Page 20 - Blog

Elvish is In the Building

And just for your delight through the questionable magic of Artificial intelligence I’ve created an ELVISH Presley to cheer you through the last few days of frantic activity in the festive season.  So for The Wonder of You we’ve got a Santa’s sack full of goodies. Just don’t step on Santa’s Blue Suede Shoes so we can create an Unchained Melody of great value. And because...

Well Lady Kim and Sir Andy Murray certainly know how to go about a top notch, or should I say ace, family Christmas. They had that grand old lady of the kitchen Mary Berry show up and film a Christmas cooking special at their Cromlix Hotel in Scotland. They bought it the year of Andy’s first Wimbledon win in 2013, I remember it well my missus was in the crowd and she fainted from the heat. It’s a red-head...

Have you ever found anything interesting on your garden fork or spade, well me neither? But 70 years ago a schoolboy was digging up potatoes in the gardens of his school in Fife and dug up what the thought was a spud, but it was far from that. It was in fact a 4,000 year old treasure. The lad was being punished for a misdemeanour, but he found a genuine piece of ancient history.  The “spud” was in...

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...