Issue 56

Those who enjoyed the Swing 2015 concert in September – and others who missed it – have a treat in store in Brodick Village Hall on Saturday, 14th November, when Arran Music Society present the Tim Kliphuis Trio.

Tim Kliphuis is a Dutch violinist renowned for mixing gypsy jazz with classical and folk music. Classically trained at the Amsterdam Conservatoire, and taught to improvise by fiery gypsy jazz guitar legends, Tim Kliphuis combines dazzling perfection and complete musical freedom like no-one else in the world. He will be joined for the concert by his long-standing colleagues Nigel Clark (guitar) and Roy Percy (double bass). Together the Trio form one of the world’s top string groups, combining jaw-dropping virtuosity and mesmerizing improvisations with a beautifully varied repertoire. They have long been firm favourites on the festival scene. Highlights include the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, collaborations with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, Richard Strauss Festival and Baltimore Fiddle Festival. In 2013, they received the Scottish Jazz International award.

The Herald commented on their show at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh: “…an expansive and often dazzling but genuinely communicative performance.”

Seating will again be café-style at tables, and you may bring a bottle. So come along on the 14th for a uniquely exhilarating evening. The concert begins at 7.30, and tickets are available on the door, at Inspirations of Arran in Brodick, or online from www.arranevents.com.

String Duo High Heels and Horse Hair galloped onto Scotland's chamber music scene in 2010 and will be galloping to Arran on Saturday 21st November 2015! Their fresh, dynamic playing and engaging style has delighted audiences across the country and earned them the Enterprise Music Scotland Residency Award for 2013-2015. Their Edinburgh Fringe show Alba to Oz was appraised 'Exquisite fusion music from a loveable quirky high-heeled duo'.

“Two lands, roughly 17,000km apart from one another, unite like brothers separated at birth – Scottish Baroque and Australian indigenous music interact in an increasingly natural and palpable harmony. This is, of course, Sonia Cromarty’s and Alice Rickards’ intention, but it’s still extraordinary that it works.” ('Three weeks', Edinburgh festival Fringe)

Alice Rickards is the only antipodean member of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. She was raised on a small cattle farm near Armidale, northern New South Wales. Before moving to the UK in 2003 Alice completed her undergraduate performance degree at the Queensland Conservatorium in Australia. She then gained her Masters with Distinction at the Royal Academy of Music, London. Alice has had a varied career in chamber music, from winning QLD Arts Councils Gertrude Langer Chamber Music Prize to performing Australian repertoire and new commissions at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. She loves the sound of gut strings and has performed with early music ensembles including the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Dunedin Consort. Alice enjoys living in Scotland, for the space and the adventurous lifestyle it affords.

Aberdeen-born Sonia Cromarty studied cello and baroque cello at the RSAMD gaining a First Class Honours degree and Post-graduate Diploma with Distinction. During her college years she won numerous prizes for solo and ensemble playing including the prestigious Peter Morrison Award for all round excellence. Since graduating she has enjoyed a busy and varied freelance career that has taken her around the world from South America to the Arctic. She has worked with Scotland’s leading orchestras and ensembles and performs and tours regularly with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera. As a chamber player Sonia is also a member of Daniel's Beard, the Amici Cello Trio, Beinn Artair Piano Trio and the Rhona Mackay Trio. Off stage, she enjoys teaching, bringing music to the wider community through education projects and introducing the world to her young daughter Nara.

The concert begins at 7.30, and tickets are available on the door or at Inspirations of Arran in Brodick.

Diane Philips is starting a new singing group for school age children on Sunday November 8th. There will be three sessions each week:

• 4:00pm to 4:30pm — P4 - P6
• 4:45pm to 5:15pm — P7 - S2
• 5:20pm to 6:00pm — S3 - S6

For more information please contact Diane by calling 07890 178531 or by email.

The Corrie Film Club's offering for November 8th in Corrie Hall at 8.00pm is Ida, held over from last July.

Directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, who made the 2004 BAFTA-wining British drama film My Summer of Love, Ida won the 2015 Oscar for best foreign language film, becoming the first Polish film to win the award. Accepting the award, Pawlikowski said: “We make a film about silence and withdrawing from the world and the need for contemplation – and here we are, at the epicentre of world noise and attention. Fantastic – life is full of surprises.”

Peter Bradshaw gave Ida five stars in his Guardian review, writing that “Ida, which pulls off the remarkable trick of looking as if it was made when it was set – the early 60s – feels more like a restored and rediscovered classic than a new movie. There really is a bitter, wintry cold here: it is illuminated by the stark, daylit whiteness of snow, and you can feel the chill in those barnyards and draughty churches.”

