The New Wheels

So we've sold our last car - see earlier post here - and have now picked up its replacement, a mobility scooter. It's a great little machine but the grim fact is that our society is built around the car and one of these, eco-friendly as it is, is no replacement. However, it ticks many of the boxes that we wanted - like, it has a range of 30 miles - and is fun to drive. So at the moment we've been steadily increasing how far we take it each day until tomorrow, when we hope to drive it in to the centre of the village.

While the vehicle is very easy to drive some of its greatest problems arise from the state of our pavements. It's part of the car culture that, if at all possible, when a hole has to be dug into the highway it's into the pavement, one 'advantage' being that the subsequent repair can be pretty rough-and-ready.

There's a remarkably wide range of scooters at a variety of prices but we went for a middle-sized, middle-of-the-range machine which was comfortable, simple to drive, and had a waterproof console: amazingly, some scooters don't, so one has to cover the console if it rains. I also liked the manufacturer's sense of humour: to accelerate one presses the hare button, to slow down, the tortoise.

The law permits a maximum speed of 4mph on pavements and 8mph on the road. So to travel on a pavement one selects the 4mph button and then there is the option of five speeds, from a crawl to - in the case of 8mph and the top of the five speeds - quite an exiting ride.

A number of things remain as problems to be solved - like, how do we get out to Littleferry if we only have one machine. We'll see how we get on but, if the experiment is a success, we might buy a second so we can add racing each other to the birdwatching.

The Changing Seasons

That we have skeins of geese passing through is a sure sign of the changing seasons. In summer we hardly see one; starting in autumn their numbers rise to a crescendo by mid winter, before falling back with the coming of spring.

The geese are evidently taking their time in their migration, for the skein you see here is travelling north, not, therefore, as part of a migration but in a daily movement between fields where they are feeding, and their overnight roosts. They'll probably move on, in the right direction, as soon as they have refuelled.

Here is another sign of oncoming autumn, rowan branches crowded with berries, a sign too that the coming winter season may be a hard one. Perhaps we should expect a hard winter, after last year's relatively mild one and the peculiarities of this damp, cool, grey summer. Another is seen in the hazel trees where....

....there are masses of cob nuts, perhaps, to my unscientific eyes, twice as many as this time last year.

Then there is the wider heather family. The brightly coloured bell heather is already dying, its flowers brittle brown against the pale lilac of the more recently flowering ling, while the cross-leaved heath, at bottom right in this picture, was first to flower but is still in sturdy bloom.
 

We still have a few butterflies in the garden - red admirals, peacocks, tortoiseshells, a painted lady - sad, small numbers which come out to play only when the sun warms them for a few minutes. 

Far hardier are the speckled woods in Speckled Wood which are on the wing - just - even when the early-morning atmosphere is still miserably damp.

We've been quite worried about Robbut who has been AWOL for a few days, we thought because the neighbouring cat with the wild cat markings had been in the garden; and last night, thinking that Robbut was away, we even allowed a couple of dogs in - but this morning he was back, and very much at home.

Robbut

Our rabbit, which is now regularly to be seen in and around the garden, has a name. It took us some time to decide on one as we wanted something that reflected his mischievous character - for example, he is now....

....regularly stealing the birds' grain.

Mrs MW came up with the name Robbut, taken from.... 

....a book she was given way back in 1952. It was a present from her mother Bea, given her while the family was on a caravanning holiday in either South Wales or Cornwall.

It's the story of a rabbit which isn't satisfied with the way things are but which discovers that, very often, what you have is far better than any of the alternatives.

Coastguard

Before eight this morning we became aware of a helicopter out over the firth which, when it came a little closer, turned out to be....

....one of HM Coastguard's machines, evidently tracking back and forth in search of something or, more likely, someone. It was later joined....

....by the Invergordon lifeboat.

I spent thirteen years of my life in Kilchoan as a volunteer coastguard, an occasional job which saw many tragedies - as I fear is unfolding in the Moray Firth today - but also much enjoyment and, on good days, satisfaction.

It was good to be part of a team which had considerable responsibility, covering, as it did, a large and very remote area. More, it was one of the few cliff rescue teams on the west coast which meant that it could be called upon to use its skills in areas outside West Ardnamurchan. We trained hard, we responded to calls at any time of day and night, we spent many hours in what was often fairy hopeless searches. Because I had time on my hands after the sale of the shop I genjoyed checking all the equipment every month, which....

