A twilight ride

I was just sitting there in the chips shop below Sandra’s Hostel making use of the wi-fi when Postman Craig came in with his motor-biking gear saying here lassie put this on we’re going for a wee ride and an old man in the chips shop said you should go to Dunnet Head and so we biked over to the mainland’s mostly northerly point passing a village or two and bogs and lochs and broom bright yellow in bloom and when we got to a viewpoint near the lighthouse you could see the cliffs and beaches and the headlands of the northern coastline and Orkney’s Old Man of Hoy and beyond to other lighthouses and sea stacks in the Atlantic and then we saw a footpath along the cliffs and we peered over and saw fulmars gliding and nesting on sheer ledges and guillemots and razorbills too and Craig said hey look at those things and I peered over and those things were puffins PUFFINS they were puffins just sitting there on the tiniest grassy ledge and I couldna believe it cos I waited an hour for the last puffin I saw on the Isle of Staffa in 2005 and I’d seen none on Handa Island a week ago but there in the gloamin were six puffins on their ledge looking up at us perched on our ledge and I didn’t have my camera and I still had my helmet on cos I didn’t expect to see such things and we sat there in the fullness of surprise and when the lighthouses lit up along the headlands and the sky turned pink we biked back past lochs reflecting the pink and a deer appeared from behind the broom and even at 60 miles an hour from the back of the bike I spotted a wading curlew and our hands were as cold as ice when we arrived back at the chips shop.