Ports of Call

This was our brief view of the sun at 9.12am shortly after it heaved itself out of the firth on this, the solstice day. Minutes later it disappeared behind heavy cloud. It did show its face a couple of times more this morning, but most of the day has been wet, very windy with gusts well over gale force, and cold. So, once again, my thoughts wandered to warmer places and past times, like those spent in Jamaica.

Whenever we could we escaped the heat and unpleasantness of Kingston and headed for this little beachside hotel at the relatively unfashionable east end of Jamaica. It was called Ports of Call and it stood at the centre of a wide bay, appropriately called Long Bay. So, sitting on the hotel's terrace with rum and ginger ales in our hands we could look north along the beach, or....

....if we could find the energy, south; and whichever way you looked there was hardly a soul to be seen.

The hotel only had a handful of rooms as it seemed to make its money from its food, based mostly around the wonderfully fresh fish from the waters it faced. It didn't offer lunch, but we made do with the huge breakfast served late in the morning, which did mean we had to....

....amuse ourselves until it was served.

It was such a lovely place, so gentle and relaxing, that we had to show it off to anyone who came out from the UK to visit us, which included....

....our mothers and....

....good friends from our Ludlow days.

Sadly, Ports of Call didn't last for the whole of our time in Jamaica. The story was that the people who ran it fell foul of their landlord and had to give it up. We missed it dreadfully but, as with so many things, it is so good to have the memories of those happy times.

Boats - 3

My father worked for a ships' agency, his job, for most of his working life, being to look after the ships belonging to the companies he served, making sure they came in to port and out again as quickly as possible, had their every need catered for, and left fully loaded. As a result, my family's life revolved around ships. For example, at the age of four, the captain of this Clan Line boat, the Clan MacKellar, gave me the only remaining kitten of the ship's cat - all the others had been taken by seagulls.

We were special guests on this ship, the Harrison Line's Defender, when she came in to Mombasa because she was the last command of my father's father, Captain Ernest Haylett, and I felt even more special when, the next time she ship called, one of the engineers on the ship..... 

....presented me with this beautiful model yacht he'd made, her name, Defender, being inscribed on a small metal plaque on her deck.

As I grew up and began to appreciate a ships' lines, you'd have expected me to favour the Harrison Line ships over all the others my father dealt with - like this heavy-lift ship, the Tactician - but my favourite ships were....

....the Clan Line ships, like this one, the Clan Shaw. Even looking at her now, all these years later, she has an elegance which other ships lacked.

Going on these ships could be great fun. Sometimes the whole family would be invited to lunch with the captain, the meal being served in his day room, or we'd be asked aboard to watch - and feel - a heavy-lift ship heal over as she offloaded a huge Garrett locomotive, or to see animals being loaded for transport to zoos in the UK - as was happening on the Bank Line's Southbank when this picture was taken.

In return for their hospitality, many of the captains came ashore to have lunch with us, and I can remember some very cheerful meals. Almost all of them had hobbies. One captain who was particularly popular with my brother and I was an accomplished conjurer.

The Beach

As time carries us inexorably on into the depths of a Scottish winter it's good to be able to warm my spirits by thinking back to the days when life was spent on this tropical beach - Nyali just to the north of Mombasa.

I struggle to believe that, once upon a time, we lived a few metres back from that beach, in a bungalow which faced out onto it, a place where we had servants to minister to our needs, where we wore little but a pair of shorts, where the day was spent either walking out across the rock pools of low tide or....

....fighting the waves of high tide while sitting in the inner tube of an old tyre. And even in the years when we lived on Mombasa island it was still easy to get back to the beach, either by borrowing my father's car for a day or by spending a few nights at one of the small hotels scattered along the beach, like....

....Whitesands where, in 1959, we seemed to have had almost the whole beach to ourselves.

This beach is now crowded both with the tourists who stay in the huge, modern, four-pools hotel which has replaced the simple, makuti-thatched building we knew, and with the hawkers and chancers and thieves who prey on them.

We were so, so fortunate; and I'm as fortunate to have the memories to warm me.

Many thanks to Tony C for the first picture

A Moving Rock

It's coming up to mid-winter and the weather here is behaving appropriately, alternating dangerously icy conditions with days of miserable rain. Today has been one of the latter, relatively warm but with almost unremitting rain and low, grey overcast.

