Entry tags:
Orcadian Tales
There may be somebody out there who will be amused by this. Everyone else will go… What is she TALKING about?
The first time I went to Orkney a shepherd named Iain tried to seduce me. I was a girl alone, he was travelling with his mother; I was tempted, but naïve and a little scared. They tried to get me to come on a trip with them to the outer islands. I fled, as fast as I have ever fled from anything, to my beloved Pennines for the next season. It was nearly 20 years before I went back.
I went back because the Orkney Islands Council asked me to come. They arranged and paid for my journey, they provided food and a comfortable place for me to sleep. (I swear I saw no ghosts of ANYBODY.) But it was very windy. My children followed a day later, when my interview was over and we would be able to explore. When my four-year-old disembarked the adults had to make a barricade around him to keep him from blowing over. He had to creep to shelter bent double, hair blown flat against his skull, laughing hilariously the whole way.
I didn't get the job. I wasn't entirely disappointed, as it would have meant staying there, without the children, for two seasons, and not the light ones.
But we had such a marvellous visit, that time, that the following summer my husband and children went back without me, taking grandparents along for the ride. I was at WorldCon in Glasgow. (I'M NOT MAKING THIS UP, YOU KNOW.) Thus, when
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sdnor ellen_kushneror someone asked if my children were around, I was able to reply truthfully (and not without some small amount of hilarity): "No, my entire family is in Orkney." This post brought to you courtesy of the fact that I've been reading some of the HIGHLY UNPUBLISHABLE stuff I wrote in high school. By "unpublishable" I don't mean "Viking wouldn't buy it"--I mean that it should be burnt, and that I would spontaneously combust of shame if anyone ever read any of it. Not that they would understand it if they did. I myself had some trouble with it, having forgotten, for example, that the boy magician was in fact a sort of transgender Orlando creature, and that his twentieth century arch-enemy does turn out to be Mordred. Or that he and Telemakos have the same birthday. Can I possibly have done that on PURPOSE? It really is a miracle that I subsequently ever wrote anything remotely readable.
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I've also, believe it or not and very sad to say, kind of forgotten that I was once a Travelling Nubile. Actually, my first visit to Orkney predated my first pull on a bell rope by about six weeks. But I'd just finished a tour with Liz T that ranged from Cornwall to Edinburgh, so I reckon it counts.
Re going back.... My first trip to Orkney was in 1986. Although (for many reasons) I was pretty weirded out and didn't enjoy it as much as I might have, and although I really loved it when I went back in 2004, it is safe to say that Maes Howe and Skara Brae have lost quite a bit of their magic. There is a huge tourist center, gift shop and cafe and car park at Skara Brae that didn't remotely exist on my first visit (when I arrived on a rented bicycle). But I really loved the Celtic church and Viking settlement on the tiny island north of there--I crossed over the causeway, by myself, as the tide was going out, leaving Tim and the weasels stranded on the mainland (I mean, Mainland Orkney). So there I was among these 1000 year old ruins in bare feet, on an island ALL BY MYSELF... it was delightful. A couple of months later Mark (who was 4) drew a picture that he still calls "Mummy on an Island" and I always imagine it is the Brough of Birsay.
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Sounds like it. Did you hunt around for a little cave to try to find some Lewis chessmen? That discovery happened under somewhat similar circumstances, after all, though I bet you wouldn't mistake them for the Little People as the 1830s shepherd was said to have done.
Your burn-bag stuff reminds me of one of Dorothy Parker's book reviews: "This is not a book to be laid aside lightly. It should be thrown aside with great force."
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no, but my head would have exploded with delight.
I once found a red glass scarab bead on the beach at St. Andrews.
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It is good! There's a lot of sex, which I find objectionable*, but it's really good. And there are too many puns. :D
* /squicked by TV sex