Lifting stones

A couple of weeks ago I was looking around for a hotel somewhere in the Highlands, for Abi and me to spend a weekend away. The booking sites showed some interesting offers in Nairn. I don’t remember ever being in Nairn before, so I pulled up a map and starting scrolling around to see what’s there, and what’s nearby. My eye fell quickly fell on ain interesting-looking location nearby: the Barevan Lifting Stone.

Location of the Barevan Lifting Stone, near Nairn.

Google Maps lists this as a “tourist attraction”, and has a link to the Barevan stone’s page on LiftingStones.org. I had no idea that lifting stones were a thing! According to the site:

Like other traditional lifting stones, the five stages of lift are used here:

  1. 1. Break the ground (put wind beneath the stone)
  2. 2. Bring the stone to waist height
  3. 3. Bring the stone to the chest
  4. 4. Bring the stone to the shoulder
  5. 5. Press the stone overhead

LiftingStones.org is a lovely web site dedicated to documenting these lifting stones and their histories. There are stones all around the world, although most of them seem to be concentrated in the British Isles. The site is a classic piece of the good old-fashioned web: one person (Dave Brown) has staked out a topic for themselves, and they’re going to build the best damn resource you can find for this niche. Are you going to get a new article every day? No. Are you going to get a fascinating tidbit a couple of times a year, well-researched, and accompanied by cool photos? Absolutely.

The Barevan stone weighs 105kg. Yeah…no. Not trying that. In the end we booked a hotel elsewhere, and there is another pair of stones nearby (the Auchernack Stones: 100kg and 130kg). I’m not going to try them either, but we might pop round and have a look.

Jack Walker goes down for one of Scotland’s largest ever frauds

A few years ago I briefly worked at Tribune Risk and Insurance Services just outside Dalkeith. It was only “briefly” because five weeks after I joined, the company was shut down by the Financial Services Authority. Over a hundred people lost their jobs, and more than 40,000 homeowners were left without insurance cover–two weeks before Christmas 2003.

John (Jack) Walker being escorted from the High Court after sentencing.  Image taken from BBC News at  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/6099842.stmWell, it has taken some time to get to this point, but this afternoon the man behind it all, John Kirke (“Jack”) Walker was finally sentenced to 4 years and 10 months in jail for fraud. He pled guilty to the charges in May of this year at Edinburgh Sheriff Court, but Sheriff Kenneth MacIver sent the case to the High Court for sentencing because he felt the five year maximum sentence he had the power to impose was insufficient to punish Walker for the magnitude of his crime.

Jack’s wife Evelyn, who founded the company, stood accused of the same crime along with one of his sons, but the court accepted their not guilty pleas. (How???)

In hindsight, Tribune’s collapse didn’t turn out too badly for me. It gave me the push to start contracting, a move I probably wouldn’t have committed to otherwise, and it’s where I met Alan Ramsay, who has become my arch-nemesis a good friend. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel bitter about it. Convicted criminal Jack Walker (how good it feel to say that–and with no danger of libel, either!) shat all over the people who worked at Tribune, and the tens of thousands of people he duped out of their insurance premiums. It is immensely gratifying to see the Scottish justice system taking a massive dump on him.

Mmmmm, schadenfreude pie.

A slice of schadenfreude pie.  Recipe and photo by John Scalzi.  Image shamelessly lifted from http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004492.html