Just for a change I spent Monday making chicken hutches. At this rate I will have to stop soon or we will run out of space to put them.
Tuesday was Norwegian Constitution Day so of course the centre of Kirkwall was closed. There was a parade from the harbour to the cathedral led by the Kirkwall pipe band and including council officials, visiting norwegian dignitaries and hoards of flag waving children. Then speeches on the green and a service in the cathedral followed by a big party and knees-up in the evening.
There is none of this for St Andrew's day which passes almost unnoticed.We even have a Norwegian consulate in Kirkwall although what they do is a mystery to me but there is a big Orkney, Noway friendship Association so maybe they organise that.
I think that they are probably organising a plot to return Orkney and Shetland to the scandinavian fold where many people would prefer it to be.
There was also one of the first cruise ships of the season in on Tuesday so Kirkwall was very crowded. There were a lot of scandinavian sounding voices around the town so maybe the cruise ship was linked to the constitution day celebrations.
Tuesday evening was as usual Molly's training class. She behaved reasonably well for a change so my new method of being more strict with her may be working. Molly is not sure that this is a good thing though.
On wednesday we were supposed to be going on a trip to Hoy but it was called off because the weather was supposed to be going to be bad.
As it turned out, the weather turned a bit breezy but nothing really bad. Just to make matters worse, there were killer whales in Echna bay on the other side of Burray and in Scapa Flow. If we had gone to Hoy then we would have been going over the flow at the time that the killer whales were there. Ah well, another time maybe.
At least it was to windy to make chicken houses.
We have a blackbirds nest in a bush in the garden and they have young still in the nest. This morning a hooded crow was in the bush trying to get the chicks but the parents gave it a real telling off and it gave up. It is surprising how such small birds can become so fierce that even the crow reckons that it is not worth the risk of injury just for a quick meal. After the crow had gone, molly went into the base of the bush to see what all the fuss had been about. She came out rather rapidly persued by two very angry and adrenalin fuelled, hyped up blackbirds.
There was another rather surprising old fogey's do on Thursday. The U3A had a meeting in Holm with a local man giving a talk on wartime Holm. Pam was a bit worried that we might not get much of an attendance but as it turned out ther room was packed and we had to fetch in another dozen or so chairs.
The talk was good and he was a natural story-teller. He explained several of the things around Holm that we had all seen but never really noticed or realised what they were. He had been a young lad in the war and he communicated the excitement that must have been felt in such a small community by all the naval activity in Scapa Flow and the building of the Churchill Barriers across to Burray and South Ronaldsay.
Just to make Pam's day, she managed to get three new members signed up fot the U3A.
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