Post-[solstitial]* equinoctial

It must be spring, because it's klwilliams's birthday - and I hope it's a good one!

At the Farmers' Market the winter veg growers told us that it's spring now, and they won't come again until the autumn - but like everyone else, they were complaining of the cold.

As always, complaints about the weather must be calibrated for the expectations of people living on a small island in the Gulf Stream; nonetheless, there was a sifting of snow on the ground this morning, like sugar on a doughnut.

ETA: please to interpret the square brackets as a strike through, which I don't seem able to mark up.

Spring in the North

Despite the bleak weather, I'm daydreaming about the north, not the south: putting together a trip to Orkney in the summer. It's three years since we were last there, and then only a brief stopover on our way home from Fair Isle. Just as shocking, it's two years since I posted a photo from Fair Isle's North Light with a promise of context in "the next post". The day we visited the light was, by one definition, the first day of spring, since it was the day the first cruise liner of the year called in - and was greeted by a craft fair at the hall, mostly of beautiful but expensive knitwear. It was greeted, too, by a brief flurry of snow, but the day cleared and by the afternoon it was pleasant walking weather again.

My notes from that last day on Fair Isle are a series of disjointed jottings:

Everyone is friendly, solicitous, interested in how you travelled to the island: did you fly? "Oh, you came on the boat..."

There are two churches on the island - strictly, one church (the white Kirk of Scotland church) and one (Methodist) chapel, but a single congregation which alternates between the two.

A line of dialogue: "Oh, you said 'rabbits'. I thought you said 'raptors'."

Bill very kindly picked us up from the South Light, where we were staying, drove us up to the North Light and gave us a guided tour of the lighthouse. We opted to walk back, through sunshine and the odd snow shower. At a steep valley punctuated by ruined mills we ran into M and J, being guided round some of the island's sites by a resident archaeologist, and together we visited the remnants of the Heinkel which crashed there in 1941.

And the next day we took the Good Shepherd back to Mainland.