As spring starts to wink knowingly at us, I’m heading south for a bit

Here’s my weekly newsletter/audioletter. Read it, listen on Mixcloud or hear it as a show on 60 North Radio, 7-8pm on Fridays. The playlist and Mixcloud link are at the end of the text

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Spring has been tentatively peeking through the gloom this week in Shetland. Two whole days, so far, when the sun broke through and the wind dropped. Daffodils are beginning to bloom, snowdrops sneaking up past the dreadful muddy mulch of winter. The darkness is starting to retreat. You can get to five o’clock without being enveloped by gloom. The consumption of vitamin D in large quantities starts to seem less essential. Better take the pills anyway.

The country Up Helly Aas are in full swing now, the less formal, smaller local fire festivals from the northernmost isle  of Unst – two of them there –  to the South Mainland. Our own Northmavine Up Helly Aa is set for this weekend and it promises to be a a glorious spectacular of genial mayhem and fun. I won’t be there

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We’re heading out of Shetland for a week or so. Susan and I are going to my nephew’s wedding in Pangbourne, which is apparently near Reading. In England. Taking a giant leap of faith in these industrially actioned days, we’re travelling by train. Before that, Susan is involved in the Scottish Labour Party Conference in Edinburgh, a city I used to work and play in all the time, and now haven’t set foot in for more than three years.

I tell a lie, there was a scary change of trains at Haymarket in the middle of Lockdown when everyone was masked to the hilt and I was desperately travelling to see my dying father. Even thinking back to those days brings a chill. I don’t know about you but we were sure death was stalking us. My wife and four of my children were all in front line medical roles and the future, any future seemed remote. Now here we are and it’s as if it didn’t happen. That those 200,000 people didn’t actually die in the UK. Those care homes weren’t emptied of living residents. 

I only found out the other day that there is a Scottish national Covid memorial. And it’s in one of my most beloved places, Pollok Park in Glasgow, somewhere I’ve been walking and running and behaving badly in since I was three years old. I’ll be going there when I come back from deepest England, if I can bear it. Because from the website ‘I Remember’ as it’s called looks almost unbearably moving.

The memorial is actually a walk through some of Pollok Park’s most beautiful, wooded sections. Conceived by poet and artist Alec Finlay, it features oak structures intertwined with living wood, each sculpture  inscribed with the words ‘I Remember.’ And yet sometimes it seems all we want to do is forget.

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The wedding coincides with the anticipated birth date of what will be my ninth grandchild, in Glasgow, so that’s why I’ll be spending a little more time in and around the Dear Green Place. Just as we remember, just as must remember, we can look forward to the future with joy and hope and non-disposable nappies…

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I have to admit I struggle with the tedium of council meetings, though it makes me worry about our council officials. How do they cope? It seems to me that most office jobs these days involve constant staring at screens while seated in complicated chairs designed to try and compensate for the fact that we shouldn’t be sitting in them at all. I’ve never been diagnosed with the currently fashionable attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) but my choice of career indicated a certain intolerance for boredom, at the very least.

 Looking back, only journalism was ever going to work out, really. Daily newspaper reporting was a joy for someone like me because it was all done at such a frenetic pace. And you turned out short pieces of writing, dealt with a subject, a person, a tragedy, an hilarious incident and then moved on. Intensity and brevity. Action. You were out and about in the pub and out of the pub. Flying here there and everywhere in my case in the highlands and Islands, climbing mountains, scaling Russian factory ships, going out with Greenpeace attack boats. Expense accounts. The Glasgow Herald had so much money it paid for all the other competing newshounds’ drinks, even those of The Scotsman’s hacks sometimes. Now? This dreadful trawling of Twitter for stories, the constant emailing. And I bet editors aren’t allowed to throw typewriters at subs anymore. 

Typewriter, I hear somebody say. What’s that?

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Anyway. From a council point of view, activity will be taking place while I’m away to try and solve serious road safety problems in the neighbouring community of Voe. I was at a pubic meeting there and recalling my time spent living in the village, and the accidents that happened even then on the busy main road that runs to the giant Sullom Voe Oil Terminal. I caught some blank faces. Then I realised I was talking about things that had happened 36 years ago. And talking to people who hadn’t even been born at the time.

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I was speaking to a councillor colleague the other day about the cost of living crisis and how our wee council, which has by far  the highest reserves in Scotland, is being terrorised by the assortment of antediluvian anachronisms that is Audit Scotland into cuts to its core services budget. We talked of a Fight the Cuts campaign, bringing back memories of anti-Thatcher demonstrations; alas, as soon as I Googled ‘Fight the Cuts’ I saw that the slogan now lies in the shaky hands of that extremist oddity, the Revolutionary Communist Party, or what remains of it. As its raison d’être seems to be the destruction of the Labour Party, perhaps I shall find another form of words to battle imposed austerity.

Anyway, tiny steps. And locally, my wife and our neighbour Barbara have come together to implement a ‘Spare and share’ programme. Basically, it’s a bucket full of non-perishable food, sitting in several local bus stops. If folk need anything, they can take what they require, free. If you can spare some tins or bottles or packets, then put them in

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There are official versions of this that seem to have taken months to sort out, and are in less accessible places.Our local version is totally unofficial and maybe even illegal. But it is something. Fight the cuts, one bottle of long-life milk at a time.

Speak next week from Ayrshire, if we’re spared.

Listen to the audioletter with the above read by me in among the following tracks. 7-8 Fridays on 60 North Radio or click here for the Mixcloud stream.

Andy Fairweather-Low — Got Me a Party

Bruce Cockburn — Isn’t That What Friends Are For?

Harry Manx — Only Then Will Your House Be Blessed

Lyle Lovett — Fiona

Clifford T Ward — Home Thoughts from Abroad

Leo Kottke — I still Miss Someone

Emmylou Harris, Mark Knopfler — If This is Goodbye

Jackson Browne — Before the Deluge

Tom Rush — No Regrets

Lindsey Black — Undone

Martin Stephenson, John Perry — Salutation Road

Fleetwood Mac — The World Keep On Turning

Danny Wilson — Knowing Me, Knowing You

Bonnie Raitt — Dimming of the Day