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Here's the view from our bedroom window on 28 March.

Those mermaids have been having a wild time - they keep losing their purses.

Hi IBHQ - just been looking at your heading photos for the various Orkney islands. A few of them have the red/yellow Orkney flag, which as we know is not sanctioned by the Lord Lyon! Consultation (hoho) is in progress to choose an acceptable new version. If you and all those people still flying the old one continue in your nefarious ways, the sky will fall in!!! Aaargh! Run!!

Well, this is us and some mates having a barbeque on Skaill beach last Saturday night - lovely sunset as you can see. This was before the weather turned wintry and there were white showers falling from the sky!

I am having a rather nice time sitting here drinking the red clover wine whilst the man downloads tunes from Limewire and Youtube. So far tonight we have enjoyed Sally Oldfield's Mirrors, a very strange video of Yes in Bruges getting chased by a nun, Rush playing Spirit of Radio at a benefit gig last year, and a bit of DJ Shadow. Nothing if not eclectic.

There's a furniture auction on Thursday - one of my favourite days out. Boxes and boxes of fabulous bruck, a slap-up feed in the caff and the omnipresent smell of coo poo. To top it all we have the comedy show provided by the mart lads whose job it is to cart the stuff in and out and hold it up for viewing. If you've never been, I can highly recommend it. Of course, we are accumulating it faster than we can offload it, so gradually bit by bit every room in the house is filling up with assets due to be sold on a well-known internet auction site (WKIAS). I try to list about 30-40 things a week but I'm still drowning. Maybe need to press the shed into service.

Enjoyed a nice tour round the Stones of Stenness with one of the lovely World Heritage Site Rangers. Met a child today called Thorfinn and had a good chat about the Futhark runic alphabet. He said he'd done a project at school! Cool hid!

Saturday morning was superb weather, although it was v v cold - you can't see the biting wind in the pics.

House is full of boxes of books following auction, so fresh air is required to escape the fusty booky dust. One of our wonderful rangers (for the World Heritage Site) were conducting a walk to the Broch of Borwick at Yesnaby so we went up.

The old wartime buildings on the cliffs have been there since WWII, when Orkney was home to over 60,000 service personnel of one kind or another - huge dairy herds were encouraged to provide milk, Gracie Fields sang from the balcony of the Stromness Hotel, and the local girls' feet didn't touch the ground. These red brick sheds were part of a camp here. There were anti-aircraft guns of different sizes fixed to the concrete base, and the raw recruits would use them in training. The equally raw recruits stationed at Twatt aerodrome would fly past the Yesnaby cliffs trailing windsocks, whereupon the gunners would fire live ammunition at the windsocks. One pilot, scared witless the first time, said that from then on he made sure his windsocks were tied on with very long pieces of rope!

At the moment, the sheds are being used to house an art exhibition.

I liked the small hut with the curtains and things in frames and I also loved the felt flags, but I'm afraid the Oppenheimer atom stuff didn't do it for me. However, in principal I am a fan of public art, especially in incongruous places, and even more especially when those spaces are never used for anything else. Nice one!


The walk along the cliff gives some top geography, including the old stramatalites, which I'm reliably informed are ancient fossilised lichen.

Here we are looking out to sea, next landfall, Canada.

The broch of Borwick is very smart, we sat inside, ate a bit of fudge and had the old 'So, brochs then, what were they all about, eh?' debate for a bit. We were checked out thoroughly by a nearby resident fulmar.

A jolly time was had by all.

And there's the Old Man of Hoy, peeking round the cliff.


Many thanks to Elaine the ranger!