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Their success is reflected in how common they still are along the coast, while the great ocean-going dhows have largely been replaced by modern, steel-hulled ships.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.