Friday 25th May 2012

A busy but very pleasant week

This last week seems to have shot by.
I think that all the fuss about the whale rescue has made it seem more busy than usual.It made the front page of the Orcadian and was apparently reported in "Thw Scotsman" and "The Daily Mail" as well as being on BBC Scotland TV news and being at one time the 3rd most visited item on the BBC website.I was interviewed along with Magnus Spence by Radio Orkney and later recieved an e-mail saying that our interview sounded like a maritime version of the Morcambe and Wise show. (I will take that as a compliment).

Interview on this link. http://soundcloud.com/radio-orkney/whale-interview

Fionn Mcarthur from Radio Orkney decided to do the interview by the harbour in Kirkwall so that he could get all the marine noises. I would have thought that the BBC could just dub the background from "Desert Island Discs" as a background and record the interview inside but Hey-Ho.

I am sure that Rodney and Libby have had a good time up here and hopefully will come again sometime. The schedule was affected a bit by vast hordes of tourists from a huge cruise ship that was in on Monday. We had been planning to go to Skara Brae and Maeshowe on Monday but after seeing how Kirkwall was heaving with visitors we decided to leave it for another day. In fact I think that there were two ships in but one of them alone carried 3500 tourists so all the tourist attractions would have been packed.

 Instead we ended up going to The Broch of Gurness, Birsay and the Barony Mills. As ususal, the Barony Mills tour took a very long time. The miller there is so enthusiastic and devoted to his mill that it is infectious. He seems to be especially proud of the fact that they do not have to pay Scottish Water for all the water that they use for the mill because of ancient water rights for the mill.

 We dropped into Stromness on the way back but it was shut.They are still replacing the concrete in the main street with original flag stones. It is to be hoped that they have it finished for next week when the folk festival is centred in Stromness or there will be chaos.

 Libby and Rodney could still ot book for Maeshowe on Tuesday and so we went round Stennes, Barnhouse, the Ring of Brodgar and Skara Brae. Unfortunately the Ness of Brodgar excavations are not open yet. They just open for about 6 weeks when the teams from the universities recommence their investigations. 

 They finally managed to get booked in to Maeshowe on Wednesday and spent the rest of the week going round the island on their own while Pam and I got on with a few routine tasks. I cunningly managed to break the strimmer on Thursday and so had to spend all day doing nothing 

I managed to get booked on a trip to Auskerry for next Saturday. It is a place that I have always wanted to go to since meeting Simon Brogan, the owner and sole resident of the island years ago when on Linga Holm for the roundup of the sheep with the RBST. More of that later though.