Festival time

Hurray - Stornoway's sleepy streets come alive to the strains of what a friend of mine used to call 'riddly diddly' music. I have been to so many gigs...anyway to start at the beginning. Jan arrived, wondering what to expect, at Stornoway's tiny airport and Bonnie was overjoyed to see her. Now the dog's holiday is complete: Annie and Martin, me, and Jan, all in the SAME PLACE! And I was quite pleased to see her, too ;-) A friend all of my own! Imagine! Jan settled down nicely into life in the van, which mainly consists of trying to remember where you put things. She's good at that (ie trying to remember) so it was plain sailing for her. We started the Festival at Stornoway's very impressive arts centre, An Lanntair ('The Lighthouse) seeing Mary Ann Kennedy with her band Na Seoid (sorry about the missing accent: 'The Heroes) with another guy from another band Skipinnish. Some really haunting Gaelic tunes (pronounced GA-LIK not GAY-LIK for Scottish Gaelic) and most of the banter being in Gaelic. Met up with Annie and Martin there, and then stayed on for the Festival Club, which was Skipinnish doing a Ceilidh. Next day we were in a Gaelic taster class from 11-1, taken by a very nice and intelligent Gaelic Studies student from Aberdeen University. Gosh what a language. It's not actually all that complex grammatically - no more than yer average, by the looks of things - but the mapping between the spelling and the sound is so different from English (try remembering that 'mh' is pronounced 'v', for example). The other thing is does is lose consonants (as English does) when certain sounds fetch up next to each other, and you have to remember which ones. But I did learn that 'Glayva' (as in the drink, it's not spelt like that in Gaelic) means 'very good'. All you naming specialists, take note.

After Gaelic we waited hours to be fed an omelette and chips at a cafe, and then walked around a lot and went to see the festival tent, then realised at 3pm we should have been at Saltfishforty gig - two very funny guys from Orkney. Managed to catch about the last few tunes, then back to the campsite before the evening do in the Big Blue tent - Julie Fowlis (who we missed because we were having a nap - typical) and then the Red Hot Chili Pipers (sic) and Four Men and a Dog. We moderately enjoyed the pipers, who are basically a high-energy bagpipe covers band (We Will Rock You, etc) but the crowd were wild for them. Much preferred Four Men (no dog) who were Irish, and played music that just made you want to dance. We went to the Festival Club at An Lanntair afterwards and saw them all over again. Because I wanted a drink, we left the van on the main road through Stornoway (really near to the bridge where you get across to the music tent) and slept there, oblivious to the passing traffic.


All through this I was attempting to be a journalist. It's different from my day job, because there, the people I'm talking to have usually hired me/us to do something they want. Journalism, you have to go up to people who don't know you from Adam and ask them things. And you have to think of sensible things to ask them. It was all a bit of a challenge to me, but we did go into the performers' bar and met the buran player from Four Men, who had asked for single women to come up to him during the gig but didn't seem so brave when we did. And I also talked to stewards and security men a lot to find out what they thought of things, and also chased anyone with a non-Scottish accent to find out the story about how they came to be here, which Caroline MacLennan who runs the Festival had expressed a particular interest in. We surprised some very nice Swedes at the next table in the Indian restaurant late one night, and I got some nice comments from them. But the man who was wearing a bandanna and doing the Pointy-Fingers dance at every event we went to, as well as a couple from Rumania who were so into each other I didn't want to look...I'm sorry, I just couldn't. I did interview two Germans wearing pork-pie hats and odd flared trousers, who apparently were journeyman carpenters wearing traditional dress, and didn't manage to get anything interesting. I must evolve my interview technique from something along the lines of 'So, you're not from here then?' It tends to elicit the response, 'No, we are from Germany', and not much else. So I say 'Where in Germany?' and they say 'Schleswig-Bad-Holtenstein-am-Rhein-mit-Slagsahne'. I am none the wiser. 'Do you like Celtic music?' 'Yes, we are listening to it often'. 'How did you get here?' 'We are on bicycles, and we have a small tent.' Und so weiter. It is not the stuff of headlines (although if you've seen the Stornoway Gazette recently, it might be: 'German carpenters join in', for example. Or 'Swiss role in Festival').