....included taking the vehicle for a run if it hadn't been used in some time.

When I left the service I was treated to a 'jolly' in one of the Coastguard helicopters, the only time I've been in a helicopter, and a thrilling experience.

Helen Wilson: A Portrait

This picture of my mother Helen arrived unexpectedly the other day by a roundabout route from the estate of my uncle, Sandy Wilson. There is nothing on the back of the photo to indicate where or when it was taken but when I first saw it I guessed that she was in her late teens.

There is the possibility that what is obviously a studio portrait was taken for a reason, and that might have been that, in 1935, she left her family in England to travel to....

....Zanzibar to take up a post in the colonial service there. This picture shows her outside the entrance to the flats where she lived, some time in the late 1930s and....

....this shows her in 1940 when she married my father.

 Looking at the pictures, I think there is a strong chance that someone, perhaps her mother, had the studio portrait taken of her just before she sailed for the romantic island where she was to meet my father. If so, then she would have been twenty-two in the portrait.

It was just as well they had the portrait as the war intervened and she was not to return to the UK until 1946, when she brought me, aged one, 'home' to meet the family.

Garden News

Our days are cool and grey, with a persistent westerly to bring the temperature down and discourage the insects from the abundant flowers in our garden. Of the butterflies, in the occasional patches when the sun's out we're mostly seeing red admirals, peacocks, tortoiseshells and....

....painted ladies, and mostly they're on the buddleia rather than on the verbena, achillea or lavender.

The bees and hover flies prefer the marjoram, which has been in flower for weeks, and the lavender which is doing very well considering it's a Mediterranean plant.

Our rabbit has settled very contentedly into the garden, popping out from his home under the shrubs every time he wants a meal. Fortunately for us, his main diet seems to be the grass, kept neatly trimmed for him by a man with a strimmer, though....

....close observation suggest that buttercup leaves are also on his menu. Pansies aren't, as they've never recovered from his arrival.

We're not seeing any other rabbits in the garden but he's sometimes seen with one of the three wood pigeons which grow fat on the larger seed rejected by the small birds.

On the subject of rabbits, we were pleased, on our rather damp walk this morning, to see, for the first time in some weeks, one of the rabbits in the farmer's field which has large areas of white in their coat. As I've said before, I'm amazed they survive as two red kites have nested in the high pine trees not two hundred metres from where this picture was taken.

Favourite Cars

Of the sixteen cars Mrs MW and I have owned between us over the last sixty years or so we each have a favourite. For Mrs MW it is the big Volvo 240SE estate which we bought when we were first going up from Essex to Scotland on a regular basis, visits which culminated in our making the decision to move to Kilchoan and find a business to run there.

We had bought it when we were looking for a vehicle which would make rather less arduous the long journey between Essex and our regular holiday destination of Ardnamurchan, which took some thirteen hours. We hadn't planned to buy an automatic but we were so impressed with this vehicle that we took the plunge - and have since been amazed that so few cars on British roads are automatics.

Mrs MW liked it because, for all its size and weight, it was such a beautifully safe yet easy car to drive. Further, when we had the shop it was used for shop purposes, so Mrs MW would drive it round the peninsula delivering goods to people who couldn't get in to the shop, and to Inverness and Oban to cash-and-carries.

The car had a huge carrying capacity. For example, we could get two 47kg Calor Gas cylinders in to it as I, as the local Calor dealer, had to deliver Calor all over Western Ardnamurchan.

My favourite car was the Freelander we bought when we sold the shop. It was a diesel automatic and a joy to drive both on Ardnamurchan roads, which were often challenging; off-road when, for example....

,,,,the Coastguard vehicle got stuck; and over long distances such as the trips we made to visit friends and family in England.

We bought the Freelander new and sold it very sadly some years later because it suffered from the Land Rover malaise of rusting, particularly in the salty air of Kilchoan.

Dragonflies and a Painted Lady

I spent some time yesterday at the seep on the track above our house looking for, and then finding, the golden-ringed dragonflies which I had seen there before. Sadly, the dragonflies were not in a mood for a picture or so I came home grumpy with disappointment - only to find....

....an absolutely stunning painted lady in our garden, sharing the buddleias with several other butterflies, including at least four red admirals.

