Incomer

The hares have been running about crazily for a few weeks now.  The fields around the house are full of them, and not rabbits, which over-run most of Orkney.  For some reason rabbits rarely venture here.  I’ve always imagined it’s because the soil in west Stenness isn’t suited to burrow construction, being too dark and rich and heavy (they seem to prefer sandy soil.) 

Maybe there’s more to it than that though.  Yesterday morning I was gazing vacantly out the kitchen window as I tend to do on Sunday mornings (most mornings, to be honest) watching three hares chasing each other in manic stop-start patterns around the field.  Then I noticed that they’d been joined by a smaller, lighter-coloured beast, which joined in their running and jumping – trying, but not quite managing, to keep up.  A young hare? I wondered.  Runt of the litter?

I took a closer look with the binoculars and realised that the newcomer was actually a rabbit!  A stranger to these parts, trying to ingratiate itself with the locals by joining in their jousting and sprinting.  It strived rabbitfully to match their speed and unpredictable zig-zags, but kept dropping behind in the sprints, and carrying on in a straight line while the hares jinked sideways…

After ten minutes or so the rabbit stopped, sat up on its haunches as if considering its options, then slowly loped off  across the field and disappeared in the long grass beneath the fence at the far side.

Did I imagine it, or was the hares’ next boxing spat more like a high five at having out-run and out-crazied the would be incomer?

The smell of sour grapes

A week ago there was a mini heatwave, got enough to ignite a moor fire on Hoy, and keep it burning fiercely for a couple of days.  Now it’s snowing, and the curtains of snow drifting through the Rackwick Glen look strangely like the grey smoke that roiled up there a few days ago.

Fire!  Snow! Volcanic ash!  I asked my friend in the north what exactly sulphuric Shetland smelled like.  ‘Rotten eggs,’ he replied.  I laughed at the idea of the whole of Shetland stinking of bad eggs, but deep down I was just jealous because Orkney didn’t smell of anything but slurry.  The smell of sour grapes… 

Why should they have all the bad luck?  I’m holding out for a plague of toads to even things up a bit.

Eyjafjallajoekull (I enjoyed typing that)

Shetland, they say, smells faintly of sulphur.  Icelandic sulphur at that, carried south with the ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano eruption.  I went outside, proposing to walk up and down, sniffing the breeze alert for any whiff of spent matches.  Before I’d so much as  fluttered my nostrils they were filled with the pungent, overwhelming stink of slurry. 

We’re deep in the season.  The hills of Hoy could be spewing ash and lava, and all we’d smell here would be well-matured cow manure.  The recent spell of unusually cold weather has meant most kye have been kept inside longer than usual, leading to a serious stockpiling of slurry.  (Hmm, you can’t really pile slurry, can you?  There must be another word for accumulating the stuff, but can’t think of it right now.)  Farmers are seen driving slowly down quiet roads, pumping the stuff in great brown plumes into all the fields they pass – just to empty their tanks.

Which reminds me of the story of Buckquoy Billy, who got increasingly enraged as the new owner of the bungalow at the edge of his land set to work on her garden, tossing weeds over the dyke into his tattie park as she plucked them out of her borders.  The next time he was spraying he went to the tattie park, stopped beside the garden wall, and pumped a thousand gallons of slurry onto the bungalow and its manicured lawns.  When the owner ran out, shrieking, and (using a circuitous route, you have to imagine) approached him furiously, he replied, ‘Well, if you stop chucking your shite onto my land, I’ll stop spraying mine onto yours.’

A true story.  It must be, you’re reading it on the internet.

What our garden is covered with today is volcanic ash.  To be honest you can only really see it on big smooth surfaces –  which is not a description of our lawn.  The bonnet of the car is the best place to see it.  It looks light grey against the dark metal, but when you wipe your fingers along it, the dust looks black against the skin. 

Though now the rain is starting to pour down, and pour sideways - there’s a strong north wind – so the ash will soon be washed away.

Only a partial washout is this weekend’s mini-festival of writing and writers, called Voice.  With all flights into Orkney being cancelled – all flights everywhere - my old friend Robert Alan Jamieson has been unable to get up here from Edinburgh in time for his events.  A great shame, for me, as it’s been years since we had a proper face to face blether.  Alan was born and raised in Shetland, and often writes about it, so it’s ironic that it should be a wind from the north with its freighting of ash that stops a writer from our northern neighbour getting here.

The First Post

‘We Orcadians feel very isolated these days as one of the most precious things in life, the communication between friends, has dried up.’  

So wrote George Mackay Brown in February 1971, in the first of his ‘Letters from Hamnavoe,’ his weekly column in The Orcadian.  A few years later he changed its name to ‘Under Brinkie’s Brae,’ and under that heading it became an established favourite amongst Orcadian readers everywhere.  It was certainly what I turned to first every week.

Not the least of its attractions was its length: 400 words or so, rarely over or under by more than a sentence. (He was a highly professional writer, George: keen to fulfill his commission, but without wasting precious thoughts or words that could be used in next week’s column, or a story, or a poem.)  We have quite a few regular columnists in the papers now, and they all have their charms: but brevity doesn’t seem to be what’s required of them, and the ruthlessly selected observations or distilled narratives of ‘Under Brinkie’s Brae’ have been superceded by lengthier, more discursive pieces. 

If I’m to make this blog a regular affair, then brevity will certainly be necessary – no time to write a thousand words!  But it’s an aesthetic choice as much as a practical one.  Will it be the right choice, for either reason?  Time will tell.

The reason for the drying up of communication between friends that George bemoans was a postal strike.  In his appreciation of the local posties (and wasn’t his father one?  I think so, though that’s not mentioned in the column) he mentions a couple of things that set me back. 

First, the rattle of the letterbox waking him up in the morning; it’s usually past noon before the post arrives at my house!  Though probably that’s due to our rural location at the end of looping postal route rather than any decline in postie performance.  Second (and this definitely is a change in the service) the fact that he received two postal deliveries a day, the second one coming in the middle of the afternoon.

For a moment I felt a stab of envy for a post that frequent.  Then I thought, ‘What am I thinking about?  Nowadays mail arrives every second of the day, and right onto my desktop rather than the doormat.’  Think of our emails arriving just twice a day, at 8am and 3pm! 

Having known George for the last few years of his life, I find it hard to imagine anyone less likely to email, to keep a blog, or even to touch a laptop keyboard.  But there’s no doubt that the flow of communication between George and his friends, acquaintances, and readers was lifeblood to him.  He’s not alone in that.