Remember the cows blocking Scout’s & my progress around Shapinsay island? I posted a photo of them (see July 6th post) and my amazing artistic sister was moved to paint them. I couldn’t draw a picture of a ball, let alone shaggy horned cows in a meadow, if my life depended on it.

She is so talented – here’s her work:

St Magnus (aka Magnus the Martyr) is one of the big guns around here – there are Norse sagas about him, he ruled Orkney in the early 12th century, and was martyred by being struck in the head with an axe (bummer). They built a cathedral named after him, starting in 1137. It’s so immense that its spire can be seen from many of the Orkney islands and (on a clear day, or so I am told) even mainland Scotland. In the UK, most of the tomb effigies you see in churches are of noblemen and women, recumbent, in long robes, clasping swords, or bibles, or crowns. In St Magnus Cathedral, the effigy is a guy lying with his arms clasped behind his head, in the buckskin clothing of a courier-du-bois, a rifle by his side. He’s Dr John Rae, an Orcadian who moved to Moose Factory to be an employee of the Hudson Bay Company (in the early 1800’s) and the first person everyone mentions when they find out I’m Canadian.

I was raised Presbyterian, but am now an atheist. Even so, I like attending church. I think there’s something to be said for taking an hour out of your week to be quiet, and to listen to a (hopefully good) speaker talk about how to do better in life. And it’s the only place I can sing in public and people can’t ask me to be quiet.

If I’m all the way across the ocean, and if I’m attending church, and if there’s a 900 year old cathedral just around the corner from my house, well, obviously that’s where I’m going.

Years ago, my Mum & I had attended a service presided over by a minister we hadn’t met before. After the service my Mum said to me, “Well, he was a very good speaker, but I do think he went on about Jesus too much”. A typical Scottish approach to religion: go to church, sure, but don’t get all pious about it. Well, she would have liked this minister – in the four services I’ve attended, I don’t think he’s mentioned Jesus once. Don’t get me wrong, he talks about the bible, but so far it’s all been Isaiah, and living with change in our lives. No Jesus.

The attendance is a mix of regular locals and tourists; I guess I won’t know until the fall how many are regular congregants. Although, in many cases you can tell the tourists – most Presbyterians don’t wear knapsacks to church.

I’m enjoying the services: the sermons are interesting and thought-provoking; there is something called a contemporary reading from a current book; he has referenced Chagall, Nietzsche, and fractals; and listening to a choir in that massive, vaulted nave is just wonderful. My only complaint is that each week we say a different version of the Lord’s Prayer – so far we’ve said four different versions and I haven’t recognized a single one of them – today’s was the worst, some sort of modern re-imagining. I’m a traditionalist – progress in the church is all very well and good as long as it leads to women ministers or gay marriage, but let us be clear here: the phrase is ‘give us this day our daily bread’ not ‘meet our needs every day’. Honestly.

I’ve lost a shirt. It’s not an important shirt (yes, it seems I rank my shirts in order of importance – who knew?), nor was it expensive. In fact, it was a tank top that I bought in France when my luggage went walk-about, and which British Air paid for. So technically, it is a free shirt.

But it irks me that I can’t find it. It used to irk me if and when this happened in Milton, but at least then I had several dressers, at least three closets, a laundry room, and even basement shelves with luggage on them for clothes to end up in. Eventually I found things.

I definitely have seen it here at home since my last trip south, and it’s not like I’ve been having a wild social life, arriving home in the morning after a night of pub-crawling, bits of underclothes stuffed into my purse. So I feel safe in saying I haven’t left it in anyone’s home. I do remember in my twenties, when my little Chevette didn’t have A/C, I was in the habit of slipping my pantihose off in the Bank’s parking lot before getting into rush hour traffic on a hot summer’s day, but the temperature here still hasn’t hit 16°, so I’m keeping clothes on, not taking them off. I did try on a pair of shoes at Begg’s on the high street last month, but I usually keep my shirt on when trying on shoes.

I doubt that one of my neighbours peeked over the hedge, saw a royal blue tank top and thought, “I just have to have that”, before slipping though the shrubs and snatching it off the line.