We dressed accordingly in full waterproofs and walked through Dunrobin woods, returning by the shore path, where we saw the usual paucity of wildlife - a curlew, two redshanks, six cormorants, a small flock of about twenty rock doves, a few crows, a gull or two, including a black-backed gull, two pipets and....

....a moving rock.

There are moments in life when the brain cannot quite cope with what it is seeing - in this case, definitely a rock on the move down the beach, not twenty metres away; and it was only as the rock reached....

....the water that we could distinguish a pair of flippers at its back end.

We've never before seen a seal along this section of beach. We see them offshore, and there's a point about a mile beyond Dunrobin Castle where there can be half-a-dozen basking on rocks, but never on this section, perhaps in part because it is so frequented by dogs. It seemed perfectly all right, sliding into the sea and then surfacing a few metres offshore, as if looking back at us with some annoyance at being disturbed.

Boats - 2

Being brought up on the island of Mombasa meant that we were in constant contact with boats, both the indigenous working boats like the great Arab dhows which plied their trade between the coast of East Africa and the Persian Gulf, which used the Old Port on the eastern side of the island (above), and the modern ships which used....

....the Kilindini deep-water anchorage and wharves on the western side.

While I do not remember going aboard a dhow, the water taxis which took us across the Old Port to swim at the Swimming Club - one is visible on the left of this picture - passed close to them....

...and when we drove out to the beaches along the coast to the north and south of Mombasa, to the small, seaside hotels which catered both for locals like us and for people coming down from the interior for a holiday, we had to remember that, long before the hotels were built, the beaches were, and continued to be points from which....

....the ngalowas set out to pass through the reef to fish in the open ocean.

If the tide was right - which meant, very low - we used to hire one of the fishermen to take us out in his ngalowa to the reef, a mile or so offshore, where we explored the brilliantly coloured wildlife in the pools exposed at low water.

Winter Walking

While our new house doesn't have as varied a range of walks direct from its front door as our previous house, we really can't complain as there are miles of tracks through the woodlands behind us and, if we feel like walking far enough, access to the open moorland I so love. However, the trouble with walks at this time of year is that, wherever we go, these's a dearth of interesting wildlife. So, on this morning's walk, the only....

....fungi we saw was this chewed up specimen and a rather unremarkable species of white fungus growing on the ends of several cut pine logs; and on recent walks the only fungi we can add are....

....this rather convoluted specimen of what might be a chanterelle and a few....

....pats of witches' butter on the branches of one particular dead gorse bush.

So walking at this time of year - lay aside the problems we've had with recent ice and snow, when we've only been able to go out with the help of metal studs on our boots - lacks the usual wildlife interest though today's walk was brightened by the sighing of a red squirrel and, as if to cheer us on towards next summer....

...of half-a-dozen daisy flowers in full bloom on a mound of earth just beside the small ponds where the palmate newts live.

'Souvenir'

This photograph is a souvenir of a visit to HMS Victory at Portsmouth. I know it's mine because I've had it for years and years, but otherwise, as a 'souvenir', it's absolutely useless as I cannot remember ever visiting either Portsmouth or Victory.

The picture, mounted on thin board, is 4" across by 3" high. At the top there used to be a small metal loop enabling it to be hung on a wall.

On the back, amid the signs of travel and wear, it has a sticker which gives some details about the ship....

....and the information that the plaque was made by Gale & Polden, a firm of printers based, originally, in Chatham.

The Antiques Centre in York has a 'roundel' including this photograph of Victory for sale at £96 - link here - from which I learn that the picture must have been taken pre-1922 as this was the year when she was moved into dry dock.

So, is a souvenir that reminds me of nothing of any use or value? The answer is an emphatic 'No' but I couldn't part with it. Perhaps, on the other hand, it's there to remind me that, as I get older and the events of the past fade, I must get used to a growing number of souvenirs which remind me of.... nothing.

As if to hammer the point home, I now discover the I've already written a blog entry about this picture back in 2022.

Winter Sunrise

People locally have been remarking on the spectacular colours of recent sunrises and sunsets. With the sun now skirting the southern horizon we, in our house, looking southeast, can now sit comfortably indoors and watch both sunsets and sunrises - and as if to make a point, this morning's sunrise was even more colourful than earlier efforts.

These pictures were taken from our breakfast table over a 20-minute period this morning, looking out across the Moray Firth. That the process was so bloody is supposed to mean a shepherd's warning but the day has turned out cold, and damp, but fine.

