It’s a funny old thing being back home after while away. There is the disorientation that this morning I woke up in a ships cabin and now, here I am. What always seems to go through my head is ‘What a lot of stuff I have’ followed by looking in wonderment at the pile of things I have been surviving with for the past few weeks – makes me wonder why I bother having shelves full of books I don’t read and DVDs I don’t watch and clothes I don’t use.
Then, slowly, little things reveal themselves to me as being wonderful. I can sit in a comfortable chair. I can watch TV. I can boil a kettle just by flicking a switch on a kettle and not squatting over a stove in the freezing rain. I can type this with a proper keyboard and not have to use my phone. I have my own toilet, and I don’t need to use a head torch or brave a cloud of midges to get to it. The fact I have access to artificial light so I can stay up later than dusk. I can microwave food to get it warm. Oh and the floor isn’t wobbling up and down.
And my bed...my wonderful comfortably bed....well I still haven’t gone near that yet, I’m saving it. I’m really going to relish it tonight.
The sea trip overnight was wonderful – it was as still as the proverbial millpond, quite amazing. We got a fabulous orange sunset and I think I saw a whale, or at least something black backed with a stumpy fin (oh and I don’t think I mentioned we saw 2 porpoise yesterday too – one actually leapt out of the water and swam under the boat, it was amazing). I had treated myself to a cabin with a window on the journey back so I got to sit in comfort and private as I watched Shetland disappear into the horizon (and as the ferry route goes down along the side of the island and it’s an abnormally long island, this took some time).
My slightly more expensive cabin also had the advantage of being above wave level and away from the engine, making for a much quieter journey...except for when we docked at Kirkwall at 11pm and there was this almighty grinding and crashing. I was in bed, but sat up and pulled up the window shutter and lo! I was looking directly at some engineers who were attaching the foot passenger walkway to the ship ready for embarkation. My cabin was only feet away from the main boat entrance. I hastily closed the shutters again and put ear plugs in for the rest of the night.
I don’t think I finished talking about the boat trip yesterday either did I? English guys playing at sea captain. A couple of Australians aboard who kept screaming out Otter false alarms. Loads of gannet flying over our head, just as many as at Herma Ness...in fact on the all day trip the day before I got talking to the banker man and he said he and his wife had actually done the Herma Ness 4 hour walk the other day and he wouldn’t recommend it. Most of the time you are just hiking over bog with the occasional bird diving bombing you, and when you get to the cliffs you can’t get close enough to them to look down and get a close look at the birds, so the boat trip was absolutely the correct way of looking at the cliffs. Bonxies taking biscuits out of the engineers hand.
Ah yes - ‘bonxie’ is the local name for skewer. Wretched birds, worse than herring gulls. They can’t dive themselves so they wait for gannets to dive and come up, then rob them of their food. They also plunder the nests of other birds and eat their eggs and chicks. Not quite as bad as fulmars that eject a foul smelling oil from their nose at you to make you go away, but bonxies are the rat/wasp of the seabird world.
Oh did you also know that shags feathers aren’t waterproof? The reason you see them sitting on rocks all the time is that they have to dry their feathers out periodically else they’ll start to hold water, and they’ll sink and drown. Gannets feathers also lose their waterproofing over time, and generally gannets dies of cold because water starts to get in as they get old. Gannets are also pre-programmed to dive if they see a flash of light in the water as well. If you have ever seen a gannet dive, it’s impressive because they start their dive from about 30foot up, and fold themselves up on the way down so they hit the water like mini-Concords. I thought there was some intelligent scanning of the water below before they dived - like eagles might do for prey on land – but no, it’s simply that if they see a flash of light under the water, the brain screams ‘Dive’ and they dive more as a knee jerk reflex action than anything else. Presumably they also surface, confused, thinking ‘What the f*ck was THAT!”. Old Shetlanders used to exploit this reflex and caught gannets by trailing hooks with shiny bits of metal under the water behind the boat to make them dive and get themselves caught.
When we got back to port, I killed my remaining couple of hours in the Shetland museum, which is free and reasonably well stocked with things to see. They had a reconstruction of a Neolithic woman from a skull, for instance, and a huge hoard of Pictish silverware which was astonishingly finely made. It’s interesting though that they had to say on one board something along the lines of ‘...and they call this the Bronze age, though Bronze wasn’t actually discovered on Shetland for another x thousand years’, and all their timelines show when the mainland discovered bronze, iron etc, and then trailing behind are when someone thought to tell Shetland and Orkney about them as well. Just keep banging the rocks together guys, you’re doing fine...
Oh and I had managed not to meet Billy Fox again for the remainder of the visit, which I thought was impressive – though I did meet the healthy looking 60 somethings again, wandering around the Ancient man section. This is how it is on Islands you see. Suddenly you can’t go anywhere without bumping into people you know.
The museum visit took me neatly into checking in time at the Ferry, and I locked myself in the car until I got my queue to drive in, because the midges were everywhere again today...all over town, wandering up and down the harbour looking at boats, buying tickets at the pay and display machine and giving you a nod hello. When it’s come to midge count, some days have been better than others and I’d say that on the whole, the Shetlands had seemed freer of the little bastards than Orkney. That said, maybe I’d been lucky about the weather again because yesterday was evil, it was one of the worst days I’d seen all visit for midges. The only way to escape them was to go out to sea. Perhaps this is why fishermen grow beards and have rollneck sweaters (and I have been keeping the sleeves of my jumpers closed with hair ties this past week – looks stupid but it works).
