philosophy supernatural nude

Administratively speaking, Fair Isle is a part of the Shetland Islands - in actual fact it's a bit closer to Orkney, although it's very far from both. Barring that, then, the southernmost point of Shetland is at Sumburgh Head, the bottom of Mainland, and it took me about half an hour to drive there from Lerwick yesterday. Just as the sea was bearing into sight, I slowed to a stop in front of a set of level crossing lights - I am a pro at level crossing lights! this is what happens when you grow up in a place with a railway line on one side and the Irish Sea on the other - and thought, huh, I thought there were no railways in Shetland.

Then an aircraft landed in front of me.

I really do approve of a place, for the record, where the road crosses the runway, and there is a man in a little car whose actual job is to drive down every hour or so and close the gates and get the lights going by hand. After the plane had landed safely he waved me through with a smile and then I got to have the unsettling experience of driving over the tarmac of an airport.

Sumburgh Head is pretty spectacular. It's way out at the tip of the island and has enormous carved-out gashes in its cliffs - there's one point where the road narrows to one track, with a sheer slope on one side and a seven-foot drop into the Atlantic on the other - and is supposed to be a prime spot for seeing whales and puffins. Alas, we saw neither; the whales are for the lucky few, and the puffins return to Shetland to breed "from April to October" - and lovely birds they may be but on-the-date punctual they are not.

We also did not see otters, to my mild disappointment; Shetland otters are interesting and reportedly numerous, having adapted to a marine lifestyle when surrounded by so much seawater. But we did get the chance to acquaint ourselves with some Shetland ponies, who trotted up to a fence and presented small furry noses for patting, and looked hopefully in my handbag for fudge, and also, quite unexpectedly, we met some seals.

( here are the seals )

They were very cheerful, hefting themselves across the rocks and basking as though there were not an entire town within a hundred metres of them. I suspect they are quite used to people, or at least to people clambering down rocks waving cameras in hope of getting a better look at them.

We caught the ferry back to Aberdeen last night, which feels like a million years ago, and returned to Edinburgh this morning. It was a lovely holiday. On the whole, we didn't do too much - we never made it far off Mainland, for one thing, and if we were to go again I think we ought to go to Unst and Yell, the northern islands (everything on Unst, delightfully, is "the most northerly [X] in Britain", and even Lerwick has Britain's most northerly barber, bookshop, court, and according to the Rough Guide to the Highlands and Islands, properly brewed lattes). The northernmost settlement in Britain is called Skaw, at the tip of Unst, and from there the northernmost point is a lighthouse called Muckle Flugga.

(This entire digression has been so I could use "Muckle Flugga" in a sentence. Unfortunately for all of us, it is not the northernmost point of Britain - that is a large, uninhabited and entirely unhospitable rock called Out Stack.)

But yes! Shetland is beautiful, and I do want to go back; and even in a few days there, I had disquieting thoughts about packing in the practice of law and living on the top of the world with my own fishing-boat. This is an entirely impractical dream, but I did note for the record that property prices in Lerwick are exceedingly low. As you can probably guess, I did a lot of reading about the Shetland Islands while I was there, but quite apart from the obvious beauty and charm of the place, I do find the whole idea of an isolated island community and how it's administered and governed quite fascinating. It's something to do with the notes of similarity and difference - for example, the red post-boxes in Lerwick are identical to the ones you find in Liverpool and Oxford, other than the fact the last scheduled collection is not 5.30pm, it's 11.30am "for the last scheduled delivery in the rest of the UK", which, I don't know, is to me an unexpectedly mundane manifestation of the isolation of the place - and it's something to do with small details of life that you take for granted when you don't live at the very top of the UK. On the way back, I was reading about a service offered by the ferry company - they will, at no cost, carry the bodies of babies stillborn in Aberdeen back to Shetland for burial.

Which, yes, is a particularly sad example, but maybe the poignancy of it stuck with me - the ferry company were talked into doing it by a woman from Shetland who, like all pregnant women with serious complications, was flown urgently from Shetland to mainland Scotland, and then of course her baby was buried there, 200 miles and a world away from home, as she put it. Which again interfaces with, I don't know, issues of identity and things; I was greatly struck by a little book I found in the aforementioned little goth shop, full of stories, songs, and poetry in Shetland dialect, which is provided to all primary schools in Shetland so, as the book puts it, children will feel comfortable and confident speaking it in schools. I was, I think, not unreasonably delighted by this, having been someone who found linguistic conformity both inevitable and highly stressful in primary school.

I was going to go on and talk about the interesting aspects of the law in a place like this, but probably if I did that I would be here forever.

In short: am back, it was good.