After 25 years, the BBC has relaunched it’s Domesday project, designed to chronicle the state of different areas of the country at one point in time.

It’s also released some of the information from it’s last Domesday project, and it captures some nice features from Inverness and Nairn circa 1985.

At this point 25 years ago, a large and expensive supermarket was being built in Nairn. It’s a Co-Op now, and it’s about to fall into the shadow of a brand new Sainsburys on the east side of town.  In employment, most of the men were working in the oil and most of the women surveyed were housewives.

In Inverness, Eden Court was young and failing miserably at holding rock concerts. Friar Bridge was just being built, and a sweet old woman was enjoying watching it being built while remembering past plagues of T.B. and cramped houses.

Have a look at the Domesday Project, and drop a comment below if you find something interesting about your home.

Originally posted by Emma Maree Urquhart on EmmaMaree.com

It’s time for more random links! Skiver Tuesday, I guess?

© Sam Rowley

Awesome deer photos by the award-winning and very enviable 15-year old Sam Rowley.  I love deer – this may be because I’ve never experienced the joys of them coming down from the wood to eat my plants. My old home in Inverness was close enough to the woods to have a fair few of them, though being honest I haven’t really seen many up-close. One of the characters in my novel The Network is a Kirin, a deer-like creature of Japanese mythos, and I’ve toyed with ideas for a YA novel linked to the animals. Yay deer. I could browse Sam’s gallery all day.

An article in the BBC covers the tricky topic of parents being abused by their children.Most of us will have seen kids and teens who treat their parents with disgust and anger, or more subtly walk over them, but abuse isn’t a commonly seen or discussed thing. Food for thought.

I try to use my writing to cover a lot of the darker things that people would feel less comfortable with outside of a fantasy setting. For example: both of my current in-progress works deal frankly and honestly with suicide and depression, because those are both important things that the target age range (teenagers) are going to come up against. It comes with stigma – the book dealing more heavily with it comes across as gothic, and the content in my lighter work will probably get called ‘emo’; both will attract negative attention from people who insist they have no respect for the suicidal and think they’re selfish. It all comes with the territory, and despite that it’s still an effective way of getting a message across.

There a Nepal animal sacrifice festival going on this week – the largest sacrifice in the world – where over a quarter of a million animals  ”>are killed. A difficult to believe amount, and understandably it has the animal rights activists up in arms. I’m indifferent – I’d have to be Hindu and understand more about the beliefs behind it to hold a strong opinion, really. However, I am interested in the quote in the article about how the gods would be just as easily appeased by fruit or flowers.

Morality aside, this paragraph caught my eye:

“Festival organisers estimate more than half a million people are already at the festival site.

Many of them, like Suresh, have brought their own animals to be killed. “

Festival organisers? It makes it sound like Glastonbury. Gadhimai-bury, woohoo!

In America, a man found out he was adopted as a child, and traces his mother and father only to discover his dad is Charles Manson. Yikes. D: I didn’t even know Manson was still alive, actually.

Then some inspiring Inverness news, a courageous and beautiful woman who became paralysed after a climbing accident and has still gone on to complete the Great North Run in a racing wheelchair, and aims to go on to be the first woman to sit-ski across Antarctica to the South Pole. Bless her, what an inspiration.

The heating is still broken at work, and the weather outside is frightful. So it goes.

Originally posted by Emma Maree Urquhart on EmmaMaree.com