Actually it’s worth saying something about my car too. Okay it was never the tidiest of cars anyway but I got by. It rains so much in Manchester I generally never have to clean it, and I can rely on the routine valeting it gets when it goes for MOT or a service to keep its interior roughly hygienic.
After two weeks camping though...for a start, you don’t realise how much salt and sand is in the air on the coast until you let your car sit around in it for a while – it starts to form a crystalline crust. Drive around as much as I do (the round trip finally came in at around 2200 miles) and you also develop a thin layer of insect guts over the windscreen, bonnet and bumper. It wasn’t raining as much as I was used to in Manchester, so gunk was just building up and by the final few days in Shetland, my car was genuinely disgusting to touch and hard to see out of. But then it rained heavily one night and that alleviated some of it. Give it one evening back in Manchester and it’ll be back looking as good as new.
The interior has suffered a bit as well, having been used as a cloakroom/dining area The area under the drivers seat was a thin layer of meat and bannock crumbs, sand and mud, sheep muck, gull droppings, you name it – its worse than the Gannetry at Herma Ness (and shit was falling like snow that day, its amazing I didn’t get hit on my observation deck). It’s also a buzzing hive of insects. Some, I think, got in when I packed my tent way, or via sleeping in my clothes. Others got in when I had to do routine opening and shutting of the car though – so there always seemed to be a handful of midges and things buzzing around my head as I was driving and one thing I can say is DON’T open up with a can of DEET in a car, it will blind you, you will choke and you’ll have to stop in a layby and cough until you are nearly sick. So a friend tells me...
...If you do though, it’s funny watching all the midges scream and start flattening themselves against the windscreen to get away from you. If you then leave them in the car overnight (and you mostly have little choice), they all seem to die and you find them the next morning coating your dashboard, sliding around as you turn corners and dropping off into your lap – else stuck to the screen in the condensation so you have to wipe them off. I’m not sure if it’s the DEET that does that, or the temperature, or whether it’s just that the foul under-layer of stuff under the driver’s seat gets to them. Incidentally as I bundled some clothes into the washing machine after I got home, I released a further cloud of midges and shooed them out into the garden. It’ll be interesting to see if they ‘take’ and displace the local population.
It was nice to get a little wander around the ferry. I had a look at the cafeteria – it was serving Scottish mainstays of meat and tatties, and dull looking sandwiches. It crossed my mind then that I hadn’t seen a Curry or a Chinese since I had entered this neck of the woods. The Scots are definitely into bland – far more so than us cosmopolitan city dwellers with our Mediterranean chiabattas and frappucinnos. They’re all for tatties, haggis, macaroni pie (yes it is...macaroni cheese, chilled in a pie case), chips, beef and bannock, black puddin’, and that’s about your lot. Desert is ‘Eve’s puddin’ – sponge cake with apple in it and heavily coated with sugar. Nary a spice to be seen for over 400 miles in either direction. Though to be fair, the co-op in Lerwick did sell croissants.
Oh they can’t make sandwiches either – I haven’t had a decent sandwich since I entered Scotland. I don’t get how they can ruin them, but they manage either by the plainness of the ingredients (egg, cheese and ham, ham, egg and ham, cheese and egg – that’s about all you’ll ever find) or the extended shelf life (the smaller shops keep the sandwiches on the shelves until they sell, be that 1 day or 5 judging by the curliness of the bread and sourness of the butter in some cases). That’s how my whole bannock obsession started. And Bannock wise...well I’m even more confused now than I was because in Orkney they are flat and round, in Shetland they are little triangles, and then on the ferry I saw something labelled as bannock and it was fruit cake so what’s going on here?
The drive back to day was ok...the GPS got confused around Edinburgh where there was a new bit of motorway it didn’t know about, and I think it picked a somewhat dubious route of B roads between Dundee/Edinburgh/Carlisle but at least I got to see the countryside round there. I had passed by it briefly once before but forgot. Nothing like the highlands with the huge imposing cliffs, its all soft undulating plains of agricultural land – if I hadn’t had Scottish radio on to remind me, I would hardly have thought I was in Scotland at all.
Was kicked off the boat at 7:45 and got back home for 1pm, thus proving you can easily be in Shetland one day, and home the next (or vice versa). No speeding penalties waiting for my on my doorstep from the journey up, amazingly, only a heap of local papers and adds for pizza joints as per usual. And my car unpacked remarkably easily (ignoring the internal layer of filth), so I had most of the day to restock food, settle down, and wander around my house, awestruck by its amenities.
Ack I’m nodding off – it’s been a long day – won’t be able to finish this entry now. I’ll do a sum up of the holiday tomorrow and also post some of my ‘better’ pics from the proper camera instead of all the cameraphone stuff. So it’s finally time to (oh be still by beating heart) lie on my bed and go to sleep. I think I may have forgotten how this sleep-in-proper-bed thing works....well they do say it’s like riding a bicycle...Goodnight.
