The 'Durban Castle'

My father's contract with his employer, the African Mercantile, included 'home leave' every three years, and this was due towards the end of 1952. My parents felt that it would be good for my brother and I to experience an English winter, but to keep that 'experience' fairly short they decided to travel from Mombasa to the UK 'the long way' - that is, from Mombasa southwards calling at Dar-es-Salaam, Beira, Durban, East London, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, St Helena, Ascension and the Canary Islands - which took six weeks rather than the four weeks via the Suez Canal.

I have some vivid memories of that journey. We travelled first class so the food and accommodation were good, and we enjoyed important events like ice cream served on deck at eleven every morning with, occasionally, second helpings. I remember the magnificently decorated rickshaws in Durban pulled by Zulus in feathered finery, and the huge shark which swam beside the ship in one of the east coast ports. I recall catching a small black fish off the stern of the ship, this achieved by lowering a tin on a long piece of string - though I can't recall what I provided in the way of bait, nor how I obtained the tin and the string. I remember going ashore at Gran Canaria and being captivated by the brilliant yellow canaries for sale in cages. I desperately wanted one but my parents vetoed the idea.

As we approached the Bay of Biscay, the ice cream was replaced with bovril. The weather deteriorated, we had to wear thicker clothing, though however thick it was it didn't seem to keep me warm. And when we docked at Southampton I remember being amazed to see white men doing labouring jobs like mending the roads.

It wasn't a good leave. My father was ill with suspected TB, so we had to spend an extra two months in a bitterly cold winter. Fortunately, we had a pleasant flat overlooking the Thames: I recall having to cross Putney Bridge to reach the small private school we attended.

While there, my parents made the decision that, as soon as I was nine, I would go to school in England. They visited their chosen school, Glengorse, but I don't remember being either invited or consulted. When we set off to fly back to Mombasa - which took three days as the 'plane could only fly in daylight - I hoped never to see England again.

Corrugations

This section of estate track near our house is displaying a phenomenon with which drivers in countries where dirt roads are common are only too familiar. Corrugations are like ripples in sand, usually with a wavelength of about a metre and an amplitude of 25-50mm, which develop across the road. They're formed by the passage of vehicles along a road which has an unconsolidated sandy or gravelly surface, the corrugations being formed when the wheels start to bounce along the road.

Travelling along such roads is both uncomfortable and jarringly painful, particularly as corrugations can continue for many miles. That they have formed on this estate track is a bit of a mystery - it's the first time I've seen corrugations outside Africa. The juddering has other, sometimes dangerous effects. For example, phillips screws have a habit of falling out.

We found that it was agony to travel along such roads slowly, and that the best approach was to drive as fast as possible so the car planed across the corrugated surface. When the car did this, it lacked traction, which meant that, in inexperienced hands, there was an increased chance of an accident. 

Corrugations were just one of the many trials of travelling on African roads. In the wet season these surfaces were sometimes covered with a slick of mud, which meant the surface behaved rather like the black ice of UK roads. Add to these problems the hazards of clouds of dust in the dry season, the way loose sand also acted like black ice, and deep, glutinous mud in the wet, into which cars sank axle-deep. Little wonder that African roads exacted a high price in human lives.

Despite the Weather....

Despite the recent appalling weather the small birds have been doing their best to carry on as if spring really was almost here - so we're seeing the males in their mating finery and....

....even some of the birds, like this greenfinch, which we've not seen in the garden for some time, now coming in to fill themselves with good things so they can excel at the mating game.

Sadly, some of them are getting a little too excited. This female chaffinch was evidently being chased by an over-amorous....

....male so, in their excitement, the two of them ended up crashing in to the glass sheets of our balcony's balustrade - with terminal results for the female and, probably, a severe headache for the male.

Down at ground level spring is being measured by the flowering of some 'old favourite' plants, like this lesser celandine and, in the Council meadow that runs along the A9....

....by the very first cowslip of the season.

A Crowded Anchorage

The Moray Firth off the mouth of Loch Fleet was crowded with ships by late afternoon yesterday, no less than six of them of which two were Wilson ships and one was....

....the ocean-going tug Kingdom of Fife, which was exceptionally close in to the Golspie shore - far closer than....

....we've seen any ship in the time we've lived here.

The Kingdom of Fife is an old friend from our days on Ardnamurchan, when she not infrequently sailed past us in the Sound of Mull. She was also involved with the salvage work when the Lysblink Seaways ran ashore at Kilchoan - for the story, see the Kilchoan Diary blog here.

