You're safe, we are back on the other side of the wall where the barbarians are.
I did get midged a bit as I liked to take an evening stroll by the loch, but apparently they were hellish only a few miles away round Loch Lomond. Yet we had very few - I can only guess it was just breezy enough.
There was also high excitement as the Coastguard helicopter landed on the lawn to drop a mountain rescue team off to attend a casualty on Ben A'an... which I was planning to ascend to catch the sunset. Eek!
And midsummer was incredible - the weather was perfect, blue skies, just hot enough, a gentle breeze - never known a day like it.
Thank you, Scotland, you were wonderful, and we will be hasting back. If only Gairloch wasn't two days each way...
We had a really interesting talk from a Lake District mountain rescue person last week @Sandemaniac. The vast majority of their call outs are for ankle injuries and the highest age group to get into difficulties is the 18-24 year olds. The pictures of fell runners sprinting up mountains with stretchers on their backs were impressive.
Ooh, I'd have enjoyed that! We are both the sort of people who sit down with the Moutain Rescue annual report and read right through. I've never forgotten reading of a Scout who went down with testicular torsion... OWW!
My brother and sister-in-law had a very bad night in a caravan last night, in the middle of the storm. Some people in tents on the same site were flooded out.
I woke in the middle of the night, and think I might have been woken by a flash of lightening, or the thunder, but I'm not sure. My son was awake in the night, and sent us footage of spectacular lightning and torrential rain.
That's making me wince, and I'm not even a bloke ...
Do haste ye back, Sanders (and CK), and maybe give wonderful West Lothian a look next time! 🙂
Might manage it. I'm the one responsible for booking accommodation, for several reasons including my employer's leave booking system. (I've already booked the timeslot for next summer...).
The BBC Scotland weather reports are looking like fantasy horror movies. How is everyone doing there?
It’s fine up in these parts. Some rain yesterday evening, just enough to water the garden for me, but lovely sunshine with a bit of a breeze now. And we have never been warmer than the upper reaches of pleasant, as it were.
But I gather that further south it is worse. Where we once lived in the Borders they have had the gritters sanding the roads to cool them, but the road over the hill between where we lived and the next town is already closed because of heat damage. I expect it has melted and run down the hillside!
There was apparently quite the thunderstorm in West Lothian on Thursday night, but I slept through it. A few flashes and rumbles on Friday morning, but nothing spectacular.
Nice day today though - warm, mostly sunny with a bit of a breeze.
I met a couple from Austria at lunch time on Friday. They were flying from Vienna to Edinburgh but due to the thunderstorms early on Friday the plane had to land in Liverpool instead ( though it was able to continue later to Edinburgh.)
The Thursday night thunderstorms were spectacular - proper house-shaking rumbles and flashes that lit the sky. Oban airport reported almost 100 000 lightning strikes in 24 hours.
The fire in the Cairngorms is really worrying. As one who used to live in the area, I know many people who are affected. I’m supposed to be visiting in Boat of Garten on Wednesday, and don’t know if my friend will still be in her cottage (which is outside the village on the Nethy side).
My sister in Stonehaven emailed yesterday to say that the smoke was getting bad there. It looks as if it's heading down the coast now. The wildfire smoke here subsided when we had wind and rain - I hope some of that will soon come to you too.
Things have come to a pretty dire pass when Scotland and Wales suffer from wildfires...
I hope that our new PM puts a block on yet more drilling for oil etc., even though this may adversely affect employment in the short term. Not much use earning £££ when there's no planet left...but I appreciate that Scottish Shipmates may know a good deal more about how a ban on future drilling will impinge on the area.
Things have come to a pretty dire pass when Scotland and Wales suffer from wildfires...
Partly it's suffering from idiots, and as a consequence suffering from fires. I've seen a report (source unverified, but it's consistent with other reports over the years) from Perthshire where a country ranger was verbally abused by a group of campers over the weekend who took exception to being informed that there's a high fire risk and that they should not have a camp fire. The police attended, along with a fire engine (one of the few maintaining a minimum service in the area with much of their resource fighting the fire in the Cairngorms) to extinguish a large campfire set among tree roots and under the canopy of trees. There really shouldn't need to be official notices saying "no fires", anyone with a wee bit of nous should know not to start a fire, especially in a long hot dry spell with fires a relatively short distance away out of control. But, some people are not only stupid, and unable to assess the situation they're in, they can't even obey simple instructions - and being abusive to those seeking to protect them and others from the consequences of fire is beyond the pale.