I was back at the seep this morning determined to capture at least one good picture of the dragonflies, to find them in such a co-operative mood that I came away with at least ten pictures worth keeping, though....

....finding them against the background vegetation wasn't easy.

The female golden ringed is supposed to be Britain's largest dragonfly but these particular ones aren't very big, perhaps constrained in their growth by....

....the short, cool summers and long winters.

I sat for half an hour in warm sunshine watching them come and go, and chasing each other all over the place, these frantic flights often ending in vicious, buzzing combat which often resulted in them falling to the ground.

Early Driving Experiences

The first car I ever drove was a Mini Cooper which belonged to a friend whose family owned large farming interests in Kent. He must have been very confident in me as I was sixteen at the time, the 'lesson' took place in an orchard where there were plenty of trees to bump into, and driving a high-performance Mini Cooper was.... exciting.

The next vehicle I drove was a one-and-a-half ton Bedford truck - picture shows the sort of thing though the one I drove was dented, dusty, dirty and grey. This was in Southern Rhodesia where I spent two terms working in a school out in the bush, and was told by the lovely man who was my 'boss' for the 50% of my time that I spent working on the estate - the other 50% was time spent teaching - that I was no use to him until I could drive; and the only vehicle available for me to learn and practise on was the Bedford. It was a pig of a machine in which I spent almost as much time veering off the road and bashing uncontrolledly through the African bush than on the road. One of the joys of the beast was that one had to double-declutch in order to go down the gears.

Once I had the hang of how to drive, the first job I had was to convey one of the estate staff's wives in to hospital in the nearest town as she was having trouble giving birth to her first child. She screamed all the way. So did I.

The next car I drove, back in England, was my parents' Morris Traveller, in which, at the age of 17, I took my test. That I passed was something of a miracle as I stalled the car in the middle of a roundabout, managing to get it going again but in the certainty that I had failed. The examiner passed me: the stall had occurred in torrential rain and he was impressed with my sang froid, learned, of course, from driving a Bedford truck.

A Littleferry Alternative

With today dawning fine but with rather too much of a chill westerly, in the normal way we might have been planning to hop into the car and drive to Littleferry for a brisk walk but, having no car now, and not having had time to organise other ways of getting there, we had to content ourselves with our usual walks from the house.

Not that Littleferry was entirely forgotten for one of the first butterflies to cross my path was this small heath, a butterfly we don't normally see here but which is common at Littleferry.

A number of other butterflies were on the wing, including red admirals and this very smart painted lady, in considerable contrast to the painted ladies we've been seeing recently which have been very moth-eaten. I assume that this is the last generation of their great migration north from lands around the Mediterranean.

There were other pleasures too. The tracks around us aren't a favourite place of devil's-bit scabious but there was a large patch of it growing along the banks of a small burn, with plenty of flies and bees in attendance. The only things missing were some of this plant's varieties - while flowers and pink.

Littleferry has fine views but this one, from the top of the track that leads to the hut circle, is equally good illustrating, as it does, the depopulation of the countryside following the clearances and the consolidation of land into croft holdings which, in due course, also largely failed..

A Sunny Sunday

The day started blustery, with a westerly wind which continued to harass us all day, so it was no surprise when, on our customary gentle Sunday morning walk, we saw the first swallows sitting on wires, a sign that they are contemplating a long journey south.

Sadly for our small birds, this bird won't be migrating out of their area. This is the first time we've seen the sparrowhawk hunting from the ground.

For the first time in ages we've have the sun out almost all day, though only at intervals, but this did bring out the butterflies. As well as tortoiseshells, in search of pictures we enjoyed chasing....

.....several red admirals and....

....the first peacock in some time.

All the butterflies were on the buddleias, of which we must have upwards of ten in the garden, but the butterflies' other favourite, verbena, is also out. We've noticed this before, that the butterflies aren't rally interested in the verbena until it's been out for some days.

The butterflies on parade included a couple of rather unwelcome whites, though we do have our brassicas covered with netting, and what is probably the same painted lady we've been seeing over some weeks, now looking very ragged.

So we've seen no less than five butterfly species today, a rare event.

The important thing is that we've also seen the sun. The last few days, with the constant wind and grey skies, have been very wearing. Sadly, the forecast is for the south of England to be back in a heat wave, which usually means we are back under cloud.