大象传媒

Its not summer its November & wear a hat you daft old woman !!

Time & time again this past (and cold !) week I have gone off outside to the shop/school/feed animals & found myself cursing what seems to be a stubborn refusal to stuff a hat in my pocket. perhaps come december I'll have gotton round to it.

Winter weather is taking its toll already, planes cancelled, ferry trips delayed till the next fine day, hay & fodder being put out for the cows.

The windmill at Brecks has been repaired, whoohooo ! No more do we have to burn oil on lovely windy days to heat the house, we have our wind powered storage heating back again, the studio rooms are again lovely & warm to work in and having finaly added lined curtains to the full length windows & the studio's outside door, the chills are being more easily kept at bay.

The met office is telling us to expect a good ole storm on Thursday, gut of 70-80mph + are expected over Thurs/Friday with Thursday being the worst.
Im just thankfull the kids are off for a long weekend from tomorrow, we wont be trying to battle the wind & get kids into the car & to school during the gales.
Instead it will just mean feeding everything as usual in the morning & keeping a close eye on the weather, when it looks like the storm is increasing we'll shut the ducks & chooks in, cats in the porch, dog in his kennel. The pigs, being sensible critters, will retire to the huts without encouragement & the sheep & cows to the shelter of the stone dyke, hopefully we'll get time to see that everything gets a good breakfast to help keep them cosy during the expected icy winds & snow showers.

As for us, it'll be a pot of soup or stew cooking slowly on the wood stove & a movie or 3 to help distract the lil kids from how noisy this house is when these wind storms hit.

They are pretty much a thing of the past here.

Fair Isle has its very own electricity company ! Yes, we make & supply all our own electricity, the island has 2 aero generators producing electric to supply the houses and when its good n windy, it also powers the electric storage heaters (which dont do the store over night thing like mainlanders do) If there is no wind, then there are 2 oil generators which run between 7.30am & 11.30 pm, outwith these hrs, most houses are equiped with invertor systems, which channel power during the day into a pool of huge batteries which provide power over night to keep the freezers etc running.

The only trouble with this storm that we can forsee.... Is that ferry didnt manage to do a supply run yesterday, so milk may become rare, there may be an outright ban on cereal for breakie till the boats gone.

This is all I can see from the office window, in fact its as good as it gets from any window today because they all have a lovely covering of salt. Its been windy but not as bad as was forcast, still the 80mph gusts were enough to shift the duck house, which ways 3/4 tonne a good 6 ft to the left.

Since we couldnt do much all else today, I set a lamb stew on the wood burner to cook away slowly for dinner, kids settled down to watch cartoons & movies all snuggled up in quilts on the sofa, then I retreated to the chilly studio (windmills both get turned off during windstorms) for a wee play. This is to be the front cover of a sketchbook, Lutrador painted on the reverse with spent procion dyes, on the front I free machined on some lace motifs, distressed scrim & some teased kozo bark, painted with semi thick acrylic mix, added some embossing powders, touches of 3d medium, attacked with the heat gun, brushed with gold markal & its now curing.

Well all things considering, 93mph gusts an all.. I think we got off pretty lightly.

Duck house is going to be a right beggar to move back since it takes more than 2 folk to lift it, but we will manage, somehow..

Fencing around some of the chook pens needs re- stapled, the chickenwire has been blown out of its fixings in some places.

The old window I had been saving for making another cold frame had been blown into the field, despite having had a sheet of ply & 5 bags of peat atop it to weight it down.

We need to give the roof a once over as it sounded like we had a loose tile or 2 last night, but it is still a tad to windy to be hauling out ladders & such at the moment, it can wait till tomorrow am when its supposed to be a lot calmer.

So, ive got this sack full of strips of denim cut from old jeans, i want to weave them & form them into some sort of vessel structure, paverpol it, then ink & decorate on a winter theme & have summit pretty (strange concept for this house, we dont really do pretty) to sit in the corner (its going to be about 5ft tall).


If only i could decide on the shape !


Weather today is lovely, the odd shower, tis cold, but the cloud formations on the scaps of blue skys are lovely !

Tis time for the kye to come into the byre for the winter, we've left them out as long as we can (They being 1 pedigree aberdeen angus cow, 1 pedigree aberdeen angus heifer (beef) 1 pedigree aberdeen angus bullock( our future gene's) and 1 shetland x hereford (in calf) heifer ), but its been so wet recently that they are starting to just make a right sotter out of the fields, so tomorrow we will get the byre ready & if there be still enough light after that we'll get them in, if not it'll be thursday morning.

