Another busy weekend. The weather was not great on Saturday. In fact the Churchill barriers were closed at one point. A driver did try their luck but a wave hit them and they were stranded on the barriers. The Police went to resuce the driver and managed to drag her through her window into the Police car as it was too dangerous to leave the car, scary stuff! Photo (not mine)

Down in Voy we just had a bit of rain and some gusty winds, enough to discourage you from going out sightseeing. So I decided to start to sort out the workshop. This building is going to make a great workshop when it is all kitted out. I had the foresight to buy some racking ‘Dahn Sarf’ and that got moved with us. So playing a large version of Tetris, or more like the sliding block puzzle that I am getting quite good at by now. I moved the boxes in the workshop around to make a bit of space and then started to construct the racking. I had five of these to do and although I thought at first just to do a couple, I got carried away a bit ! By about 5pm I had all the racking built and all the boxes unpacked and roughly sorted which gave me space in the centre of the workshop again. The forecast for Sunday was good so we both decided to use the morning to go through the Container and find the other stuff for the workshop that had been incorrectly labelled by Pickfords as ‘Office’ and also to try and find some of the other bits that we seemed to be missing. Pickfords did and great job of packing, however some of the boxes near to the end seemed to have a real mix of items, for example we found two lens for the telescope in the box marked ‘office’ which had paper and two axle stands! Unpacking these boxes can be quite an adventure!

For lunch we decided to take a drive to Birsay tearooms and on the way we popped in to Yellow Bird Gallery to see Jon and Lesley who are the artists there. If you remember the picture in our sitting room at Melford of the two yellow birds, this was an early purchase from there, by Anna’s daughters for her birthday some years ago. We stopped for a nice chat with Jon and bought some of their cards, Lesley was out at a craft fair in Evie.

We had a nice light lunch at the Birsay tearooms, the view from this place is lovely and it is one of our favourite places to eat, although it is very busy in the Summer, those of our friends who have been up with us may remember this place and I have included a little snap shot of the view from our table there.

We decided to drive back past the Orkney Brewery as I had run out of beer and the Grand Prix was sitting on the recorder waiting for me. I bought a seasonal one that I hadn’t tried before called Clootie Dumpling, I shall report back! The brewery has a very smart visitor centre and restaurant and is worth a visit.

We drove back past the Ring of Brodgar to take a quick look at the work that they are doing there, it does look strange with scaffolding up in one area where they are trying to improve the drainage apparently, although I would have thought that if it has been ok for five thousand years it should still be ok, but I’m sure someone will enlighten me. I said my hellos to the stones and we headed back to unpack the boxes we had excavated earlier and to hang some of the more of the pictures and paintings up.

And now to watch the Grand Prix, don’t tell me who won!