Found myself going up and down to Stornoway these two days, rather than being out and about. It's called bad planning, unfortunately. As I've said before, Lewis's main town is not exactly the Venice of the North, but it's looking slightly less drab than normal,due to the Christmas decorations being up. They were lit on December 2nd. Christmas is very close now, so town is very busy indeed with hoards of islanders jostling around in shops, frantically trying to get the shopping done. The driver on the Balallan to Stornoway bus always plays BBC Radio 2, and I'm already fed up with the Xmas songs. The weather has been persistently greyish. And very wild, particularly on the night 22nd to 23rd December. A gale was forecast for evening and early night, and boyo, did it blow. Good god above. The roof was making a racket, I thought at least all the tiles would come off. Rain was swept along the road - seen horizontal rain now. This was a mere force 10, I think. Come morning, the sun was out, and there were a few showers on the horizon. Quite innocent really. But by the time I came out of the library, at 12 o'clock, the clouds had taken over and rain was coming down again. Nonetheless, I went for a little walk, this time heading north out of town, past the Western Isles Hospital, and the hamlets of Lacasdail and Newmarket. In Laxdale, there is a well, which was improved and put in use by King Edward VII in 1902. Went off into the Tolastaidh / Tolsta road. Then climbed over a gate and walked across the saltmarsh to as close to the shoreline as I could get. And walked the same way back, after lunch.
On return to the hostel, somebody had been a bit zealous in the cleaning, in throwing out my old copy of the Stornoway Gazette which contained all the info about bus services in the islands over Christmas. Bit inconvenient.
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