Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

If they returned to Edinburgh now, they might imagine that the city had resolved its human problems. They could look down at the Grassmarket and instead of the poor, they’d see restaurants and theatres. They probably wouldn’t realise that you need a taxi or an infrequent bus to get to the outer ring of the city, where they would see the estates, the danger, the other Edinburgh, renowned as the ‘AIDS capital of Europe’, the junkies, the inspiration for Trainspotting, the layer that has been carefully placed on the outside, hidden from view with such care.

  I’m aware that this may be romantic nonsense, but I suspect that Adam Smith, David Hume, James Watt and Walter Scott would still love Edinburgh, its view of the Forth Bridge, its imposing crescents and pillars and balconies and Morningside ladies asking, ‘Ye’ll have had yer tea?’ But they’d ignore the Vue cinema, and Walter Scott would write a stern letter to the council about the bagpipe man playing opposite his monument. Then they’d sneak into beautifully awful plays in the festival and get pissed in squalid pubs in the Lothian Road, being ordered out for swearing during an argument about the nature of gold as a global currency, or barred when the landlord growled, ‘We don’t have many rules in here, but if you fall asleep while Mr Hume’s opining on the separation of mind from body ye have ta fucken leave.’

  Orkney

  The top of Britain seems like a fault in the design. It’s a huge long extra bit that goes on and on for no reason, taking up eight unnecessary pages at the end of your national road atlas. Surely Inverness is far enough to have anywhere, isn’t it? But then there’s another 120 miles that’s pointless.

  It’s not that the top bits are too far or too north, they’re just empty. That might be excusable if they were on the way to somewhere, but as they’re the last bit they’re a waste of mountains.

  You feel slightly uneasy once you pass Inverness, as if your insurance won’t cover you up there. There are miles and miles of nothingness, punctuated by odd villages made up of a farm, a stream, a grey housing estate and an industrial building behind a padlocked green gate. As you approach the very end of the country there’s a vast wind farm covering the hills, from where you expect to hear whoopy sirens and an echoey voice booming, ‘An intruder has entered the Kingdom of Highlandius,’ as robots surround the car and march you underground to meet their leader.

  Then comes Thurso, the small town that sits near the top of Scotland like a night-time security guard, keeping lookout in the stillness, and just past there is Scrabster, which is a cliff and a place to get the boat to Orkney. A blue bus trundles up to the port, and you imagine that if you asked the driver where to get the ferry, he’d say, ‘Ferry? But it’s Christmas Eve 1935.’

  A couple of trucks join you in the queue for the ferry, which is next to a hut with one of those visitor centres that’s not only shut but has clearly never ever been open. After twenty minutes in the queue as the rain gets heavier you realise you’ve no guarantee this is the queue for the ferry, you’ve just assumed it. You get out to peer through the downpour at a nearby sign which you imagine will give you some information, but it’s full of regulations about transporting pigs, so you walk back drenched, and wait a while longer in the car.

  Once you’re on the ferry you feel like a proper explorer, leaving the top of Scotland behind, as if you’re breaking all the rules and there ought to be people calling at you, ‘Stop – no one’s ever been up there and come back.’ That’s the glory of Orkney: it’s a place where the directions are to get to John o’Groats and then do something else. When someone from Orkney reads about those people who cycle from Land’s End to John o’Groats they must think, ‘Lazy bastards. They never made it to here.’

  You can seek comfort by the bar, or try to play a fruit machine as it tips up with the waves, but for the true experience you must go out on deck and see strange, uninhabited islands emerge through mist and rain, and as the foam and sleet merge into a combined assault on your ability to stand or see, you feel an urge to write a diary entry that starts: ‘It was six days since we last ate, at the base camp at Inverness, and we began to discuss eating the weak ones.’

  After the ferry had swung into Stromness I drove past treeless watery fields to the capital, Kirkwall, where I was welcomed with a distinctly Orkney greeting three times in the first hour: ‘So you made it to the island then?’ The wonderful implication is that many people who try are never seen again. It’s a sentiment that carried itself into the radio show, where I got the biggest ovation I’ve ever received at the start, which was clearly nothing to do with the show but acclaim for having got there.

