When I was young we visited Harris once a year to see my grandparents. I have very fond memories of these special weeks: visiting friends and family and eating too many oatcakes and biscuits, helping with the peats, picking vegetables and fruit and taking surplus cabbages and potatoes to neighbours in return for a bottle of fresh milk, jumping in the bogs and making dams in the stream. But one memory that is very special is Nelly who lived in Geocrab. She was a keen knitter and sold her wares from a bonnet of a car parked near to her house. When someone stopped she would hastily walk out to them to see if they wanted anything. This memory has stayed with me all of my life so I wanted to do the same with the aim of selling my recently woven wares. I parked the car in the middle of nowhere on the peat road to Leverburgh. I was there for 3 hours on a cold, wet and windy May day and 4 cars passed me and they didn't stop.
The clothes horse fell over a few times, I saw an eagle, I got very cold and I didn't sell anything.
You may be asking yourself, 'Why didn't she choose a better location?'
And I would answer,
'I wanted to be in the middle of nowhere to surprise people.'
In the end no one wanted to get out of their big, warm, cosy cars on a cold, windy day to look at some random stranger's weaving in the middle of nowhere.
