Local Services

This Romec van was parked along the Ormsaigbeg road on Tuesday.  Romec is the private company which has a ten-year contract to maintain Royal Mail properties, including its post boxes, so it wasn't a surprise when....

....we found a man painting the postbox.  We asked him whether he was dealing with the postbox by the church, which has been covered with a Royal Mail bag for the last few weeks because its door had fallen off, and he told us that it wasn't a problem with the door - the whole front had fallen off it.  He'd also had a go at painting the box by the shop but that's got a hole in it.  Apparently there are new, stainless steel post boxes which would be better suited to our salty environment but....

....when we passed the postbox by the church it had been replaced by a second-hand old-style one, and the man obviously hadn't been able to do anything about its tilt - is it imagination, or is this getting worse?  And, since no-one had told him about the hole in the one by the shop, he hadn't brought along a spare to replace that one - and he wasn't prepared to do a nine-hour round trip to go and get one.

The monthly strim of our verges is in full swing at the moment, and very good they look too.  Furthermore, our environmentally friendly strimmer-man now knows what a wild orchid is, so he carefully worked round these beautiful northern marsh specimens by the church.  It's another very good reason to have services like this one devolved to the local community otherwise Highland Council might have been responsible for destroying these beautiful plants.

The roads are being dug up in various places, including in front of the school and near the pier.  There's a story going around that the work by the pier is for the installation of an electrical charging point for cars.  No-one round locally has an electric car, but maybe a free charging point might encourage a move to this green technology.  The other works may be a continuation of the preparations for our superfast broadband service due to go live in 2016.

Here's a further upgrade to local services.  HM Coastguard Kilchoan has been called out so often in the last few days that they now have a permanent presence at their office in Pier Road.