'Naethin ever cam frae Scotland/But dear meal an' greedy ministers.' - Shetland expression

Images from our weekend in Northmavine, the northern part of mainland Shetland. We stayed at the tiny white croft house on the right side of this photo. It was a lovely weekend of eating, drams, chat, and attempting to stay upright in 60+ mph winds whilst hiking.






Happy Up Helly Aa! We've seen the galley and heard the pipes. The parade is at 7 and the party starts at 9, and ends at 8am. Have a wee dram and think of the Jarl.

happy

"The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so." - William Ralph Inge

Matt's been sick for the past week and I've now got something similar. I am a horrible, dysfunctional, snotty brat when I'm sick and all I want to do is curl up and die, or whinge about it until someone tells me everything will be okay and I can bite their head off with some sort of drama queen soliloquy. This morning I attempted to write and everything was tainted by my mood (kind women became bitches, charming men adulterers) so I began surfing. I try to avoid this, as one can lose hours immersing oneself into voyeurism. Today, though, I felt happy.

I find it quite silly that happy people are often considered jesters, naive souls who haven't had to deal with the harsh reality of life. I have this game I've played since I was a child where I look random people in the eye and smile at them just to see if they'll smile back. America has the most smilers. Europe, not so much. Responses have ranged from idle grunts to barks and incomprehensible spews of a language I don't know. It's an interesting game. And it passes the time, cause then you can make up stories about why this person you just smiled at is so damn cranky.

Anyway. I save the blogs that people recommend, hoping to find the time to read them one day. So I peeked at a few. And I felt happy. Call them narcissists or self-indulgent, but some people seem to be in cyberspace just to be there, and to offer a different view on this planet we share. Some are witty. Others beautiful. Some share simplicity. Some are sassy. There's something quite cool about this form of self-expression. A large percentage of blogs are long-winded, poorly written drivel, but it's somebody's drivel, and that somebody wanted to say something. It might not change the course of existence, but it might make someone smile.

Other things that make me happy: the energy of a new country as soon as you step off the plane. How sunshine makes marble sparkle. When my cup of tea cools off enough to be drinkable. A really good sneeze. The smell of the air after a Midwestern rainstorm. Telling stories with good friends. Getting an email from an old friend. It's nice finding happiness in the inconsequential. Though perhaps I'm happiest knowing this damn cold will be over soon.
The above photos are from places that make me happy. Top: Lisbon. Middle: Como. Bottom: decaying port advertisement, Obidos, Portugal.

"On life's vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but passion is the gale." - Alexander Pope

January 24th, or the day before Burns Night, or the day before our friend Zain comes to visit. Shetland has been ornery this week. Spats of rain and wind, then a few blissful hours of sunshine, then a temporary deep-freeze, then more wind, then blue, blue sky, then clouds. Today was the weirdest yet - walked ta da toon, sunshine. While at lunch, rain. Walking to butchers, sun again. Back out and these pebble-shaped snowflakes (not heavy enough to be hail) pelleted us, then in another shop and out, sunshine again. Then rain. Then more pebbly-snowflakes that covered the road, which is where we are now. There's no choice when it's sunny - you take what you can get and get your ass outside to play before it changes its mind. Monday morning we awoke to snow - or Shetland snow, which is a light dusting of similar consistency to powdered sugar, and thick, invisible ice that throws down WWF-style. And it lasted all of about 30 minutes.
The seals were out in full force that day. They let me get to within about five meters before they started barking. The drama queen of the lot began flapping her body around and pushing other seals with her face, but they all preferred to be lazy in the sunshine. I'll miss these guys.
The Clickiman Broch, below, is one of the many on Shetland and is not even two blocks from my house. I've never been. Brochs are unique to Shetland (*LIE! The Tourist Board thinks so...but apparently they're also on various other Scottish islands...thanks JDS) and were built and rebuilt from the Iron Age onward. This one was inhabited from 1000 BC to AD 500 and was restored in the 1950s. Thirty or so people would live in the area, working the peaty land around it. The view would have been amazing from the top of the broch onward towards Bressay and the North Sea.
It's been a good writing week. I had a chat with my agent last week and am now reworking 30K words to create a completely new book. I have to be finished by the end of February, so that's given me incentive to do between 3K and 5K a day, and I have sorted out a new ending. This part is exciting, seeing where the story is going to take me. Our mate Zain is working on a book too, so poor Matt will have to deal with our pretense all weekend as we sip tea with our pinky-fingers sticking out and frown and say things like, "Extraordinary dialogue" and "Magnificent imagery". We're staying in a wee croft house in the middle of nowhere with a peat fire and a kitchen - should be extraordinary, magnificent.

