… a thing.

Not so many days ago I was saying that we hadn’t seen Grima for quite some considerable time. So when I walked into town later this morning, I was surprised to see this boat moored up to the quayside.

At first glance I thought that it was Grima, albiet having had a major refit because, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, she was looking rather tired after almost 45 years of service.

But on closer examination she isn’t Grima at all but another former Shetland ferry called Thora.

She’s not quite a sister of Grima because she’s slightly larger and has a different superstructure.

But she also worked around the Shetland Islands and the last information that I have was that she was laid up as a reserve in 2011.

Anyway, here she is in all her glory. A rather blurred photograph unfortunately but it was taken rather late at night on a very slow exposure.

And I would have liked to have found out much more about her, but there was no-one around to ask.

On eof these days I’ll have to go down there when there are people around, and see if I can talk my way into having a guided tour.

It was another bad night last night. I spent most of it tossing and turning. It wasn’t until light that I started to drift off to sleep. And so I rather ignored the alarm when it went off.

With having a late start and a late breakfast, it was getting rather late to walk up to LIDL. And then Ingrid appeared on the internet so we had a really good chat for over an hour.

No chance of going shopping now so I just popped into town for a baguette, when I encountered Thora.

I don’t understand these lizards.

For my lunch I went and sat on the wall as usual. Two lizards came to keep me company, and although I dropped three pieces of pear on the floor, they spent most of the time fighting over just one of the pieces, totally ignoring the other two.

Back here I had a shower and cut my hair, and then started to tidy up. Everywhere is vacuumed and I just need to wash the bathroom and the floors, which I can do tomorrow before I go to the station.

I also did a lot more tidying up, and there’s not all that much more to do now.

Tea was one of the pies out of the freezer, and that reminded me of something. I have some gluten-free pastry here so I made a couple of green bean and mushroom pies for tea tomorrow night. No sense in wasting the pastry, is there?

It was another beautiful evening when I went for a walk around the headland.

There were crowds of people out there tonight picnicking in the lovely weather, and while I was looking out to sea I noticed a movement right way in the distance.

And one of the advantages of having a really decent telephoto lens and image editor is that you can crop and enlarge the image to see what’s going on.

No prizes for guessing what it is of course.

It’s the Channel Islands ferry, the old one (I’ve not seen the new one for quite a while, thinking on – maybe she’s up at Barneville) coming back from the last run of the day from St Helier.

The tide is on its way in right now so it’s the right time for the ferry to come back and moor up. And then, I imagine, she’ll be going off into the inner harbour for the night.

She’s not the only one who’s back in port right now.

As well as Thora who is still where I saw her at lunchtime, Marité has also returned from her latest voyage and is moored up here at her quayside this evening.

She doesn’t appear on any port call list that I can find so it looks as if she has just been on a trip around the bay. But not, presumably, at five bob a head.

So now that I’m back, I’m going to have an early night. I’ve managed to go for a whole day without crashing out, and I’m going to be busy for the next few days, so I need to make sure I’m in good form.

Not quite sure how I’m going to manage that though.