Pics and trivia
Saturday the ninth of May 2020
This is the moon rising behind houses across the road with a streetlamp competing to illuminate.
(it was at ten past midnight so really it was Tuesday's moon but …)
Here it is fifty minutes later having risen into the clear sky
These aqualegia in my garden are beautiful. I can take no credit for them, or for anything growing in my garden, as I haven't planted anything since moving in some twelve and a half years ago.
This is our cob swan - he spends about sixty percent of his time at the Eastern end of the pond chasing the youngsters off the water and the rest of the time near his pen on the nest. He's lately taken to pursuing the greylag geese, trying to chase them off the pond - presumably they look enough like small swans to seem a threat.
There's a couple of picnic tables and benches next to the car park on which folk leave goodies for the birds. This rather skinny looking robin was presumably collecting food for its kids.
There's a couple of picnic tables and benches next to the car park on which folk leave goodies for the birds. This rather skinny looking robin was presumably collecting food for its kids.
The turtles were unmoving on their log until a coot chased a moorhen over them when the smaller one dived into the water.
Claws!
Turtles do move, but not a lot
I believe, with no conviction, that these fish are carp.
You can't tell the sizes from these pictures but all of those above were over a foot - thirty centimetres - long. Some were almost twice that. The water was 'boiling' in places - presumably they're mating (?)
Here she is, the great crested grebe still keeping the eggs warm on their travesty of a nest.
A bird that I've not seen often round here - I believe* it's a greenfinch.
*(always open to correction)
Another flower that came with the flat - about five inches - twelve centimetres - across. I've no idea what it is.
Thursday the Tenth
Didn't go walkies at all today
Back garden bluetit on the fat feeder
Trivia
Whisky Galore
The films Whisky Galore (1949 & 2016) were based on an actual event:
After passing the Isle of Man, the weather had worsened, the winds had risen to gale force. As the winds drove SS Politician further off-course, at 7.40am she foundered on the unseen sandbanks off Rosinish Point on the Isle of Eirisgeigh.
Eriskay from the causeway twixt it and S Uist
The present location of the remains of the rear of the SS Politician
The SS Politician was carrying all manner of trade goods, from cotton to medicines to biscuits, but the ship is best remembered for the contents of Hold Number 5: some 264,000 bottles of Scotch whisky.
To the locals, beset by the privations of war and rationing, this was too good an opportunity to miss. Unofficial local ‘salvage parties’ began to form, with the men even donning their wives’ old dresses to prevent their own clothes becoming stained by incriminating ship’s oil. Few if any regarded what they were doing as stealing; the foundering of the ship made its cargo theirs to save under the ‘rules of salvage’.
The authorities, however, did not share this view, not least because the whisky was destined for the United States – and so no duty had been paid on it. Police raided villages and crofts in an effort to recover the liquid cargo – and the locals secreting their ill-gotten gains wherever they could. Or else they just drank them.
Many of the estimated 24,000 bottles of whisky ‘salvaged’ from the wreck by the islanders were never seen again.
As official salvage operations were called off, the ship’s hull was dynamited to destroy any further temptation to explore its contents; but the odd bottle was still washed up on nearby beaches, and a local diver found eight bottles of whisky in the wreck as recently as 1987. Two of these were sold for just over £12,000 by Scotch Whisky Auctions in 2013.
Hold Number 5 didn’t just contain whisky; it also held 290,000 10-shilling notes destined for the then colony of Jamaica – in other words, £145,000 or, in modern terms, several million pounds.
Reports filtered through of some of the notes being found at Benbecula, 25 miles north of the wreck site. By June 1941, four months after the SS Politician’s demise, branches of the Barclays and Midland Banks in Liverpool began reporting the presentation of water-damaged Jamaican 10-shilling notes. By 1943, the notes had turned up in London, across the south of England, in Stoke-on-Trent and in the north of Scotland.
also
Of course, contraband is not the only famous thing to have come ashore on Eriskay’s stunning white sands – the island is where Bonnie prince Charlie first set foot on Scottish soil.
It is said that the pink flowers that bloom here in the machair* grasses grew from seeds he dropped from his handkerchief on his arrival before heading off to the mainland to lead the Jacobite Rebellion.
*Machair ; sometimes machar in English) refers to a fertile low-lying grassy plain found on the Outer Hebrides. The best examples are to be found on North and South Uist, Harris and Lewis.
Sea Bindweed
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