One word? When seven would do…

Wednesday – I worked 🙂 For money 🙂

Clare who runs the teashop had a lunch party of 60 people to cater for. Fort William Historical Society coming to have a tour of the castle and eat lunch between boats. She was planning soup, sandwiches and tea / coffee and needed help. So I was down at the teashop for 9am ready to make sandwiches. 8 loaves of bread, many times of tuna, lots of eggs, much grated cheese, lashings of mayo and packets of ham later we had eight platters of sandwiches ready to be consumed. Never underestimate how long such things can take!

The first party came in at 1pm and I served soup from the big soup kettle and then teas and coffees and we just about turned it around again to be ready for the second sitting at 145pm.

Ady and the kids had spent the morning at the static learning about Scottish history and entertaining the couple of visitors that had arrived – Vikki bearing flapjack and Georgie with her camera wanting photos of us and the static for the Rum website. They had met the ferry which had contained our diesel 🙂 but not our food shopping 🙁 Argh! Hurrah for Jinty’s shop feeding us again.

They then all came down to the teashop and the kids spent some time with Mike looking at his laptop at wildlife photos while Ady took over from me serving soup so I could dash along to the school to meet Stuart Poole, the cluster headmaster for Rum, Canna and Knoydart primary schools. It had been an incidental meeting last week at the pier which had led to him offering a chat and me thinking it mightn’t be a bad idea to make contact with ‘the enemy’ if for no other reason than to reassure them about us.

I went armed with notepad and pen and he met me armed with the Highland council leaflet on Home Education. Which I have to say is one of the better informed leaflets on the subject I have seen! He said he had been informed that children were moving to the island and he had passed back the information that they had arrived but that is as far as any contact is likely to go unless we ask for support or someone expresses concern as the kids have never been to school anywhere, let alone Scotland or specifically this area we are not leaving a trail behind to be followed up on so won’t arouse any interest really.

The school here is about to close for a year – the nursery has a vacancy that has not been filled and there is no obligation to do so but once that child (Eve, Sean & Ali’s daughter) reaches school age they will have to reopen the school again. From our point of view we require no support, are not really desperate for resources and I don’t want the scrutiny anyway but I did talk to Stuart about the possibility of flexischooling with very minimal attendance in order to keep the school open, get funding and have access to stuff for us if we needed it. He is going to speak to his superiors and see if there is any mileage in such ideas. More on that if anything comes of it. If nothing else what I achieved with that visit was reassuring the only real likely person to voice a concern about our kids and their education that we’re doing just fine and there is no need for alarm!

Back to the teashop to help clear up and then we sat in the sunshine enjoying a post-catering day beer or two. I shot off inbetween to visit Vikki as I’d missed her twice this week and was not sure if she actually wanted to talk to me about something specific or just a hello so I went and had a cup of tea with her.

It was lovely sitting in the sun with a cup of tea and then again back at the shop with a beer. I spent an hour in the teashop catching up online briefly before heading home for dinner. Ady put the birds away while I washed up and then we actually all managed a fairly early night. When Ady took Bonnie out for her last walk it started to rain really heavily and didn’t really stop til morning but in the same way as a tent is really cosy on a wet and windy night so is the static so once I was snuggled down with my hot water bottle it was lovely to drift off to sleep with the sound of the rain.

Today was Shearwater day again. We half debated not doing it as the weather was not great but we need to be tough and hardy 🙂 We did some one to one stuff – Davies and I wrote some more of his story and talked about different words to use instead of ‘said’ when writing dialogue (joked, argued, suggested, ranted, replied etc.) while Ady and Scarlett did some uppercase / lowercase stuff. We then walked down to the library to pick up some books – some early readers for Scarlett, some more Scottish history, some cookery books for the Come Dine With Me evenings and a bit of fiction for me that looked interesting.

I’ve been in touch with the library service on the mainland and am hoping to take on the little library here which is in dire need of some love and attention but has great promise and could be amazing as we have access to all the stock we want. It’s being raised at the next RCA meeting so I’ll wait til then to officially offer and ensure it doesn’t offend anyone but I’m very excited about a library! 🙂

Sandy was in his workshop (which was built as a swimming pool in the 60s and is amazing) and called us over for a chat. He said he’s really excited about us being here and has heard great things about us already and thinks we’ll be really good for the island and community 🙂 Always nice to hear. He offered some more scrap wood and metal too so we’re going to be doing just fine for building materials for all the shelters and stuff we want to get built.

Back home to drop off Bonnie and collect more clothes before heading to the pier via the Teashop to collect some leftover sandwiches from yesterday for our lunch and then we met Mike, Georgie and Ian (new resident) and boarded the Shearwater for a rather colder, wetter, windier trip than last week with far less to see but plenty of promise of more stuff in the coming weeks and months. 2 minke whales were spotted just off Rum on Tuesday this week and Ronnie the skipper was showing us all his pictures of sunfish, basking sharks, minke whales, dolphins etc from the last couple of years. It’s our plan to do the boat trip pretty much every week I think 🙂

After that we were mostly in need of hot drinks so came home to warm up. We did have plans to tackle the compost bin making today but it’s too wet to choose to be out if we don’t need to so we’ve come to the village hall to do online stuff, place our veg box order and make a couple of phonecalls instead.

Tomorrow morning we have a couple of campers interested in crofting coming up for a cup of tea to chat to us about crofting, living in a static and more. Should be interesting :).