Stornoway

I was doing a gig there in, uh, in a, in a remote part, 'cause I like to go out and, you know, explore a country.

And I did a gig in a, in a Stornoway, which is a little remote sort of fishing community up in the-

Jesus

...

And they said, "We thought they'd send a lookalike." [laughs]

[laughs]

Don't get many people going to Stornoway.

No. [laughs] No.

They knew what had gone, not the entertainment, the mechanism, the thing that carried everything.

And now there are people working hard to rebuild it, And there's a place in Stornoway that carries the name.

And Ty Cayley.

And there are storytelling nights there.

And then I came back here, didn't really post as much.

But I had one of the followers, she had an amazing little cafe store in Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides.

And she was sending me DMs and saying, will you sell your work? We're looking for little, we're looking for some mugs.

And I was going, no, I'm not ready to sell anything.

And these three, like sort of 20, 20 or 30 year old then a 50 plus and then an 80 you know they were all like I mean that's fantastic so that I was really proud and also getting repeat custom uh I'm very proud of that because that means I'm doing something right and they like my work so yeah that's what I'm proud of that people want to buy my work.

Brilliant.

I was going to ask about the stockists and because you have Penzance and you have Stornoway, are you selling the same things at both ends of the country or is there a north-south divide?

That's a good question.

And she's, she's just some piece of work, basically.

You know, she's kind of, it now transpires, I think it was, I'm not sure if it was Stornoway Gazette or the P&J that got it, that she'd had done exactly the same thing at a community in the United States and gone through exactly the same sort of contention that she'd got a disability.

There's even somebody who's got a piece online that's fascinating, who's a lawyer, [clears throat] um, who's gone through exactly [chuckles] the torturous logic of how you would prove you had a mental disability curable by having a dog.

Mm.

I mean, geez.

She- exactly the same over there.

Then the same in Stornoway, where the lobster pot or whatever it was had the same sort of exactly the same thing.

So she's kind of a repeat offender in this respect of just basically going around getting extremely, I mean, her language is all so weird.

I went there.

We went to the far reaches of the Outer Hebrides to Stornoway.

And it was great.

And all along the way, we were looking at how those places and those people have affected our history.

I know.

Well, his mother was a Mary McLeod, born in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis in 1912.

Yeah.

My grandmother was born in Stornoway, an Ishmael McLeod, born in 1898.

Now, the chances of these McLeods with the population of Ireland then not being related are fairly slim.

That is true.

Tis five years ago the first day of last June.

I was in Stornoway in the Loos and I was going to the Gerlach preachings.

It was rough, cheerless weather and all the fishing fleets were at anchor for the night with no prospect of a fishing.

The fishers were sitting together talking over the bad weather.

He was not even certain if the boat was Manx.

The landlord of the inn at which he said he stayed when in the Loos did not remember him.

A thing not to be expected, he told the jury, for in the summer months what with visitors and what with the fishers a face in Stornoway was like a face on a crowded street.

The young man might have been there.

This is political physics presenting us with the spectacle of the hitherto immovable blob in its last throes, as it now encounters the irresistible force of Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

Dr Stephen William Welsh, Stornoway, Western Isles.

That concludes the selection of today's letters from The Herald.

The final letter today is from The Herald on Thursday the 20th of August 2026.