Plus this week’s brand new Beatcrofting radio show, with dog intervention

Another promethazine voyage

We arrived back in Shetland on Saturday, discombobulated and deranged as usual by the (12-hour) boat trip. Three days’ recovery is usually necessary at my advanced age. We had a cabin and the sea was relatively smooth, or at least we didn’t notice any roughness thanks to a small white wine, a large fish and chips and some promethazine, aka Phenergan. Which is apparently a recreational drug in the USA, but here is available over the counter for travel sickness and indeed, is the secret to comfortable North Sea Morton transhipping. That is to say, it provokes unconsciousness.

One 10 mg tablet only for me, though I am informed that huge doses are regularly used in psychiatric hospitals to keep anxious patients pacified. Or comatose. And that’s without the fish, chips or the white wine.

The railway museum is not really nostalgic

The big treat for me this trip south was a day looking after grandweans Charlie and Rosie, and taking them to the Bo’ness and Kinneil Steam Railway for a jaunt. The actual choo-choo shoogle was fine, but better still was the slightly hidden and utterly magnificent Museum of Scottish Railways, which lurks massively behind the restored Bo’ness station.

It’s a good 10 minute walk over bridges and along winding paths to the museum, but it is everything the old Glasgow Transport Museum used to be. You can climb onto footplates, see not one but two royal trains, pretend you’re sorting mail for Ronnie Biggs to steal and inhale the tarry wonders of the past. The Glasgow subway carriages I travelled in as a 17-year old student are there, complete with ‘no spitting’ signs. Huge diesels, squat tank and goods engines, wagons and…as usual we didn’t have time to see it all, not nearly. This was my third visit and next time, I’m coming alone. For the day

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Why? I feel calm and at ease among old trains. It’s the same childhood re-immersion I get on our residences in my youthful home of Troon. It’s not a yearning for a return of the past, but a comfort in and enjoyment of it. A kind of romance; a fiction.

American writer and commentator John Hodgman is being deliberately extreme when he says this:

“…normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn´t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can´t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox news. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, (and) fundamentalist terrorism.”

Yes, steam and diesel trains were (are) dirty, inefficient carbon-burning monsters, but I love being amongst them at Bo’ness, silent signifiers of an industrial heritage, and the first childhood experiences of travel, speed, a sense of movement across the earth. Holidays. Destinations. Change. Lost and absolute, probably illusionary security.

Electric car horror attack!

I wish to embrace the modern, the clean, the glorious age of electrical transportation. Except this week I had my first experience of dealing with an electric car and it was a nightmare.

We had an NHS Shetland car at the surgery, sitting next to our never-before-used ‘fast’ charger (none of our vehicles are electric) and the car, an MG ZS EV, was dead as an unplugged Scalextric set. As surgery janitor, I was told to get it charged, as someone from NHS Estates was coming to collect it.

I unlocked the car (there was just enough juice to operate the central locking), climbed in looked at the controls. No gear lever. Just a big knob with N, R and D. No hand brake. It was basically a luxurious dodgem with a roof. I found the manual, the secret charging point (like an Iniana Jones puzzle, you press a magic badge) and the charging cable, and after much trial and error, discovered that you had to plug everything together in a strict order, wave a not very smart card, then lock the car and retire. Three hours later, it displayed a range of 60 miles (on the flat, with a following wind, no heater or wipers on). It took eight hours to get to its full capacity of just 150 miles, though this is an ‘old’ 2020 model.

Meanwhile, I was hopping about in my 2009 Vauxhall Corsa Van, which does 80 mpg per gallon of diesel with its Ecoflex engine and yet is still banned from Scotland’s Low Emission Zones. Still, it’ll get me from Aberdeen to Southampton on a single, three-minute filling-up.

Not remotely: the perils of three council meetings on Teams in your jammies

I only had Saturday and Sunday to get my head straightened out for three days of Shetland Islands Council business. Well, mornings, kicking off on Monday with a Licensing Committee meeting. I actually think the Licensing Committee (and Board, which is for drink and gambling-related matters; the Committee handles things like street trading and taxi-driving permissions) is properly important. Livelihoods, public safety and welfare are its core concerns, and councillors can bring crucial community knowledge to decisions that officers and police may not have. Having said that, committee/board can make and has made mistakes

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The proceedings on Monday were confidential, so I can provide no details of what happened. With Covid raging in the Isles and memories of actually catching the plague at a licensing meeting, I had already decided that this would be a week of “remote participation” via Teams, which worked well, though not as well as it should do. The SIC has invested hugely in webcasting, audio and video technology but a crucial chunk of semiconductor stuff has never arrived from China, and so our “integrated” Siemens system is still clunking along with added Microsoft. For me, 37 miles north of the council chamber, not to mention the councillors a couple of ferry rides away, taking part digitally should be the norm, and I’ve tried to make it so. Saves diesel. Not to mention expenses, for those who claim them.

Yet on Tuesday the “pre-meeting” link for the Employees Joint Consultative Committee didn’t work, and the main meeting was over in 16 minutes. It was all about renaming and regrading positions in the care sector. I won’t bore you with the details. Or with Wednesday’s interminable briefing on how the council’s pension fund is invested, what effect people taking early retirement has, and what an actuary actually is and does. If you absolutely insist, you can watch the whole sodding two hours and 11 minutes here. I’m invisible in digital Hillswick.

https://shetland.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/800398

One thing only occurred to me afterwards: the two spruce and genial Irish fellows, flown in from Dublin to tell us (a select few councillors; most appear to be still on holiday in Cleethorpes or Miami) how wonderful KBT Global Ltd is, were simply thrilled to be in Shetland, and were thanked for making the trip after so many Zoom and Teams conversations, as it was SO much better to have them there in the flesh.

Except, of course, for me they were just two sets of dancing pixels. And why, exactly, was it better to have their fleshly presence in glorious downtown Lerwick, eating presumably into our budgets and Powerpointing a presentation that we’d all already been sent (and some of us had read)?

Still, that was Wednesday and the council stuff was just about over, except for emails to or about various annoyed or concerned constituents, again confidential though with all kinds of potential for trouble. Next week there’s will be briefings about the hilariously expensive Fair Isle Ferry and lots of energy stuff, so I may actually fire up the diesel van and head for Lerwick. If the Covid eases up.

(PS: I was actually fully dressed for all the above meetings. Honestly.)

The Beatcrofting Radio Show

Here’s the playlist for this week’s Beatcrofting. The Mixcloud link is here:

https://www.mixcloud.com/tom-morton2/beatcrofting-with-tom-morton-friday-25-august/

It also goes out from 7-8pm on 60 North Radio on Friday nights. There is an interruption to do with Dexter the Dog and his affection for Bad Brad the sheepdog. No internal surfaces were urinated upon.

James Edwyn and the Borrowed Band — The Last Waltz

The Band — Don’t Do It

Leonard Cohen — Waiting for the Miracle

Robert Palmer — Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley

Gillian Welch — Black Star

Radiohead — High and Dry

Fairport Convention — Meet on the Ledge

McRary Sisters — I said it, I Meant It

Richard Thompson — Cooksferry Queen

Tom Petty — Refugee (Live 1985)

Roches — Runs in the Family

Tom Waits — Heart Attack and Vine