Two Days; Two Views

From my kitchen window on New Year's Day

Today

Of course it wasn't like that all day on either day. 

The Silent Sea

Usually the sea below my house is audible in my garden. It can be relatively gentle lapping or the thunder of heavy waves in a swell or driven by gale force winds.

On other, rare, occasions the sea feels as though there is a steely, unreal quietness in it. It's a rare occurrence and the results are shown in the pictures below:

When I see the sea like that I am always reminded of a paining by Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela that I saw and liked in the National Gallery in London. It is called Lake Keitele: A Vision of Finland. 

What I do not know is what phenomenon or combination of circumstances causes it. 

SID10 Spring

For two days now (today isn't sure yet) the sun has shone out of a predominantly blue sky with no accompanying wind.  Today the sun is winning the battle against the clouds but the wind is from the North, is strong and is bitterly cold. The atmospheric pressure is bumping against the stop at the top of the scale (this photos was taken before it quite got there). 

I worked outside most of the time for two days but today it's indoors things. 

This morning I made a list in six sections: outdoor jobs; indoor jobs; garden; garage; paperwork; and today. It should keep me going for 12 weeks. Hopefully by then it will be almost empty and one job after another finds its way onto the "Today" list.

The birds are now attacking the provisions on the bird feeder which is a sure sign of Spring. I have absolutely no idea why 'my' birds eat hardly anything from my feeder in the winter (but flock to a neighbour's). Well over a decade ago I fixed a bird nesting box to my garage wall about 15 feet from the ground. Unfortunately I fixed in on a North facing wall which is where the cold winds come from. It's been used occasionally (I have opened it up in the winter sometimes to have a look). However I have never actually seen a bird taking nesting material into it. This year it's definitely being used. I will definitely have to give it an overhaul when the autumn comes.

Meanwhile I heard the melodious call of a Stonechat from the top of one of my trees. I nipped inside, grabbed a camera and from 25 metres or more through the kitchen window managed to get a recored if hardly a good photo. 

On Thursday morning (the first sunny day of the week) I decided to go for my allocated daily exercise by walking the long way round by road to the pier below my house, along the shore and then up the croft back home: around 2 miles with plenty of gradient to exercise the heart and lungs. The view from the beach looking into the sun was one I could look at for ever.

Looking up from the bottom of the croft my house seemed a long haul up. Unfortunately now that the land isn't grazed it's virtually impossible to walk straight up the croft because of the huge tussocks of thick grass interspersed with deep ditches which are partly covered up now. A broken leg was not what I needed at this stage of the game. So I walked along the shoreline and up the track.

I'm Sorry About The Storms

However just to cheer those of you languishing in inclement conditions it's 2100 hrs on Lewis and this is my view:

It's a shame about the haar out in The Minch but that will doubtless burn off in the morning.

The View

Someone, a recent follower obviously, asked what the view from my house was like. Well this is the view as I sit at my breakfast/lunch/everything else bar.

It Just Takes One Day

Yesterday I did some work in the garden and despite being absolutely brilliantly sunny  the strong wind from the North-East was bitterly cold. In fact it was so cold that I wore full winter garb and only stayed out for half an hour. It was the same the day before.

Today I spent the whole afternoon in the garden planting out tubs and so on and it was toastie.

Down in the bay the youngsters' actions said it all:

Official: We Are A Caveat

This morning CJ and I were watching the weather forecast. Given that the weather today was totally pish (a technical term meaning less than clement - by a very very big margin) I'm not sure we needed to be told. Carol Kirkwood (a Scottish weather presenter, employed by the Met Office and best known for forecasting the weather for BBC Breakfast and various other programmes) ended by saying that there was a caveat in relation to today's national weather: The Western Isles. 

I know I'm beginning to sound obsessed by the weather but if you have for the first time in decades started growing vegetables and so on this early summer has been very intimidating and rather disheartening. However today I did harvest my first vegetable: a radish. CJ and I had half each at lunchtime.

Now all I have to do is remember why I am growing curly kale. I had some last year and I must have liked it enough to grow some. Ah well that's the advantage of the internet.

Anyway the weather does give me the opportunity to show you some of the rather splendid haar photos.

18 Hours

is all it takes for the Island to be transformed from this:

to this:

Yesterday was a beautiful, still, if fairly cold day: wonderful for working in the garden. So I built a raised bed for vegetables and gave it it's first coat of preservative. A few days previously I had built the large composter to take the contents of my plastic ones which were full.

The first thing I had to do was gather the old plastic composers and put some very heavy bags of peat and so on inside them to stop them blowing away. When the wave photos were taken the wind was only gusting at about 46 mph (74kph, 40 knots, Beaufort 8). 

Now it's way past that.

Ho hum.

A Different Perspective

Those of you who have followed this blog for any length of time are bound to have seen many pictures of the bay below my house photographed from my house.  Few of you will have seen or are likely to remember the view from the pier down in the bay.  Yesterday the sea was boiling whipped up by 40mph winds from the East so I decided to go down to the pier and photograph what, from above, looked quite a maelstrom.  Oddly from down at the pier it didn't look quite so bad when photographed but, believe me, the wind was pretty fierce and the spray soon covered me, the camera and the Nighthawk parked quite a way back in salt.

Home

I arrived home last night after a slightly extended journey at the very last minute when the ferry, 10 mins out of Ullapool, had to return to its berth to pick up a passenger who had gone to the toilet in the terminal and obviously been there for a very long time given that passengers embark before all the cars at the moment while the new terminal is being built for the new ferry due next month.  In 40 years travel on the ferry I've never known it return before.

I woke this morning to another glorious sight: the sun through the mist heralding yet another glorious day.  Obviously I had to take a couple of photos.  

The garden has gone mad and the grass is 6" high again and the sun has encouraged more algae in the pond than I've had all summer.  Ah well plenty to keep me busy outdoors (and delay all my communications and Blogland catching up).

However this glorious, still, warm morning means something else too:  The Return of The Midges.  Arghhhhhh.

Portrait of a Place

Andrea, a fellow Islander and blogger with a thousand old film cameras, a penchant for black and white (and various photographic techniques I'd not heard of until I started reading her blog), and a wonderfully eccentric style doesn't 'do' landscapes.  So when she produced one a few days ago she called it a 'Portrait of a Place'.  I'm never ashamed publicly to admit it when ideas are not my own so strictly speaking I never plagiarise I simply use other peoples' ideas.  Of course having now given Andrea credit for the words I will continue to use them and at some time in the future someone will read them and not realise they are not mine.  Honour and morality are satisfied and I will still get some residual credit in the future.  

This doesn't just apply to today's heading.  There will be many more which, over the years, even I have come to believe are my own original thoughts.  Of course people who know me well know that, competent though I may be in writing up an adversarial case for, for example, a ministerial meeting or  a planning inquiry, any original thoughts contained therein will always have been gleaned from others who have the required talents.

This is a rather different portrait of a place that my readers see all the time but from a very different perspective.  This was taken from across the valley by Dave (Spesh's hubby) on his mobile phone.  My house is indicated by the arrow.

Today From My Window

Costa del Bayble

Today has been as warm and as beautiful as one is likely to experience in Scotland's Outer Hebrides: even paradise cannot rival it.

Down at the pier - and bearing in mind it's a Lewis Sabbath - it was as crowded as I've ever seen it:

It's not all that long ago that a local fishing boat out on the Sabbath would have been unthinkable too.

Even on Lewis the words Bob Dylan's words herald the inevitable:

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.