91热爆

The dentist from Mull has just been in. He missed the spring visit because of an MOT failure. Only on Coll does the dentist need an MOT! Or at least, the mobile surgery does, and it wasn't going to get one, so he had to get a new van. Actually I'm surprised he got it this year. I rather needed to see him as two of my teeth broke just after Christmas and I have had two holes in my teeth since then. My tongue had got quite used to the new shape of my mouth, but it feels better now they are filled. Until I broke another one. On a smoked salmon sandwich, not exactly tooth breaking food. It was my wisdom tooth. I only have one, and it was twenty odd years newer than all the other teeth in my mouth, so why did it break? Two days later the remains began to wobble and it fell out, bringing back more memories of losing baby teeth. I didn't put it under my pillow, it was rather black and soft, and not the kind of thing you'd want in your mouth. Who would be a dentist?
The new mobile surgery didn't like Coll much. The door has a button you press and then the door opens automatically. The button isn't very near the door, I stood outside for some time looking for the button before finally getting the doors open. The button inside to close the doors was much easier to find and the doors shut. And opened again. I pressed the button and they closed, and opened again. I sat down, pretending it wasn't me who had broken them. The dental nurse came out, pressed the button and then grabbed the hinge at the top to stop the door opening again. I climbed into the chair, got a mouthful of injection which left me dribbling out of both sides of my mouth for the next four hours and listened to the next person come in and go through the automatic door re-opening dance. Strangely enough, when I left, the hidden button on the outside shut the doors and they stayed shut.

And meanwhile, lobsters. The colour of a live lobster is blue, and this colour comes from a compound called astaxanthin. Astaxanthin is made up of two compounds: astacin, which is red and stable, and xanthin, which is blue-green-brown and unstable. So when the poor lobster is dropped in the pot the unstable xanthin breaks down, leaving only the red astacin which is why the shell goes red. So what I don't know now is 'why are Scottish prawns pink when they are alive, raw and cooked, but Thai prawns start off blue, and only go pink when cooked?'

On Coll there seem to be only two seasons, and I'm not sure if this is due to not having trees, or because the ferry timetable only has two seasons. However, Saturday is officially the first day of winter, and although we get a boat on Sunday until Christmas, Monday, Wednesday and Friday are now designated quiet days. When we first moved here someone said how nice it was when the boats changed, and now I know exactly what they meant.
Trainee chef is back for a week. I think it was supposed to be a holiday but we soon got him back in harness, so his bar tab is covered. He has had to learn a lot of French at chef school, because he keeps thinking he is about to be taught something new, and then discovers he knew the process, but didn't know the posh term for it. So I now know cartouche is the posh name for the bit of paper you line a baking tin with. It was his twin brother's birthday on Wednesday, so Happy Birthday Marc.
I read in the Oban Times there is a new Chief Police Inspector, and as part of his 'meet the people' campaign he came to Coll. I wonder if he came here early because it was a cushy trip, or if he thinks our quiet still waters are hiding something. He was trying to talk our young men into going to Las Vegas and getting married. And then who would I ogle at from behind the bar? I'm getting too old to find the older man as attractive as they used to be!

Have you ever wondered how to date sand? (Not in the going-out-with sense). No. Nor had I. But last night a very Heath-Robinson piece of kit appeared and a very black bin-bag and some sand samples. Then I had to go and hide in the kitchen so I didn't know what happened next. But this morning, before I agreed to cook kippers I demanded an explanation. I love good teachers, people who make complicated stuff understandable, even when you haven't completed the previous course. So this dating of sand isn't dating the time the individual grain became sand, or when the bit of shell was a marine thingummy, or even when the rock grain was a big rock. It measures how long ago a cup-full of sand last saw light. So what it dates is how old a beach is, for instance, and when a flint thingummy was put down and forgotten about. I've watched Time Team, so I know mostly they date stuff by dating other stuff. But this measuring 'how long the sand has been in the dark' is a new (5-10 years) science and has implications in dating rises in sea level and they have huge posh bits of kit in the labs. So what I don't understand is why the kit in the bar looked like it came out of the fifties and is like stuff my dad used to play with.

Apart from archeologists Coll is full of builders. The Dumfries boys have just left, the Tiree crew have just arrived and a new gang from Dornoch leave tomorrow. My Scottish geography is improving enormously. It is not so easy for deliveries now, it isn't possible to send stuff to 'the new house' any more.

It is going to be a long week end; an early boat on Saturday because of the sale on Tiree, the hour change on Sunday, and the forecast is wet. But at least the house is warm, pipes all fixed after two leaks and the radiators are mostly full of water not air. Even though he had to resort to filling them with a funnel as they just would not bleed!

I don't mind sending IBHQ a cake, but I am not talking about pigeons or double decker buses.

(mjc you won't understand, it is to do with cricket)




Cheery

I'll raise you two cakes and the security guard.



Thanks Ming for technical support.