Dawn and Stornoway

My brother, CJ, is staying with me. His wife, Jo, arrives a few days into August. After a week of distinctly un-summery weather we've had a few beautiful days.  CJ was up for some reason or other at 4.58am on Friday. This was the view from my kitchen window:

We have had coffee a crossword in town most mornings. Today I actually stopped and took some photos in the town centre.

One For The Weegies

Many of you, my dear readers, will know what a Weegie is but many of you will not. A Weegie is a Glaswegian. The Scottish equivalent of a Liverpool Scouser. The difference being that Weegie has an obvious link with the term Glaswegian and Scouser has no grammatical link to Liverpudlian. (I do like rambling introductions).

There has been a rumour for the last couple of centuries that the folk from Lewis are a dour Presbyterian lot.  Presbyterian many may be. Dourness is, however, fading fast and, even then, I'm not sure a many deserved the accolade.

Some years ago a number of statues began to appear in Stornoway. This is one of them. Recently someone with a sense of humour (and probably with Glasgow connections) has tried to outdo the Weegies as their own game.

So what, you might ask, is the Weegies game? It is adorning the head of the Duke of Wellington statue outside the Museum of Modern Art in Glasgow's Royal Exchange Square with a traffic cone.

Statues, Longfellow and Other Thoughts

I love statues and suchlike works of art. Not all statues, of course. Just like a picture, for every thousand (or whatever figure) we see, one will strike us as important for some reason: we may love it or hate it but we will notice it. The moment I saw this statue (an enlarged version and details can be found at Soaring Through The World In Pictures on the posting entitled Stepping Stones: William Hamo Thorneycroft: 1878 which I posted earlier today) in the Kibble Palace last week I fell in love. Seldom have I seen such love and care brought to life from a block of marble.

When it was first exhibited in Glasgow in 1880 it was accompanied by the couplet "Pausing with reluctant feet/where the stream and river meet" which, I have since discovered is from the poem Maidenhood by Longfellow. What a coincidence.

Why a coincidence? Two reasons: Firstly it links the statue with those of you in the USA who read this blog because Longfellow was American and secondly because only a short while ago Heather quoted from Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha which I subsequently included in a posting on 7 July entitled Lunch at Duck Bay.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 - 1882 was an amazing person whose talents were far wider than 'just' writing poetry.

Sculptures in The Kibble Palace

Many people, including me, go to a Botanic Gardens to look at the plants and relax and soak up the atmosphere. Many, of course, go simply to enjoy the sun and sit outside and watch their children play or have a picnic or otherwise relax. I have to say that once I got inside the Kibble Palace the plants, though very interesting, took second place in my enjoyment score to the sculptures. I have always enjoyed sculptures and was absolutely overawed when I was in Firenze (Florence) by the statuary there. I must blog on it sometime. But I digress. In the Kibble Palace were a number of statues which really appealed to me. Eve reminded me a bit of Pania of the Reef which is a statue in Napier.

Donald Dewar

Donald Campbell Dewar (21 August 1937 – 11 October 2000) was the first First Minister of Scotland from 1999 until his death in 2000. He was the first person to hold the position of First Minister following the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.

In May 2002, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair unveiled a statue of Dewar at the top of Glasgow's Buchanan Street — and in keeping with his famous unkempt appearance, it showed Dewar wearing a slightly crushed jacket. The statue was taken down in October 2005 to be cleaned and was re-erected on 6-foot (1.8 m) high plinth in December of the same year in an effort to protect it. Not from malicious vandalism but a glaswegian cultural trend of putting orange traffic cones on the statues head, one such attempt damaging the statue's glasses, Ironically it is considered a gesture of respect by many in the city as most of the cities statues have found themselves wearing the familiar orange cones, On the base of the statue were inscribed the opening words of the Scotland Act: "There Shall Be A Scottish Parliament", a phrase to which Dewar himself famously said, "I Like That!".

Herring Girl

Years ago the herring ladies were not just a common sight in Stornoway but in many Scottish fishing towns and villages where the herring were landed and gutted and salted in barrels. Somewhere I have pictures which I took of Number 2 Pier in Stornoway covered in barrels of herring many years ago. Now the only 'herring girls' to be seen are in bronze round the harbour in the Town. When CJ was here I'm sure he did a posting on them but I was walking past this one on the Inner Harbour on Tuesday and decided that the light was so perfect that I had to take a photo.