Festivals

In Orkney, the Nature Festival and Folk Festival both occur during May. Perhaps surprisingly, due to our busy lives, we attended more events of the latter than of the former. We did, however, visit the seabird cliffs at Marwick Head and have a good chat with RSPB staff who had set up telescopes to allow members of the public to view the various Gannets, Kittiwakes, numerous species of auk and Fulmars.

For the folk festival, on the opening night we went to see Anna Massie of Blazin' Fiddles and RANT fame (plus BBC Radio Scotland's Travelling Folk trad music programme), who shared the bill with Polenta, a Finnish quartet of three fiddles and an acoustic guitar.

The following evening, to indulge our trad/funk/electronica yearnings, we went to see Elephant Sessions in a nightclub in Kirkwall. The gig didn't start until 10.30pm so we didn't arrive home until after 1am. Then, 24 hours later, Megan went to see The Chair, another late gig. I reckoned I wouldn't manage two late nights in a row, so she had a girls' night out with friends.

On the final afternoon of the festival, we wandered down the hill to listen to the Stromness RBL Pipe Band. Whilst not Scottish by descent, the pipes speak to my emotions on a visceral level, with several of the tunes bringing a happy tear to my eye. As a left-leaning person, I guess I am Scottish by dissent. Halfway through the band's set, I realised that the vista of the Stromness rooftops on the horizon from where we were stood was the same as the logo on the big bass drum.

During the past week, I have been trying to wrangle the formatting of the Orkney Field Club's annual journal, which meant that I was at home when a delivery turned up for one of our neighbours. The noise of a large lorry trying to negotiate their narrow entrance eventually broke through my concentration and I went outside to offer to move my car if that would help. In the end, the better solution was to allow the lorry to park on our land and crane the delivery across our garden.

Mocha was a bit too interested for my comfort!

One recent evening, Megan walked into the lounge from the garden and announced that she had found an interesting white spider on the house wall. The most interesting part of the situation was that Megan was having anything to do with spiders at all, as she's even less keen on them than I am. By the time I found my camera and wandered out into the garden, things had taken quite a turn. The scene I discovered was initially rather confusing.

The white spider appears to be a Xysticus species which has seized an Amaurobius species for its supper. The slugs are simply out looking for romance, as they are hermaphrodite and it is Pride Month after all.