  I expect the reviews of shows there go something like, ‘It was a virtuoso five-star performance, in that he turned up. This was so much more powerful than last week’s production of The Crucible, which gave up and did the show in Scrabster.’

  Kirkwall has a population of about 5,000, but it fools you because you know it’s the capital, and the biggest town in the entire geopolitical region. So you start at one end, get to the first shops and think, ‘Ah, we’re getting near the centre,’ then there’s a farm and a country lane and you realise you’ve been through it. Its character isn’t so much determined by being small, as by being remote. Normally in a town that size you can get in a car or train and go to a place so populated it has two sets of traffic lights, but Kirkwall is the big town. If there’s something you can’t get there, you won’t get it by nipping up the road to the peat bog where they’ve got a much wider selection.

  There are two main roads in Kirkwall, one that passes the harbour and a parallel one with the few shops, some of which improvise by taking on more than one role. For example, the pram shop, which exhibits an impressive array of prams, buggies and baby baths in the window, has a sign above the door saying the premises is licensed to sell beer, wines and spirits. I went inside, past the sterilisers, cots and nappies, to find a fully stocked off licence.

  ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’ I was asked.

  I said, ‘Hmm, I can’t make my mind up between a pram and a bottle of whisky.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got both here,’ said the shopkeeper, as if this was a normal request, and people often wander in for a bottle of rum and then say, ‘I tell you what, while we’re here we might as well conceive a child, as we’re in the ideal place for a pram.’

  It takes a while to acclimatise. I naïvely asked in the newsagent for a newspaper, and the man said, ‘No papers before 11.30,’ with the disdain of someone who runs a provisions hut in the Tibetan mountains responding to a tourist who’s come in demanding a decaffeinated mocha coffee with semi-skimmed milk.

  Tom, who runs the museum, told me he was taking his kids out shopping the next day. I assumed he meant taking them off to the shops, to a shopping centre that had shops. A while later I said, ‘Hang on – where are you taking them shopping?’

  ‘Just along here,’ he said, gesturing to the High Street. Maybe in Kirkwall kids get excited about a day out in the street where they spend their entire life anyway, stringing out the process of buying a baby’s car seat long enough for the Daily Expresses to arrive.

  There are about twenty shops in the town centre, but not only are there few chain stores, the type of shops they have make you wonder whether it was designed at a mad planning conference where everyone had a cupful of magic mushrooms as they went in. Apart from the pram and whisky shop, there’s a wool shop, a toy shop, three cafés, a bank, the almost pointless newsagent, a record shop, a shop that sells hats and Airfix models, and a wireless museum. I can imagine one sober official suggesting, ‘I really feel we need a greengrocer,’ and everyone shouting him down with, ‘What? And not have a wireless museum?’

  The wireless museum is one room of mostly broken wirelesses, run by a couple you can’t imagine were ever younger than eighty. The natural length of time you’d spend in the place, to allow for prodding the exhibits of interest, turning the odd dial and reflecting on the poignancy of the transistors you remember from your youth, would be just under
a minute. But it would seem rude to wander in, say hello, then fifty seconds later say, ‘Thanks very much, that was marvellous,’ and leave. So you stop and look for ages at an aerial, then the man comes across and says, ‘You can turn that one on.’ So you turn it on, and sure enough, there’s a radio station coming from it. ‘Yes, it’s definitely a wireless,’ I said, and thought about adding, ‘I can see you’re not trying to cheat by sneaking in a kettle,’ but thought that might confuse him.

  There was a huge map of Orkney on the wall, covered in little red pins. The man lifted up his stick and said, very slowly, like a snooker commentator, ‘There were troops stationed here – and here – and some here – and some more here – and here – and troops here – and here, with some here, and here,’ each time pointing at a red pin. It was really hard not to say, ‘Tell me if I’m wrong, but is it that the red pins mark the places where the troops were, or is that just coincidence?’

  This went on for about fifteen minutes, until I broke the spell by buying a tea towel with Second World War aircraft on it and left.

