The Night Sky

This picture, taken just before ten last night from our house, looks west over the village of Golspie. The sky is still light in the west-north-west from the setting of the sun and the length of each night will shorten quickly as we approach the solstice, so by June the sky we will have twenty-four hour daylight.

I don't really enjoy the light nights. They seem, somehow, unnatural, and I'm not one to see any value in the extending daylight. I far prefer the tropical night which falls quickly at six in the evening and is done at six the next morning, to the extent that one can put one's clock right by it.

The bright 'star' directly above the statue on the top of Ben Bhraggie is Mercury which will set before 10.30pm.

Disappointments

I took our most usual walk this morning, north along the coast path towards Dunrobin Castle but stopping to sit on the bench which overlooks this shallow bay with its long-disused stone pier. Much of the shore bird population, as with our garden birds, seems to have disappeared with, for example, not a redshank nor a ringed plover in sight, the only....

....birds in any numbers being gulls, like this pair of herring gulls, cormorants and the usual chatty oystercatchers.

As time progressed the sky cleared so I was sitting with nothing to do but enjoy the warm sunshine and wish the occasional passer-by a good day, looking out across the firth....

....to where some impressive cumulus was building over Ross-shire when....

....something disturbed the sea's smooth surface. It was a small pod of half-a-dozen dolphins but their surfacing and the click of my camera shutter simply refused to coincide so all I have is pictures of patches of disturbed water. It was frustrating, as was the next moment of potential excitement when.....

....what might have been our long-sought otter surfaced close inshore. It wasn't an otter but a seal, which swam slowly away from me, as if disappointed in my lack of enthusiasm.

The 'Geologist'

Although I took geology at university to degree level I was never 'a geologist', because I never practised the art in the field as a means to a living. Many of my student contemporaries did - North Sea oil was coming on stream and there were plenty of jobs both offshore and abroad if you wanted them. However, I did teach the subject, both in England and in Jamaica, to A level, and I loved it.

One of the essentials in becoming 'a geologist' was fieldwork. Despite this I have no photographs of me on any of the many field trips I attended while at Keele but I do recall being told before the first one that a practical geologist's most important tool was a 'geological' hammer. My first hammer was the standard hammer of its day: it had a hickory handle, square-sectioned steel head with wedge end for splitting the rocks. Later, when I had a bit more money, I replaced it with this one, which was American and has stayed with me ever since.

The other essential piece of equipment was a hand lens. Most of the ones my fellow-students bought boasted a single glass lens while the one I obtained was second hand, with three plastic lenses.

Although its magnification was small, it was surprising what a difference it made but one had to learn how to use it. The first thing was that the lens had to be held close against the eyeball and the specimen brought up to it - which is how a jeweller uses a lens.

I am very proud of the fact that I have managed to keep my original hand lens because they are so easily lost when one is tramping round the great outdoors in all sorts of weather and in all sorts of odd places, constantly stopping to look at a bit of rock or a fossil or a crystal. However, as can be guessed from its dusty state, I haven't used it in years.

Later, other equipment became essential so, for example, in my last yers of teaching everyone had to wear a plastic hat. As well as knowing the sites to which I took the students - usually quarries - I needed all sorts of other skills, like negotiating skills to persuade very reluctant construction companies to let us in to their quarries, and passing tests which qualified me to drive a minibus with trailer. The field trips took ages to organise but I cannot recall one which I didn't thoroughly enjoy; and this was probably the best, with my last upper sixth class at The Plume School when we went to Shropshire, the year before I left teaching.

Road Trips

Before first travelling in North America in 2006 I do not recall the phrase 'road trip' so I have always associated it with that continent of vast panoramas and awe-inspiring distances, which big vehicles like this Ford Explorer - hired to take us from Edmonton Alberta to Seattle - simply ate up. I learned to love sitting in pampered comfort and stopping for the night to explore the small towns upon the way, places like Buffalo Run, MacBride, Penticton and Valemont; and breaking the journey to watch the wildlife, walk and picnic in the many parks, and....

....overcoming some of the challenges of the way, like the onset of winter conditions in the Cascades.

