Take off

I shot these 3 minutes off video footage as my plane took off from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, yesterday. Hope you enjoy.

Tuesday 12 May

Finally arrived into Stornoway at 7pm last night, and shared a taxi with two pleasant ladies who wouldn't hear of me paying my share of the fare. Thank you both, hope the local hotel was to your satisfaction. I'd been on the road for 14 hours, so pretty shattered - an early night was called for.

Awoke this morning to bright blue skies and brilliant sunshine. Visibility very good, I can just about make out the Applecross Forest, which lies 60 miles away to the southeast. When flying north last night, I could make out some snow on the higher mountain tops near the Rannoch Moor; the tops near the coast (like Slioch, east of Gairloch) were snow free.

I'm going to spend today recovering from yesterday's journey. I enjoyed it very much, but a 5.30 start needs catching up on. When I have sorted out the pictures and videos I took yesterday, I'll put them on a next entry.

En route

Left home at 6.15 am this morning, and joined the train to the airport at 6.45. This took me there on time (for a change), and that has (so far) been the theme. On leaving Amsterdam at 10, we flew right down the westcoast as far south as Walcheren, then veered west towards Gatwick. Once there, it was a speedy transit to the Glasgow plane, and that showed me it's a beautiful sunny day right across the UK. As I said on Twitter, it was fun flying up the M1 motorway at 550 mph with impunity. The Lake District was laid out in all its glory, and updrafts from the mountains juggled the plane a wee bit. In Glasgow as I type this, and awaiting my onward connection to Stornoway, which is due at 6pm, in four and a half hours' time.

Remind me

To write about vaccinations, cancer treatment and teenagers when I'm back in Stornoway next week.

Hurricane update 4 May

Typhoon Kujira has left the Philippines, leaving behind the usual trail of floods and destruction. It is currently roaring its way through the Pacific, far south of Japan. The storm is carrying winds of a trifling 115 knots (that's in excess of 130 mph), with gusts of 140 knots (160 mph) near the centre. The Japanese outposts of Iwo To (formerly Iwo Jima) and Chichi Jima will see a slightly weaker incarnation of the storm on Wednesday.

The Philippines weather agency should look over its shoulder. Rather than wave good-bye to Dante (the Philippines' name of Kujira), they want to monitor tropical storm Chan-hom. This system is gathering strength in the South China Sea, east of Vietnam, and could batter the Philippino island of Luzon later in the week, possibly as a typhoon. A typhoon is the same as a hurricane by the way. As I indicated above, it is lethal floods that present the greatest problem with tropical systems in the Philippines, and I am looking forward to see a bulletin from PAGASA by morning.

Normal blogging is currently on the Shell Gallery, as I'm in Holland.

Serious incident in Holland

Please switch to the Shell Gallery.

Paper Moon

The yacht I referred to in a previous entry has been located in the island of Bonaire, and its owner is flying home to his family.

Emergency message

Copied from stormcarib.com - please relay

For all you sailors out there, we have an emergency message for the Sailing Yacht "Paper Moon".
The man that bought Paper Moon is not answering emails, cell phone or satellite phone. His family has a major emergency and he is desperate to find him. The lone owner/crew is Juan C., and is believed to be somewhere between Culebra and Colombia.

PAPER MOON is a Morgan Out Island 36 foot sloop,
Name on stern is Paper Moon, N. Miami Beach.
White with blue canvas.
On stern solar panels,
wind generator,
dinghy on davits a West Marine with 18 hp Toshiba.

Please send emails to boaters throughout the Caribbean.

Email DearMissMermaid [at] aol [dot] com, if you have any sightings or info, I have additional info for the owner/crew of Paper Moon.

Flat on your face

Lori is telling us the story how she landed flat on her face yesterday. No real damage done, I should hastily add.

In the winter of '78/'79, I was trying to go to school on my bicycle in deep snow, with a half-inch layer of ice on top. Decided not to proceed further when I saw that big hill I had to go down to reach the school. However, when I reached the driveway at home, it all went wrong on me. Bike went first, then I went on my knees, then my hands, then my face hit the deck. Fortunately, it happened very slowly.

In 2001, I was visiting the Italian city of Naples, when I wanted to catch a tram to return to my lodgings. I ran for it, but tripped over the cobbled pavement and went for a flyer. Fortunately, my shoulderbag was hanging in front of me so I landed on that. Without said bag, I would have ended up with some damage, I'd imagine .

Monday 27 April

I'm going to start with a couple of one liners.

• The day started out grey, overcast and wet, but the sun just came out.
• Anyone else having fun putting in their new Sky viewing card? Ain't working this end.
• Swine flu is on the top of everybody's agenda - let's hope it can be contained.
• If you're on Twitter, bear in mind that the number of tweets can overwhelm you if you follow hundreds if not thousands of people. And please refrain from repeating yourself 4 times over with the same message on that forum.
  

