Back in the Blogger Saddle

To my Dear Readers

Thank you for your concerns and good wishes. They really do mean a lot to me.

It's been a wonderful but, at times challenging, few weeks. My New Zealand family arrived and my Island family went down with Covid and Carol and Brodie were quite unwell. Gaz was working on his own and soldiered on. Obviously with The New Zealand Family flying back to New Zealand tomorrow we all tried to stay well away and avoid anyone with Covid. Wendy's (New Zealand Family) Mum and partner in Edinburgh also succumbed so no last minute goodbyes there either. 

As alway The Family had a great time here catching up with people from their past. I had a great time just being with them again. Obviously I was in hospital part of the time and I confess that it's taken me longer than usual to regain my strength 100% again. 

Today is the first really beautiful day here for weeks (The Family knew what was possible weatherwise and just got on with things). This photo was at 0450 this morning.

The Wedding in Edinburgh was, for me, one of the most emotional affairs I can recall attending. I'll hopefully blog about that soon. A rare occasion for me to wear my full Highland Dress.

January Sunrise

Sunrise over Bayble Island to the West Coast of the Scottish Mainland.

It's To Be Expected

This week we have had some beautiful weather....until yesterday and, particularly, today. For your information the mainland is about 40 miles (60 kilometres) across The Minch from the Isle of Lewis where the photos were taken. The photos were taken throughout the week with the last one taken this morning.

Sunrise over the Mainland with Lower Bayble in foreground

Late morning

 Late afternoon

Sunset over the hills of Lewis

But sometimes it was also cold and frosty

Today we had 70mph winds and all the ferries were cancelled.

Most will recognise Bayble Bay down from my house.

I'm Still Alive

This may have been the longest gap in my blogging  for a long time: perhaps since I started. I've been so occupied with changing the decoration of parts of my house so thoroughly that I've had little time for anything else. I've learned a lot though. If you remove seven doors in order to paint them it takes a long time to get to the end. I paint them in my workshop when they are horizontal. I can only do two at a time. Each door has to be sanded down and an undercoat applied and then two top coats. So that is three days for each side of each door (to allow the paint to dry between coats) and assumes that nothing poops on your paint from above (which something, of course, did). Anyway it's all over now bar the clearing up and the new curtains being hung. Hopefully I'll be spending a lot more time back in Blogland.

We have had some bizarre weather here in the UK and, although we've not had the heatwave those further South have experienced we've had some cracking days (as in Yorkshire cracking à la Wallace and Grommit) as well as some, how shall I say, less cracking days.

Some of the sunrises have been spectacular:

More soon!

Life, An Update

On Tuesday (is it really Thursday already?) we ('we' being Anna - a friend who had been staying - and I) drove down from Eagleton to Bishopbriggs.  We came via Skye and the Western Highlands and it was a beautiful drive.  Until, that is, night closed in as we left Fort William.  For me it was a foretaste of something I've not experienced since 2005: driving with temperatures around zero and the threat of ice on the roads.  The car is getting shod with winter tyres tomorrow.

It's great being down here are catching up with folk, shopping, going to a concert and the theatre and so on.  In theory I should have just as much time for Blogland but I've hardly read a blog this week.  I also miss the Big Skies which you just don't get in towns and cities. This is the sunrise a few days before I left: 

As we left the little township of Tarbert on Harris to cross to Skye I left a little bit (quite a lot actually) of 'me' there.

Boarding the ferry MV Hebridean Isles

Tarbert is on an isthmus between North and South Harris 

The barren landscape of Harris made even more rich and brown in the low sun of winter. 

The splendid bridge between the mainland of Harris and the small island of Scalpay

A Realisation

This is the first year since 2005 that I have been on Lewis on the 13 November and this morning the realisation of one of the things that means hit me: I couldn't actually see the sun as it came over the horizon.  I am fortunate in that I live with big skies and can see the sun pop over the horizon for much of the year and for much of the summer I see it coming over the horizon behind the mountains of the Scottish Highlands on the other side of The Minch.  Today for the first time (the stormy weather means I've not seen a sunrise for a week or more) the sun rose just to the right of the little headland in front of my house.  Mind you what I could see was still pretty spectacular but you know what they say "Red sky in the morning sailor's warning" and we are supposed to be in for another big blow and torrential rain by this afternoon. 

At the summer solstice the sun rises where the yellow line points and sets where the orange one points and just dips below the horizon for the other few hours.

Today the picture is quite different with the sun rising and setting as shown below and there are still two more months to the winter solstice.

Sorry If I'm Boring You.

This morning I woke so it was, as I always say, a Good Morning.  

