Flooding

We knew we wouldn't be able to get down to the village today by our normal walk through the woods - the flooding burns prevented us yesterday - so this morning we tried by following the paved path down to the A9 and then along the pavement to the village. The fields by the railway line give some idea of the amount of rain we've had - over 50mm in the last 48 hours, according to my rather inaccurate rain gauge - but what we hadn't expected....

....was to find both the A9 and its pavement flooded just by the entrance to our village hospital. Cars were getting through but....

....the police turned up while we were watching to....

....put out a couple of SLOW notices warning of the flood.

The A9 is the main arterial road from civilisation to the south of us to Caithness, Sutherland and the Orkneys, yet the company that maintains it on some sort of contract to the government seems not to bother about....

....regularly clearing the drains so any floodwater goes DOWN them and doesn't come UP them.

First Day at School

While there are more important milestones in life, one's first day at proper school is usually one of the more memorable. Mine was recorded by my mother who was never very good at taking photographs - she's managed to get her shadow in the shot.

I had been to a nursery school but, in 1950, headed off from our new house in Oyster Bay, Dar-es-Salaam for the European primary school. The uniform....

....is a bit strange, though the hat with its badge is fairly normal for schools in tropical lands. I also like the shorts my brother is wearing, held up by what appear to be integral braces; and I do wonder what was in the little woven bag I'm carrying.

In fact, I have no memory of this day at all. I look remarkably happy so perhaps I took it all in my stride and didn't suffer the trauma that some children do.

Littleferry Birds

We were greeted when we arrived in the car park at Littleferry today by a small skein of pink-footed geese flying overhead, some 35 birds in all, and....

....the first warnings that bird 'flu may be on its way back. Happily, we saw.... 

....no dead birds along the high tide line, not necessarily because bird 'flu has yet to arrive here so much as there being very few birds around. Along with a second, larger, skein of geese the only shore birds we saw were a cormorant, a curlew, and....

....a small flock of about thirty eider.

I checked back on posts written at this time last year and found one relating to a walk at Littleferry when, just like today, there was precious little to report in the way of birds.

Squirrel Mystery

On our way to the village this morning, walking through dark, dank woodland, something moving at the bottom of the Scots pine in the left foreground of this picture caught my eye. On closer inspection it turned out to be....

....one of the small, introduced population of red squirrels. Even from close up it was very difficult to work out what it was doing. At times....

....it seemed to be burrowing into the soil, as if to bury or excavate a nut, at others....

....it curled up, shaking, staying still for a few moments before....

....moving around and then, at one point, rolling down the slope, recovering, and....

....climbing back to the tree and curling up again. At no point did it seem to notice me.

I assumed it was sick - but the squirrel looked to me to be too healthy to be suffering from one of the diseases, such as squirrel pox, that are killing red squirrels.

That it wasn't diseased was borne out by its disappearance by the time I passed the pine on my way home, some half an hour later.

There is one other explanation for its behaviour. Shortly before we found it, we met a dog walker, with two dogs, who would have passed the site a few minutes before. Could one of the dogs have chased and caught it on the ground?

Happily, a few minutes later as I approached Squirrel Alley, I spotted another, very healthy red squirrel.

Wishing all our readers a

merry Christmas feast.

Christmas Eve

Today's gentle Christmas Eve stroll coincided with a glorious sunset over the trees and....

.... over the A9.

Silence

There's a point about half way on the walk from our house to the village where the path emerges from the forestry to give open views across this field. We called it Roe Corner because, last winter, it wasn't uncommon to see one of more roe deer feeding in the field. So far, this winter, we haven't seen any but what we particularly noticed today was the silence. We stood for some minutes listening and the only birds we could hear were the rooks in their very noisy rookery above Back Road in the village. In contrast.....

....our garden bird feeders are, after a slow start to the winter season, busy. Goldfinches, along with.... 

....coal tits, are almost constantly on the sunflower kernel feeders while everything they drop is welcomed by....

....the local chaffinch gang. Other birds we've seen in the garden today include blue tits, great tits, five blackbirds, a dunnock, a wren, a rook, and....

....our resident robin.

Jahazis

This is a jahazi, a lateen-sailed boat which plies the palm-fringed beaches of the east coast of Africa. Her big sisters are the....

....dhows which worked the seaways between the ports of East Africa, western India and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, while her small sisters are the ngalowas, mostly used for inshore fishing.

Jahazis are the equivalent of the delivery trucks of modern road network, so they were and still are, inshore boats, cargo boats, though they also carry passengers. Their success is reflected in how common they still are along the coast, while the great ocean-going dhows have largely been replaced by modern, steel-hulled ships.

Many thanks to TC for sending me these beautiful pictures. Sadly, the name of their photographer is lost but we do know they were taken some time around 1900, so they are a window into the design and technology of these ships before the arrival of European ideas.

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.