Ron MacMillan - Between Weathers

RON McMILLAN

Ron McMillan has been travelling since 1979, when he spent time in Germany working on Formula One cars, which he maintains was not particularly glamorous, since the workshop was a grimy factory in Bavaria and the cars were toys. The following summer saw him in Germany again, where demolishing the roof of a metals factory sixty feet above swimming-pool-sized vats of boiling acid was only slightly less perilous than working alongside three Liverpudlians, all of whom were called Frank.

After two years in Australia and New Zealand (funded by dishwashing, driving and digging ditches), came fifteen years in the Far East. He began in Korea as a part-time English teacher and full-time student of Tae Kwon-do; then, amidst the flying rocks and tear gas shells of nationwide student demonstrations in the run-up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics, became a freelance writer and photographer for newspapers and magazines in Asia, Europe and America. During a decade based in Hongkong, he visited Mainland China on assignment nearly fifty times, lied to men carrying guns in at least a dozen different countries, and made five tourist visits to isolated North Korea. The resultant photographs from North Korea graced the covers and inside pages of Time, Newsweek, LExpress and the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

On his return to Scotland in 1998, he took on a domestic travel column for The Herald. He also wrote and photographed travel and business stories for magazines including the inflight titles of Cathay Pacific Airways, Korean Air, Thai Airways and Japan Airlines. In the autumn of 2005, he spent five weeks in Shetland researching the first travel narrative to be written about the islands since 1869. BETWEEN WEATHERS Travels in 21stCentury Shetland is the result.

Ron McMillan is now a correspondent based in Bangkok, Thailand, where a vibrant live music scene allows him to indulge his passion for playing blues harmonica rather badly.

Travels in 21st Century Shetland

RON McMILLAN

Foreword by Aly Bain

Sandstone Press

Highland, Scotland

BETWEEN WEATHERS

Travels in 21st Century Shetland

First published 2008 in Great Britain by Sandstone Press Ltd, PO Box 5725, One High Street, Dingwall, Ross-shire, IV15 9WJ, Scotland. Reprinted 2009

Copyright 2008 Ron McMillan

www.ronmcmillan.com

Foreword Copyright 2008 Aly Bain

The moral right of Ron McMillan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

Editor: Robert Davidson

ISBN-epub: 978-1-905207-46-6

All photographs 2008 Ron McMillan

Cover design by Basil Pao and Stella Lai

Da Clearance, Rhoda Bulter (1929 1994), quoted by permission of Mr Dennis Bulter

Shetland map 2008 The Shetland Times Ltd

Designed and typeset in ITC Giovanni by River Design, Edinburgh.

The publisher acknowledges subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the publication of this volume

www.sandstonepress.com

Heartfelt thanks are due to everyone at the Visit Shetland Tourist Information Centre in Lerwick, and in particular to Stephen Simpson for his unflagging professionalism.

I am indebted to travel guides Elma Johnson, Allen Fraser and David Murray, as well as to Shetland Amenity Trust and the Shetland Islands Cruisers.

Brian Smith and Joanne Wishart of Shetland Museum and Archives responded to a slew of enquiries with saint-like forbearance, and David Kosofsky, Mark McTague, Charles Martin, Tom Slover, Peggy Myron, Roberto De Vido and Allen Fraser offered valued editorial advice and encouragement.

Brian Johnston of Shetland Times Ltd supplied the map adapted on page ix, and the family of Rhoda Bulter kindly granted permission to quote her poem Da Clearance on page 208.

Thanks go to Basil Pao and Stella Lai for the cover design; and to Aly Bain for his generous foreword.

Gratitude is also due to Robert Davidson, Moira Forsyth and Iain Gordon at Sandstone Press, for their patience and considerable assistance throughout the writing process. Any remaining errors in the text are, of course, entirely of my own making.

Lastly, I thank the people of Shetland, who forged a special place in this travellers heart.

Dedications

This book is dedicated to my father, Tom McMillan,
to my late mother, Ellen McMillan, and to the two ladies
in my life, Ae Shim and Shona. And no dedication would
be complete without a wee wave to my Aunt Sadie McPhail.

Colin ViKing Fraser Aberdonian, Liverpudlian,
sooth-moother and proud Shetlander passed away
in September 2007. A fine friend sorely missed.

This is a refreshing and entertaining look at my native islands. It has all the more value as the author is a much travelled journalist. It would be impossible to describe Shetland without giving the weather its place. Ron McMillan does this to sketch in the background to present day Shetland.

The Oceania, sister ship of the Titanic, was grounded on a reef off the island of Foula on 8th September 1914. Her skipper, Henry Smith, realising that she could not be floated off, said she would be there as a monument for all time. A local man commented, Ill give her two weeks. They were both wrong - she was gone in three. This was a ship the length of two football pitches.

In the days of open six-oared fishing boats, when a fleet turned, heading for shore at frantic speed, there was no sense of competition they were rowing for their lives. They would cut their long lines in full awareness that the lairds who owned the boats and gear would expect full compensation.

Life for past generations of Shetlanders could be extremely harsh, and the author reflects that during the Clearances the families whose roofs had been burned off their cottages might look back from New Zealand or the Americas years later and think that it was the best thing that ever happened to them.

Shetland today is a place of much happier circumstances. There is comfort and prosperity, a good social life, a great musical tradition. Incomers are made welcome and many have put down roots and raised families. There are, of course, many weeks when the weather is memorable for all the right reasons.

Above all, however, this is a book about people. Ron McMillan looks at Shetlanders with a sharp but affectionate eye and his style has a wit which makes reading this book a pleasure.

As for the Shetland character, when a writer as widely travelled says that Shetland is the best place in the world to thumb a lift, he has said a great deal.

Aly Bain

Edinburgh 2008

Late on the night before I drive to Aberdeen to set out on a lengthy trip among distant northern isles, a button marked Gale Warnings on the Met Office website draws my computer cursor like iron filings to a magnet.