unless we’re talking about 5:45 pm. We have never, as yet, failed to be up and about by then.

"And don't come back until you've got me a tuna."

                Smokey instinctively knows when we are about to abandon her for the day. She is usually quite ambivalent about our erratic time-keeping, provided that one of us takes the time to top up her biscuits or slop out a bit more tuna into her bowl at regular intervals. Both of us awake and dressed before 8:00am is all the evidence she needs to justify beginning the psychological warfare, meowing at us each in turn, purring theatrically the moment she is shown attention  and generally being in the way in an attempt to stall our departure. To compensate for our feeling of guilt, we shade off the end of the bed for her for when she sleeps and leave the radio on for her when she’s awake. If she had opposable thumbs, heck, I’d put the X-box on for her.

                We head off just after 8:30 to arrive at Loth pier by 9:00. You never know when you’ll find yourself behind a herd of cows being moved to fresh pasture along the road. There are so few roads on the island that there is no chance of making a detour so we would have been obliged to wait for them to reach their destination before continuing. Starting a stampede just because you’re running late is not recommended. As it transpires, our route is clear so we arrive in good time, joining the queue of vehicles already waiting at the assembly point. It starts to rain and there’s no sign of a boat. When there is an early morning sailing, a boat will have moored up at the pier overnight. Later sailings have a ten minute turnaround, disgorging its vehicles and passengers arriving from Kirkwall before allowing those of us leaving the island to embark. Our ship is the largest of the fleet, the Varagen, so there’s plenty of room for all. We make for the passenger lounge, sit down and wait for the scenery to move. The journey takes about eighty minutes, plenty of time to make it down to the cafeteria for a bacon roll for me and a tuna mayo one for Gail.

                Soon, Kirkwall homes into view. Well, it would have done if the lounge faced forward, but it doesn’t. Having watched the islands of Eday, Stronsay and Shapinsay slide past, the green bits ceased to have blue bits around them. That means that this is Orkney mainland. We’re getting close. We recognise Hatston Pier which means we’ll be on terra firma in minutes. A ship announcement calls us down to the car deck and we get back into the Skoda. On Sanday, vehicles drive on to the stern of the ship so that when we reach Kirkwall we can drive off from the pointy end. First though, and this still never fails to freak me out, the whole prow of the ship swings upward while we’re still moving. It’s just as if the Herald of Free Enterprise capsize had never happened!

                There are a few places in Kirkwall that offer free parking. The largest site conveniently lies directly opposite the supermarkets but it is presently closed for a travelling funfair. It was a race therefore to secure one of the limited spaces on the waterfront. We are lucky to find one and head on foot to the town centre, but we are distracted by more boats arriving. One of the ships is my favourite, the Shapinsay ferry, as it is a drop-fronted ro-ro like at the Normandy D-Day landings. OK not quite like June 1944, but the same principal. This landing was interesting as the slipway was currently being used to launch a rib that was stubbornly refusing to detach from its trailer. Fortunately, the ferry crew were aware of it and stopped in plenty of time. The ramp was lowered and those on the deck playfully teased those with the rib that they were holding up their passengers and should pull their fingers out. A good-natured dialogue ensued, avec hand gestures before the rib was launched and the 4x4 drove up the slipway before the ferry’s ramp rode up behind it.

The Shapinsay landing craft is thwarted by a congested slipway

                It’s a short walk to the middle of town. They have a Boots, a Euronics, an M & Co and a Co-op, but other than the banks and the energy company shop, the rest of the shops are independents. After a visit to the library and a little ‘high street retail therapy’ we stop for lunch at Café Lolz@21. It’s the calm before the storm of rushing around Didldidi and Tesco before filling the car up with unleaded on the way back to the pier. It all goes swimmingly. There was some initial disappointment when Lidl didn’t have any Paprika crisps, but the gods of fortune were smiling on me when the petrol station shop turned out to be a Spar, who make and sell their own brand paprika flavoured tube crisps. That was the ferry snack problem solved. It is a mystery why British crisp brands don’t produce a paprika flavoured version. It’s like being abroad without having to be abroad. It’s exotic. They taste a damn sight better than prawn feckin’ cocktail!