Friday we attempted to go to Callanish (site of ancient stone circles) with Annie and Martin, who came to pick us up in their car. We'd just turned into the road to Callanish and BANG - we were hit by a local coming in the other direction, who removed our wing mirror and made the driver's side window explode. We weren't hurt, but the car was full of glass - so we just had to turn round (after I'd taken loads of insurance-style pictures) and go to the nearest garage. Annie and Martin spent the rest of the day sorting that out, finding another car, getting police to attend, etc. The bloke drove away (perhaps he normally drives in the middle of the road, and we were expected to know) but he later reappeared at the garage we had gone to to get a cup of tea and sort ourselves out, to get petrol! He didn't want to admit it was his fault and seemed unduly concerned with the state of his own car, which looked like it wasn't its first experience of this kind of thing. The cafe was full of fisherman, and had the slipperiest floor, to the extent that Martin came in from his ordeal with the police and the other driver, sat on a chair, and promptly toppled over, very slowly and gracefully, onto the floor. You can understand they decided to call it a day.

Jan and I went back to the campsite in a taxi, and in the evening met up with Annie and Martin to see Ross Ainslie and Jarlath Henderson, who I really enjoyed - really young guys playing guitar, small pipes and whistle. Jarlath sang a song that made me cry buckets to the extent I had to go out and blow my nose! Annie and Mart weren't blown away by them - and we all thought they could do with a few more people on the stage (a drummer? a fiddle?) but I was so impressed with them, and particularly by their youth and the new compositions they'd come up with.

Saturday we went out to Annie and Mart's B and B to meet their landlady and visit them. It sounds a bit odd to be meeting people's landladies, but Ann runs a house where anyone can come and stay who needs a bed, so there are always loads of people there. While we were talking to her, she whipped up a batch of breakfast scones, and was very useful indeed on the subject of Bonnie, who wasn't at all well that day. I'd noticed she had a bad tummy (which isn't unusual) but she was very hunched up and unhappy that morning, and by the time she'd lain under the table for an hour or so while we were eating scones she couldn't get up and squealed heartbreakingly when she tried. Martin had to carry her out to the van. So Ann helped me get a vet's appointment back in town for 10 to 2, which put paid to the plan of going to Tong for the Highland Games (turned out that Annie and Martin didn't make it either, in the end). The vet was great - said she didn't think the stomach and the neck thing were related, gave Bonnie a jab, and I've got more Metacam for her (painkiller and muscle relaxant). I'm also having to feed nothing but rice, chicken (Co-Op delicatessen ready-roast) and vegetables for her tummy. Her neck seems quite a bit better now but we were really worried about her: I've never seen her that bad, just unable to move and all hunched up in a blanket. She has another vet's appointment for Thursday to see how she's going on, and we've just been for little walks since Saturday (it's Monday today). Just before us at the vet two men came in with a very old, grey-muzzled, blind border collie on a blanket (it's border collie central here: sheepdogs) and left him/her with the vet: I guess it was probably its last trip). It was one of those country vets' surgeries - not the kind that looks like a doctor's, but the kind that looks a bit of a mess, and has tall shelves behind the counter with sheep drench and horse liniment on. The feature that most struck me, though, was a pair of blow-up parasites (presumably supplied by a drug company) fully a foot long: a sheep tick and a flea. With all the legs and everything. Yuk. I wasn't at all sure about sitting underneath an inflatable tick while we were waiting.



