Well, winter's finally arrived with a vengeance. Snow started to fall on Thursday & after a weekend of heavy showers & blizzards conditions at times we're now pretty much snowed in. Monday morning now & all Orkney's schools are closed (you can probably hear the cheering from the schoolbairns) plus many of the roads are blocked - the snow's really fine & powdery - perfect for drifting. The cats are all sulking - they hate the snow - but the dogs think it's great - snow & ice counts as edible if you're a Labrador. It's a pest having to bring buckets of water out the house for the sheep & the hens but at least we don't have to go out - got plenty of food & coal in, which is probably just as well since this is forecast to last all week at least.
Probably means I'll miss another session at the West Mainland Strathspey & Reel on Thursday unless the weather improves a bit - the road from here to Stromness has some nasty steep bits with right angled bends - not the sort of road to be done at night in slidy conditions. I missed last Thursday too - partly because of the snow & partly because I'd been out at a funeral in the afternoon. Orkney funerals are proper traditional affairs - the majority of folk are still buried, in a Kirkyard with generations of their ancestors, so you do the whole thing - the Kirk, followed by the graveside committal with the family as pallbearers, with the Minister reading the service and then the 'earth to earth' bit, with special dry earth in a bucket for the purpose. Then back to the local hotel for soup & sandwiches & a warm up - believe me very welcome when you've been stood at the graveside in the snow. Thankfully the really heavy snow held off until the proceedings were over.
The other week saw the launch of the new VisitOrkney 2011 brochure just in time for them to be taken down to the Orkney stand at the BBC Food & Drink show in Birmingham. Orkney Quality Food & Drink go every year and VisitOrkney goes too - they have a miniature version of the 'Orkney Village' stand which used to go to the Bath & West show. It's a great idea - all the Orkney producers band together & support each other & therefore have a bigger presence at the show - all Orkney stands together, Orkney music playing, Orkney flags flying etc. It's a five day show finishing yesterday & Radio Orkney reported this morning that all the stands had sold out of everything, all VisitOrkney's brochures had been handed out & the Island Smokery had won a bronze & a silver medal in the National Cheese Competition for their smoked cheeses.
My friend Pat's the organiser on behalf of Orkney Quality Food & Drink so she'll be well pleased - also exhausted I should think. She'd been running around sorting everything out for weeks before - as well as organising all the logistics of getting everyone there, the lorries, the stands etc she's also in charge of remembering to take things that she knows from past experience that everyone else will have forgotten - like a dozen bottle openers for the Orkney beer for instance.
Once she gets there she has to get everything set up - I mind on one year she told me she was having trouble getting something sorted - lots of folk with clipboards telling her it couldn't be done - so in typical Pat fashion she nipped out the back to see the boys who were doing the work - couple of sides of Orkney salmon & bottles of Highland Park later all problems were fixed. All the other stands were very puzzled as to why the Orkney stand was ready so quickly & why Pat only had to lift a finger to be overrun with folk ready to do her bidding.
Hopefully they'll all get home today - various airports south are shut including Edinburgh, Kirkwall airport was due to open late after they'd cleared the runways yet again. Just had Pat on the phone & they're all stuck at Birmingham airport as the early flights have been cancelled - they're reviewing the situation at 12 o'clock but it doesn't sound too hopeful. I was right - she was exhausted & had lost her voice so badly I could hardly tell who it was when she rang.
Ho hum - better go & do some work on my PhD I suppose - I'm trying to edit my chapter on Bronze Age Climate & Environment - appropriate given the weather. The problem I'm having is my usual - my supervisor wants me to condense everything & be more concise - she reads what I've written and says things like 'that's really interesting - now get rid of it'. She generally wants me to condense 30 pages into 3, whereas I think they should increase the thesis word limit.
I am also snowed under with technical papers - how does anyone read all this stuff? There are huge numbers of journals, all with inspiring titles like Quaternary Science Reviews, Quaternary International, Quaternary Research and my particular favourite Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology - commonly referred to as the 3 P's - and a lot of them run to several thousand pages a year - making hundreds of thousands of pages on info - how are you meant to keep abreast of them all? I reckon everyone just reads the abstracts & conclusions & skips the details - you'd have no time to do anything else otherwise. The papers all have snappy titles too - how about 'Compilation of non-annually resolved Holocene proxy climate records: stacked Holocene peatland palaeo-water table reconstructions from northern Britain'
That's not to mention all the other publications - there's even a NATO sponsored conference proceedings Third millennium BC climate change and old world collapse - climate change being big news these days of course.
Right - better get down to it - so far all anyone appears to be able to agree about is that global climate changed abruptly at 4.2 ka event and 2.8 ka event BP (2250 & 850 BC or thereabouts) which meant it rained a lot in the north & everything dried up & blew away in the south.
http://www.orkneyarchaeologytours.co.uk/