Scout wouldn’t have taken it; she likes to carry my socks around in her mouth, but only socks. I only have one dresser, two closets, a rail of fall & winter coats, and a laundry hamper. Where on earth could it be?

I know it shouldn’t matter; it was free, I wasn’t all that fond of it, and I do have other tank tops, but it just bugs me. The search continues.

Milk comes in 1.13 litre (= 2 pints – these Brits really resent metric measurements; they seem to think it’s the EU imposing their bureaucratic ways on them) or 1/2 litre(ish) square plastic jugs. I only use milk in my tea (or an occasional mac & cheese recipe), so I usually buy the little ones.

I don’t like loose open containers of dried food in my cupboards – I think they’re messy and they spill easily. So when I open a packet of rice, or lentils or beans, I pour the remainder into these washed-clean little jugs. They’re also great for making dressings, etc…

LL was so impressed with them, she took a half a dozen home with her for her new RV (they went into the part of the suitcase that had housed all the ramen on the way over here, I suppose).

But, while I like their convenience, and I do re-purpose them and re-cycle those I don’t need, I’m not crazy about using plastic. I noticed this Milk Refill Station in the local grocer & general store. Well, this is genius! You buy the bottle, and then re-use and refill. And, it’s buying local.

Laundry day today. My washing machine and dryer each take much, much longer than back home – I have noticed this here and at my Uncle’s, and my American/Canadian friend now in Oxford confirms it. So it’s more ‘laundry week‘. I can usually get through two loads a day, but at three hours a load in the washer alone, it is an all day undertaking. (And I don’t like running the dryer when I’m not home, so I have to turn it off when we go for a walk, and then remember to turn it back on.) Today is bed linens.

I don’t get the British approach to duvets. I mean, of course, I get duvets – they are nice and cosy and warm on a winter’s night, and they look nice on the bed. What I don’t get is their sheets. As at home, sheets are sold in a ‘set’; unlike at home, that ‘set’ is one fitted sheet and one or two pillowcases (depending on the size of the bed).

My first week in Orkney, I went into Tesco (the woman at the local linens shop had been a tad snotty when I went there first – maybe she thought I was a tourist wasting her time by asking about bed sizes in the UK? – so I decided not to ‘shop local’ that day) and picked up two similar-coloured but slightly different packages that looked like one fitted sheet and one flat sheet (each with a pillow case) for my temporary single bed. Turns out I had bought two fitted sheets – the slight difference in packaging was due to some re-branding by the manufacturer – so for my first few nights I slept with a fitted sheet on the mattress, and a ‘naked’ duvet. I hunted high and low (including going back into the local linen shop) to find flat sheets, but to no avail.

My cousin was quite surprised when I complained about this. It seems the Brits simply use the cotton duvet cover as their top-sheet. Why, she asked, what did North Americans do? I explained, as she & I were wrestling the duvet cover back on the duvet in her Dad’s guest room, that we buy fitted and flat sheets together as a set, and use both on the bed. Well, what about the duvet? I told her that we bought a pretty cover for it, and treated it like a bedspread. What was the benefit of that? Why not just remove, wash, and replace the duvet cover when changing the beds? Why involve an extra sheet? (Did I mention we were ‘wrestling’ with a cover as this conversation was going on?) I tried telling her that our way involved far less work: strip the bed weekly and wash those sheets, and maybe strip the duvet every few months or so – less wrestling. But clearly I am in the minority in this way of thinking – I have yet to see flat sheets in Tesco.

*There was even an article in a British newspaper this week – a Mediterranean journalist telling the Brits how to beat the heat during this unusual heat wave: one recommendation was to ditch the duvet for the summer, and just use a thin cotton top sheet at night. Genius.

But, here at home, I continue to dread, postpone, then angrily tackle changing the bed and washing the linens every week (who am I kidding – every two weeks). It was bad enough wrestling with a duvet cover when there were two of us, but when it’s just me, well, FFS, life it too short for this crap.

