Wednesday 29 June

After yesterday's excitement, the weather started grey and breezy and a lot cooler than the last few days. It was only 16C / 60F this afternoon, when I went to the village cemetery to visit my mother's grave. As we came back, the skies slowly started to break.


This is a young blackbird, which crashed down into those leaves and started to scurry round in them to look for food. Nothing there. He was quite gormless, and didn't know what he was doing. He did know he was scared of me, being about fifteen times his size and made off - clumsily flying through the bushes.

In the early hours of this morning, armed robbers blew down a wall of a money handling centre in Amsterdam and made off with an amount of cash. As the police arrived, they were met with a hail of bullets. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. The robbers hijacked a car and sped south down the A2 motorway at speeds of up to 150 mph. Between Utrecht and Den Bosch, their vehicle crashed and burned into flames. The culprits hijacked another vehicle and continued their high speed flight. At Eindhoven, 50 miles south of Utrecht, they once more threatened the cops with their automatic fire-arms, upon which the police decided to abandon the chase. The robbers got away, their whereabouts currently unknown.

Although all Dutch police are routinely armed, extremely violent robberies of this sort are fortunately virtually unheard of in this country. Automatic fire-arms are strictly licensed and not commonly or easily available.

Tomorrow, I am returning to Stornoway by air, and once more, my travelplans look set to be thrown into disarray. The public sector trades union PCS is mounting a strike, involving customs staff at immigration points, such as the London airports through which I am passing tomorrow morning. I'll have to wait and see how it all goes.

The Shell Gallery will once again be going under wraps, until my next visit to Holland later in the year.