The stolen Volkswagen Polo R remains parked by the village notice board. So much for the Police asking the owner to come and remove it. The question now being asked is how long will it stay here before being collected. The secretary of the Community Council says she saw someone skulking by the 'T' junction in the wee hours of New Years Day. Angus quietly wonders how you can tell if someone is 'skulking' ( maybe they were just 'lurking' ) but sensibly doesn't ask for details. The secretary is unsure whether the skulking figure was a man or a woman. She is also vague on whether there might have been more skulkers waiting in the car. The worry as of Sunday morning is that someone has 'borrowed' the car, come down to the coast, gone walking with their friends along the waters edge ( in the pitch dark ) while intoxicated , fallen over on the rocks and been swept out to sea. This seems an improbable sequence of events for a cold and dark Hogmanay morning but logic has never troubled the village rumour mill.
We're still topping up the hybrid from the charging point on the golf course. The new car communicates with us in a chattily breezy and unexpected way. Something the Volvo never did. This morning it sends me a text saying that we're averaging 43 MPG. This it goes on to tell me is better than 57% of drivers of the same model. Perhaps it will send a third text saying 'Well done !' When we started up the engine we had 9 miles of battery range. By the time the windscreen had been defrosted and the seats warmed up this was down to 3.
A hundred or so surfers out on the sand making good use of the waves barreling in from the bay. By the time we return from our walk the car park is completely full. I would say the surfers were enjoying themselves but is that the right word for bobbing up and down in the North Sea when it's -5 and there's a northerly wind blowing ?
Back out on the coast the turbines on the offshore wind farm glow in the rising sun. Donald Trump has said that the UK's investment in wind is a big mistake. Quite what should get our local wind farms into his crosshairs is something I must look into.
A different view on what's going on with the world :https://trackingpeoplesdaily.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-world-order
Sign of the times :https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2025/01/researchers-pave-the-way-for-climate-ready-crops-with-potatoes-that-thrive-in-heat/
11 comments:
Oh, I can tell you that!
After he built his controversial golf course north of Aberdeen, a wind farm was built directly offshore. He was raging. Opposed it every step of the way, used the law, tried politics, and, I’m pleased to say, lost.
‘‘Twas a big scandal. See “Alex Salmond; his works” passim
Hari OM
Surfing is a zen activity - once over the hurdle of just getting wet, the rest is blissful. (Well, that's the case in OZ and I expect it to be true even at minus five!)
I shall listen to the world order podcast over lunch. The potato article was very interesting. A long time ago, before emigration, I worked at the East of Scotland College of Agriculture (linked to Kings Buildings, Edin) and was a number cruncher for agric accounts and statistics. One of the professors I worked with was The Potato Man, John Anderson. He'd be quite fascinated with this research! YAM xx
Trump should get his own house in order before poking his long nose into other country's affairs. He seems hell-bent on alternatively dictating and threatening the UK, before he tries a take-over to make it yet another off-shore US state.
Coppa's Girl
Last summer I was riding a high speed train in France, passing wind turbines, I thought, this is a wind powered train, how neat.
Scotland, it is claimed, has 30% of Europes wind. Why you would want a) to trumpet that or b) measure it is beyond me but we certainly have a lot of offshore wind farms.
Different times have different names applied - I see now as The Time of the Carbunkle.
"The UK is making a very big mistake. Open up the North Sea. Get rid of windmills!", the US president-elect wrote.
The Texan oil producer Apache said at the time it was withdrawing from the North Sea by 2029 in part due to the increase in windfall tax on fossil fuel producers.
The photo of the wind farm glowing in the sunshine is beautiful and impressive. I didn't realize the wind farm is as huge as it is.
Between the Orange creature and Elon Musk, I'm quite sure that the British people are sick & tired of their bloviating. Donnie boy has never gotten over the wind farm offshore in Aberdeen, he's been raging about it ever since.
Trump hates wind turbines and keeps complaining about how they kill birds. (As if he cares about birds.) The Aberdeen story reminds me how Frank Lloyd Wright fought furiously to try and stop the construction of above-ground power lines in front of his Taliesin West compound in Arizona. When he failed to get the power lines buried, he restructured the entire compound to face the mountains behind instead. For me at least, this kind of thing is more forgivable where the principal is an artist.
We have a view of a wind farm high up on a ridge about 30 miles from us and it's a lovely site and not in the least disturbing. Would I want to live next door to it? No.
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