Edit: I found super-strong, made-for-the-islands clothes pegs last month, so I am now hanging much more of my laundry outside. I went out just now to bring in the duvet cover – it was gone! It must have blown away. No, wait, there it was – it had been moved?!? It must have blown off the line and a neighbour saw it and re-hung it on a different part of the clothesline. Except, my clothesline is tucked away in a back corner of my garden – who the hell had been wandering around my yard? Had it flown into my neighbour’s yard and they came all the way around and returned it to the line without telling me? Or, I finally realized, it is an umbrella-styled rotary clothesline stand, and the wind had spun it around – way to go, Einstein. Paranoid much?

We’re having a heat wave. The United Kingdom is freaking out over the temperatures this week. Brits are being told to stay indoors and out of the sun where possible. It’s lingering for several days, with London looking at highs of 30°. Even Glasgow and Edinburgh are looking at mid-20s.

This week, Orkney will see a high of 15°, and cloud cover likely for fourteen straight days. I wore a fleece and a windbreaker to walk the dog just before lunchtime this morning. Gloves were considered, but rejected because, well, it’s July.

I can’t say I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for.

Robert Burns is considered Scotland’s greatest poet. Well, some would say Sir Walter Scott, but I can guarantee you every English-speaker over the age of 9 knows at least one line of a Rabbie Burns poem, and quotes it at least annually. Not sure Scott can lay that same claim. (The line is, of course, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot . . .”)

We know many more of his lines, but may not always know the source: “man’s inhumanity to man” and “my love is like a red, red rose” are a couple of examples.

His poems had some interesting titles: Address To A Haggis, which is read aloud each January 25th at Robbie Burns suppers, refers to haggis as “the Great Cheiftain o’ the Puddin race” – seriously, how can you not love a poem praising oats, pepper, and sheep innards? There was To A Mouse – an ode to a – yes, really – to a mouse. That’s where the phrase “The best laid plans of mice and men aft gang a’gley” comes from. And honest to God, he actually wrote a poem called To A Louse. Yup. A Louse. Remarkable.

Which brings me to today’s aggravation: I have lice. Well, no, wait, that sounds wrong. My house has lice. Wood lice to be specific. In the winter I might see one or two of these tiny brown trilobite-like bugs a month. As the weather warmed up, more and more were showing up. Now, I dispatch about a half dozen a day, either squished in a kleenex in the garbage bin, flushed in loo roll (toilet paper) down the toilet, or hoovered up with the vacuum. I was a tad freaked out about this: was it a reflection on my house-keeping? Was it all the fault of not having window screens? Did I have to move all my non-canned food into the fridge? But I have since asked around and done some research: they are wood lice and to be found in wet wood. Like in the foundations and walls of Scottish houses; every house has them. And it seems they don’t really like being ‘above ground’ as it were, as they dry up and die quite quickly in the open air, so my foodstuffs are fine.

So, much like high winds and strong accents, the wood louse is something I have to learn to live with here in Orkney. But I still don’t think it deserves its own poem.

On Tuesday, the ferry MV Alfred ran aground. It ran into the island of Swona. Yes, a whole island. People were loaded onto lifeboats, with some minor injuries, but the ferry was able to limp into port under its own steam. This is the ferry I normally take to Scotland. Hunh.

Then, yesterday, a torpedo was found in Scapa Flow. Yes, an actual torpedo. In a body of water less than two miles from my house.

Oh, and Scotland has tentatively picked a date for an independence referendum: October 19, 2023.

Never a dull moment.

After almost three years, I’ve started back at yoga classes. I did try on-line classes during COVID, but I’m crap at that level of self-discipline – I like being in a class with others. When I got to Orkney, first there was the tail-end of Delta variant, then Omicron, so still no in-person classes. But last month I finally signed up for weekly classes at the local community centre, ‘The Picky’ (The Pickaquoy Centre). Going to classes has got me back into doing practices at home too.

In the past it was difficult to do yoga with a 62-lb doodle licking either my face or my feet during downward-dog. But Scout is more mature now and doesn’t need to actually be involved in the poses anymore. Although, clearly I couldn’t do this without some kind of coaching – this is her beside me as I wrap up with savasana pose.

