11 days to go

Today I was on the Island of Gigha to take part in a four way hustings organised by someone on the island. We went with our neighbours , John & Morag Shiveral, who had never been to Gigha and who took Cooper their labrador along in their own car, suitably branded of course !

The sun shone and although the meeting was smaller than the one I held on the island in April it was good. There were a group of local farmers there on whom the Tory (with whom I had never debated before) had clearly pinned his hopes - along with his Mum, who sat in the front row and who, in the middle of the meeting, chastised Elaine Morrison of the Greens for being sharp with her boy.

However I suspect any undecideds who were present went away far from convinced by the harsh exposition of an unsympathetic ideology that stridently insisted on leaving Europe, defended expenditure on Trident and expressed some hostility to renewables. At times he sounded like a UKIP candidate. He also seemed fixated on Alex Salmond, something that all the Better Together campaigners suffer from whilst the YES campaign rejoices in the very broad church it has become.

This association of the NO side with parties, not people, was in evidence later in the day when I met the same young Tory eagerly handing out leaflets in the main street of Tarbert which promoted him as the Tory candidate for 2015 as well as arguing for a "patriotic" no vote ! Hardly the way to persuade wavering Lib Dems or even the few Labour voters in the village and the polls of course now show that such rhetoric is not wining support. In addition Tarbert had hosted a much bigger YES cohort earlier in the day which was distributing a much more palatable and relevant local message.

Anyway Gigha is a lovely island with lots to offer beyond hustings. The gardens of Achamore House are owned by the community and are looking particularly fine at present. We got a good walk round them after the political event and there is much worth seeing though we had to get away quite quickly as we were due in Dunoon for the evening.

I was spoilt for choice for blipping, so compromised with more pictures than I ever put into a single blip before - so probably worth looking at it LARGE.