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The new sea defences around the pier car park are finished and the boys went away today. Their ears must have been burning as the general opinion was they were ‘really nice lads, very polite and considerate’ and ‘a good thing’. They certainly worked, and it isn’t their fault the wall is a hideous grey concrete lump and the ‘matting’ (rocks on concrete blocks) make the shore look as natural as a motorway bridge.

Coll is an ‘Initiative at the Edge’ place (which means it gets priority over funding) and there is a meeting next Wednesday to look at where ‘Development Coll’, the company running the scheme, is going. The usual outside bodies will have their say but there does seem to be an opportunity for something to happen which will be pushed from here, rather than being imposed from outside. There even seems to be some people prepared to attend the meeting. Unfortunately I’m working so can’t go, but I might have, Andrew from SNH was very persuasive!

We signed up for broadband on Sunday. I forgot to time it, but it didn’t take long. We should be fully connected on 23rd. I announced this in the pub and was told the telephone tower has been condemned and will have to be rebuilt before broadband can happen. This was an unofficial source, and I had heard it before, but it was still a bit worrying. Then a BT man came over from Tiree, except they aren’t BT now, they are Openreach, and did whatever needed doing in the exchange to enable broadband, and rang to tell us everything is fine here. He has put ten houses on broadband so far, and expects to be back very soon to do some more. This is still slow old internet because the hardware bits we need are somewhere in the postal system. I’m counting down to the time I can see the pics on the blog, instead of running out of patience and just reading the words.