Catacol Glen

A beautiful walk with the dog this morning playing dodge the sheep up Catacol Glen. Ranza is well trained and doesn't chase sheep, but they are naturally nervous, so our route was well planned not to send them further up the glen. Usually the sheep in Catacol are fenced in, but a fence was taken down by the snowstorm last week and they are spreading out in their search for food. There is hay provided for them in the field, but sheep aren't known for their intelligence!

A lovely time this afternoon, today is my niece's birthday, so we had cake and presents once her Mum finished work. The most entertaining bit was the fight over who got to eat Harry Styles (it was a One Direction cake). The birthday girl and her dad won that one. He, unlike his daughter is not a fan. Last Friday when about 70 kids got stuck at Lochranza Field Studies Centre, most of the parents were very understanding, but a few weren't. One mother wanted to know what he was doing to get her daughter home as she was going to a One Direction concert that night, he restrained himself from saying 'well, at least she's been saved that'! At the other extreme, the mother of one of the group which should have arrived last weekend phoned to say that there was a parcel in his office addressed to her daughter who was to have celebrated her 21st in Lochranza. The parcel contained 21 bags of Haribo, and she said to just open the parcel and let the kids who were stuck eat the sweets.

We lost power late this afternoon for 3 hours, we hope as the whole island was switched across to mains power. I have said this before, but many, many thanks are due to the heroic engineers who worked 12 and 18 hour days, returning to stay in hotels with no or limited power, and going back out into the cold again in their wet work clothes. I suspect they will be even more glad than we are to have mains power restored!