It's one of the things I have most missed since leaving Kilchoan, where a wide variety of ships working up and down the Sound of Mull passed very close to our house.

The reason for so many ships being anchored in the Firth is very apparent today. We are in the grip of a run of fierce westerlies which are battering us with hail, sleet and even occasional snow; and there's little sign of this weather letting up as the week progresses.

A Deserted Beach

We were on the beach again yesterday morning, walking into a stiff southwester which brought sudden showers ranging from rain to hail. While not altogether pleasant, the weather kept other people off the beach so, in walking about a mile along it, we saw not another soul.

In the seaweed washed up by the falling tide we found....

....a dozen or so of these 6" long flatfish - having seen hardly any washed-up fish in months - and....

....one of this species, probably a short spined sea scorpion.
 

Out in the Firth, four ships still lay at anchor, though the Rix Pacific had been replaced by the Wilson Plymouth.

This shot shows the Wilson Harrier and a large flock of wind-harried geese.

Ships in the Snow

It's been snowing here on and off since yesterday morning but, during the day, any that settled melted almost immediately. However, through the night some of it accumulated on....

....the rooftops, though these deposits didn't last long.

Although the weather really shouldn't be doing this to us in late March, more surprising was the number of ships anchored in the Moray Firth, more than we've seen before.

To the left in this picture is the Jomi, the ship we saw at Littleferry the other day, while the ship to the right is the Wilson Harrier.

From our house the Neuseborg (above) lay away to our left while the Rix Pacific was too far round for us to see.

Why we have this sudden accumulation of ships is a bit of a mystery, particularly as there is no exceptionally bad weather forecast during the next few days..

A Wide, Sandy Beach

It's one of the privileges of living in Golspie that we have easy access to a wide, sandy beach which stretches for miles but which usually has hardly another soul on it.

Today, this beach was so deserted that we also shared it with....

....two seals. This one, from the tracks it left running down the beach, had come ashore during the night's high tide but, by the time we were near it, it was almost back in the sea while....

....this one seemed quite happy to ignore the very occasional passing human.

To add to the interest of the walk a ship lay at anchor not far offshore. She's the Jomi, and this isn't the first time we've seen her off Golspie - see earlier post here.

The wreck in the right foreground is all that remains of the Tones, which came ashore in 1937 - see earlier blog entry here  

A Gloomy Day

The contrast between today\s weather and yesterday's couldn't be more stark: when Mrs MW walked down to the shops yesterday she wore a t-shirt, while today she was back in a winter coat.

The day's general gloom, and an accompanying thin drizzle, made photography challenging, at a time of year when, suddenly, a great deal is happening. So....

....this attempt at a red squirrel was the best I could get.

More frustrating was my encounter with three roe deer, the first since last August. None of them would stop long enough to have their picture taken. Their nervousness is understandable: the estate has been managing its deer population though the winter, and culling quite a few of them.

It's amazing how many chiffchaffs have arrived and how quickly they're spreading through the forestry. I would guess that there is now a chiffchaff every 200m or so along the tracks, enough for me to find one which would stay still long enough for a photo.

Only the other day I was bemoaning the lack of yellowhammers. Well, this male has now arrived in one of the yellowhammers' favourite spots, just by the small quarry where the tadpoles and newts can be found. He was alone but singing lustily so, hopefully, he'll soon be attracting a mate.

Peacock

In the early afternoon the peacock was back in his garden today, sunning himself on a rock and occasionally visiting the heather flowers.

After a long, grey winter it was a joy and a tonic to sit and watch this beautiful creature, and to bask with him in the sunshine and 17C warmth.

First Butterfly of the Year

A few bumblebees have been busy in the back garden during the occasional sunny interval over a couple of weeks now but we did not expect that they would be joined this morning by....

....the first butterfly of the year, a peacock. Not that we should really have been surprised as the weather is perfect for an early-flying butterfly, with clear skies, no wind, and a still-air temperature of over 13C.

However joyful we were to see this butterfly we couldn't refrain from patting ourselves on the back because these first butterflies and bees are dependent for their early appearance on the food in the garden - and we're therefore thrilled that our planting over the last two years while we've been developing the garden has produced some flowers which these pioneer insects can exploit.

Both the pictures of the bee and the butterfly are of the same plant, a heather, one we bought over the internet two years ago. How the nursery managed to persuade a heather to flower at a time when we could still have snow and plunging temperatures is a mystery to me, but it has definitely had the desired effect.

