Which is why I have been studying closely the culicoides impunctatus, the proper name for a midge. Documents produced by Scottish Natural Heritage help us understand this blight on our lives. And, no surprise, I read it is all the fault of the moaney bidges. Sorry, the autocorrect on my computer is playing up again. That should read blone midges.

It is only the female midge that sucks blood from cats, dogs, rats, mice, sheep, cows and Hebridean gentlemen of a certain vintage. As we love to suck Cornish ice cream, so this bloodsucker of a she-midge needs protein to make the yolk in all these eggs she lays. That ensures we will be scratching ourselves from April to October next year.

Meanwhile, the dosy male midge is happy to nibble at a wee salad of grass or bracken. The guys congregate in swarms of a few hundred manly midges near breeding sites by vegetation or mud. The female of the species then fly coyly by, probably flashing the thighs of their six legs, before each swoops on their unsuspecting fella.

The SNH report says the males then “rest during the day in sheltered sites such as grass tussocks and amongst moss.” If I remember right, a tussock is a wee hillock so neither am I surprised that the coves need a breather after all that falling to the ground stuff. 

It also says the bite rate of a female midge is affected by the distance from the nearest breeding ground. They have been found over half a mile from their breeding ground in search of a sucker to suck but they like to keep near to the same area. Well, I never. Midges get homesick and just can’t chomp and suck so well away from home.

Their home community is where their pals are – and their many very close cousins. Interesting. Being a midge must be very much like being a Maciver in North Tolsta.

That report crossed my mind when I was delivering a parcel to Marvig in South Lochs a few weeks ago. Having accidentally left the window open, I got back to the van to find in it a whole swarm of very thirsty lady midges. I had to jump in and drive off.

I could have quickly opened the windows and hoped the haemoglobin hunters from hell would be quickly sucked out. But I was feeling bloody minded. With the Queen Midge and her attendants gnawing and slurping at my every bump and orifice, I speed on and on and on.

After 12 miles, we reached the Balallan road. I activated the UBPES, the Unwelcome Bloodsucking Passenger Ejector System. That is not for Mrs X when she grabs my credit card and demands that I take her shopping. It is for these other annoying wee women. With a deft press on the button as I roared up past the school, the windows slid open on both sides and the midges were whooshed out. See ya, suckers.

These ferocious midges, which had lost the inclination to ravage me before we reached Kershader, nevertheless had their bellies full from sucking my sore face earlier. However, I knew they were so far from home they wouldn’t make it back to their friends and cousins in Marvig.

Like many a lost Lochie before them, they wouldn’t make it past the Loch Erisort Inn in Sheildinish before falling on the ground again. I felt such a murderous maniac. Mwah-hah-hah.

I had a touch of déjà vu doing that. Many years ago, exhausted after witnessing a particularly competitive livestock section rumpus at the Lochs Agricultural Show, I was whooping it up at a very late-night Lochie party. After the grumpy host ran out of patience and rum and coke, I found myself lost and tramping up that same Balallan hill on a Sabbath morn.

With no money for a taxi, I smiled wryly as disapproving kirk-bound motorists whizzed past. No thought of being Good Samaritans on the seventh day. It was miles on at Keose that an elderly lady from Harris on her way to Leurbost showed me the milk of human kindness. She had a few pints because she also took me the extra seven miles to Stornoway. And she gave me her Alka-Seltzer. God bless the Hearachs.

The post How I killed that extended family from Marvig in Lochs – column appeared first on Iain Maciver Writes.

The members of One Direction deciding they want to take at least a year off because they are sick and tired of pretending to like each other is not “the freak accident I will not get over”, as one young devotee claimed. What happened to me last week was. We had workmen in and, as usual, the four-legged member of this family would hear the front door and rush down the stairs barking furiously to announce their arrival each and every time. It got a bit much because workmen have to be in and out.

Filling a squeezy washing up bottle with water, I got it ready in my office upstairs. Then, when Hector heard someone come in, he leapt up and headed off down the stairs, barking loudly. I quickly followed and fired the water cannon. Then I realised the workman was already coming up the stairs and the poor cove was suddenly greeted with a jet of water right in the kisser. There just aren’t enough ways to say sorry in that situation.

Chris Murray, with 10 toes intact, at Buckingham Palace

Not all freak accidents are painless though. Spare a thought for a friend of mine who suffered a horrific and painful freak accident at the end of last week. You could call it an embarrassing wardrobe malfunction but it had more dire consequences than anything that may have been inadvertently shown to us by famous flashers like Judy Finnegan or Janet Jackson.

The gentleman concerned is now hobbling around in agony after breaking his own wee toe. Ubhag. You probably know that when you head west and cross the Minch the word ouch becomes ubhag. It was how he did it that has raised a few eyebrows. Knowing how sensitive are the sweet readers of this publication, I’ll be brief. That’s a clue, by the way. Well, you see it was like this; he was pulling on a garment and it got caught on the little toe of his right foot.