Next Tuesday is Up Helly Aa, the Daddy of all viking fire festivals, and the men are getting hairier by the day. Seriously. Their beards are creepy. Then four more days and we move. I'm so, so excited to have a place of our own (without hairy, shedding roommates who cook ready-made curry for every meal that stink up the apartment and take three 35-minute showers PER DAY) and to have the space to set up (gasp!) a desk to write on and sit on (choke!) a sofa that isn't vinyl (my butt has permanently scarred the sofas in our living room, as it's the only place to sit and write all day). This place is second-to-worst on my scale of Hellacious Living Quarters, the worst being a windowless room in a dark apartment in Lisbon where I shared with a psychotic Portuguese woman who would paw through my things when I wasn't there and thought she was psychic. Obviously she wasn't - I moved out one day without telling her and she freaked out when she got home and I was nearly finished. I digress.
Expecting gales again this weekend, so should be an interesting stay in the croft. They've even cancelled the ferry service until Sunday. (Here, that means no food at the supermarket, no newspapers, no mail either.) For more interesting small-town island news, check out the daily Shetland News.
Happy Burns Night, and go get a beer on Tuesday in honor of Up Helly Aa.

'piss up' indeed

The Scalloway Fire Festival. What it was: A gathering of randoms along a street in Scalloway, Shetland. All lights in the town went out. In the distance, the sound of a drum, the lilting sound of bagpipes, a chorus of yelps and hollers. Then the heat of a hundred long torches, held by men and women clad in everything from elaborate Viking costumes (below) to pink fuzzy skirts to policewomen to traditional kilts.
The randoms followed the lighted mass along Main Street to Da Waterfront, where each torch added to the lit boat structure, or galley.
And once everyone had a go, the boat was gently pushed onto the water. Pretty amazing event, and this apparently ain't nothing compared to the Lerwick Up Helly Aa.

New rumors about this tradition: The various squads, often a group of people who share a profession, make up skits and dances and songs to perform on the day. Once they've learned their part, the dress rehearsal happens. (This was yesterday for most squads.) The squad gets together in the morning, spends an hour getting drunk, then performs their entire sketch drunk - just to see if they can do it. This continues again and again until everyone can perform it perfectly whilst intoxicated.

We had a busy weekend. Spent Saturday cooking a massive Mexican fiesta for friends before heading oot to da middle a nowher for a party. (Ask me sometime about pushing Matt's car up an icy hill when we took a wrong turn.) One of the nurses at the hospital has this party annually and invites the whole hospital, though it was mainly nurses who turned up. Val and John are in their early 60s and have a wonderful house on the water - an old croft house with a beautiful extension that is the nicest home I've seen here. John is a small man with a white beard and spent the first two hours dancing and singing along to country music - he used to be a truck driver - and I tried to teach him how to two-step and line dance. Such a laugh to hear this music in this very uncommon location. Matt took his pipes and the inebriated nurses decided to trip all over themselves attempting to Riverdance. Or something. The party was to celebrate the Shetland New Year, always on 12 January, according to the Julien calendar. So at midnight, everyone toasted as Val fed everyone amazing soups, meats, cheeses, and breads. Once you're in with these folk, you're in; everyone was wonderful to us on Saturday night.

More fire...very cool!

"One guy asked me the other day, 'What is it you call the fire festival?' I said simply, 'An excuse for a piss-up'." - guy on the street in Lerwick

It's January 11 and the day of the Scalloway Fire Festival. It's the kick-off event of the Viking Appreciation Festivals which run through March each year. Learning about these events is similar to trying to get your head around the US university Greek system, the Masons, and the Junior League, and perhaps a smattering of Opus Dei, at the same time. Some of the events are exclusive, some welcome everyone. Some don't allow women to participate, some do. I'm still confused about the Lerwick Up Helly Aa on the 29th, as apparently we have tickets but can't tell anyone we have tickets because we're not supposed to get tickets, as 'foreigners'. So don't tell anybody. Each event has a Jarl who is like the grand poobah, and in Lerwick this honor costs 40,000 GBP - !! The Jarl then chooses his squad and they get drunk, spend the day meandering the town visiting schools, rest homes, government offices, etc. and basically rabble-rouse until the official parade begins. It's all quite hush-hush and I'm keen to steal more information as we get closer to the Lerwick event.

Tonight's festivities include a Jarl squad parade and a 'burning of the galley' - whatever a 'galley' is. I'll know in a few hours.

Matt and I went back to the mainland for New Year and got back to Shetland on Sunday. It was nice being somewhere that had daylight after 3pm. Our flight arrived early, so we went to St. Ninians Isle for a short walk while we still had daylight. It's a cool place as the Atlantic shore is on both sides of the sand. The island itself is grassy and flat, and often splashed by huge waves. Pretty amazing place.

Every other day has been nice this week - by nice, I mean 7 degrees and sunshine. This is the Clickiman broch (a Shetland dwelling from 1000 years ago) by a loch not even 10m from the sea. Our flat is just to the right and down the road.
It's strange thinking we're almost done with our time here. The lack of stimulation means more creativity is needed, and perhaps that's how these books have been completed. I'm working on a new one now, and it's writing itself. Must be something in the air.

Happy new year to everyone. May '08 be the year it all happens!