Someday we’ll dance, and the dragonships will burn

The Shetland days are starting to lengthen, but your soul doesn’t know it. Your body drags through each tiny day into the long evening, the longer midnight. The spirit sags. You’re suffering from Shetlag.

There’s no uplift in mood. Maybe the darkness shortens, marginally, but it deepens, and comes attached to rain and wind, sometimes in very large, fast-moving quantities. Frost would be a relief, solidifying the ground and (for gardeners) hopefully killing a few tattie-ruining bugs. Snow. We love a bit of snow. I remember an elderly couple moving here who, local gossip insisted, spent their winters in northern Sweden as “the clear skies and moonlight reflecting off the snow means they can see better. What with their eyesight problems…” 

A conversation with the couple one summer revealed this as complete invention. Their eyes were fine. They wintered in Hertfordshire. “It’s warmer.” It had all been wishful winter thinking by a neighbour.

Because we do long for the light. In whatever brief blinks of sunshine available I try to get out, along the cliffs to the Heads of Grocken, over the Ness, down to the West Ayre. Just into the garden. Anything for some vitamin D. In the past Shetland’s culture of ‘føy’ (partying at the drop of a bannock) brought winter-long flickers of social enlightenment, not to say conflagration. Up Helly Aa fire festivals marking “the lightening of the year” are scattered throughout the isles, and start around now, mid-January, lasting until almost March. All canceled for the past two years, and in the months ahead. Dances, “men’s nights” (feasts where every domestic duty is undertaken by males), all kinds of classes and meetings and clubs, not to mention the “in aboot da night” habit of social visitation: Stopped. The community which made its own illumination has been cast into three winters of pandemic darkness. Only in Downing Street, apparently, was there permission to party until all available suitcases were completely empty of Lambrini.

Up Helly Aa usually involves at least a year’s worth of planning; costumes and skits being worked up, flammable galleys built. A few festivals have gone ahead with the writing and display of “da bill”, the public litany of squibs and jibes against the personal follies of community members, and the foibles of Shetland bigwigs and organisation. But the long nights-into-day of drinking, dancing, eating and generally having a spree are in abeyance. Though one of the Lerwick Indian restaurants is doing a pop-up takeaway at the Hillswick Hall tonight; I can hardly contain my socially-distanced excitement.

I have attended many Up Helly Aas, both the major toonie event in Lerwick with its formalities and attached mega-hoolies, and others throughout the isles. Especially our own in Northmavine – the best, I’d  argue, and one where women pretty much have equality in the roles they play.

But Shetland traditional dancing has always been a problem for me. It’s to do with the crushing , horrific embarrassment of school gym dance lessons, I think. The awful fate of being the last unpaired boy, and thus forced to dance with the sandpaper-handed (female) PE teacher, who smelled of smokey staffrooms and cheap talcum. Boys and girls lined up on either side of the gym, waiting for the instruction to choose partners. Which always resulted in an initial stultifying reluctance, followed by a desperate rush of the confident for the popular and beautiful and a shrugging acceptance for the rest of whichever partners a coy hanging-back provided.  Boys selecting girls, unless it was a ladies’ choice, visited on us like a kind of blessing.

All for the sake of annual Christmas dances, in a smalltown hall decorated with long strings of what looked like tinsel but was actually the waste foil from the local dairy’s stamping out of bottle tops. I helped decorate, as a prefect. I never went.

Anyway, my wife loves to dance. My unwillingness in the terpsichorean department has always been a source of dismay and frustration, and so my rash admission this week that I was filled with a desire to dance a Boston Two-Step at the Hillswick Hall, perhaps as the Northmavine Fiddle and Accordion Club played, was seized upon and cast in contractual stone almost instantly.

Not that any dancing is likely to happen before next winter. So there’s plenty of time to practice. Or maybe she’ll forget. 

I’m longing for the smell of burning paraffin as the UHA guizers light up their torches, for the daft marching songs about grand old vikings drinking McEwans Export on the ocean wave, chased by Stewarts Rum. For the thump, crackle and spark as dying torches are thrown by guizers into the painstakingly-built galley, and the roar of flame as it ignites, in Northmavine”s case, afloat. The destruction of that dragon-headed vessel. Spiting the night.

Then later, opening the hall’s entrance door, to the hot aromas of soup, sweat, spilt drink, stewed tea, a variety of perfumes, deodorants and aftershaves (even from those sporting Norse beards) and residual tobacco smoke. People. Bad but very cheap drinks. Sneaky hip flasks. The music and yes, the dancing, the toppling over, the very occasional piece of scandal or “falling by…”

Take your partners for a Boston Two-Step! Skirling accordions, wailing keyboards, the thin crash of a snare drum. Off we go, the Slipperene on the floor turning us into stumbling Strictly gods and goddesses…and we’ll dance until the break of dawn. The dragonboat will be ashes. The light will return.