I hope that our new PM puts a block on yet more drilling for oil etc., even though this may adversely affect employment in the short term. Not much use earning £££ when there's no planet left...but I appreciate that Scottish Shipmates may know a good deal more about how a ban on future drilling will impinge on the area.
It's a political football with various sides claiming to act for the people of Aberdeen. But, any rational assessment will recognise that the North Sea is producing less and less oil and gas, and new licenses issued in the future isn't going to change that, in the short term it's not creating jobs or even really protecting many of the current jobs, at best those new licenses would allow the industry to continue at something not too far below current employment levels for another decade or so. The number of people employed in the sector is declining, and there's a desperate need for alternative employment both for those skilled in the industry and for those who if the industry was still thriving would be taking jobs there and building up their skills. There are other industries being established using some of those skills, building and maintaining off-shore wind for example. But, these are not currently in the same league of plentiful well paid jobs as the oil industry used to supply.
I was speaking to someone the other day who was talking about the impact reduced oil activity in the North Sea was having on house prices in Aberdeen - it's very much a buyer's market at the moment.
That's to be expected. Regardless of whether another field is opened up in the next few years, the oil and gas boom has come and gone. Aberdeen is never going to have the number of well paid oil and gas jobs that was there 20-30 years ago. The boom, as booms do, resulted in an inflation in house prices. Added to that as the oil and gas industry continues at it's lower employment rate there's likely to be a reduction in the number of jobs in Aberdeen in general, and migration away to jobs elsewhere which means there's going to be more houses than actually needed. Those two factors combined is going to see a fall in house values in Aberdeen.
Of course, that's also going to be generally the case if we actually start having the houses we need built, if we have enough houses built (and brought back into use) the demand for homes will fall, and that will mean prices generally fall. It's one of the reasons why governments keep saying "we need to build more houses" but the number of houses actually built falls far short of that - private house builders don't want to significantly reduce demand because that will cut profits, and politicians don't want to face an electorate who have seen the value of their homes fall.
I was speaking to someone the other day who was talking about the impact reduced oil activity in the North Sea was having on house prices in Aberdeen - it's very much a buyer's market at the moment.
But it’s great for finding reasonably priced student flats. When I think of the hovels I lived in during my student years there, shared loo on the stairs, etc., and all far from the uni, and the places my son has been, there’s no comparisons. And that despite there being so many more students in the city than previously.
A similar thing happened in Orkney in the mid/late 70s: the oil terminal at Flotta brought a flurry of ridiculously well-paid jobs and sent house prices through the roof.
Not having lived there for nearly 40 years, I'm not sure how the turn-down has affected things, although I know from Facebook pages that there's a frightful shortage of places to rent there.
I don't understand why nobody is pushing geothermal energy. We've got all these abandoned coal mines lying around... even if only half of them are usable, that's potentially a lot of energy. There are some people working on it in Wales, I believe?
A similar thing happened in Orkney in the mid/late 70s: the oil terminal at Flotta brought a flurry of ridiculously well-paid jobs and sent house prices through the roof.
Not having lived there for nearly 40 years, I'm not sure how the turn-down has affected things, although I know from Facebook pages that there's a frightful shortage of places to rent there.
Back in the early 70s when the first oil arrived in Aberdeen, they were careful to explain the life cycle of the industry: exploration, construction, production, and decline. The message then was: look ahead. I've been away a long time too, but I'm not sure that there was ever a serious post-oil strategy of any consequence. It didn't take crystal balls to see the decline in house prices approaching, but if you need a house, you buy one.
My brother and I bought houses of roughly equal value at roughly the same time. His is now worth almost double mine, because house prices here have been stalled for so long. But I love my house, neighbours and village and wouldn't change anything. I felt for my niece though; actually losing money is hard.
I don't understand why nobody is pushing geothermal energy. We've got all these abandoned coal mines lying around... even if only half of them are usable, that's potentially a lot of energy. There are some people working on it in Wales, I believe?
There's a project in the suburbs of Glasgow (Rutherglen) looking at heat from mine water. There are some technical issues, you can't just pump warm water out of mines because it's going to be heavily polluted, and changing water levels in old mines can have impacts on structural integrity (an old mine drift collapsing can have impact on the surface, especially for relatively shallow mines). There are also questions about water flow, essential for getting as much heat as possible to the extraction points. But, yes there are moves towards extracting heat from water in old mines. One big issue is social - people are no longer used to distributed heat networks, though many older tenements and housing districts were built with communal heating they've been converted to each home having it's own boiler to feed central heating, there's social reluctance to moving from independent heating each home controls to district heating where each home has less control over heat supplied.
