Portsoy in Aberdeenshire was one of the many places that we visited a few weeks ago when we drove north to Aberdeenshire for a few days. The harbour dates back to 1692 and the photos wouldn’t really do it justice, it’s a series of small harbours interlinked. It means that there are safe areas for children to play in with quite shallow water, when the tide is out anyway. When we were there it was crowded with kids having great fun, the water would have been relatively warm too. So I wasn’t able to take photos of those parts because of all the people there.
The harbour has been used in various TV and films, such as Peaky Blinders, Whisky Galore! and various BBC period dramas, as well as in a Tennents lager advert.
The photo below is of the grass at the edge of the harbour, as you can see there’s a modern sculpture of a dolphin there.
I love just about any kind of ruin and this window is just about all that remains of a cottage above the harbour, presumably the weather played havoc with the rest of it over the years.
Portsoy is apparently famous for the marble which used to be mined there, there’s a marble shop there where you can buy various sorts of marble and carved stones. Portsoy marble was used in the Palace of Versailles, the marble is really red and green serpentine. It’s a lovely wee place, I would visit it again, if we are ever in that area again.
Snow Country by Yasanuri Kawabata was first published in 1956. The Penguin Modern Classic which I read was translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. It’s a short read at just 121 pages.
Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson is another of my 20 Books of Summer although it wasn’t on my original list which has had to be amended somewhat. This one was a request from the library.
Where the World Ends by Geraldine McCaughrean was first published in 2004 and it won the Whitbread Children’s book award that year, also the Carnegie Medal in 2018 for an illustrated edition. This is one of my 20 Books of Summer.
Gideon Ahoy! by William Mayne was published in 1987. Gideon is a teenager and he’s profoundly deaf, so he doesn’t have much in the way of speech. He seems to be mentally handicapped but he would probably be described as being severely autistic nowadays. The whole household revolves around Gideon who makes a lot of noise which of course he can’t hear. His younger sister Eva gets somewhat neglected because of the situation, not that she minds. There are also two younger children, called Tansy and Mercury. Their mother has a hard life because she’s more or less a one parent family, the father is in the Merchant Navy and spends most of his time away at sea.