There's still one to pack on! Skoda is under the truck.

                Our boat for the journey North was the Earl Sigurd. The Earl Sigurd and her sister ship the Earl Thorfinn are both smaller than the Varagen, so it was a challenge to fit all the returning vehicles and a couple of huge trucks full of aggregate onto the car deck. Gail and the other car passengers had to bail out so the cars could fit three abreast.  It was a bit like a Krypton Factor puzzle, but the ferry crew were up to it. I made my way out of the lounge and onto the ‘deck’ in order to snap a few pictures of Kirkwall as it receded into the distance. I returned to the lounge and stuck my head into my new library book. The next thing I know, we’re back at Loth. We were behind schedule due to the kerfuffle loading in Kirkwall. It was gone five and the light was fading. I joined the back of the train of cars heading across the island, thinning as those in front of us each reached their destinations before us. To save lugging all our stuff down the driveway, I gave myself special dispensation to park right up at the house. There was no short-cut to putting all the goodies away though.

                Then it was tea, coffee and faux Dickmanns. Feet up, catch the last rounds of Pointless and relax. Repeat this process every five weeks. Fin.

September in a page

Now the whole world knows. (If they happen to be passing.)

                On an early September walk along the beach, in improved weather, I espied a pile of building rubble and, when I checked it out, found a great big slate roof tile that was practically begging to be ‘recycled’. It took me a while to lug the thing home. It made scrambling up the shingle onto the dunes particularly hazardous. After chipping all the flakey bits off it, Gail painted the house name on it and then coated it with waterproof PVA to seal it. While she was busy with that, I made a staked frame for it to stand on. It was a pile of crap, I admit. It didn’t even stand up to being whacked into the ground with a mallet so I very much doubt that it will survive the Orcadian elements for very long. For the time being, however, it looks pretty neat, even if we do say so ourselves and at least visitors will be spared having to phone up for directions having driven straight past. That is unless it rains, apparently. It doesn’t look as if the PVA is properly waterproof. When we arrived home during a ‘peedie’ storm the other day, it had turned to foam and rendered Gail’s artistic lettering, in careful ‘papyrus’ style font, completely illegible. If it wasn’t for the horsebox, I’d have missed the gate and driven past. Maybe not.  

     

"To get to the lighthouse, you have to get past us first."

                Gail and I finally went on one of the walks organised and hosted by the islands ranger, Rod. It was to Start Point lighthouse. I’d been there before, on my own, but this time we were going to get inside. We still had to scramble across the rocks to the island and then yomp another half a mile the other side through quite heavy ground. It was knackering just getting there. There was not much left in the tank for climbing all those steps. In addition, the fact that they wound round and around made Gail very queasy. The ladder to the light itself was a journey too far for her. Our guide explained the operation and history of the lighthouse before letting the rest of us climb another short ladder to the balcony. Stonking views were denied only by misty weather, but I took pictures anyway in the hope that something could be discerned from the fuzzy images. The light itself was powered by gas for many years and given the difficulty we’d had getting ourselves here, it was hard to imagine the nightmare of carrying over a hundred cylinders to such a remote place. More about Start Point at http://www.nlb.org.uk/LighthouseLibrary/Lighthouse/Start-Point/

                Gawping out of our windows remains a primary occupation.

I can see you, you little bugger!

Leo waiting for his dinner to arrive.

A racoon bird. Really?