For hard rock geothermal, there's some research being done to hopefully increase options in Scotland. THERMOCAL project, you may recognise one of the names of the people involved in that.
A few weeks ago there was a discussion on another thread of that useful word: bourach, or bùrach. Scotrail could hardly have provided a better example of it than the launch of their new phone app over the last few days.
Comments
I did get midged a bit as I liked to take an evening stroll by the loch, but apparently they were hellish only a few miles away round Loch Lomond. Yet we had very few - I can only guess it was just breezy enough.
There was also high excitement as the Coastguard helicopter landed on the lawn to drop a mountain rescue team off to attend a casualty on Ben A'an... which I was planning to ascend to catch the sunset. Eek!
And midsummer was incredible - the weather was perfect, blue skies, just hot enough, a gentle breeze - never known a day like it.
Thank you, Scotland, you were wonderful, and we will be hasting back. If only Gairloch wasn't two days each way...
Do haste ye back, Sanders (and CK), and maybe give wonderful West Lothian a look next time! 🙂
I woke in the middle of the night, and think I might have been woken by a flash of lightening, or the thunder, but I'm not sure. My son was awake in the night, and sent us footage of spectacular lightning and torrential rain.
Might manage it.
It’s fine up in these parts. Some rain yesterday evening, just enough to water the garden for me, but lovely sunshine with a bit of a breeze now. And we have never been warmer than the upper reaches of pleasant, as it were.
But I gather that further south it is worse. Where we once lived in the Borders they have had the gritters sanding the roads to cool them, but the road over the hill between where we lived and the next town is already closed because of heat damage. I expect it has melted and run down the hillside!
Nice day today though - warm, mostly sunny with a bit of a breeze.
The fire in the Cairngorms is really worrying. As one who used to live in the area, I know many people who are affected. I’m supposed to be visiting in Boat of Garten on Wednesday, and don’t know if my friend will still be in her cottage (which is outside the village on the Nethy side).
(ETA fixed code, DT)
I hope that our new PM puts a block on yet more drilling for oil etc., even though this may adversely affect employment in the short term. Not much use earning £££ when there's no planet left...but I appreciate that Scottish Shipmates may know a good deal more about how a ban on future drilling will impinge on the area.
It's a political football with various sides claiming to act for the people of Aberdeen. But, any rational assessment will recognise that the North Sea is producing less and less oil and gas, and new licenses issued in the future isn't going to change that, in the short term it's not creating jobs or even really protecting many of the current jobs, at best those new licenses would allow the industry to continue at something not too far below current employment levels for another decade or so. The number of people employed in the sector is declining, and there's a desperate need for alternative employment both for those skilled in the industry and for those who if the industry was still thriving would be taking jobs there and building up their skills. There are other industries being established using some of those skills, building and maintaining off-shore wind for example. But, these are not currently in the same league of plentiful well paid jobs as the oil industry used to supply.
Of course, that's also going to be generally the case if we actually start having the houses we need built, if we have enough houses built (and brought back into use) the demand for homes will fall, and that will mean prices generally fall. It's one of the reasons why governments keep saying "we need to build more houses" but the number of houses actually built falls far short of that - private house builders don't want to significantly reduce demand because that will cut profits, and politicians don't want to face an electorate who have seen the value of their homes fall.
But it’s great for finding reasonably priced student flats. When I think of the hovels I lived in during my student years there, shared loo on the stairs, etc., and all far from the uni, and the places my son has been, there’s no comparisons. And that despite there being so many more students in the city than previously.
Not having lived there for nearly 40 years, I'm not sure how the turn-down has affected things, although I know from Facebook pages that there's a frightful shortage of places to rent there.
Back in the early 70s when the first oil arrived in Aberdeen, they were careful to explain the life cycle of the industry: exploration, construction, production, and decline. The message then was: look ahead. I've been away a long time too, but I'm not sure that there was ever a serious post-oil strategy of any consequence. It didn't take crystal balls to see the decline in house prices approaching, but if you need a house, you buy one.
For hard rock geothermal, there's some research being done to hopefully increase options in Scotland. THERMOCAL project, you may recognise one of the names of the people involved in that.