Greenland

Looks like the son of 5A Tong has swept aside all the conventions, treaties and understandings that have kept Europe broadly safe and peaceful for the last 80 years or so. I'm not overlooking the war in the Balkans, nor the current invasion of Ukraine. 

After flouting the rule of law by forcibly removing the (admittedly unelected) president of a sovereign country, namely Venezuela's ruler Nicolas Maduro, the power has gone to the head of the US president. 

Taking a leaf out of the book, written by Vladimir Putin, he now seeks to grab what he wants, never mind that Greenland is a territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, a close ally. He threatens all who verbally oppose his ambitions, and / or those that support Denmark and the Greenlanders in maintaining the status-quo. All the words of condemnation from various European leaders are just that: words. 

It looks that Donald Trump, like Putin, now only understands the rule of the bully, the rule of force. This could well spell the end of NATO, and expose us to the risk of an active threat from Russia. 

Trump turns 80 in June. His own mother once said: don't let Donald John anywhere near politics. How true Mary Anne Macleod's words now ring. 

 

11 January 2005

Twenty-one years ago today, 11th January started as your usual winter's day in the Islands. But when darkness fell, the wind rose to a screaming crescendo. Stornoway was battered by 100 mph winds, the old school I was staying in at South Lochs shook under the onslaught. Blue flashing lights across the water in Laxay indicated that police had closed the A859 to Tarbert, after a busdriver reported a sheep flying past his window. Power went off for 48 hours in my location, up to six days in nearby Sildenis. We all hunkered down in darkness, waiting for the storm to blow itself out. 

The next morning, 9 am. Phew, that was a bad one. Roof off here, trees down in the Lews Castle Grounds, boats wrecked at Newton. You got any damage? 

News began to filter north from South Uist. Five members of the same family missing out of Lionacuidhe, on the South Ford. They had fled towards the causeway in two cars, but never arrived. As the winds abated, a search of the Ford, the channel between South Uist and Benbecula, yielded all the missing. Lost to a storm surge the evening before. 

I can never bear to see the faces of the two wee ones lost that night. Or those if their parents and grandfather. 

I'll just post the link to the news report. 

RIP.

Lockerbie - 37 years on

Wednesday, 21st December 1988. 7.03pm. Flight PanAm 103 was en-route from London to New York, when it disappeared off air traffic control radar, substituted by several fragments, which fell to the ground. One piece slammed into the town of Lockerbie. All on board the plane were killed, alongside eleven townspeople from Lockerbie when houses were destroyed by falling debris and fire. The plane had been brought down by a bomb, planted by terrorists allegedly linked to the then Libyan government of Col Ghadaffi. The full chain of command for the attack has never been fully clarified, in public at any rate, and there are questionmarks as to why security services didn't manage to foil the plot. One man was put on trial, convicted and sentenced. In 2009, he was released on compassionate grounds and repatriated to Libya.

All that is immaterial to the relatives and friends of those killed. They are remembered in a memorial on Sherwood Crescent in Lockerbie, which was flattened by the downed plane. We remember them all. 

Image courtesy BBC

July 1981. On my way north with family for the annual holiday. As we headed north up the A74, an all enveloping horror made me lie down on the back seat. I cannot explain what it was about, or why. But after I had given in to my emotion, I looked up again and asked where we were. "Lockerbie", came the answer, and I saw the sign for the A709 turn-off to Lockerbie and Lochmaben flash by.


The same sign that can be seen in the footage from December 1988. The location where parts of the plane came down. Don't ask me to explain the coincidence. I can't.

In 1988, I was a student in Holland, and given to watch rubbish on the television. That evening, the Lockerbie images flashed by - and that road sign. A74 Glasgow, the North - A709 Lockerbie, Lochmaben.

May the innocent victims of Lockerbie, from the plane, or on the ground, all rest in peace.

Pearl Harbor Day

On 7th December 1941, the Empire of Japan attacked the United States' Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was to bring the US into the Second World War, after more than two years at the sidelines of the conflict. This move signalled the beginning of the end for the Japanese Empire: one of its leaders observed that we have wakened a giant. Three years and eight months later, an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and another one on Nagasaki prompted the surrender of Japan. The war in the Pacific was brutal, and indescribably atrocities were visited upon those under Japanese occupation, not to mention upon any prisoners, or prisoners of war.