“Agata Trzebuchowska is tremendously mysterious as a 17-year-old novitiate in a remote convent: she has the impassivity and inscrutability of youth. This is someone to whom literally nothing has happened in her life, and now we will watch her react, or try to conceal her reaction, to an onslaught of momentous events. It is 1962, and Anna is about to take her final vows in the convent where she was left as an orphan baby in 1945 by persons unknown. But Anna has one surviving relative, and the Mother Superior – who has clearly guessed more about Anna’s background than she admits – insists that she contact this woman before she makes the irrevocable decision. The relative turns out to be her aunt, Wanda Gruz, tremendously played by Agata Kulesza – a worldly, hard-drinking woman who lives on her own. “They didn’t tell you who I am – and what I do?” she asks.”

Bradshaw concludes his review with “Ida is a compelling film that achieves a great deal in a short time. The performances are superb and the sense of location and period miraculous.” Meanwhile The New York Times review said that "with breathtaking concision and clarity Mr. Pawlikowski penetrates the darkest, thorniest thickets of Polish history, reckoning with the crimes of Stalinism and the Holocaust. Until the very end, the audience never hears music unless the people on screen hear it, too, and many of the scenes — at once austere and charged with an intensity that verges on the metaphysical — owe an evident debt to ’60s cinema heroes like Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson."

In an extended essay in The Conversation, Jeremy Hicks describes how Pawlikowski has addressed the issue of Poland’s repression of memory: “In the 1960s there were some very guarded attempts to hint at the truth of the occupation: that Poles rarely aided their Jewish neighbours and sometimes were complicit in their annihilation. In doing so, Pawlikowski has staged quite a coup. He has succeeded in making a film about repression, sexual and political, about memory and Polish identity. Most crucially, perhaps, it is a film about the Holocaust that doesn’t feature the Nazis.”

The director of Ida, Paweł Pawlikowski, was born in Poland and lived his first fourteen years there. In 1971 his mother moved with him to England. Ida was his first Polish film; in an interview he said that the film "is an attempt to recover the Poland of my childhood, among many things.”

Do come along to Corrie Film Club to see Ida – all are welcome, and a small donation is asked from visitors.

Sometime in the midst of June a group of islanders got together with Eco Savvy to work on upcycling a familiar tale. Alice in Wonderland was 150 years old this year and her image has been redesigned. This creative group of people felt that they could create a new look for Alice by using a range of upcycling processes. Throughout the summer they met and designed, sewed, glued and painted their way through a collection of donated and waste items to create not only a new image for Alice but also all the costumes, props and decorations that were to become the upcycled story of Alice in Wonderland.

Last Friday in Whiting Bay village hall Alice in Wonderland was retold with a small invasion from characters from the Wizard of Oz! A packed audience bought into this madness and eagerly anticipated the new tale that had become Eco’s version of Alice in Wonderland. They were not disappointed as a cast of adults and children led by Alice Lockhart took to the stage to tell a tale that became a journey through the unknown. A story sprinkled with dramatic entrances, comedic moments and choreography that just left us all smiling. The creative team chose the Queen of Hearts as the character to represent exactly what can be achieved with upcycling and her entrance from the back of the hall did not disappoint. The madness continued until the culmination of the story when the brand new upcycled Alice was presented to the audience. It was a moment to pause and reflect on what has been achieved by a spirited group of people who set themselves no boundaries. The show closed with a stunning new arrangement of ‘Somewhere over the rainbow’ from the Vivace choir. The curtain call was in now typical Eco Savvy style and as Beyonce blared out the entire cast took to the stage once more and the audience clapped along.

Eco Savvy put on a night that created lots of special memories but more than that he showed us all just what can be done with a group of commitment people and upcycling. He would like to thank everyone that helped to make the project such a success and he has left us wondering ‘what next?’.

If you would like to join Eco Savvy in his work on the island towards an ambition of zero waste, do pop into his shop in Whiting Bay and have a chat with one of his volunteers or visit his website.

Our Arran Artist of the Month this month is Jan Inglis. Jan and husband John live in High Corrie and are well known in many areas of island life.

Some readers may have seen the notice from SEPA, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, in the newspapers about an application from the Scottish Salmon Company (SSC), who propose an increase in cage depth from 10m to 12m in order to increase the number of fish held in the Lamlash Bay fish farm. Stuart Turner from Lamlash has been doing some research, and he points out that this means more feed, more fish excrement and more chemicals being released into Lamlash Bay. These chemicals are needed because the fish are kept at such a high density that they are vulnerable to sea lice, among other things, and these are causing a huge problem throughout Scotland:

www.salmonfarmingkills        www.scotsman.com        www.thecourier.co.uk

Stuart goes on to note that, despite its name, SSC is mainly owned by a Ukrainian banker and a Norwegian investor and although The Scottish Salmon Company Limited has an Edinburgh address it is a subsidiary of The Scottish Salmon Company PLC, which is registered in Jersey. There’s a list of their largest shareholders here. The details are that SSC is majority owned by Northern Link, a private equity backed by Edinburgh-based, Ukrainian-born, banker Yuri Lopatinsky. Northern Link and other shareholders own shares in SSC through a custodian bank, Six Sis AG. The second largest shareholder is Frode Teigen, a Norwegian investor who owns shares in a string of fishing and aquaculture companies including Marine Harvest and Austevoll Seafood.