  But at points in this tiny street you could imagine you were in the centre of London or Manchester, as the cafés and shops are littered with leaflets and posters for jazz evenings and folk nights, cinema clubs, festivals and bars. It’s like a party you find in a barn at the end of a desolate track, and Kirkwall seems unusually youthful for somewhere so isolated, driven by an unexpected quirkiness. For example, the library has a website that states: ‘Our slogan will be something like “Stop doing that crack and heroin, read a book instead.” I cannot believe that no one has thought of it already.’

  Maybe this is the sort of dialogue that takes place in Kirkwall library: ‘I’m afraid this Catherine Cookson should have been back last week, Mrs Sinclair. There’s a nine pence fine.’

  ‘Oh, sorry dear, only I went back on the crack, you see. Off my tits I was, thought I was reading the final chapter but I was looking at the side of a paint pot. For two days I thought the chef’s daughter had married a warning to wash your hands after use. Thank goodness I’m off it and back here again.’

  Or there’s the town hall, which has an unusual figure on its roof, of a gargoyle with his tongue sticking out. This is a result of the council recently needing to repair a section of the roof, including the gargoyle. They asked one of their labourers, who was a trained stonemason, to do the job, but refused to pay him any more than the normal labouring rate for this skilled work, so he retaliated by making the gargoyle poke his tongue in the direction of the council leader’s office.

  Several people told me of the Orkney wedding custom of drinking from a huge wooden bucket, that’s passed round the way you imagine would have happened at a party held by King Arthur. Each resident has their own recipe for the drink that fills this bucket, and Tom was especially proud of his. He steadied himself before running through it, the way Nigella Lawson pauses for a moment before recounting what she’s done so you can write it down. ‘I use a bottle of rum,’ he said, ‘with a bottle of whisky, a bottle of vodka, a bottle of gin and then some beer.’ Presumably there are heated debates about the most effective recipe, and others will be adamant that their method, which includes adding a bottle of Bacardi and a bottle of brake fluid, is essential to bring out the true depth of flavour.

  After a day in Kirkwall you find yourself bumping into the same people over and over again. A woman who helped show me round St Magnus Cathedral turned out to work in the pram and whisky shop. The receptionist in the hotel was running a bar I went in. It’s as if they’re like a student play at the Edinburgh Festival, and haven’t got enough people to play all the parts in the town, so everyone has to take more than one role.

  This makes it seem even more strange that to the rest of Orkney, Kirkwall is a mighty urban dragon, the São Paulo of the region. Altogether Orkney consists of twenty inhabited islands, of which the biggest has the imaginative name ‘Mainland’. One of the smaller ones, Eday, has a population of 121, and relies for supplies on an inter-island plane. This is a world-record-breaking service, because the journey from West Ray island to Papa West Ray island is the shortest scheduled flight in the world, taking two minutes. It must be a magnificent experience, especially if they do all the normal procedures, so from the moment the plane takes off you hear a garbled, ‘Welcome aboard this is your captain we will be flying at an altitude of fifteen feet please listen to the safety announcements exit’s over there somewhere flying conditions are expected to be fine, there might be some turbulence after thirty-five seconds but it should clear up after forty chicken or mushy vegetable thing there you are no time to eat it can I clear it away we have begun our descent thank you for flying with us bye.’

  No one lives in Orkney as a retreat from the chaos of the city, the way people rent a cottage in Norfolk, insisting, ‘And it’s only two hours from London so we can pop up every weekend and pretend we’re country folk by calling out, “Oh, look, that’s a bird of some sort.”’

  People who live in Orkney accept that it’s where they will work and live and have friends and they can’t nip to anywhere, except from West Ray to Papa West Ray. Similarly, as a visitor you feel privileged. This isn’t somewhere you can pop up to if you fancy a restful Sunday, so you feel a small sense of achievement after almost every activity, because you’ve not only done something, you’ve done it in Orkney. For example, ‘I’ve just been to the toilet – in Orkney,’ or ‘I’ve just had a row with my girlfriend about bugger-all – in Orkney,’ which is an altogether different accomplishment.