This sort of travel was a far cry from the 'road trips' of our youth when we stood by the roadside and hung out a thumb in the hope of a lift. In some ways that form of travel was more exciting - not least because it was so unpredictable - and it certainly meant that one learnt a great deal from the driver about the country through which one was hitching. It might also be considered the 'greenest' form of travel since all we were doing was occupying otherwise empty seats.

One of the pleasures of those North American road trips was that the roads were superb and, at the time of year when we travelled them, remarkably empty. Today, we live on a road, the A9, which is part of one of Britain's attempts to create a 'road trip'. The North Coast 500, so-called because it passes through 500 miles of the north of Scotland, is along cramped, crowded roads - some single-track - so the visitors are unpopular in the villages through which it passes. There is inadequate accommodation, the roads are potholed, and too many of the participants turn the route into a race-track: recently a visitor was caught by the police doing 110mph.

I greatly enjoyed my North American road trips but, very sadly, I cannot see me doing one again. At least I did them, and have the memories to savour through my later years.

The White Wizards

When I first went out to the country which, in my lifetime, has had three names - Southern Rhodesia, as it was on my first visit in 1963, Rhodesia, as it was on my second, in 1967-70, and now Zimbabwe - it was, aged 18 and fresh from public school, to teach at Bernard Mizeki College, which aspired to become an African Eton. I was only there for a couple of terms and so I was worked hard: as well as teaching I was loaded with other responsibilities, which included training the school football teams.

As players, these boys were brilliant, but they were individualists, so they disliked passing the ball. Once we had sorted that out, taught them how to use a formation, and bought them a new all-white strip and some decent boots, they started winning games, and became so successful that they were known on the school circuit as the White Wizards.

The other day, leafing through an old album, I discovered that I had printed their names on the back of the photograph. Having their names suddenly brought back all sorts of memories, not least of the pride we had as a team, and how hard we worked to earn it - like getting up half-an-hour early in the morning to go on a training run.

I felt very humbled by their determination to succeed. They only lost one match.

I also trained the second eleven, and there was huge competition to move up into the firsts. Most fixtures involved both teams so, on away matches, the twenty-two players would pile into the back of the school's one-and-a-half ton Bedford truck and Crispin, the school's driver, would take us all over the country, sometimes to very remote schools.

Again, I have....

....their names on the back of the photograph and, with them, another flood of memories.

Bernard Mizeki College was a small school, just two forms of entry and, at that time, three year groups, so a total of around 180 students. Most of these boys would have gone on to take Cambridge 'O' level in a years' time. The school didn't plan to offer 'A' level, not yet, so these boys would have had to compete for places in one of the few schools which did, and which would take black students.

As is fairly evident from the photographs, many of these 'boys' were grown men, some probably older than I was. It had taken them that long to work their way up the African, poorly-funded part of the country's education system.

By the time Mrs MW and I went out in 1967 the bush war between Rhodesian 'security' forces and black guerrillas crossing from Mozambique and Zambia was beginning. I often wonder how many of the students I knew out there joined the fight, and how many died in that terrible war; and I wonder what happened to those who survived into the new Zimbabwe.

Another Welcome Return

I first heard one about ten days ago, far out across the waters of the firth, a series of short, grating cries quite different to the coo-coo of the rafts of eider trying to sort out their mating preferences. They were far too far out to see, even with binoculars, but....

....although they were closer in on Saturday, just off the mouth of Loch Fleet, they are so frailly built that spotting them against the brightness of the sky is a lottery, so it wasn't until this morning as we were walking along Golspie's promenade looking for the dog otter that's supposed to be there - we still haven't seen an otter since coming to Golspie - that....

....I saw one.... and then another, and.... when I had dragged the camera out of its case, yet another.

They're terns, most likely Sandwich terns, back from their winter holidays along the coasts of north, west and southwest Africa - see post about them here. Welcome back, terns!

A Crowded Beach

It's a bank holiday. The weather is perfect, with warm sunshine and an almost imperceptible onshore breeze. There isn't another soul on the beach so we wander along it, stopping to remark on the....

....strange sculpturing of the sand and....

....how heavy the surf is along the shore, and getting heavier still with the rapidly rising tide.

We walked the sands, and sat and watched the world go by, for a good two hours. We saw twenty-four people accompanied by eight dogs. For this beach, that's a serious crowd!