Seen and/or Heard

I like to set out on a walk, as I did this morning, with some sort of purpose in mind. Today it was to count how many different bird species I either saw (S) and/or heard (H) - and I started well with a red kite (S&H) flying above me as I left the house, followed by the very distinctive tapping of a woodpecker (H) in the woodland by the sheep field.

Most of the walk was through this sort of terrain, with the open area in the foreground the result of the fire that swept though part of the estate land some years ago. There I identified buzzard (S&H), chaffinch (S&H) - lots of them - dunnock (H), blue tit (H)....

....robin (S&H), blackbird (S&H), wren (H), wood pigeon (S&H), collared dove (S&H), rook (H), carrion crow (S&H), pink-footed goose (H) and....

....this song thrush (S&H) which serenaded me with an abandon of joy.

Because I didn't count the birds which are close in to the houses because they're being fed by people like me, some of the birds that might have been included in the count included great tit, coal tit, siskin, goldfinch and green finch.

The highlight of the walk occurred along this stretch of track where my Merlin app once again insisted that....

....a chiffchaff was calling. Last time this happened, on Tuesday a week ago - see blog entry here - I dismissed it as an error, but today there was no doubt: the first chiffchaff (H) has arrived. Sadly, although I spent some time searching for him, he was invisible in the dense coniferous plantation.

Which leaves me with a total of sixteen birds either seen and/or heard in an hour's walk.

Introducing Harry

This is not something we normally do, name a wild animal, but this sparrowhawk is exceptional. He's in our garden almost every day, sometime spending time perched on a vantage point where he can wait for a meal to come his way, somethings passing through, at high speed, almost as if he's not really hungry but he wants to remind the small birds that he's around and hasn't forgotten them.

Harry's a good name because it both describes what he does - he harries the small birds - and it sounds princely - and a prince he certainly is.

We're now waiting with some impatience to see if he finds a mate to show off to us, and to the small birds.  If he does, I wonder what we'll call her.

Friends

Judging by the photographs in the album my mother made for me to take to England when I was sent to school there in January 1954, I was not short of friends - this is my third birthday, at the old German bungalow in Dar-es-Salaam.

However, one or two photos show a different picture. The boy at the right, all by himself, is me at the Crole-Rees' party on one of the Dar-es-Salaam beaches. I don't look unhappy. I just look as if I don't want to be doing what the others are doing.

When we moved to Mombasa and went to the European primary school just down the road from our house we had many friends. This is the first of four pictures taken at the Swimming Club. My brother Richard and I are at centre, and the girl and boy at right and left lived in one of the flats in the building next door to our house in Cliff Avenue - I think owned by one of the banks. Sadly, I can only remember the boy's name, David.

I look quite happy in this picture which shows Mrs Shinn, wife of a colleague of my father's, with her daughters Sandra, right, and Rhonelda. We didn't like them mostly because my father, who had always wanted a daughter, kept threatening to swap one of us for one of the Shinn girls.

In this picture, from left to right, are John Solly, me, Mark Solly and my brother Richard, gathered round the yacht made for me by an engineer on one of my father's ships, and called Defender after the last ship my grandfather commanded. The picture was taken in 1953.

This picture shows the four of us again but with a boy, on the right, whom I remember but can't name - and look how unhappy I am! I suspect that this might have been in the summer holidays of 1954 or '55, shortly before I set out for school in England.

A Saturday Walk

We parked this morning at a point along the Littleferry road where a short walk gave us this view across Loch Fleet. From here we could watch the a scattering of birds working the mudflats - mallard, shelduck, widgeon, oystercatcher, curlew, and half-a-dozen gulls - before crossing the road and plunging....

....into the plantation, parts of which were badly hit by the storms of the early winter.

Walking through this woodland we identified wren, crow, woodpecker and blackbird but the place was eerily silent, so we were quite pleased to emerge on the far side onto....

....a sandy beach reappearing after the 8am high tide, with something dark lying on it - visible at very centre of this picture - which turned out to be....

....a seal, minding its own business while it enjoyed the sun.

We skirted widely round it but it didn't enjoy our presence so....

....made its way down the beach and, reluctantly....

....out to sea, from where it lay watching us until we had passed.

We walked a little further along the beach, seeing just three oystercatcher, three sanderling and a single gull, until we found a spot where we could sit and watch the view and the occasional passing humans - in the event, just one small group of three people with three dogs.

It was a beautiful morning for a walk, if a little chilly, but the lack of wildlife - even allowing that many species may already be involved in pairing up and nest-building - remains a real worry.