Storm on the island

A Shetland friend, Susan Bowie, shared this Seamus Heaney poem yesterday as Storm Ophelia approached the UK… To all my friends across the sea sheltering from the howling beast We are prepared: we build our houses squat, Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate. This wizened earth has never troubled us With…

Three weeks later…… some thoughts

Our sky has shrunk, we are hemmed in by trees and houses, edgy about the multiple cars on driveways and roads, the local water is contained in a man-made channel, the air feels warm…… For now we are reduced to the ordinariness (and extra-ordinariness) of everyday life. Droitwich has the same population as Shetland but…

Some of the best

After three months away it takes a while to sort out life here in Droitwich as well as reflecting on and sorting through all the experiences we had whilst we were away in Shetland – so expect some more on the blog in due course as we work our way through. In the meantime …..Malcolm…

Shetland living – living Shetland (3)

Of course oil fields are not bottomless pits of black gold and some of the North Sea oil fields are now reaching the end of their economic lives. For an island that has built much of its current economy and community life on the promises of the 1970s there must be concern about the future.…

Shetland living – living Shetland (2)

From the fifteenth to the twentieth century the most northerly tip of the Shetland mainland, Fethaland – just a couple of miles north of North Roe – became a summer home for hundreds of deep sea fishermen and fish processors, including some women. They lived in basic stone lodges, roofed each summer, and worked  from…

Shetland living – living Shetland (1)

As many tourists do we arrived in Shetland with an interest in history, in my past, in my parents’ experiences when they came here 70 years ago – and even further back than that – how had  life in Shetland developed over the centuries? How did the Methodist church take root here? How did people…

Born before the NHS

My mother gave birth to me just a few weeks before the NHS was  born in July 1948. When the NHS was ‘celebrating’ its 60th birthday in 2008 the Shetland Times ran an article on the early days of the NHS in Shetland – you can find the full article here 60 years of the NHS…

PS – some Methodist connections!

A postscript to the previous blog – perhaps because Methodist ministers are itinerant and because churches are grouped into circuits and districts – or perhaps because they are rather sociable people, it seems that whenever we visit a Methodist church we find some connection, some personal link with the place or the people there. There…

Methodism in Shetland

Methodist ministers and preachers have always been ‘itinerant’ – they move around from place to place. In the eighteenth century the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, set out to spread the ‘true gospel’ by travelling the length and breadth of the country on horseback, setting up small ‘societies’ within Church of England parishes. These eventually…

Living in the landscape

We’ve just driven to the supermarket and back, a twenty mile round trip, on a gloriously sunny afternoon, light clouds in the sky and a strong gusty wind ruffling the waters and grasses. We are now about two thirds of the way through our three month stay here and just beginning to realise that sometime…