Hello, my name is Lisbeth Jardine. I live in Port Angeles, Washington, U.S.A., just 17 miles across the Strait of Juan da Fuca from Victoria, B.C. My interest in the Orkney Islands has to do with a novel I've written and hoping might be published fairly soon. It's called The Female Creature. It's about the 2nd, the female creature, Victor Frankenstein, on one of the smallest and most remote of Orkney skars--some "five miles from the mainland" Mary Shelley wrote (and anyone who's got a good guess of which of Orkney's she may have had in mind is most welcome to get in contact with me; the question is "did she mean the mainland of Scotland or the Orkney "Mainland"?)--nearly completed the female creature and then fearing that "future generations will think of me as a pest," tore her apart, put the parts into a giant Orcadian basket (that's my addition), put the basket into his skiff, sailed out into the North Sea, dropped the basket overboard, and sailed away from that spot. At any rate, to write the story of what happens after that, I've had to do a fair amount of research on the Orkney Islands. And the Creature, at t! he end of Frankenstein is not dead. Girl + boy = gotta meet. Lisbeth Jardine