CAITHNESS is jam-packed with charity events that raise money throughout the year, but it is always useful to see what other rural areas are doing for charity.The tiny mountain town of Inlet in New York state, America, has shown that a small town can have big ambitions, and has achieved major fundraising with an inspirational, record-breaking event on the water.
The event took place around the time that myself and other members of Caithness Kayak Club were practising rafting up in Sinclair’s Bay. This is a useful safety exercise as well as one of manoeuvrability.
Not long afterwards I came across this spectacular example of kayaks and canoes rafting up in a lake by Inlet, in the Adirondack Mountains. The raft event was called One Square Mile of Hope (www.onesquaremileofhope.org).
Thanks to an amazing aerial photo taken by photographer Nancie Battaglia, the raft of 1925 kayaks and canoes has been recorded forever and travelled around the world via the internet. Inlet has only 400 residents but they got their act together with the intention of regaining the Guinness World Record for the largest floating raft. The record had been taken from Inlet by the city of Pittsburgh, which has 350,000 residents. In 2008, Inlet had held the title with 1104 boats but the city later took the title with a raft of 1619 boats.
Inlet’s giant raft, which took about two hours to form, also had the purpose of raising money for breast cancer research (a charity called Susan G. Komen for the Cure) and has reached more than £40,000 so far.
The event was covered by large-scale community radio station North Country Public Radio (ncpr.org), which featured the iconic raft image on its website. The image subsequently featured on various social networking pages.
“When the little town of Inlet decides to win, we do it in a big way,” said Connie Perry, organiser of One Square Mile of Hope. “We had two goals: to raise funds for Susan G. Komen For the Cure for breast cancer research and to grab back the Guinness World Record we held three years ago.”
This year’s raft-building event hosted over 2200 paddlers in solo and tandem boats from 14 American states and Canada.
One Square Mile of Hope is a testament to how much can be achieved when small rural communities sets their sights high.
Maybe a huge raft isn’t the way to go in the sea off Caithness, though, unless the participants want a frozen, bumpy ride to Stavanger.
Do you want to share your car with a sad, cringeworthy man?
AS if road rage isn’t bad enough in itself, one company has launched a ghastly satnav featuring the awful Jeremy Clarkson and various other Top Gear gimmicks.
With an October launch, presumably this horror is intended to be a Christmas gift for dads and boy racers who really should know better.
TomTom boasts the Go Live Top Gear edition, which brings fans of the tedious show a combination of Stig mode, nasty Clarkson’s directions and selected points of interest such as racetracks used in the series. There will be no escape from this dated lads’-mag-style TV programme that celebrates speed – now available an in-car device that helps you avoid mobile and fixed speed cameras!
As if our road death toll wasn’t bad enough already.
The blurb says: “Drivers can choose to have The Stig mode, which renders the device instantly silent, or select Jeremy Clarkson’s voice to guide them.”
I can just hear it now, Clarkson’s irritating voice: “Watch out for that stupid woman driver over there applying lipstick instead of learning how to reverse park.”
And let’s not forget that this is the man who called former UK prime minister Gordon Brown a “one-eyed Scottish idiot” – so you can imagine the satnav dishing out the advice: “No, don’t take the A1 north, stay away from evil Jockland.”
Clarkson also made a so-called joke a few years ago about lorry drivers killing prostitutes. I’m sure the lorry drivers of the country will be delighted to hear directions from the man who thinks they are all crazed sex killers.
At a mere £179.99, you can share your car with this sad, cringeworthy man. Or you could score TomTom off your list of acceptable satnavs.
THE fight to retain health services rages on in Caithness, helped along by not-too-distant memories of how we were treated by NHS Highland management when it attempted to rid us of our consultant-led maternity unit at Caithness General Hospital. Raigmore is only a risk assessment away, as they say.
Now the fight focuses on Thurso’s Dunbar Hospital, with a significant growing petition opposing cuts to services.
When it comes to childbirth there is nothing like the element of surprise, and a recent story from Derbyshire shows that even the blindingly obvious is sometimes not apparent.
Forty-four-year-old Jane Eadie believed that she was having an early menopause and weight gain from stopping some unnamed pills, until she felt unwell while shopping and then gave birth on a bench in front of surprised shoppers.
This being her third baby, one wonders how the idea of being pregnant did not enter her mind. Having experienced the elephantine feeling, bizarre appetite and Gothic mood swings associated with pregnancy, I find it a wee bit difficult to understand how after nine months of carrying a baby you would not work out what was going on.
Mrs Eadie also assumed her contractions were a result of a tummy bug. She must have had some pretty severe abdominal complaints in the past.
It just underlines the importance of having obstetric advice nearby day and night.
Corrina Thomson is on Facebook and Twitter @corrinathomson