  The people of Orkney’s most impressive effort at proving they’re spectacularly off-centre is a sport they call the Kirkwall ba’. The ba’ is a specially made ball, and to start with the process of team selection in this sport is fascinating. It’s played every year on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, between Uppies and Doonies. If you’re born between the Mercat Cross in the centre of town and the shore, you’re a Doonie, and if you’re not, you’re an Uppie. The ba’, made from cork and leather, is thrown up at the Cross, and all the men of the island try to get hold of it. The Doonies have to get it to a goal uptown, and the Uppies have to get it in the harbour. And that’s all the rules there are.

  A reporter from a newspaper in Ohio described it thus: ‘Once thrown, the ba’ seemed to disappear into the swirling, pushing, steaming, kicking, groaning mass of humanity in which the male population of Kirkwall is knitted into a giant knot. In the eye of the storm the fighting is merciless.’

  But the merciless fighting is all in good fun, so a local book called The Kirkwall Ba’ says: ‘There’s an amusing story of how, during a tough game, a battered and dishevelled player lurched up to an innocent bystander and smote him a resounding blow on the ear.’

  And that’s an amusing story. There was a game in 1951 when the ba’ went into the Peedie Sea, which was ice-bound, so the players all piled in after it. The ice broke, but they carried on. Some players cut their legs open on the ice, and according to my book, ‘They were stitched in the surgery, but so cold were the players’ limbs that no anaesthetic was required.’

  Or there’s the account of a game in 1998 in Scotland on Sunday, that described the Uppies’ team-talk: ‘There was a hushed silence as the captain gave his tactical analysis. “Look,” he implored, “I don’t want to see any of you sneaking off during the game. And if you’re going to have a fag, have it in a place that can do some damage.”’ I think Alf Ramsey used to say much the same thing.

  You can tell the sort of game it is because the book about it has a little sub-chapter called ‘Through a Hotel Window’. For a moment I thought, ‘Is this some clever prose?’ but no, it’s an account of the day someone was thrown through a hotel window.

  There is a strategy to winning, that includes the art of smuggling. This is where a few members of one team sneak the ball away without anyone seeing, and get it towards their goal while everyone else carries on scrapping, unaware that the ball’s gone. One year someone even got in a ca
r with the ba’, drove it to the goal, and went to the pub while most of the other players were still creating amusing stories by ripping each others’ livers out in the harbour while trying to find it.

  The goal at the opposite end to the harbour is the wall of a house, so the people who live at this house can find themselves under siege if the ba’ comes near it, with dozens of men fighting mercilessly in their garden, preventing any living creature from getting in or out as they put their fags in places that can do some damage. As the Christmas-dinner conversation is lost beneath the cacophony of yelps as limbs are dismembered, the family inside must be thinking, ‘I wondered why this place was thirty grand cheaper than identical houses in the rest of the street.’

  This is not just an unorthodox world, it’s the people of Orkney’s and theirs alone. Even the climate, which Orkney scholar Hugh Marwick described as ‘the vilest under heaven’, makes them proud. They’ll boast of not having had a day without rain for four months, and you get the impression the tourist board would be happy with a slogan that went, ‘If Hurricane Katrina came through here, we’d say it was mild for the time of year.’

  Unlike other remote parts of Scotland, there’s little sense of Scottish nationalism in Orkney. Not out of affection for England, but because Orcadians barely feel part of Scotland. Even the accent confuses the novice, as you’re expecting some variant of Scottish, but instead it’s clipped and musical and Scandinavian, so the first time you hear it someone will be telling you they’re looking forward to your visit, and you feel the urge to reply, ‘Well thanks, but how am I supposed to take down your address with you putting on that stupid voice?’

  There’s a reason for such an accent, which is that Orkney was ruled by Norway until the fifteenth century. So Norway is in the names and history, and the culture. For example, one of the Norwegian earls who ruled the islands in medieval times was Thorfinn the Skull-Splitter. Fascinated by someone with this title, I looked him up in my copy of Who Was Who in Orkney, where it says, ‘Little detail of his rule is known, although his nickname suggests it may have been violent.’