Voice readers will be well aware that Lamlash Bay lies in the newly designated "South Arran Marine Protected Area" (MPA) which is an attempt to help rejuvenate the badly damaged fish stocks and marine diversity in the Clyde. COAST is not opposed to fish farms if they can be proved to be sustainable. Unfortunately they have not received information which shows they can be ecologically sustainable. Their view is that if we managed our wild fish populations sustainably there would be no need for fish farms. They will be discussing their response to this proposal in detail themselves but will be opposing an expansion of current activities. In the meantime they would encourage people to make their views known to their elected representatives and to SEPA.

If you would like to contact SEPA please send an email to registryangussmith@sepa.org.uk, and to our MSP's email address: Kenneth.Gibson.msp@scottish.parliament.uk.

The application can be found on the SEPA website.

Stuart suggests some of the following points could be made in any response to the application:

1. The fish farm is within a designated MPA. MPAs allow for multi-use but the assumption throughout the MPA consultation has always been that there will be no expansion of the fish farm within the MPA.
2. Lamlash Bay frequently fails to meet the Food Standard Agency criteria for Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs). More organic waste from more fish and fish feed will not help to improve this situation.
3. The fish farm is located too closely to the mussel farm. An expansion of the fish farm will only increase the potential of the fish farm to impact adversely on the mussel farm.
4. A great deal of money and time was spent on an interceptor sewerage pipe by Scottish Water to take organic waste out of Lamlash Bay. An increase in organic waste from the fish farm will impact on the health of the wider bay and the seabed under the cages.
5. The community on Arran with the backing of North Ayrshire Council has already made its position clear with regard to an increase of fish farm activity in the Lamlash area and around Arran. The community strongly rejected the proposal for a fish farm north of Hamilton Rock and has been opposed to any other increase in activity.
6. The fish farm has suffered from fish disease in the past necessitating the transportation and incineration of tonnes of stock. An increase in the carrying capacity of the cages will only exacerbate the potential for disease.
7. By increasing the cage sizes there will be the potential for greater numbers of farmed fish to escape into the wild if there is a breach in the nets. There has already been a major unplanned release of salmon from the farm at Carradale this year.
8. Lamlash Bay is one of the most scenic bays in the Clyde and a huge draw for tourists and leisure craft. The fish farm is already an unsightly industrial installation and a source of noise pollution in one of the most natural areas of the bay. An increase in capacity will inevitably lead to an increase in associated operations, infrastructure and noise pollution.

Meanwhile, ITV News on the 8th October ran a story about the number of seals being shot to protect salmon farms. Official returns sent to the Scottish government by salmon farms show that 110 seals were shot in the first part of 2015. Although officials say this is a 5% decline on the same period last year, campaigners are calling for a ban on the killings, and supermarkets are being urged to stop sourcing farmed salmon from 'seal-unfriendly' salmon farms. Protests are planned in Edinburgh (30 October) and in London (9 December) before a protest outside the RSPCA's head office in Sussex (10 December).

Our seas are filling up with plastic rubbish and chemical sludge. It has recently been estimated that 8 million tons of plastic waste are dumped in the ocean each year and it is predicted that the total amount could increase tenfold by 2020.

This has a massive impact on marine wildlife: for example, plastic bags look very much like jellyfish when floating around and a dead whale was recently washed up in France with 800kg of disposable bags in its stomach. The remains of sea birds are regularly found with cigarette lighters and other assorted plastic in them. A recent scientific study estimates that 90% of the world’s seabirds are likely to have pieces of plastic in their guts. Plastic waste also affects other marine wildlife such as dolphins, seals, turtles and fish, which become entangled or choked by it.

And it doesn't stop there – all the plastic that has ever entered the seas is still there. It just breaks down in sunlight into smaller and smaller particles. These microparticles are then ingested by smaller fish and organisms There is also concern that the so-called microspheres present in more and more cosmetic items are adding to this problem. In addition, in the process of breaking down many plastics releases toxic chemicals, which scientists have proven are building up in the food chain – something to think about next time you eat seafood.

