Page 20 - James Pirie News

Parts of Scotland were hit by an earthquake this week, but it wasn’t a biggie. It measured just 2.1 ML on the Richter Scale which is what we might otherwise call a tremor. Each time you go up on the Richter Scale it goes up by a magnitude of ten. So 3.1 is ten times bigger than 2.1. On the 3^rd December the earthquake was felt in Morvern in the Highlands in the middle of the afternoon. And those reporting...

I don’t know about you, but I have become aware of a new James Bond themed quiz show on Amazon Prime, but despite my affection for 007 in his many incarnations, almost as many as the Doctor Whos, I still haven’t made the time to watch the show despite Scotland’s national treasure Brian Cox, not the astronomer, presenting the quiz. The show gives nine pair of everyday people the chance of winning up...

Well I hope you enjoyed the special day for our patron saint, Saint Andrew, but I’m not sure that the drone operator in the Orkneys who ditched a very expensive piece of hardware into the sea will have enjoyed it as the investigations around the crash continue. A remote operator saw that the new drone mail delivery service for Orkney showed a fault on the system. And following protocol they allowed...

This year what with the credit squeeze and the cost of living crisis me and the missus have started doing our Christmas shopping early, not to avoid the rush, but to pick up bargains where we can and set them aside for the festive time and spread the cost over a few months. This frugal urge doesn’t apply to all though as someone has paid £2.1m for a bottle of the true nectar, whisky. A single bottle...

I don’t know about you, but last week I had to drive through floods on three occasions and one was so deep I was feared that the car would stall and me and the missus would have to wade to safety and leave the darn thing in the water. However, we made it through and I had a moan about how we wouldn’t have had that problem if we still had my ancient Jeep which I sold not so long ago. So flood measures...

A couple of weeks ago we were basking in the glorious sunlight of Barcelona and visiting lots of art galleries and it was generally a marvellous experience with the highlight being the first day of a Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso exhibition before the hordes arrived, but the most puzzling was Roman Ondak’s stuff with his largest artwork a coat cloakroom installation. This was a load of coat hanging racks...

The sea has forests that keep our world healthy, but we don’t think about them in the same way that we worry and fret about the deforestation of the Amazon, but seagrass meadows are very important to our ecology rather nearer  to home. In Orkney teams are harvesting seagrass seeds to implant them across the nation’s coastal sea beds and improve the planet’s ability to absorb carbon and provide a...

Strangely enough I know a lot of Fionas, but the latest Fiona I hear is a bit of Greta Garbo kind of girl. She didn’t ask to be alone, or even rescued, when she was stranded at the bottom of a cliff for two years. But that’s because she was a sheep; and she’s now been rescued. I’m not sure if she knew she was lonely, even though the species is a flock animal, but she was dubbed “Britain’s Loneliest...

As you all know the 31^st is my son’s birthday, oops sorry, you didn’t know that, but it’s Halloween and the day of mischief. In fact that’s what we used to call it when I was a lad, Mischief Night. And woe betide any adult who had mortally offended us, especially if we had an egg or two. It’s the day before All Saints Day which is a very special day in the Christian calendar when goodness is set to...

How long could you live alone at the bottom of a Scottish cliff without going completely baah mi? Two years perhaps? That’s what’s happened to a ewe which has been stranded, literally on the strand below a cliff in Scotland’s north east. She was first spotted two years ago and now she’s known as the nation’s loneliest sheep. A canoeist,  not unlike like myself, was paddling along the coast of Sutherland...