March enters with some brutally blustery dreichness…but there’s music to rejoice in

Shetland has been glowering at me this week, dreich and bleak and blustery, the tides high enough to bring the sea spluttering into the garden, rusting the cars ever more thoroughly, leaving seaweed in the porch and beach stones on bonnets. No smashed windscreens yet.

But spring is on its way, if not yet here and at these latitudes the amount of light – I used the word advisedly; it’s more like a murky glow – we get every day increases noticeably faster than in the deep southland of Ayrshire. Daffodils are sprouting, early, and crofters are girding up their loins for lambing, hoping that doesn’t race ahead of itself and the weather too.

As I write, there’s a problem with the ferries connecting us to Scotland – the regular dry dock servicing of Northlink’s Hjaltland has gone awry – the story is that a pump room flooded when it was refloated and the ship is still out of service, leaving just one boat to the mainland every two days. That’s if the conditions allow sailings to go ahead, which seems unlikely this coming weekend.

I don’t know: a flooded ship never sounds good, and Northlink’s three identical ferries – Hjaltland, Hrossey and Hamnavoe, all built 23 years ago – are getting old. They even look bashed and battered in a way that the much-maligned CalMac ferries never did. Maybe it’s that white and blue colour scheme.

I normally travel by boat to and from Aberdeen, even in stormy weather – it’s that old joke about sea versus air to Shetland – on the plane you think you’re going to die; on the boat you wish you were dead – but this most recent couple of flights left me feeling less knackered than I usually do after a trip away. Intense fear, yes, but it wears off quicker than promethazine.

Those Russians…

I’ve written an introduction to the photographer Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert’s excellent published essay on the last days of the klondikers, the mostly eastern European factory ships that used to come to Shetland to buy and load pelagic fish, mackerel and herring. Jeremy’s pictures capture the post-Soviet era when the ships, dodgily privatised, were badly maintained rust buckets and the crews desperately scavenging for scrap on the Lerwick town dump. You can order his ‘zine here, along with other superlative publications, notably on on pigeon sales in Ayrshire with an introduction by Andrew O’Hagan.

When I first came to Shetland in the 80s the boats, Polish and Russian mostly, were overseen by political commissars and the crews were desperate not so much for rubbish, though some did scavenge, as for hard currency and Lada cars, which were then being disposed of in the UK as they ran out of repairable viability. With the late Scotsman photographer Dennis Straughan I spent a memorable afternoon aboard a former whaling ship, playing pool, eating pickles and drinking copious amounts of vodka with the captain. The bottle of Smirnoff I’d been told to buy disappeared in a flash, its cap tossed into the sea.

“Best vodka in the world,” the captain said. Maybe he was a renegade Tsarist – the original Smirnoff, or Smirnov was a favourite of Russian royalty. In the 1930s, though, Vladimir Smirnov sold the brand to American interests.

America and Russia in a business relationship, eh? Who’d’ve thought?

Beatcrofting show

Here’s the latest Beatcrofting show – an hour and a half of music that has caught my attention or soothed my troubled breast over the last few weeks.

You can listen to my ramblings about the tracks as I play them on Mixcloud here.

https://www.mixcloud.com/tom-morton2/toms-march-beatcrofting-with-chatter-and-general-rambling/

Or if you just want the music and not the chat, here’s a Spotify playlist. Full playlist in text form is at the end of this newsletter.

Syd Straw — Hard Times

Mekons — Lyric

Bonnie Prince Billy — Tonight with the Dogs I’m Sleeping

Esther Sparks — I Saw the Hills

Lloyd Cole — Santa Cruz

Don McLean — Magdalene Lane

Bruce Cockburn — Night Train

Joni Mitchell — Amelia

The Band — Mystery Train

Michael Marra — The Guernsey Kitchen Porter

Crazy Horse — I Don’t Want To Talk About It

Nick Lowe — House for Sale

Peter Nardini — I’ll No’ Let You Doon

Boo Hewerdine — Bell, Book and Candle

Blind Boys of Alabama — Way Down in the Hole

Siobhan Miller — All is Not Forgotten

Bongshang — Hurricane Jungle