Includes Martin guitars, a Vauxhall Cresta and an Aston Martin DB5. Merry Christmas!

I’m driving out to Heglibister in Weisdale to collect our Christmas Day oysters

I’ve to be there at 2.30pm, by which time darkness will be creeping in round the edges, here beyond 60 degrees north. Even though the post-solstice light has already started accelerating towards us, and Up Helly Aa season, “the lightening of the year” is just around the corner, it’ll be night by 3.45.

Winston Brown is Shetland’s only oyster farmer, and the family business, Shetland Oysters Ltd, is only three years old, although he’s been working on the project for almost two decades. I first met Winston  40 years ago, when he was a teenage  assistant in Kenny Johnson’s Lerwick guitar shop – Kenny was then the only official dealer in Scotland for Martin Guitars. He sold so many of them that Chris Martin IV himself made a special visit to Shetland from Nazareth, Pennsylvania. I played at the concert mounted to welcome him to the isles. Using a Gibson J40 I wish I still owned.

Since then Winston has travelled the world in the merchant navy as a marine engineer, but his heart and the family croft was always in  Weisdale on Shetland’s west side. Someday, he vowed, he’d come ashore for good. But no Shetlander ever escapes the sea.

About 30 years ago, Winston was in Chesapeake Bay, on the east coast of the USA, between Maryland and Virginia. He found that there were oyster farms near where his ship was moored. 

“They were using oysters to clean the water in the bay, so I knew that they were having a good effect and it was proving quite a success. I knew that it wouldn’t have any detrimental effect on the surroundings. If anything, it would be an improvement. That’s why I thought I would try it here.”

Winston and his family have been producing and selling the bivalve molluscs, a mixture of native Shetland and Pacific oysters – not available commercially from Shetland for over a century – for three years and these days stock is being shipped to London, where they’re exclusively available at Borough Market. 

When I arrive at the Heglibister croft, down a road I’ve never travelled along Weisdale Voe, the light is well and truly fading. It’s been a beautiful day “atween wadders”, between weathers, the sea still as glass and the lowest of suns providing a milky illumination.  The oysters have been harvested that morning, purified and UV treated. We’ve had them before and they are delicious. They taste of wind, sea, tide. They taste of Shetland.

 “The oysters very much take up the taste of their location. And we have a unique location.” says Winston. Shetland is unique for many reasons, but the cleanliness of our waters and the care that’s taken in the production of our seafood are two of them. Winston shows me the state-of-the-art gear bought to develop the oyster croft . “I’m working two jobs to support this,” he says. “But it’s better than sheep! Planting trees and growing oysters is hard, but it’s all about the challenge. And they don’t move anything like as quickly as sheep.” Hard, intense work. The grit in the oyster that produces the pearl. Eventually.

And there’s vision, too. The kind of vision that, 40 years ago, brought  the world’s foremost guitar maker to Shetland to see why so many of his instruments were being sold here. And a vision  that takes a young man from a wee shop in Lerwick to college, then around the world on deep-sea vessels, captures him in Chesapeake Bay and decades later, leads him to begin a business at home that flourishes on quality, care, patience and a sense of place. 

As for the owner of that wee guitar shop 40 years ago: Kenny Johnson, inventor, entrepreneur and proprietor of Skynbow Pure Acoustic, his worldwide success with custom made violins and acoustic pickup continues. Though that brief venture into importing decorative Far Eastern marble is probably best forgotten.

Oysters collected, and so to the butchers for Stornoway black pudding and local sassermaet-as-stuffing. It’s Christmas. No time to be totally shellfish.

A classic car for Christmas

I don’t want to own a classic car

I’ve no wish to remember

Broken down near Darvel

24th of December

Nearly midnight, no reply

When dad phoned the AA

And Santa wouldn’t come

If we weren’t home by Christmas Day

It was a Vauxhall Cresta

We’d been to Bellshill, Motherwell

Seen both grannies, aunties

Other relatives as well

Lanarkshire, some way past Strathaven

On the way down to the coast

My sisters were both crying

But I was upset most

I loved that car, and every single one

Ever owned by my dad

The Wolseley, and the Zodiac

He’d previously had

The Velux, Morris Oxford,

Even the Triumph Renown

And now the newest and the best

Of them had let us down

I don’t remember how we managed

To get home that night

I fell asleep, dad must have fixed it

(That may not be right)

But on Christmas morning somehow

Santa had arrived

Left me a Corgi James Bond

Aston Martin DB5

These days I just drive cars

That get me from A to B

In comfort and quite quickly,

Above all reliably

I lease a hybrid Kia,

But in my dreams it’s true

I’m driving Hillmans, Singers, Rileys

Vauxhall Crestas too.

This Substack is free to read. But if you feel like it, you could always make a wee contribution to a charity dear to Shetland residents and essential to their seagoing welfare. That is of course the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.