Somewhere between my first getting up (3.30 a.m. - took a few pictures, coffee, back to bed) and my second getting up (5.00 a.m. - chatted to GB on Skype and took a few more pictures) it rained. How dare it. I'm really concerned that it should be sunny and warm while Jo is up here next week. Partly because I want us to have some time out in the sunshine and partly because I feel so proprietorial about the Island now. I feel more at home here than I do in Pensby - partly because it is my sort of environment and life-style and partly because of the people. (The spillchucker rejected 'proprietorial'. I thought it sounded a reasonable enough word - meaning, in my mind, 'having a sense of ownership'. Putting it into Google got me one dictionary that accepted it - Wikipedia. Good old Wikipedia.)
Upper Bayble in the morning light.
This was the weather when I set out for a walk at lunchtime. Would you believe that 20 minutes later I was soaked to the skin through all my waterproofs.
This was five minutes before I got caught in a most torrential downpour.
Turn round 90 degrees and this is where the weather was coming from.
Great Black-backed Gulls are huge and vicious creatures. Jo and I even saw two of them harrying an Eagle on Harris once. But whatever crimes this one had committed in the past it was a real shame to see it lying newly dead on the cliff top. There was no sign of what had happened to it. There was a trap (which I take to be a mink or hedgehog trap) nearby but this Gull hadn't been got by a Mink because there was no sign of blood or injury.
On the way back if I hadn't been sure of where the line of fence posts was I would have had to come to a stop because it closed in so badly and my glasses were running with rain. I got back to GB's cold, wet through and happy. Why happy - because my camera had remained dry. What else matters?
Back home and the brief storm is over.
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