Shapinsay is a small island of about 300 people, 25 minutes away from Kirkwall by ferry. It seems to be quite a desirable place to live; I’ve met many in Kirkwall who lived their entire working life on Shapinsay and only moved to Kirkwall when they got older (shopping, doctors, hospital, etc). It also has a castle and a 2-hour walking trail. It has several ferries throughout the day leaving from Kirkwall harbour.

So, I woke up yesterday to sunshine and thought, why not head over to Shapinsay for a few hours to check it out. Walk the trail, enjoy the weather, and then head home. I looked it up: I could take the 11:30 ferry there, catch the 3:15 home. All for only £4.24. I did have a few things I wanted to get done in the morning, but if I focus, I really can get a lot done in quite a short time frame. So I tidied, vacuumed, started a stew in the crockpot, loaded the dishwasher, and roasted some vegetables. Then suddenly it was 11:00 and we had to hustle.

You see, I wanted to walk to the ferry. To walk from my house somehow felt more island-y (it’s hard to explain, I guess because I’ve never really lived near water, the idea of popping over on a ferry I’ve just walked onto appeals. I dunno). But we were cutting it fine – where had all the time gone, granted I’d managed to get a lot done, but still? We walked briskly to the Ferry office in the harbour, ordered my ticket (the clerk said, “oh, you’re a local” as she keyed in my purchase and found my account; I felt so proud), then quickly hoofed it over to the Shapinsay pier. Except there was no boat. I could see other ferries, in other parts of the harbour, but the Shapinsay sign clearly pointed to this pier. Had the loading area moved? Did I have time to walk back to the office and ask the girl? I checked my watch: it was 10:20. Yes, twenty past ten. Not eleven. I was an hour early for the damned ferry. No wonder I was surprised earlier in the day, I had accomplished all of that housework and cooking by 9:55. Well, nuts. Now what? Walk the 15 minutes back home, sit around for 30 minutes, then walk 15 minutes back down? No, that seemed daft; I headed over to a coffee shop and made a bloody expensive flat white last as long as I could.

Then across the road and onboard the ferry. The young lady had told me she was emailing me my ticket and I would show it and pay onboard, so I wouldn’t need paper. But I looked – no email. Now what? The boat had already left the pier – was I going to be kicked off in Shapinsay? Was this like the GO train where they publicly shame you? I tried to explain to the ticket taker (are they called conductors on a boat? that seems wrong) who didn’t understand what I was talking about and said, “just tap your card here, luv”. And then off he walked. Okay. That was simple.

A lovely half-hour ride to Shapinsay across the Wide Firth. We walked off, and I headed along the road to where my guide book had said the path would start. I saw the castle, but there were signs everywhere warning you away from the field, as there were cows with their calves. So now what? How do I follow the trail if the field is closed off? And it was full of big cows. With horns. I took a picture of the castle, then we turned back and headed around the harbour the other way. After 10 minutes walking we’d come to the end of the houses. Again, now what? I had thought we’d stay until the 3:15 ferry, but it was 12:20, and I’d seen everything I really wanted to, if we couldn’t follow the walking trail.

I could see the ferry was still at the pier, but couldn’t access wifi – why hadn’t I downloaded the ferry timetable? We turned back and walked to the pier. There I was able to check the website – the ferry wasn’t leaving for another hour – yes, another hour-long wait for the ferry. Twice in one day. So we went and sat on a picnic table on the grass about 25 metres away. Scout was getting a little twitchy, then I realized, the minute we had stopped moving these weird, smaller than house flies but bigger than midgies, flies were all around our heads.

So we headed back to the pier, away from the grass and into the sea breeze, and she lay on the cement and I perched on a bollard, and the only thing flying around us was a pair of sand martins. And we waited.

The ferry left at 1:30; we were back in Kirkwall by 2pm, and, frustrated and ravenous (oh, had I mentioned? The guide book and the Orkney website both showed a place to eat on Shapinsay – well, okay, but I never found it), so we did the obvious: headed to the Kirkwall Hotel where I ordered a large wine for me, a bowl of water for Scout, and a veggie wrap with chips (everything comes with chips – at my parents’ pub in England in the 80’s, they served lasagne with chips, chili with chips, and quiche with chips). And that was that – home to unload the dishwasher.

So not my most successful day in Orkney. Ah well, it was a nice day for a sail.