Page 7 - James Pirie News

Do you enjoy your job, is your profession a life’s work? A certain pilot who has just retired from flying to Orkney can answer in the affirmative after 21 years of island hopping for Loganair. Not only did the flyer enjoy the scenery he loved the chit and chat to the passengers which enlivened the short hops where he was both pilot and crew. Sometimes he a was also the baggage handler too. 

The flights...

You might have noticed a gap in the blogs. Well me and the missus took a sneaky week in Provence thanks to a friend with a pad in France. The weather was so unlike home, clear skies and starry starry nights. We managed to go to Aix en Provence twice, the first time because we got the day of the Cezanne tour wrong and had to go back the following day. But that was no hardship, only a 90 minute drive...

There is  wonderfully named  organisation called the Fireball Alliance that tracks meteors and meteorites across the country and they have issued a plea  for those wandering the hills and conquering Munros to look out for bits of debris from a pretty big space object that fell on the 3^rd July this year.  It wasn’t like the blips of light that you get from the very small meteorites that we...

I’ve not been wowed by the release of a spin off to the great TV series Outlander, but that’s just because the characters can never be as interesting and multi-faceted as Jamie and Claire in the original, but for those who need their fix Blood of My Blood is streaming now. However, away from the enormous plasma screen, Hollywood is still exploring history with only the occasional tongue in cheek....

When I first took my youngest son to the USA I took him to a local eatery to acclimatise him to America. It was Seven Brothers an American institution and if you could have seen the look on his face when they brought the enormous meal it would startle you. The portions were generous beyond belief.  But this week it has been three brothers in the news. They are the MacLeans from Edinburgh and they...

If you are familiar with the Clydeside skyline, then you may have seen the Greenock Titan Crane? This monster mover was built in 1917 and now there are exciting proposals using the giant structure as the base for the nation’s longest city zipline, and who doesn’t love a zipline? There was a time when the power of shipbuilding in Glasgow was one of the foundations of wealth and security in Scotland....

 It took a turn by a singer song writer at the Edinburgh Fringe to reveal that there had been an impostor Palm Tree at the Royal Botanic Garden in the capital and instead of being a rare endangered species it was “as common as muck” and nothing special at all in the botanic world other than its age and girth. The palm tree in question had arrived in the nation in the 1790s, being loaded onto a ship...

It used to be the case of just getting through it when you were doing “Dry January,” but now there are so many non-alcoholic options for getting through that grim month.  For ages there has been alcohol-free beer which is now of terrific quality, according to my missus who is a devotee of zero beer. And there are numerous very low, or zero alcohol wines, which I have to say is not of the same standard...

Have you ever wondered how the animals from the distant shores of Australia would fare in Scotland’s wet and windy shores?  Well you need wonder no more, because everyone’s idea of the second most cuddly inhabitant of the land of Oz, the wallaby lives here. The cuddliest is of course the koala! But the  Koala needs eucalyptus trees which we lack.   However,  shortly after the end of the Second...

It’s August it Must Be an Amber Weather Warning

Well Storm Floris, no that’s not Storm Florist is bashing across our shores, so that is a sure sign it is the summer holidays and  the kids are off school. We can expect 90 mph winds seems. If you want to catch a train down the East Coast Mainline you can’t. If you want to go to the Fringe on the Beach you shouldn’t. If you are planning on flying from...