Not directed at any of my usual readers, just throwing a barb at something that is irritating me: just the fact that someone is at the forefront of an Internet development doesn't mean that the rest of us who are quietly tagging along in the mainstream, barely aware of this brave new world, are all numpties.

Tomorrow, I am not going to be around on-line as I'm travelling to Holland. Friday is the first anniversary of my mother's death - as of Wednesday, you can find me on The Shell Gallery. Because my Twitter activity tends to be heavily focused on matters local, here in the Isle of Lewis, I shall most likely not be there after today. I will see if I can get Facebook to work for me again; I'm finding it hopelessly cluttered, with all sorts of apps chirping for attention - sorry folks.
Normal service will resume in 2 weeks from now, on May 12th, when I am back in the islands and back to posting on Atlantic Lines and as @adb44 on Twitter.

Local History file

The three previous entries are a mission statement on my work on areas of local history for the island of Lewis. The First World War had a large influence on the island, one that cannot be overstated. The loss of nearly 1,300 men, constituting one out of every twelve alive at the time dealt a savage blow to this small community of barely 30,000 in 1914 (nowadays it is about 20,000). The impact of the Iolaire Disaster cannot be overstated either. In placing my and others' findings on the Internet I hope to make this material available to anyone across the world with an interest in them. I also aim to keep alive the memory of the 1,300 who died in the First War and the 400 lost in the Second. Their sacrifice helped shape the world we know today, and ensured your and my liberty.

Local History file - Faces from the Lewis War Memorial

The victims of the Iolaire Disaster constitute a sizeable proportion of all those from the island who died in the First World War. It was a small step to extend the work for the Iolaire to the whole of the First World War. I started off by photographing the panels on the Lewis War Memorial, which stands just north of Stornoway. They show the names of all who fell in WW1 and WW2. However, those listings are incomplete.

Loyal Lewis Roll of Honour 1914-1918 adds quite a few more names, as well as 400 portrait photographs, which I scanned in. This publication does not supply a large amount of information on the men concerned, but that is easily amended by cross referencing with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website. It is most fortunate that accurate address references are given for many of the casualties, greatly increasing the accuracy of any matches. Many islanders had emigrated to Canada and Australia, and the National Archives of both those nations yielded a lot of background information. Another source are local war memorials, of which there are about 16 outside Stornoway.

Hebridean Connections, a website that is being expanded to include information from all corners of the Western Isles, currently provides information for the districts of Uig, Kinloch, Pairc and Great Bernera, allowing for another layer of cross-referencing and additional information. Finally, the islands graveyards once more added further information, yielding approximately 350 gravestones. At time of writing, there are 1286 names on the list for the First World War.

Faces from the Lewis War Memorial
Scottish War Memorial Project
Scottish War Graves Project

Local History file - The Iolaire Disaster

The former private yacht Amalthea, rechristened HMY Iolaire [Eagle], was sent to Kyle of Lochalsh on 31 December 1918 to assist in the returning home of servicemen from Lewis and Harris. This was done because the normal ferry, SS Sheila, could not accommodate the hundreds that were amassed on the quayside at Kyle. Iolaire left port at 7.30 pm, and was approaching Stornoway some 6 hours later in poor weather conditions when she struck rocks on the Beasts of Holm, 2 miles south of the town. More than 200 drowned, the bodies of whom washed up on shores up to 5 miles away. Some 60 were never recovered. The exact cause and circumstances of this sinking are still not entirely clear, and Admiralty files on the incident are closed.

The Stornoway Historical Society were very helpful in supplying me with the names of those involved in the tragedy. In turn, I placed the list of names on the Internet, adding as much information as I could find in local and Internet sources. I also established a simple website, outlining the circumstances of the disaster and a link to the aforementioned list. This has since been augmented by portrait photographs of the men concerned, as scanned from Loyal Lewis Roll of Honour 1914-1918. Because the Iolaire went down a few hours after midnight on 1 January 1919, the First World War is held to have ended in 1919 in the island, rather than 1918 as is the case elsewhere in the UK. I have visited the island’s graveyards to photograph gravestones to the victims of the Iolaire Disaster, and those pictures have been included on the extended listings site.

http://www.adb422006.com/iolaire.html
http://iolaire1919.blogspot.com/
http://www.adb422006.com/Iolairelist.htm

Local History file - HMS Timbertown

In January 2005, I obtained a copy of the book “Lewis: A History of the Island” by Donald Macdonald. It mentions the fact that during the First World War, a number of people from the island were interned at Groningen, a city in the northeast of Holland. Being from that country myself, I was intrigued at this unexpected link between Lewis and the Netherlands. I was to find out later that an even more surprising connection exists, going back to the 17th century.
After publishing a letter in the Stornoway Gazette, I received a handful of reactions from local people, whose ancestors had been interned at Groningen. With the help of several of the island’s historical societies, I managed to compile a list of more than one hundred names, as well as the story of HMS Timbertown (as the internment camp was known amongst its inmates). Groningen historian Menno Wielinga, from his side of the North Sea, added to that in no small measure.

