Loaghtan Books

The photograph is our delivery vehicle.  Seriously. W e live and work close to the Manx Electric Railway, the only tramway in the world still operating with its original rolling stock.  Most of the vehicles are Victorian or Edwardian and it’s our public transport. The MER runs between Douglas and Ramsey on the east coast of the Isle of Man.  Laxey is roughly midway.  We have customers in Ramsey, Laxey and Douglas and, what with the lack of parking, we use the MER to deliver to customers whenever we can.  Besides, the MER is fun! Interesting fact:   the main coastal route into Douglas (the capital) from the north only exists because the entrepreneurs building the tramway thought they might as well lay a road next to the rails at the same time.

I was delivering some books to a customer in Ramsey and I saw a peregrine falcon. Not overly surprising you might think, but this one was eating a pigeon on a small patch of grass right in the middle of the town.  Ramsey is the second largest town on the Isle of Man and, while not huge, still has its share of main roads and bustling shops. I’d never seen a peregrine falcon on the ground before so I hung back to watch.  Not so other passersby.  Pretty soon a small crowd, all waving phones around taking photographs and selfies, was… well… crowding.  Not surprisingly the bird didn’t like it.  She backed off,  fluttered to perch on a nearby bench and eventually gave up and flew away.  Cheated of her lunch the falcon had to hunt again.  Less shy, crows and seagulls finished off her pigeon. It struck me that this was like a microcosm of what’s happening in the world.  Our wants take precedence over the needs of everything we share the planet with.  We seem incapable of standing back.

Welcome to Ramblings, the Loaghtan Books’ new blog.  The photograph is of my office window ledge. The Loaghtan Books newsletter goes out four times per year (January, April, July, October) but we thought we needed something a little more immediate for anything which might be happening between those times.   So, Ramblings was born. I’m not going to promise to update this weekly, because we may not have anything worth saying weekly, but I do hope our readers will revisit frequently to find out the gossip, rumour and scandal of the Loaghtan Books world. Until that happens, a thought:   is an iPhone charger, apple juice?