A Bowl of Cherries

It's a blog for heavens sake. How can one have writers' block (or is it writer's block?). The strange thing is that I have so many notes about blogs to be written that it's almost a daunting task just reading through them all. Anyway after a very busy two weeks where reading posts took precedence over writing one I'm on the ferry travelling south with no excuse to get up and do something else.

You know how the saying goes - people don’t remember what you say or do, but how you make them feel.

So why do organisations not realise that their reception staff are such an important part of their organisation and that their interface with the public should receive far more attention than it obviously does. I say this because I sometimes think that the criteria adopted these days is to find a person who can 'protect' the organisation from its customers, patients or clients rather than facilitate the interaction.

I am by nature a happy, positive person and I approach reception staff with that attitude. I went to medical practice recently where the reception staff are invariably very busy with phone calls and patients waiting to speak to them but are, in my experience, always pleasant and helpful. However on this occasion there was a fairly new member of staff who looked up from the telephone call she had just taken and with a broad and genuine smile dealt with my requests. It made my day.

I then had a hospital appointment and again received a cheerful welcome and some banter with the reception staff and nurses and was out from the (again very cheerful) consultant 5 minutes before my appointment was due.

To complete my medical trilogy I went across the car park to the dental practice where one of the staff was completely the opposite. It's true that what she had to tell me didn't exactly please me but it was the dismissive and rude way she dealt with me that irked. She denied vehemently that she had been rude so I will reduce the charge to cheeky with scant regard for the fact that she was speaking to someone over three times her age.

Basically it turned my day from being perfect (and it was still only 0945) to being decidedly imperfect.

So I decided to treat myself to a bacon roll at the Woodlands. There I was met by another happy smile and was asked if I wanted my 'usual large black".  I retired to my crossword with the feeling that a modicum of well-being was restored.

Have a nice day. Or as someone in the US apparently now says "Have the day you deserve". Ah. Perhaps that was the problem.

As Ethel Merman and then Rudy Vallee sang (and Lew Brown wrote back in 1931)

People are queer, they're always crowing, scrambling and rushing about; 

Why don't they stop someday, address themselves this way? 

Why are we here? Where are we going? It's time that we found out. 

We're not here to stay; we're on a short holiday. 

Life is just a bowl of cherries. 

Don't take it serious; life's so mysterious. 

You work, you save, you worry so, 

But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go. 

So keep repeating it's the berries, 

The strongest oak must fall, 

The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned 

So how can you lose what you've never owned? 

Life is just a bowl of cherries, 

So live and laugh at it all.

A Little Bit of This and That

Those of you who also read the blog of my brother CJ, John, Scriptor Senex will have a reasonable idea of what has been happening in Eagleton over the last few weeks whilst CJ has been here and since Jo arrived earlier in the week.

The Nighthawk has had its brain re-programmed and is now as right as rain and raring to take me and my visitors wherever they may wish to wander. This particular journey was with CJ to Callanish.

CJ and I went to the shore at Barvas accompanied by magnificent skies:

 and whilst CJ searched for pebbles I photographed the surfers

CJ and Jo at the Butt of Lewis with CJ using Jo as a photographer's rest to photograph a gannet

On the way from Ness I was left musing as to what the Council was doing allowing such a plethora of road signs on a main road where the high volume of traffic (note position of tongue when uttering this statement) could cause a pile-up whist drivers' concentration was distracted. 

If anyone thinks that the people of Lewis in general and Ness in particular are staid and unimaginative then think again. However the real reason I included this was so that Spesh would suddenly realise that David had a job to do before this 'summer' is over.

The weather has been such that the young sparrow have been sheltering from the strong cold winds and taking advantage of the stones warmed by the sun at the same time.

 or sheltering in the lee of the garage. It's a hard life arriving in the world to a 'summer' like this.

Feeding The Bairns

One of the things I learned from evidence led in a planning inquiry I was involved in many many moons ago was that the common tern is a highly adaptable bird: disturb its nesting colony and it will just move somewhere else and establish another one. I've lived in Eagleton for 23 years and the terns have rarely flown over my house on the way from the feeding grounds to the nesting site. This year they have been flying non-stop for several months over the house. 

Terns fly very quickly and with a flight that is either extremely graceful (with the wind and with nothing in their beak) or extremely jerkily (against the wind and with a fish in their beak for the young).  Either way they are a difficult bird to photograph when they are in flight. Anyway in between the rain I've managed a few shots:

The distance between the possible breeding sites and the feeding grounds is between one and one and a half miles:

I have no idea how many flights a day each tern flies but several months from 0400 'till 2100 one is talking of a great many miles.

A Post for Adrian

Adrian likes tractors, HDR and macro photographs of insects.

I like tractors, have been converted to the artistic merits of HDR (used sparingly) and have always enjoyed photographing insects (and just about everything else for that matter).

So here's the old mill and a tractor at the end of the road over the moor from Eagleton: a view I see every time I go into Stornoway:

The tractor appears to have been abandoned but I think it's still alive.

However it probably started life when photography was largely black and white so I thought I'd do an 'artistic' B&W version in Photomatix.

As for the Red Admiral on the Dame's Violet these were taken from 4.5 metres through the kitchen window using a Canon bridge camera at 50X (about 215mm). I'll never be able to compete with Adrian for detail so I just go for opportunity.