               I took a bike ride up to Scuthvie, where the tarmac ends, in the North-East corner of the island. Eventually, I want to try cycling from one end to the other so I wanted to see just how far it was from my gate. Mapometer says it’s three miles. Adding the twelve to Loth Pier, it’s not a journey I intend to try any time soon! (http://www.mapometer.com/cycling/route_2379071.html). On the way back, I detoured around the North Loch. Hundreds of geese and swans were happily floating around on the water, occasionally taking noisily to the air, circling around and landing again. It’s a full life for a fowl. This ‘road’ led me to the edge of the bay on the opposite side of the island to the Bay of Lopness. It’s called Bay of Sandquoy, but it is part of a larger stretch of coastline called Otters Wick, which is a clue to what beasts frequent the area. And it didn’t disappoint. Just off the rocks, an otter was swimming along, parallel to the shore line, diving and breaching frequently. My first sighting.

                My Makita drill got another outing when a couple more curtain poles needed putting up. Buoyed by the success of those projects, it was time to try getting through two courses of breeze block to get the aerial cable fed in. Even with the bit extension attached, it was necessary to go at it from both sides, creating the problem of making both holes align. It also meant that I couldn’t quit halfway through the gig, despite the temptation. Leaving holes in external walls is not clever, apparently. I also learnt that spade bits are meant for wood. When used on masonry, the point breaks off and the spade blades wear out, leaving the idiot with the trigger bashing his way through concrete with a fast-spinning spoon. I am just amazed that the feeling in my hand eventually came back. Thankfully, persistence is rewarded, even when common sense is completely absent. Now we can watch TV without the window open. It’s like we’ve evolved or something.

                 Gail has requested my signature dish, haricot and olive bake, a couple of times now. I’ve also made bread dough for some homemade pizzas. I’ve even knocked up a very passable carrot cake, with carrots from our own garden. Also, Gail trusts me to do veggie ‘fry-ups’. Apart from that, other than breakfast porridge every morning, meals are primarily Gail’s responsibility. She’s an absolute diva at opening cardboard boxes and putting containers in the oven. To her credit, she makes a damn good biscuit. If this paragraph makes it through her ‘edit & proof-read’ I will be very much surprised.

                The islanders running the Sanday bus got in touch with me and invited me for a ‘ride-along’. This meant an early start if we were to pick up ‘Northenders’ on the way across the island to Loth Pier for the first ferry of the day. It made a pleasant change to be the passenger for once and I’m afraid that I wasn’t much help, nor a very avid trainee, as all I did was rubberneck at all the amazing scenery. I get away with a little bit of that in the Skoda, but I usually get shouted at or smacked very promptly. With the higher elevation of the minibus, it was even more spectacular. I made a second trip two days later for the evening run and made sure that I was more attentive. It must have worked as I was asked to do the following evenings run solo. I brought the bus home and parked it by the gate. To say that I was nervous would be an understatement. Unsure as to whether the accents, rabbits in the road, single-track carriageways, the ticket machine or the vans temperamental clutch would prove my nemesis, I played every disastrous scenario, including driving the bus off the end of the pier, in my head a million times. The gig itself was an uneventful success. The only exception was the local owner of the self-catering cottage at Park (near Start) telling me off for not stopping right outside the door. When I told him that I had been warned not to do any off-roading and that it was my first day, he was most understanding. I’d carried six passengers, seven if you include the kitten, and taken nine pounds in fares. It then struck me that that was my first work in twenty months. Well worth the wait!

Thank you to the copyright holder, whoever you are.

                At the pool, we finally met the lady in charge and put our names down for lifeguard training and duty. You do sod all for a year and a half and suddenly you get two jobs at once. The lifeguarding however is purely voluntary. Actually, I’ve just remembered that we’ve lined up another one as well. An archaeologist on the island is working for Scottish Coastal Archaeology and the Problem of Erosion (SCAPE) to identify ‘at risk’ sites on Sanday. We’ve contacted her to express our interest in the project. She’s keen to find volunteers who are willing to photograph the current condition of the sites in the hope of obtaining funding for excavations and then to help with the digging. We’ve watched all the episodes of Time Team so it’s about time that we got our knees dirty.