I made a resolution as I was getting up to do nothing at all until I had finished at least two emails from my ever-lengthening list.  It is now over three hours later and I still haven't even added a word to one I started yesterday.  Shame on me.

However - and I really will try and make this the last post this winter on the subject - as I walked into the kitchen I was met with this 

and, yes, the sea really was ablaze like that.  Before I knew it my resolve had evaporated and I'd reached for my camera.  By the time I'd downloaded the images I had switched on the morning news to see what everyone was saying on this the last pre-Referendum morning and then, as always, managed to get side-tracked by a few emails and so on as well as the scene developing over the next hour or so across The Minch to the West Coast of the Scottish Highlands.

I have so many more blog topics waiting in the wings so I'll try and get some more variety in over the next few days.

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.

I Never Get Tired

of waking in the morning to the views from my kitchen and study.  I promise that I won't do this every day like I did when I was in Italy.

I'm Home

It's been a long journey.  I've been away over four weeks (but a few days less than the five I anticipated) and driven the best part of 5000 miles or 8000 kilometres.   I haven't done all that I intended to do - I couldn't see my Goddaughter nor her Mum which was a huge minus - but time and things conspired against me at the end.  It's been a wonderful time being part of the extended family of one of my oldest friends who arranged the holiday and brought six people from four countries around the world together in a large and beautiful Tuscan villa  to celebrate her 70th Birthday.  

The journey home took a week.  Mo (friend from Canada who's birthday it was) and Di (her sister in law) and I travelled back to Di's beautiful and restful house near Merseyside in the trusty Nighthawk via The Leaning Tower of Pisa (Di had never seen it), the Cinque Terre (and satisfy Mo's desire to walk between two of the five towns), Albiano near Lucca (to see my dear friends Peter and Sandie from Callander who have a house there) and Antibes (to satisfy my desire to see my son Gaz in situ in his life as Chief Engineer on a super-yacht.

Then I drove up to the Scottish Borders to visit friends in their new home before bringing a friend, Anna, up from Bishopbriggs to stay on Lewis for a few days.  It's been a good journey.  

There have been the occasional hiccups  for example when one hotel booking disappeared into the ether and when our rooms were double allocated in another hotel.  The most irritating problem for me was internet access.  For the most part lack of time meant I wouldn't have been posting much but in Antibes the hotel's internet server provider went down and thereafter in France I couldn't get internet access even on my phone to set up a wireless hot spot for my laptop.  I couldn't link to Di's wifi and after that I managed to answer a few emails but catching up with friends precluded anything more.

So this morning I woke to my old familiar view just before the sun rose across The Minch over the mountains of the Scottish Mainland:

I know that many of you will have seen it all before but to me it was just wonderful to see 'my' view again and to be able to share it with you.

Hopefully I'll manage to catch up over the next few weeks with all the posts of the holiday as well as catching up with all of my friends in Blogland. 

Photos at Last

Since I returned to Lewis I have hardly taken any photos.  In fact in three weeks until today I had taken fewer photos than I usually take in a single day.  So today I set out to remedy that situation.  Mind you it started well because the Scottish Mainland was highlighted very spectacularly by the early morning sun. For your information the coastline at its nearest point is 30 miles (48k) away from me.

My Plan

My plan is to have no plans for the next few weeks.

I'm back in Eagleton having arrived at nearly 10pm yesterday after a drive through the Highlands of Scotland in flawless, cloudless conditions. I eventually got to bed and decided to sleep as long as I wanted this morning. Needless to say I was up at 0600 and just couldn't wait to get going sorting things out and making lists of things that have to be done. As the weather is dry for a change the top priority is cutting the grass. But that comes after making phone calls and catching up. The problem is that when the weather is good here there is a desperate urgency to get things done in the garden.

The first lot of washing is in and some of the things I brought back that have to be sorted have been at least put into the 'proper' room. As a consequence the study looks as though a bomb's hit it. So does the living room. And the kitchen. Ah well. Who cares I have 29 days to sort it before I leave for NZ.

29 sleeps. How fast they will go.

How come life goes so fast?

But this morning when the sun came up I realised just how privileged I am. Could things ever be better?

A View To Live For

I know that you must be getting a bit sick of photos of morning views from Tigh na Mara but when the view is like this I can never get tired of looking at it. And looking is not enough. I want - no, I need - to share it.

Sunrise

Here on Lewis I have big skies and grand vista views. It's 0500 and the sun has already popped up over the horizon.

In Napier I live in a kettle or bowl and have a beautiful but much more intimate and cosy view. I don't have sunrises and sunsets. I only see a mature sun.

To me that's probably the most noticeable of the visual differences between living in Tigh na Mara here on Lewis and The Cottage in Napier.