So it comes as no surprise that Arran is also impacted by marine pollution. I am sure that while walking along the beach you've seen plastic drinks bottles and other rubbish littering our shores. When the Gulf Stream hits the south coast it brings with it not only warm water but also plenty of plastic. For this reason, and to make the Coastal Path more pleasant for walkers, the Arran Coastal Way team decided to clean up the whole coast of Arran.

Starting at Kildonan and with generous help from COAST, local farmers and volunteers, they have so far collected around 150 tonne bags of rubbish – sometimes from extremely inaccessible stretches of coastline. This includes a lot of items from the fishing and shipping industries (nets, full and used oil canisters, fish crates, buoys, gloves etc.) and a vast number of plastic drinks bottles. Additionally they come across car wheels and tyres, plastic shopping bags, tents, sweet wrappers, cigarette lighters and many other smaller unidentifiable pieces of plastic. One of the most common items, and probably the most difficult to pick up, are cotton bud sticks – cotton buds thrown down the toilet after use are small enough to pass through the sewerage plant filters and end up in their tens of thousands all around Arran's beaches.

The team has been doing litter picks every Wednesday for the last six months and has so far reached Blackwaterfoot. They intend to work their way clockwise around the coast until they reach Kildonan again. If you are interested in helping out, then please contact Rachel Sedman on 01770 303926 or you can write to her at arran@coastalway.co.uk

The internet is full of articles about plastic pollution in the sea. If you'd like to read more, then you might want to start here and then here.

Information about the work being done to improve the Arran Coastal Way can be found on their website.

23/10/2015, Lamlash

Alyssa Colwell, Katie Mowatt and Charlie Weir are pupils from Arran High School. They have joined the Community of Arran Seabed Trust (COAST) team for a week of work experience. Katie is considering a career as a researcher: “I thought COAST could be an interesting experience and give me a better idea of what I’ll be doing if I finally go into research”.

Their task has been investigating the prevalence of Japanese knotweed around Lamlash bay. Alyssa explains about their findings: “We went from Clauchlands Point to Kingscross Point over the course of three days and found substantial evidence of the presence of Japanese knotweed, finding twenty-eight separate patches, some as large as twenty square metres, if not bigger. We found the majority between Kingscross Point and Cordon, but there was a definite presence around the rest of the bay, particularly near residential areas”.

Japanese knotweed is a non-native, invasive plant species which has a negative impact on the natural plant species found on Arran, as well as being damaging to properties, should it grow near them. This is because the roots of the plant can grow through concrete and cause structural damage to any buildings within a vicinity of seven metres. It can be removed by excavation or by the use of herbicide spray over the course of about two years, but any treatment must be performed by a trained professional, as there could be legal consequences if the plant is not completely destroyed. From a fragment the size of a fingernail, the plant can grow vertically to the height of three to four metres above ground and three metres below, as well as growing seven metres horizontally underground. The plant is characterised by long bamboo-like shoots with purple flecks, stems in a zig-zag pattern with smooth, flat based, shield shaped leaves, which can grow to ten to fifteen centimetres. In the summer months, the plant grows creamy white flowers, which it loses by winter.

A Green Party report (Airport Expansion Doesn’t Make Climate Sense) has revealed that the UK will not meet its climate change targets if David Cameron goes ahead with a new runway at Heathrow, Gatwick or anywhere in the South-East of England.

The Troubled Man by Henning Mankell
Vintage paperback £7.99 USBN 978-0-099-54840-9

Mankell in New York in 2011

Henning Mankell, the Swedish novelist and crime writer who died last week, was one of the most human and perceptive authors in the genre. The Troubled Man, his final book about Kurt Wallander, a reluctant police detective with a lot else to worry about, hinges on the fact that Wallander absent-mindedly leaves his service gun in a cafe. There is of course an official rumpus, but at a more telling level, it ushers in Wallander's awful fear that he is in the early stages of Alzheimer's. At the time, we now realise, Mankell would have known he had lung cancer. The plot is Chandleresque in its subtlety, but the strength of the writing comes from the author's ability to get deep inside the psyche of his troubled hero. At one level, the book is a tense, dangerous thriller, but at another, its pages set out a human testament that is elegiac and deeply moving.

A baggage check ticket to Johannesburg fell out of my second-hand copy, left by someone reading Mankell on a long flight. He was truly a writer for the world.

The Voice is following Kirsty Crawford's blog from India. Here is Kirsty’s latest posting. (Please note that Kirsty’s photographs are subject to copyright.

Selected by David Underdown who also writes the commentary.

South to make Three No-Trumps. West leads a diamond.

Clafoutis

Fresh plums are abundant at the moment and here is a tasty way of using them. It can also be made with fresh apricots or even apples or pears, but plums work best.

The quantities given will be plenty for four people and it should be served with lashings of double cream.

Please click on the “Print” icon below to download a pdf copy of the recipe.