The Japanese emperor was stripped of his status as a deity in exchange for not having to face war crimes charges. Japan has never apologised, for whatever good that would have done, for its actions during WW2; and its neighbours, like Korea and China, still regard the land of the Rising Sun with suspicion.

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #30

 NaBloPoMo comes to a close for another year, and once again, I have not blogged every day in November. I have not been in the habit of blogging regularly since I took to writing on Facebook. However, a blog affords you the space to write more expansively, and you have more versatility in posting pictures. Late November sees some very short days here, with sunset before 4 pm. I shall close NaBloPoMo for 2025 with some images at dusk, taken last Friday, 28th November. 

I'll continue to blog irregularly going forward. 

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #29

 I have been in the Isle of Lewis for 21 years now, and things never seem to change. They are going to now in a major fashion. The local authority has granted planning permission in principle for the construction of an electricity converter station, just south of the Lews Castle Grounds near Macaulay Farm. This is near the turn-off for Arnish on the A859 road towards Tarbert. The electricity hub will convert the AC current, generated by on-shore and off-shore windturbines, to DC for transmission down a 50-mile subsea cable to the Scottish mainland. Landfall will be at Dundonnell, south of Ullapool, and the cable will continue further east towards Beauly, near Inverness. 

The converter station will stretch a total of 400 yards, with buildings rearing up to 90 feet into the sky.  It will be visible from far and wide, and basically turn that area of the island into an industrial wasteland. 

Yesterday, I walked down to the Arnish Road, upon seeing reports that the double-tracking of that road had commenced. This is part of the project. It was not pretty, and I find it horrible to see vegetation stripped off the bedrock and diggers tearing up the land. Some call it progress. I don't really agree. 

Who is going to benefit from those renewable energy projects? We are supposed to get £4.5m per annum in community benefit, except this will now be syphoned off into a Scotland-wide pot from whence we'll get zilch. Jobs? Just for a couple of years, and the majority of the work will be done by imported labour. These people will be housed in accommodation blocks at Willowglen and Sandwick - only to move away once the project is complete in 2031. 

Another gripe. The landfall station for the offshore windfarm will be north of the Barvas Machair, in (what the developer admits is) challenging terrain. Initially, they referred to the machair as scrubland. It is in fact a protected habitat. But it's money that talks here. And government policy. 

 

 

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #23

 The war in Ukraine is moving towards its 4th anniversary next February. In 2022, the Russian Federation invaded the territory of its western neighbour, having already occupied the Crimea and areas of the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk since 2014 through proxies. Ukraine is resisting valiantly, but is inexorably, slowly losing terrain and men. As Russia invaded without provocation, any ceasefire that includes ceding territory to Russia by Ukraine would be unfair. However, that is exactly what Donald "Chamberlain" Trump is proposing. Let's not forget what preceded this war. 

Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, assisted a secessionist movement in Abchazia, a rebellious province of Georgia (on the east coast of the Black Sea) in splitting off from Georgia. Apart from loud protests back in August 2008, no military consequences ensued. Putin occupied the Crimea, part of Ukraine, in March 2014, without any military consequences. Putin's forces allegedly shot down a civilian airliner over the east of Ukraine in July 2014, with the loss of 300 lives - without any retalitatory action. Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This time round, Ukraine's allies rallied round with supplies of military hardware and intelligence. When Donald Trump became US president in January, he started off by giving Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zhelensky a row in the White House. Trump likes strongmen, like North Korea's Kim Jong Un and Russia's Putin. And Putin manipulates Trump. 

We saw in the 1930s what happens when you try to pacify aggressors. "Peace for our time", Neville Chamberlain said in November 1938, upon adorning a piece of paper with some more ink in Munich. Adolf Hitler did not pay the slightest attention, but invaded Czechoslovakia the next year, followed by Poland in September 1939. Only then did we have a declaration of war from Britain and France. Had these allies stood up to Hitler upon his incursions into the Rhineland in 1936, for instance, war might have been averted. But we'll never know. 

We'll see what happens if Trump's peacedeal is adopted.