Saturday night was great though, and we had relaxed because we'd seen the vet and felt OK about the Bon. We decided to sleep out again (An Lanntair carpark this time, just next to where the ferry docks) and the acts on in the tent were Seth Lakeman, Bodega and Shooglenifty. Seth L is a very handsome dark-haired Cornwall person who sings his own compositions as well as traditional songs - but we found it all a bit hard work. Despite it being quite rocky (the music not the coastline) it's hard to get on down to songs about the loss of 8 men in a lifeboat disaster. And the acoustic guitarist, who we felt looked a bit like Alvin Stardust, was emitting waves of ego to rival SL's own. Ego is not a thing that happens in Scottish Celtic music - not noticeably to me anyway - which is one of the nice things about it: people seem to see themselves as vessels for the tradition who owe a lot to their mentors, and will always talk to you about how so-and-so can REALLY sing/play, rather than thinking they're any good themselves. Anyway, we managed to miss Bodega - don't know how because we were there at 8, but another feature of these things is that they start on time, rather than keeping everyone hanging about for hours to wait for His/Her Egoness to turn up, but Shooglenifty were our favourite band of the whole thing: lots of odd mixtures of styles (Jan was trying to get me to Merengue at one point) but really danceable music, led by a mad-looking fiddler who looked like a cross between Billy Connolly and Roy Wood from Wizzard (remember him? No?). At the Festival club later we saw Shooglenifty again, and really enjoyed Bodega (well, I did: Jan was muttering about sound engineering, but then she does that). They were all really young, and musically I thought they were great. Shooglenifty came on again too, so we stayed until the end at about 2 and then staggered over and slept in the van.

Sunday, ah. Sunday, EVERYthing is shut. No cafes, petrol stations, shops, pubs. No ferries, therefore no Sunday papers (they arrive on the first ferry in on a Monday). Nowhere to get a coffee, so we self-catered and then drove (without incident this time) to Callanish, where we froze a bit at the stones and looked at the closed cafe in the closed visitor centre, and then had (guess what) a nap before I had to take Jan to the airport. Where we were a bit wobbly about saying goodbye to each other. Apparently, when they inaugurated Sunday flights they had Presbyterian ministers protesting on the runway. But there were quite a lot of people needing to leave after the Festival, and I found myself sitting next to a familiar face - someone I can't remember the name of, of course - but an extremely funny guy who was in the Scottish sketch show 'Chewin' the Fat'. Most memorable, I recall, as a lighthouse-keeper.






So where did the time go? We had a BRILLIANT time, and it was so good to see Jan. Because this is our third co-existing holiday we are getting quite good and not falling over each other in a small place, and it was lovely to have her company, particularly since we were going to gigs, because I've got used to having her at my side! And also because Bonnie was ill, and she gets as worried about her as I do. Jan likes to nap, which is good, because it's also one of my hobbies. And now she's gone we miss each other, and I have only a light coating of long red hair all over the van and several discarded bindis to remember her by (that's not true, actually, the text message traffic both ways is quite active). But I'd like to thank everyone who contributed - or even thought of contributing - to Jan's birthday trip, because it was great - for me to see her, and for her to come up and see Lewis at its best.

Today (Monday) I haven't done much except get a new gas bottle and go to the Co-Op for the Monday Sunday papers. The campsite has emptied out: around 60ish tents and a dozen or so camper vans disappeared this morning, leaving me pretty much on my own again. It's so cold and windy today that Bonnie doesn't want to walk, despite being taken to a beach, and neither do I. But I have made a birthday cake for Annie (birthday tomorrow). Shhh. But it's highly unlikely they'll be sitting over at their house reading this. The cakes, made from a box of Co-Op chocolate cake mix, have come out about 1cm deep each, and wonky. Here's a tip: if you ever want to find out if your van is REALLY level, bake a sponge cake and observe how it rises. We're all very excited about tomorrow because Tesco's is opening in Stornoway - the only one in the Western Isles! But more about Stornoway another time...and I'll let you know how the Tesco's opening goes.