It is a beautiful, still winter’s day here on Shetland’s sea-ground. Atween wadders, between weathers, as the saying goes, because we’re not heading into spring yet and there’s bad Scandinavian stuff huffing and puffing in the predictions. The brutal blizzards of a fortnight past gave way to deluges and flooding, then the kind of unremitting gales that unsettle the soul, as you cower round the old black Rayburn. In those conditions it’s a stove that needs microscopic adjustments if the ferocious three-storey draw of the Manse isn’t to turn the flue white-hot and the upper chimney into a volcano.

But now, after a clear, frosty night, the blue sky is reflecting off a sea so still I could kayak, if not comfortably then with relative assurance of not finding myself submerged in St Magnus Bay. Of course I could still encounter a killer whale in playful mood, but I leave that to the wild swimmers. Or as we call them hereabouts, seafood.

Hugo the Segugio Italiano, Cypriot rescue hound, has just slipped out of the back garden and is baying lustily as he scents otter. I hope he doesn’t actually encounter one of the nasty wee mustelidae, anthropomorphised and romanticised to such a cuddly degree. I always think of TV naturalist Terry Nutkins, who as a boy lost half a hand to one of Gavin Maxwell’s Ring Of Bright Water creatures. And the closing pages of Henry Williamson’s book Tarka the Otter would terrify any dog owner.

Williamson was of course a member of the British Union of Fascists. He moved to the Norfolk village of Stiffkey in 1938, was pro-Nazi during World War Two and was for a time interned.

The farmhouse he lived in has a flint outer wall on which the faint outline of a swastika, painted by Williamson himself, can apparently still be seen.

Stiffkey is a place famed for eccentric inhabitants, perhaps most notably Church of England priest Harold Davidson, once Rector of Stiffkey, who was defrocked for alleged “public immorality” involving the prostitutes among whom he conducted a controversial ministry. He  became a circus showman, exhibited himself in a barrel in Blackpool, and then, as would-be lion tamer, was mauled to death by a big cat during a performance in Skegness.

During World War One, Davidson served as a chaplain in the Royal Navy, and was stationed in Shetland aboard the depot ship HMS Gibraltar, supplying the 10th Cruiser Squadron, which was based at Busta Voe, just a few miles from where I write. Indeed, the old wooden hotel I can see shining in the sun a few hundred yards away from the Manse was the officer’s mess for the ‘Muckle Flugga Hussars’ as the squadron was known. 

I like to think that Harold – who was probably innocent of all the charges levelled at him by those pesky Anglicans – would have taken tea and a modicum of  British Spirits at the St Magnus Bay Hotel , and possibly even visited the Church of Scotland minister of the day, here at the Manse…

I wonder what they might have talked about? Prostitution, certainly, which was a known issue in Shetland during World War One because of the military presence. Theology, surely. Davidson was punctilious in organising a compulsory church service for sailors every time a cruiser returned from sea. Lion taming in Skegness? Probably not.