Monday – Ady and I cautiously went down to Fliss and Sandy’s waterproofed up and in many layers. We’d not heard from them since Saturday morning despite me emailing Fliss to check everything was ok with them. Fliss came out as we arrived, gave me a kiss for my lovely email and reassured us that all was well.
We gathered net bags and off we went: Learning all the time! Way easier to fill a bucket than a bag, you just log ’em in without faffing about holding the bag open. Bag is good to decant once you get a full-ish bucket. Lots of layers is a bad idea. It’s not cold while you’re moving about and lots of wet layers is way worse than one wet layer. You will get wet. Hats and hoods are a bloody nuisance. Wind is possibly worse than rain if you have to choose one or the other. Nail varnish gets chipped really quickly but wearing gloves hampers your speed. My new wellies leak. Kneeling in water for any length of time will always mean you get a wet knee no matter what you are wearing. Crawling over rocks will result in bruised knees and aching backs.
So, winkle picking – educational and fund raising!
I suspect two mornings at it is not enough to form a proper opinion but so far we’ve quite enjoyed it. It makes us very grateful for our warm shower, fire, dry clothes and hot cups of tea, cheese on toast, home made soup etc. It is mindless, mundane stuff but kneeling next to someone else to chat to and laugh with and having that amazing view to look up at every time you pause for breath makes it worthwhile. Plus it will be cash in hand – Christmas hopefully paid for in full. Our plan is to earn £1000 which will buy the kids the couple of things they want each for Christmas and give us a chunk of money for a mainland visit in January to get Bonnie spayed and stay somewhere nice (with electricity, baths and TV!) and have a bit of a shopping trip to Inverness and stock up on stuff. With a goal like that in mind this feels like perfectly acceptable work.
So we did that until the tide started to come in, had a cup of tea with Fliss and Sandy and then met the boat which was supposed to be in early because it didn’t go to Muck but came in late due to weather. This was the only down side of the winkle picking as we were both soaked to the skin and having stopped for over an hour were starting to get shivery and chattery of teeth. Also there was nothing on the boat for us anwyay (despite us expecting lots of things) so we came home a bit fed up.
Good humour was quickly restored with showers, dry clothes, cheese on toast and cuddles with children.
We have two other ongoing things winding us up just now which are chasing a replacement delivery of a powerpack from Maplins which had been sat in Inverness for 5 days according to the live tracking and getting a refund of the returned one sent last Monday and getting dimensions and weight of boxes of the woodburner we want to buy so we can arrange a courier to collect it as the company do not deliver to the highlands and islands. Neither was proving straightforward and with limited internet and phone it was all getting very frustrating.
After a fairly unsatisfactory afternoon trying to sort that out we went down to the hall to meet a couple of representative from the planning department. We’d taken a few images of the house we are hoping to build along with a map of the croftland to show where we were thinking of building. We wanted to know if those all looked acceptable and then what issues might face over materials, ground works, power and water. We were utterly unprepared to be told that actually the croft sits outside of the designated development area so we may not be able to build at all and if we can then it would all be subject to various constraints including possibly needing to have vehicular access. Argh! We came out feeling hugely pissed off at the world in general but specifically the IRCT for once again doing a halfarsed job of things. Crofts should have been let with outline planning or at least the agreement that they would be eligible for building on. The access track should have been investigated further to check if it would pose a problem or not. Sigh.
We came home fairly pissed off but had a very nice curry which helped and we watched Attenboroughs Ark which also helped. Lovely, soothing David 🙂
This morning was an even earlier start but further rain meant we left the kids home. Fliss and Sandy have lent us their oilskin waterproofs and what a difference they make. Am now investigating the price for a set each for Ady and I – oh for car boot sales and charity shops rather than ebay. The tide was not low enough to start so we had a cup of tea with Sandy before we got going. We only did an hour or so today thanks to tide times and ferry coming in. Sandy did offer to collect our stuff from the ferry so we could carry on but we’d promised the kids we’d be back for lunch so we did our hour and then went to meet the boat. We still did about half a sack between us, definitely getting quicker. Tomorrow we should get about 4 hours at it so hopefully an even better haul. We’ll do it again Thursday and maybe Friday depending on weather and tide times. If we can manage to work in a couple of hours each day without it impacting too much on the children then we will do so.
The boat was far better today with our powerpack coming, my ebay salopettes which will be no good for winkle picking but were fantastically warm and cosy and dry for walking down to the village in later, my new headtorch and some more business socks for everyone. Also our animal feed from Harbro. Phew. We stuck the powerpack on charge and came home for lunch.
I got an email from Vikki asking for some proof of ID to send off for my directorship of Rum Enterprise so as there was a break in the rain I took the opportunity to try out my new trousers and walked down to see her and drop off the paperwork. I had a chat and she reassured me that they’d spoken more to the planning bods and been told that actually there should not be a problem with building on the croft aslong as we adhere to certain guidelines, that they are going to turn a blind eye to the static not having planning permission but that we would be well advised to speak to Building control regarding what they would say about stuff like the access track. I got home to find an email from Lesley saying much the same thing. Being gobby at the shop about how pissed off I was last night certainly paid off with lots of people jumping to try and sort stuff out. Word had got all around the village (and I’d not even been THAT angry in public, wonder how much people would jump if I really lost my rag here) and Mike came up to check we were okay this evening.
Oh swings and roundabouts. So lovely emails today from Gav and Laura (new crofters), Maplins power pack turned up and they are now looking for the returned parcel. Winkle picking went okay, log burner people finally got back to us with weight and size and I’ve found a courier for about £20 which is nowhere near as scary as I’d feared so we may even have that here and fitted by this time next week alleviating the while damp and mouldy issues. Planning stuff will no doubt be a further headache to deal with but we are at least being supported and backed up here and the leaping to our aid when we kicked off a bit was very heartening. Let’s see what tomorrow brings – I know it will include winkles and a meeting with various people in the afternoon as I attend my first Visitor Management Plan steering group which I am a new member of.