Monday 17 December

A beautiful sunny December day, which ended in a hard frost. There was very little wind, and the sunset, at 3.35pm, was stunning. Apart from Christmas cards I have also taken delivery of a handful of postcrossing cards, from Hungary, Ukraine, Germany and Holland. I'm not sending out huge numbers of postcrossing cards, partly on account of the cost of stamps.

Today, it became known that the cost for a legal case involving Storas Uist (the community body that owns the estate encompassing South Uist) is £200,000, a sum that Storas will have to cough up. The legal costs are also those of their opponent in court. It should be born in mind that land is sacrosanct in these parts, and people are prepared to go to extremes to defend their rights - or what they perceive to be their rights. The sadness of this particular case is that it is the community that (indirectly) will be paying for this; on the other hand, £200k can easily be recouped by selling 40-50 plots of house building land, making hardly any dent in the land assets of Storas Uist. Even worse, a petition had circulated the island in 2010, pleading for the case to be settled amicably.