Pigs need to be moved too, they're going where we grew Bere this year, 2 young gilts are to be taken off for the freezer, & the boar & sow can run together until jan as *fingers crossed* if all the interest the boar got from the sow was productive, we should be having wee piglets early feb, hopefully 6 to 8 so that we can do all our orders & have 2 for ourselves for next winter.

We've got ourselves a handsome new ram for next year, and whats more, he is pure shetland. After the carry on with the lambs this year ive decided not to bother with sheep much any more, I went through the flock & kept on the best 7, who looked good possibles at throwing me a lamb capable of a really super fleece when put to our new lamb (our ewes are hill bred shetlands), I'll have to see if i can get a photo of the new guy tomorrow, he's still a peerie bit shy of me, but carrots are helping to get over that.

We've been having the *do we ring him or do we not* discussion about the wee bull, Im not much in the favor of using a means of inflicting pain & giving cause to anger, as a way of controlling an animal. He's a lad thats always going to have a lot of one on one from us, limits will be set & stuck too, and above all, he will be respected, we plan to be buying another 2 pedigree aberdeen angus heifers next year, so for his first few years he will have just the 4 girls, give him a year or two to come to full growth, build his stamina etc, and then we think we'll go for 2 more heifers & start working towards building up a bloodline of decent respect, for that reason, we wont be using him on anybody elses cows, when your building up a new bloodline, the last thing you do is go & water it down in cross breeds, our shetland x heifer wont matter since she is just there to produce beef for the freezer on a yearly basis & since shes such a lovely steady girl, maby a bit of milking (dont panic, we'll buy a pasturizer, shame to have such a perfect house cow & not make use of her).

No, I dont miss take aways ! we've never lived in a place for the past 15yrs where take aways have been an option !

And, without to much tom foolery either !

The old cow, being used to the coming in & out when it starts getting cold, was no bother at all, her only concern being... will there be more food when we get there ?


Heifer calf.. Every inch was a shove from behind, but once she was in the byre she was fine & stood good while we were going about in & around her.

The peerie bull.. What a gentleman ! He is going to do us proud if he stays such a well mannered wee chap, he was a bit unsure to begin with, 5 of us turned up armed with ropes & halters so it was a bit of what the heck is going on here ! He can be a bit unsure, but he responds really well to steady handling, so came away in fine, teetered at the door a bit (he's never been inside) just in case anything big & spooky was lurking there, then came away in & into his stall good as gold, halter off & ohh yeah scratch me there please !

The x bred heifer was another stubborn lass, but she eventually got the message that inside we were going & although it was inch by inch we got her there in the end, to many new things to take in I guess. She's due to calf in march & we hope, the old cow will calf late summer.

Pigs are much happier now that they moved & are no longer amid a guttery spluter, been so much rain here that its hard to avoid guttery spluter, but they've a whole big field for the winter, we'll just keep moving them over a bit as the dig it up for us.

The weather tomorrow just is not being very willing to play along with my plans, but then, thinking back, i dont think it ever has, i cant remember a single time ive booked a flight off during the winter & managed to leave on the day/time the flight was meant to be at. In order to have the best possible chance of getting off tomorrow, im bumped onto the morning flight instead of the afternoon which means that if only one flight gets in/out, ill be on it.

Bulls on Fair Isle, very often the best & most economic way of getting ones cows into calf, A.I is ok, but quite often A.I does not work the first, second, third & sometimes 4th time, timing with A.I has to be spot on, where as a bull will do his work a good few times during the period a cow is seasoning for so has a far better chance of getting a result & if we select our 2 new heifers with great care & attention to blood lines, we then have a totaly new blood line for this area, which gives us a product (not a term i like to use with animals, but its the best explanation ) worth putting out to the sales as breeding heifers & if we throw a really really good one, the odd bull for the sales, some things work far better when left to nature to make happen in the way it is designed to, and wee Hamish is such a steady wee lad, its a right shame not to give him the chance to make something of himself.

So yesterday, operation leave the island was thwarted 3 times during the day by fog and low cloud, so after a reshuffle in our travel arrangements, flights & northlink ferry have been re-booked for today, so with a lot of luck, the plane will get in at 10.40am & after enduring 8 hrs in lerwick, i will be sailing to Aberdeen at 7.30pm tonight.

I guess i am kinda happy i ended up not leaving yesterday, one is seriously full of a rather rampant cold & had i left, i would have arrived in aberdeen this morning feeling totally elcrapo & feeling seriously daunted at having a walk of some 800 yrds to get a bus to my parents, id manage the walk, but i doubt id have managed it with luggage, im struggling to life my coffee mug at the moment. I think today will consist of coffee & decongestant tablets & a slow amble around shetland museum with santuary being found in a bowl of hot soup at some point.

At least once on the boat at night, i can treat myself to the decongestant bliss that is a wee taster of a good malt.