So if it wasn't a warning to shepherds, then for whom was this sunrise a warning? Perhaps it was to all of us, for after breakfast I sat and read an article in the New Scientist which described the precipitate melting of the sea ice round Antarctica, so dire that a special conference had been called which met in Tasmania to discuss the implications of what appears, now, to be a runaway process.

Littleferry Birds

Today's was a beautifully still morning with occasional spells of sunshine, but cold, the temperature reluctant to rise above 2C so, for our daily exercise we drove out to Littleferry, spending some time looking out across the inner basin of Loch Fleet but finding very little in the way of wildlife - the ducks at bottom left of the picture are....

....widgeon, part of a small flock of about ten, which....

....didn't hang around once they spotted us.

A pair of red-breasted merganser were much less shy, though the male seemed rather more concerned about our proximity than the female.

In the outer basin of the loch very little moved, the main exceptions being....

....this lone oystercatcher working the seaweed and....

....a stately grey heron.

Once again we noticed the lack of birds. Even where a species was present, it was only there in small numbers.

Boats - 1

One of the good things about being old is that one doesn't feel the need to justify sitting in the sun on a sunny day and just remembering. For example, the other day I began to list all the different sorts of boats I had been in, and my list started, logically, I suppose, with what must have been the most primitive, the coracles two friends and I built in the summer of 1962 in which we floated - or, rather, sank - on the River Thames.

Coracles led to the beautiful ngalowas of the East African coast and the memory both of sailing out in them to the reef and also more recently, while on a holiday in Tanzania, of being taken out in one by a young man who allowed me to take control. And thinking of small boats led to others I have enjoyed, like....

....yachts, both in East Africa and on Ardnamurchan, and rowing boats, from dinghies to racing eights, and then....

....to kayaks and the many happy memories I have of paddling the clear but sometimes rather wicked waters off Ardnamurchan.

My Father's Pubs - 2

My father was a lunchtime drinker. Perhaps this went back to his days as a ships' agent on the coast of Eastern Africa, where he would start work very early in the morning and then take time away from his desk through the heat of the day. Lunchtime was also when he entertained the captains of the ships that came in to his agency, taking them to the club before bringing them home for lunch.

So I have many happy memories of time spent with him in this pub, the successor to the Three Oaks Hotel after my parents moved into Hastings Old Town. It's the Cinque Ports Arms in All Saints Street, Hastings, a small, single-bar pub with panelled walls and a perfect pub atmosphere. In it....

....my father (right) would meet his friends, particularly Gordon Faulkner (second from right). Being such good, regular customers meant that they were well looked after by the landlord (left) and his wife. What was special about the pub was that it didn't bother with the inessentials, like food; if existed for its beer and its atmosphere.

My father spent the fading years of his life in Maldon, Essex, where his lunchtime beer was taken at the Blue Boar hotel. Although he walked the half-a-mile from his house to the pub, by this time his hand was shaky so the bar maid, a lovely Spanish lady called Inez, would pour him a three-quarters pint of Adnam's bitter and then top it up.

We also lived in the town so I was able to spend some lunchtimes with him. By this stage his memory was going so I would hear the same stories day after day. This repetition didn't bother me: I was just so pleased that he had these experiences to enjoy. However, he wasn't happy with his life - my mother worried that they should have stayed in Hastings rather than move to be nearer us.

It was in this pub, sitting by the window, that he turned to me one day and said, "Life owes me nothing." I think I understand what he meant.

A Lone Redshank

There's plenty of seaweed, much of it kelp, along the tidelines of the beaches below Dunrobin Castle, dumped there during the recent easterlies. It's ideal feeding for waders, and in previous years we've seen small flocks of them working it, but on Thursday, when I spent some time scanning the benches with my binoculars, the only wader I could find....

....was this lonely redshank.

I keep insisting that the number of shore birds we're seeing is significantly down on previous years. There is only the occasional curlew, we've a serious shortage of redshanks, the sanderlings seem to have gone AWOL, the turnstones are finding stones elsewhere, and the oystercatchers are all on holiday at Littleferry. Even the starlings are missing, as are the rock doves, a flock of which were here only a week or so ago.

Look up, though, and skein after skein of pink-footed geese is passing over, their numbers in the hundreds. Thank goodness that at least one species appears to be thriving.