In October 1914, the British Expeditionary Force, sent to Belgium to hold the tide of advancing German forces, found itself at Antwerp. The onslaught from the Germans could not be stopped, so the British withdrew west. Trains were supposed to take them to the Channel ports at Zeebrugge and Ostend, but our group missed their train. The officer in charge commanded them to head north, into the Zeeuws Vlaanderen area of southwestern Holland. On crossing the border, they handed themselves in. They ended up in Groningen for the duration of the war, more than four years. Their story is told on the English Camp website.

One poignant detail concerns the return of the internees to Lewis after the Armistice of November 1918, and particularly in the aftermath of the Iolaire Disaster, of which more in the next paragraph. Upon learning of the hardships suffered by survivors of the trenches and the Atlantic crossings, not to mention the deaths of so many fellow islanders (relatives, friends and acquaintances), the former internees felt ashamed. They had had a (relatively) easy time in a camp, whilst others had died, suffered injury or been witness to unspeakable horrors in combat. So, many lived out their lives and took their stories into the grave.

Website English Camp

Looking back

Was surfing the web just now and as I was listening to recordings by Winifred Atwell, I was reminded of a presenter on the BBC Worldservice, Gordon Clyde. In the 1980s, I frequently submitted requests to his classical music request programme "The Pleasure's Yours", which I used to listen to on Sunday mornings. Living in Holland at the time, I could hear it in relative clarity on medium wave 648 kHz, rather than be subjected to the vagaries of shortwave radio. It taught me a lot about classical music. Gordon presented the programme from 1973 until 1990.

I was sad to read an obituary in The Times, stating that he had died on 26 January 2008 at the age of 75. His wife Anne died in 1990; they had one son. Gordon, thanks for many hours of great music - the pleasure was certainly mine, and many people's around the world. RIP.

Hurricane season

Once more, I'm plugging hurricane awareness as the 2009 North Atlantic hurricane season is now less than a month away. If you are in the path of hurricanes, start preparations now. A good place to review is on the National Hurricane Center's webpages. When a storm forms, I tend to reflect it on my own Tropical Cyclones blog, but you must always refer to the NHC for the latest up-to-date advice.

Stay safe.

Sunday Ghost Story

I have recently started reading a blog from New Zealand, called Whitemeadow's Wanderings. It contains what I could term a ghost story - pop along and have a read. Bear in mind, when reading the rest of the blog, that they are currently going into autumn.

Sunday 26 April

Quite a nice morning, although with a chilly breeze. Sun is coming out as I type and it can only get better.

The outbreak of human swine flu in Mexico has claimed 81 lives so far. The virus, which causes the illness, is of the H1N1 strain which is known to cause seasonal flu outbreaks. It has changed to incorporate genetic material from flu viruses that affect birds and pigs, hence its name of swine flu. Confirmed cases are also reported from the USA and elsewhere. The WHO is warning that a global outbreak is possible, a pandemic.


The ship pictured above is the MV Hebridean Princess, the former Caledonian MacBrayne's ferry MV Columba. She has plied Hebridean waters for 40 years, latterly as a luxury cruiseliner. The company that deployed her has hit on financial troubles. Both ship and company have been taken over by a new owner, ensuring that this icon of the Hebrides continues to sail.
The Hebridean Princess, which can carry up to 49 passengers and charges up to £7,000 for a cruise, was selected by the Queen in 2006 to carry her on her 80th birthday cruise round Scotland's western islands. The picture above shows her coming into Stornoway at the end of that journey.

Saturday 25 April

Overcast but calm day. The spring tide is at a low ebb, leaving a lot more exposed than you'd normally see at low tide. Just watched the first cruiseliner of the summer season leave port heading for the Shiants. That's a group of 3 islands about 20 miles south of Stornoway off the coast of Lochs. Nobody lives there permanently, but are quite scenic.

Midnight post

Quarter to midnight, and time to close the session for today. Weather has gradually improved, and the sun came out in the hour before sunset. Tomorrow, 25 April, will be ANZAC Day in Australia and New Zealand. Those two nations will remember the dead of two world wars and other conflicts since. The date marks the start of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign in the First World War. On 25 April 1915, the first attacks were launched against Turkish strongholds southwest of Istanbul. The idea was to take the fortresses and open the way for Allied troops to march on the Turkish capital, which (at time) was Istanbul. A series of blunders, both in planning and execution, saw Gallipoli out as an abysmal failure. It also left thousands of Australian and New Zealand soldiers dead.

As I have remarked earlier this week, Australia is currently in the grips of a fierce debate on immigration and racism. Whilst remembering the Fallen, I hope everybody remembers what they fell defending. And that doesn't just apply to the Antipodeans.

Good night.