Golfing and hill-walking

Yesterday was not quite so sunny as the weekend but it was still warm and dry. Russ and Josh played golf in the morning while Jennifer and I visited the lighthouse and then went for an early lunch at the Elphin Café, where we had some rather tasty nettle soup. There were baby lambs and baby goats playing around with their mummies outside the windows, they were very sweet. We have a long-standing joke that the Elphin Café is never open when we pass, so we were very gratified to have managed to visit. However Jennifer told me that as we left the café she saw a sign which said that it would be closed from Wednesday to Saturday, so we had better not count on finding it open too often!

James arrived in the afternoon, tired after his awful day on Sunday. We all went for a delicious dinner at the Ceilidh Place, where the menu is much improved on the austere menu used between lockdowns over the last couple of years. 

This morning we all walked up Ullapool Hill, which gave Josh a good view of the area as this is his first visit. There was a cruise ship in the loch, another sign that things are beginning to get back to normal after Covid. I think it’s only the second cruise ship this year, after none at all for the previous two years. I was feeling a bit tired and struggled up the hill, much encouraged by Jennifer. But when we arrived at the top it was James who suddenly felt very unwell. His head was thumping and he felt nauseous. Back at the cottage he took himself off to bed for the afternoon; I think that this could well have been a reaction to the shock of Sunday’s tragedy, even though he coped so well with it at the time. 

He felt a bit better in the evening and came downstairs for a couple of hours. However some drama was about to unfold. First of all there was what sounded like an explosion coming from the direction of the play park. It was probably just a firework but it was loud enough that lots of birds flew out of the trees. We all went outside to see what had happened, and although there was nothing to explain the noise, we noticed that the cruise ship (which had left Ullapool a couple of hours earlier) had returned and was slowly moving back towards the village. A tender appeared and headed to the pier, and then the coastguard helicopter landed on the golf course, where presumably the casualty had been taken by the local ambulance after being met at the pier. The helicopter then set off towards Inverness. The Ullapool Facebook page was buzzing with speculation about both the loud bang (which remained a mystery) and the cruise ship’s return, and someone “in the know” confirmed that a cruise passenger had suffered a heart attack. I hope that they will be ok.