After the brilliant weather calm of the previous two days, I should have taken a hint from cloudier skies, ten-degree drop in temperature and blustering northeasterly, all sprung up overnight. After Saturday surgery, I wandered off down to the harbour in my I-say-it’s-summer shorts to find a huge crowd in anoraks milling about because the ELYC regatta booked for that day was rather stymied: not just by the weather but a spring ebb so low (0.9m) that yachts out in the West Bay were aground.
Since there was little going on there, I stopped by the Seabird Centre to find they’d mislaid their inflatable dinghy and so couldn’t get out to fetch the rib out in the bay. After twenty minutes fruitless search, I cadged skipper Calum a lift on one the the ELYC rescue boats that had launched and, while waiting to help him load passengers, alerted SSC trip dispatcher Gayle that they were going to have trouble running their Family Trip booked for noon as Seabird II was sitting in mud and would stay that way until well past 1pm. Not a happy bunny to hear that so I slid off to Galloway’s Pier to help Calum tie up.
Not only was it slippy with spray and weed but a building swell coming down the Fairway was being amplified in the shallow water. After several attempts with me in water to my knees (good job for the shorts) we got the rib moored. Almost at once, the painter snapped in a particularly brutal surge, persuading Calum to call the trip off (hard to load and swell likely to worsen by return—a call I fully endorsed). Gayle’s mood darkened more, so I decided it was a good time to be elsewhere.
So I checked out our new summer shuttle bus that started today. Why ELC awards any contract to the perennially incompetent First, I’ll never know. It showed up on time for the trip up to NB station but it was the usual big bus (we need a minibus) with a driver who knew nothing about the area (it’s intended for tourists) and nothing about the train schedule (they now run 6 mins later, so the bus should run later too). Sure enough, as the train was pulling in (and I got ready to point visitors to the bus), the bus left, bang on schedule with no-one on board. The driver said I’d been his first customer. No wonder.
So, tempted to drink as I was, I decided to spend the afternoon usefully printing sheets for the shuttle’s three main stops because nobody had provided any and hand timetables to give out at the Tourist Information, SSC, MoF, Tantallon because (yes—you guessed) nobody had provided any. As a reward, I called a friend to see if she wanted to catch Dunsinane at the Lyceum. She did but, as it was its last night, there were no tickets.
Only then did I realise it was one of those days and cracked open my first beer. Some days—and this was one of them—you should just stay in bed.
davidsberry 