Hot showers finally reach Loch Ossian

Good week, bad week By Roxanne Sorooshian

It’s a good week for ... smelly hillwalkers

EIGHTY-FIVE years is a long time to go without a hot shower, but the power of hydro electricity has finally reached Loch Ossian Youth Hostel.

For the first time since starting up in 1931, the accommodation in the Highlands is able to offer visitors hot running water.

The hostel is one of Scotland’s more remote, and can only be reached by travelling by train to Corrour station and then walking for about 20 minutes. I suspect that its clientele are not there for the mod cons, but the stunning scenery round about.

Nevertheless, visitors must welcome the end of years of cold showers thanks to connection to a nearby hydro electric scheme. It also means the building now has a fridge and electric heaters.

Cold beer, warm welcome. Sounds like the perfect culmination to a day on the hills.

It’s been a bad week for ... ostrich hunters

While the rest of the world was chasing Pokémon, the small Ayrshire town of Patna was the focus of a very different type of hunter. The prey? A rogue ostrich. As social media attention mounted, reported sightings grew arms and legs, even wings, with speculation that the bird was not operating alone. But suggestions that there were accomplices involved could not be confirmed.

A Twitter account was set up in honour of the loose bird.

According to the ostrich’s online presence, the bird would surrender itself for a “three-bedroom council house or a nice pen at Heads of Ayr”.

A tweet goaded the hunters: “Nobody has the Poké-balls to catch me.”

Although at the time of writing the bird was still at large, the mystery surrounding it seems to have been solved. It turns out the Patna ostrich is a pet rhea on the run.

Its owners, Elaine and Ian Wilson, have had the bird for six years without incident, but something spooked him and he vaulted the high wall where he was kept. They have appealed to the public to leave the bird alone as rheas, flightless cousins of the ostrich more commonly found roaming the pampas of South America, are timid creatures and it is thought he will be disorientated and scared.

And maybe a little emu-tional.