Iain Maciver writes …

NOW that our annual festival of all things musically and culturally Celtic is over, we are all back to being grumpy on this side of the Minch. We are noticing the rain again.

While the joie de vivre of the festival gripped everyone last week, we didn’t even notice that it was persistently precipitating and blowing a hooley just about every day.

There was one unconfirmed report of a squall so strong it had blown Murdo Maclennan, the festival chairman, off the top of the Big Blue tent. I imagined him being carried away and flying past Lady Matheson’s monument. But then I saw him on Monday, busy trying to take the tent down again. Wasn’t walking funny or anything.

The gusts had delayed the tent going up, causing Murdo and the team sleepless nights. But it all came right in the end.

Photo by Chris Murray

Then it was time to take it down again, but the gusts from Arnish were so strong they had to abandon the job once more. They should just leave it there and we can have a HebCeltFest every weekend.

A drenching and a good blast up the kilt affects us all. We will whinge more in wet weather, say the experts.

Recent moans in Stornoway have been how the deluge nearly spoiled the HebCelt, the festival line-up, the queues at the beer tent, the length of Reverend Kenny I’s sermons, the prices in the Co-op, the latest rise in diesel prices, the length of Reverend Kenny I’s sermons, the average age of the youngsters teetering around the town after the festival, the price of coal and, of course, the length of Reverend Kenny I’s sermons.

Obviously, I started some of those complaints myself and just let other people run with them.

Moaning is wonderfully contagious.

On the bright side, as I may be visiting there soon, I have been taking an interest in China. The government of the people’s republic has ordered people not to pick their noses or scratch certain parts of their bodies during next month’s Olympic Games. I am really glad I won’t be there in August. In a rickshaw, there are no wheels or pedals. And we all need something to do with our hands. So if there’s no one looking . . .

The propaganda department of Beijing’s Dongcheng District also ordered the citizens to smile a lot at foreigners. Yet the Chinese are famous for smiling, anyway. In the Peking Cuisine Takeaway last weekend, the girl who was serving me smiled and giggled at me as I paid for the sweet and sour chicken, the char sui and the prawn crackers. It made me wonder what she’d heard. Maybe I should just learn how to pronounce char sui.

And, of course, the world’s third-biggest retailer opened its doors in Stornoway. You can easily find the new Tesco. It’s where Somerfield used to be. And Morrisons before that. And Safeway before that. And Presto . . . Just why do these supermarket giants skedaddle after a few years? Jonathan Merriman, boss of the new store, assures me the Pile It High, Sell It Cheap company is here for the long haul.

They will have a good start, I reckon. Sadly for its local rival, the big Co-op, the recent hike in food prices happened while Tesco had closed the store it had taken over and was refurbishing it. Many people thought the Co-op must be cashing in on its monopoly. Bad timing or what.

Meanwhile, a real live member of the Royal Family was strolling around the administrative capital of the Western Isles. Yet there’s been no excitement about Princess Anne being in our midst. George Gawk told me he’d heard she was spotted walking round the pier. I asked him if she was incognito and he said: “No, but she could have been in the Star Inn. You get all sorts of nice women in there nowadays.”

She had a flashy taxi courtesy of the Northern Lighthouse Board. She is the patron.

The lighthouse tender Pharos duly appeared at Number Three Pier and eventually she sailed off to Skye with her to inspect lighthouse builder Charles Stevenson’s handiwork at Rudha Reidh light near Gairloch.

Someone thought they saw her wearing big sunglasses in a butcher’s shop.

Wouldn’t surprise me. That woman is so down to earth. I met her at the opening of the Breasclete factory and at Taigh Chearsabhagh art centre in North Uist last year. Yap, yap, yap. She is just like one of these refined ladies you find in slightly posh places. Like Bakers Road.

Now that I think about it, there was an elegant-looking woman in a headscarf beside Murdo Maclennan as he was wrestling with the guy ropes on Big Blue. Probably her, then. Or a housewife from Bakers Road.