Am on the train home from doing the Shereen show on Radio Scotland. The host is one of those iconic broadcasters in Scotland that everyone knows by her first name, and it’s her show so it’s a good name, does what it says on the tin.
Here it is if you want to listen https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000q4jr
There was the novelty of seeing people in 3 D rather than on a flat screen, making a pre broadcast coffee that was somewhere not my house and for more than myself or the occasional one other, (I had to leave the pot sitting on a worktop and the others had to go individually to pour their own) and a cup that wasn’t my own and conversation with more than one person that wasn’t interrupted or disjointed while two people jumped in at the same time and the technology messed up. It was absolutely fantastic.
What was really obvious was that everyone was feeling it, everyone was saying how much they were missing people, missing having somewhere to go, missing a reason to leave the house and be somewhere, anywhere. But it also made me realise that just knowing that you are not alone with those feelings isn’t enough, you still have to experience them yourself and live with them, and no amount of people understanding or even feeling the same as you can take them away or the necessity of coping with them and living with them alone inside your own head.
En fin, it is not easy for most people right now.
For reasons that you can listen to on the programme I mentioned Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown who, born in 1921, has the centenary of his birth next year.
I’ve been dipping into Mackay Brown’s collected journalism from the column he wrote for The Orcadian in the 1970s, it’s a kind of erudite localised writing that reminds me of some old Spanish writers collected works I used to buy in the 90s that doesn’t really exist anymore. The Orcadian itself still exists, and this weeks issue has a 10% off voucher off the fresh cut Christmas trees at Wellpark Garden Centre, a story about rescuing stranded dolphins from the beach at Sanday and the news that taxi fares are going to go up for the first time in three years.
Reading Mackay Brown’s columns you can see him as the official story teller of a place whose main weekly stories are the above. He writes about watching Van Gogh on the telly and moves on to his own experiences with artists and poets in Edinburgh, another piece is about the vagaries of the weather on the ferry across the Pentland Firth. He writes about the life that people are living around them, links the train journeys they have to take to the same world where Alistair Cooke is on the radio and tells them that the actor on a film on TV the week before thought Stromness, Orkney’s second town and Mackay Brown’s home “the most beautiful place he had ever seen” Although he rarely left Orkney himself, Mackay Brown’s columns are a constant reminder of the connection with the wider world while also being deeply local, which in the end, is what we all need our writers to do. Mackay Brown’s columns makes you feel Orcadian in the same way Leonardo Padura’s fiction can make you feel Cuban or Hilary Mantel in Beyond Black can make you both believe in psychic mediums and know what it’s like to be one.
I’ll leave you with an extract from Under Brinkie’s Brae, Mackay Brown’s column from 12th February 1976.
“It seems that the most famous of Orkney foods is clapshot. The man who talks about food prices on the radio one morning each week was talking the other day - and I in bed half asleep - about potatoes, and the very high price of them nowadays. Then he said something like - “Why don’t you try that splendid Orcadian recipe, clapshot; potatoes and turnip mashed together?” . . .That woke me up completely. A good way to start the day.
The BBC food advisor was right - clapshot is one of the best things to come out of Orkney, together with Highland Park and Orkney fudge and Atlantic crabs. I have it at least once a week, sometimes more. It goes with nearly everything - sausages, corned beef, bacon, mealie puddings.
The other day, by way of a treat, I bought a piece of steak for grilling. Would clapshot go with grilled steak? No harm in trying. I peeled carefully the precious ‘golden wonders’ - and thought, what a shame, in a way, ‘golden wonders’ being so delicious boiled in their thick dark jackets. And while the tatties and neeps were ramping away on top of the electric grill. it came into my mind that somewhere, I had read a recipe for clapshot that advised an onion to be added. (It may be one of the books of F. Marian McNeill, the Orkney born connoisseur of food and ancient Scottish lore.)
In no time at all I had an onion stripped and chopped and delivered (my eyes weeping) among the neeps and tatties in the rampaging pot . . .Fifteen minutes later the probing fork told me that it was all ready. Decant the water into the sink, set the pot on the kitchen floor on top of last week’s Radio Times, add a solid chunk of butter and a dash of milk, then salt and plenty of pepper, and begin to mash. . .
Everything about clapshot is good, including the smell and the colour. I think this particular clapshot, with the onion in it, was about the best I have ever made. And it blended magnificently on the palate with the grilled steak. And it made a glow in the wintery stomach.
Everything good about clapshot? I have a certain reservation about the name. It sounds more like some kind of missile used in the Thirty Years’ War than the name of a toothsome dish. And yet I’ve no doubt the roots of the word are ancient, worth and venerable. As soon as I have finished writing this I must dip into The Orkney Norn.”