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Once upon a time news travelled by word of mouth. Then someone invented the telephone and to keep up with Coll news it became necessary to have a contact in Glasgow, because many of the juicy bits went there first. Now there is Skype and the hot gossip travels to New York and back. I kid you not, Coll is big in the big apple!
Back here the building boom is continuing. We went east to inspect the road, which isn't well, although nowhere near as rough as the west end road last summer and also a new type of house. A beko house. I know that is spelt wrong, but we have a Beko fridge, and I can't remember the house spelling. A beko house is made using giant lego blocks made of polystyrene and filling the hollow bits inside with cement and unfolded paper clips (reinforcing). It's been on Grand Designs, even I've seen it so it must be several years old. Along with the blocks they supply an instructor for a day, except on Coll you get him for a day and a half (thanks Calmac, occasionally the timetable works out really well) and if he has a trainee you get him as well, so the house, which is really small, went up very quickly. When we saw it it was up to ceiling level and looked very house-like. Out west a traditional timber kit house is going up, about the size of a small industrial estate, so I'm looking forward to some great parties there. And inbetween there is a lot of grumbling at lack of building warrents and paperwork delays.
Meanwhile back on tourist Coll the raft race is this Saturday and I still don't know if the beer is here, the golf course is playable, the beach football is next Saturday and White Lightening will probably be without trainee chef as he has a dodgy ankle. The village fishing is on Monday 23 and the show is 3 August. And that will be the end of the summer. Except for the Half Marathon and 5 and 10 k runs, which are attracting loads of entries ((Sat 25 Aug), although I would advise anyone not to run as Piperactive are playing that night and plenty of energy will be needed for dancing!

Our friend the North Star was back this weekend. The North Star is one of the barges that brought the gravel in for the airport, this time it was bringing gravel for a new house. I had a technical gravel talk with one of the drivers while he was waiting for some repairs to be done. Barges break down a lot! There were three types of gravel, one lot for the road, one lot to put round drainage pipes and another type for mixing with cement. Gravel is such a fascinating subject. (?) The lorries tested the new road out, and it mostly stood up well, but it started to melt in the village again, and I think I saw the start of a pothole developing on one of the few bits of road that didn't get repaired.

Up at Bousd the Pirate Party and Raft Race (and beer festival) were great. Loads of pirates, the doctor walked the plank, there was nearly a dead heat in the raft race, but the Beko builders team beat the timber kit house team, and now everybody knows rafts have to be built out of polystyrene, so that's my luxury if I ever get asked on to Desert Island discs. Coll's favourite beer is Nimbus, followed by Latitude (both Atlas beers) but we were playing down the Red MacGregor so we could drink it ourselves. It wasn't the weather for Dark Island, although it was fine once everything else was gone. And it didn't rain at all.