Pictures of Nairnshire.

I don't think the Gurn has linked to Looksharp's pictures of Nairn before. Here's two pages of Nairn pictures. Perhaps a few Gurnites have already come across the Flickr group Nairnshire. Here you'll find pictures of Nairnshire submitted by 32 photographers.

13/12/09 A very cold day but a very beautiful day!

More pictures here. Have any other Gurnites put pictures on-line today? Please send us the link if you have.

More songs for Christmas soon

Strong winds predicted for next weekend

An alert weather-watching Gurnite wishes to warn his fellow citizens of strong winds that are forecast for next weekend. Hopefully the esitimates might be revised in the near future but if not it might be prudent to be careful on the way home from the pub next weekend if the forecast turns out to be accurate.

Christmas song returns

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Subsidy free singing to entertain shoppers this lunchtime  as the Nairn Baptists sing all the old non-politically correct favourites.  A few more pictures here.

Kessock Herring returns

Thanks to one of our regular correspondents for this picture taken this afternoon.

Cawdor will rock you

The maze always rocked - here it is at Christmas time 2001

The Gurnmeister had the pleasure of working for nearly ten years up at the Castle and more than once in a lazy moment (there were of course never too many of them) heard the suggestion that the brae on the Golf course would have been a great place to have a rock festival. Well that probably wouldn't be the best site now as a lot of trees have been planted and grown considerably since then but it is great to see that we may soon have another choice of music venue closer to home.

More about dinners for councillors

On  a Friday morning someone at Gurn headquarters usually rushes out  to buy the Inverness Courier, it's fun to hold a huge piece  of old technology in your hands whilst eating breakfast and you do get to read their news before they post it on-line (the other Inverness title in the SPP group the Highland News uses the same tactic and why not when you consider that putting it up on line is giving it away for free whilst the the newsprint version is what keeps mouths fed). 

Anyway anyone anxious to read the latest about free meals for councillors may wish to buy the paper too as it seems the councillors are to be treated to not one but two free Christmas jamborees at our expense. Personally I don't grudge them one dinner at public expense but there are those that do. Here I must confess myself to having a free cuppa and biscuit from the Council hospitality facility when I went through to listen to Liz speaking out to defend MacLean Court earlier this year. The Courier reports on this issue in a front-page spread and  an editorial. A quote from the editorial:

'As councillors eat their way through two Christmas lunches at our expense next week they will be polishing off any moral authority they have to ask staff and the public to make individual sacrifices. ' 

Nairn blogsphere this evening

Evening Gurnites, there is a bit of confusion in the Nairn blogosphere tonight, and just to clarify the Gurn is not the Spin and the Spin is not the Gurn. The Gurn has no responsibilty for content on the Spin. 

Brian of MyNairn has issues with the Spin, see this article here. As for the Gurn we think we have always been very fair to Brian, and although recently we wrote an article perhaps somewhat downbeat on his latest Nairn Internet venture we believe we maintained this sense of fair play,  see this article here and the associated comments. In fact that thread on the Gurn was closed because we were fed up with the nature of some of the material coming in which we didn't publish. I have made a comment on the Mynairn thread this evening but so far it hasn’t appeared. 

With regard to Brian’s comments about templates, these are available to anyone that opens a google account and creates a blog, there are choices of colours and gadgets to put in the sìde bàr and require no help from anyone to set them up. I have in the past provided advice to a local blogger but this was a few years ago and was not the Spin. I have been promoting all blogs that appear in the Nairn blogosphre and the Spin button only appears in a seperate ‘gadget’ because I haven’t had the tìme to produce a button of a similar size to the other buttons you can see in the sidebar. However they are all basically historical now since I saw another blog using the ‘feed gadget’ and I have introduced that as well in the sìde bàr, it is far more efficent and gives readers a good idea of what is happening elsewhere.

For reasons I stated in a comment to the mynairn thread I have nothing more to say on the issue and bid you all goodnight.

Highland Councill filling the P&J today

£30 million investment in fags, £90,000 for meals and soft drinks for councillors and a mere matter of having to shave £45 million off the budgets. One of the three top men found time for a wee whiz round Inverness in a stylish new electric car however. Inspectors are not happy (again) with a council run care-home in Inverness.

The budget cuts meeting is taking place next week. Given the scale of the cutbacks that will be needed to bring the budget to book will the pain that will be inflicted be too much for the 3-party coalition? Will the independents be able to hold the line as they reflect on the impact of council cuts on their communities? If jobs have to go will the Labour Party members on the council vote to see fellow trade unionists lose their jobs? Will the Liberal Democrat members be prepared to shoulder their share of the blame for the cuts in the eyes of the public? Liz and her fellow SNP councillors must be glad they are in opposition. Not a good time to be a councillor, people do go in for it to try and do their best and end up helpless victims of circumstance. Could local government services as we know them today soon become a thing of the past? Never mind at least Alasdair Darling has made Bingo a bit cheaper.