SO the Army is pulling out of St Kilda, that jewel of the western seas. They don’t need so many people to make the rockets fizz and boom over the sands at Gerinish.
They need to save cash, so it’s going to be done by someone pressing a button in south Wales so they are just going to abandon the base on St Kilda. Oh really?
Time I wrote to General Sir Richard Dannatt, head of the British Army.
He is not afraid to have a go at Gordon Brown about soldiers’ pay and conditions, and has often put the son of the manse’s nose well and truly out of joint.
Rapier on Benbecula. Pic: Peter Russell
For being a bolshie sort, he has been passed over for his expected promotion to chief of the defence staff. That’s Brown for you.
Instead, the general is getting his jotters next month and being sent to the Tower of London. As constable of the tower, he will be in charge of a few Beefeaters and fewer ravens. Enjoy, sir.
I might be just in time to catch him before he picks up his P45. I am going to tell him he either keeps his people and equipment on St Kilda or they all clear off and they have to take their rubbish with them.
Having finished doing up the County Hotel, Shonnie Beag is now looking to have an annex on St Kilda for the towrists and he certainly doesn’t want a radar station on the hill where he plans to build the windfarm to power it all.
Dan the Man is almost one of us, after all. He is an Anglican evangelist. That would be like a wishy-washy version of the Free Church (Continuing), I think.
So he doesn’t care what other people think – just as long as it’s the same as him. My work, I shall tell him, has taken me to St Kilda quite a few times. I even sailed out to a wedding there.
Heading out under blue skies from Carloway in a fishing boat, there was a song in my heart and a half-bottle on my hip – for five hours with a band of jolly shipmates including John Angus Mackay, then boss of the Gaelic TV Committee, a bright-spirited woman called Ray Clancy who was one of Fleet Street’s finest and also a youthful BBC reporter called Alasdair Morrison.
I know Ray scribbles from her base in Normandy nowadays, but whatever happened to the rest of them?
Soon the archipelago hove into view and we prepared to land the carry-out.
Then everyone filed into the tiny church for the service watched by suspicious Soay sheep, frightened field mice and the ghosts of generations who struggled to eke out a life for themselves there.
The reception was in the oft-lamented Puff Inn, the pub at the edge of the world.
We were there till chucking-out time which was, well, a bit later on. Except we had a boat to catch back to Carloway at the breaking of the day.
The coastguard seemed a bit unsure whether we should set off. Ach, why not? It’s only five hours. That’s nothing, we thought.
But it was five hours yesterday which was a balmy day with a flat sea.
Now it was a ferocious cauldron out there with a right hooley from the south that chilled the very cockles that had been recently caressed by lashings of trawler rum and wedding cake.
We were put-putting out of Village Bay when the blast struck and shivered the timbers. Heroic skipper Rory was cool as you like as he fought the Atlantic storm to keep his doughty vessel on course for home.
For the rest of us, we were being rapidly sucked into our own private hell.
Tossed around like one of those salads you toss, it was too much for me.
Before long, I was calling over the side to a whale called Hughie. When I did manage to wind my neck in and look around on board it was not a pretty sight.
Everyone was trying to hold meaningful conversations with each other.
Yet when they tried to speak it was not words that came but sick.
I peered down below and could see the lower deck awash with a colourful and pungent mix of seawater and the contents of various stomachs.
A tide of diced carrots swooshed and swirled around a mound of crumpled clothing. Recognising the rags as the previously immaculately-pressed wedding suit, shirt and tie of John Angus Mackay, I deduced he was, in fact, still wearing them.
Hunched tightly in the foetal position, eyes clamped shut and handkerchiefs stuffed in his ears, he was blocking out the storm that was threatening to make the happy expedition our last.
That sort of thing stays with you. St Kilda is special to us. The MoD has not even thought of a plan to restore it to its original state because it would cost a bomb. They hope everyone will be so grateful for their occasional presence that they will get off with not doing anything. Er, no.
“Those thick Hebrideans won’t give any trouble as long as we promise not to go out on a Sunday.” You can just hear them. Sadly, it’s not the dinosaurs on the Stornoway Trust you are dealing with now, chaps.
Even with rockets still whooshing up from Uist, St Kilda has no strategic role.
It is not a vital link in any hush-hush network to listen in on Vladimir Putin in Russia or Kim Jong Il in North Korea.
It must be restored to a greenfield site.
So there’s a lot of demolition to be done, landscaping to be installed and puffin poo to be pressure-washed.
