It's a grey day in Stornoway, with occasional light rain. At least it's not really cold, with the mercury up a few points to 9C / 48F. The weather will continue to fluctuate, as a battle is being fought between cold air over Scandinavia and milder air over the Atlantic. The mild air looks set to win at this stage. However, it's still only February and three weeks left in that month.
Yesterday, I was thinking that the southern Indian Ocean had been quiet so far, in terms of tropical cyclone formation. Promptly, up pops this disturbance (94S), which is rumbling away some 450 miles north of La Reunion, which looks set to turn into a nasty piece of work. At the moment, it may well intensify to a category II hurricane as it passes just west of La Reunion over the weekend. I should get a flood of visits to my Tropical Cyclones blog - when cyclone Gamede passed by the Mascaregnes in 2007, the record for the number of daily visits was around 3,000.
If you want to read a long and verbose account of speeches to a departing president of the Gaelic Society of London, look no further than my local history blog Pentland Road. Roderick Macleod lost a son in WW1 (hence my interest), and left the presidency of the GSL in 1927. His farewell do attracted about 200 dignitaries.