He must have forgotten he was barefoot and gave it a good old tug to release the undergarment. It’s not for nothing he is known as Balach Mòr or Big Boy. When he gives something a tug it is well and truly yanked. Unfortunately, as he did that he heard a loud crack. Ubhag, ubhag, ubhag.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Mr Chris Murray, holder of the Queen’s Gallantry Medal for heroism as a winchman on the coastguard rescue helicopter, managed to break his teensi-weensie pinkie toe with the most fearsome of dangerous implements – a pair of his own underpants.

Should you meet the Dornoch-born winchman, who is nowadays training other novice danglers on the wire, hobbling along and he happens to mumble something about stubbing his toe or going over on his ankle, it is all nonsense. He is too embarrassed about the truth. He was disabled by his drawers. ‘Twas the pants wot done it.

All of which gives Chris a bit of a problem. He spent more than 20 years battling through storms to rescue many people, being flung against the sides of large ships and was even caught by an enormous wave and washed overboard off the deck of a crippled ship himself. Many times he returned after arduous missions and I saw him wincing with a painful leg after a particularly bruising rescue. Just an occupational hazard.

Chris and his colleagues were summoned to Buckingham Palace some years ago to have a rack of medals pinned onto them for saving the lives of some of the crew of a sunken German ship way out in the Atlantic. So, for us islanders, if we see Chris limping along Cromwell Street we expect the injury to have been caused by something that was agonising, something that would make ordinary mortals weep, and perhaps something to make Her Majesty reach in the medal drawers again.

Sorry Chris, didn’t mean to mention drawers again.

As an ex-military man himself, Chris appreciates that underwear can be a challenge in the field. When I was on RAF basic training in Sherwood Forest, problems with transport meant our two-day stay became four. We weren’t prepared. On day three, the Flight Sergeant announced: “Today we’re going to change our underwear.” We all began to clap and cheer. Then he continued: “Smith, you change with Blenkinsop. Maciver, you change with O’Hara …”

The post Will the Queen again make Chris Murray toe the line? – column appeared first on Iain Maciver Writes.

Although the men just wore regulation Harris Tweed jackets with elbow patches, we did have a few stylish female teachers. They were the ones in mini-skirts with the Mary Quant boots up past their knees. Some too it a step further and wore swishy gabardine coats that, disappointingly, went all the way down to their chilblains. Those female teachers also wore loose-fitting shirts but we were told we had to call them blouses.

The cardigan

We could see they had curves as the blouses from the Pakistani traders like Sardar and Nazir in downtown Stornoway became thinner. However, if the lady teachers were Free Church or FPs, they would always put a cardigan over the blouse even in August to go with their sensible shoes. Much has changed since then – except, of course, the Free Church teachers still have their cardigans.

Teachers knew everything back then. They never answered a question with “Google it yourself, lazybones”. We believed everything they told us. One told us about the evil that happens on a distant place called the mainland – an awful place where some people don’t even go to church and where some shops were – “you will not believe this, children” – open on a Sunday. “If you ever go to the mainland, you will not go to such places, will you?” “No miss.”

Forty six years ago, after a summer sunning myself on the Costa del Bosta, a certain maths teacher told our class what we already knew – that a man called Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon. It was the ultimate achievement of science, he told us. Then he said quietly: “Some people may tell you it didn’t happen. But it did.” Gosh. An element of doubt? There were rumours in the cloakroom that even some teachers did not believe it. What is the world coming to? Why was that teacher whispering through his straggly beard?

I believed it. My dad and mum believed it. Some people in the village did not. I always thought moon doubters were wacky. I am not anti-American nor a tub-thumper, like so many of the conspiracy theorists. However, I am no longer sure anyone went to the moon. There, I have said it. I no longer believe. Or not so much as I did before, if you know what I mean.

Look, we didn’t have the technology to land that craft gently without a Jeremy Clarkson-style pile-up near the Sea of Tranquility. We didn’t even have the technology to send live pictures from the moon. The shadows are in the wrong places. Radiation would have frazzled Armstrong and his mates in seconds. One small step for man and all that cobblers was enacted in a wee studio under Cape Canaveral while talking into two cans connected with a piece of string. It was all a hoax. Obvious, innit?

The communications systems were not what they were cracked up to be – a bit like Vodafone nowadays. A very nice man called me the other day on his way to Tobermory. He had looked on Vodafone coverage checker website to see if there was mobile phone coverage there. The website responded: “The location you are looking for is not in the UK.” When I asked Vodafone what country they thought Tobermory was actually in, they must have panicked. They now have Tobermory back on Mull where it belongs.

Oh yes, teachers have changed over the years. I think they are more understanding nowadays even under the occasional very challenging circumstances. I have just heard of one teacher who was talking to her pupils after they had all had all had their class photos taken. She was trying to persuade them each to buy a copy of the class group photo.

She said to them to think about looking at it when they were are grown up. It would bring memories flooding back and they would say something like: “Look, there’s Margaret. She’s a lawyer now,” or “That’s wee John. He went into politics, didn’t he? He was always going to go far. Wasn’t he a Lord or something?”

All of a sudden, from the back of the room, a wee voice shouted: “And there’s the teacher. She’s still old, nasty and wrinkled.”

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