“We’ve been forgotten”. Said
the middle-aged Scot, who lived in New Zealand ,
worked for the oil industry in Nigeria .
“The oil is running out here; that’s when Scotland will get her independence,
when it’s all gone. There’s still some deep-well drilling off the western coast
of the Shetlands”.
I was in the Neptune ,
a small granite shanty bar facing the shipyard with their gargantuan gas
storage cylinders, freight, oil tankers and the North Link Ferry.
Footdee, an area at the mouth
of the River Dee of old fisherman’s houses now “bought up by yuppies”,
according to the barman, slightly effeminate with brilliant white teeth and a
hint of a fake tan.
The working harbour is run by a
government charity, companies hire it out and the charity thus benefits from
oil. After the import and export of herring Aberdeen harbour transported paper.
The Neptune was bombed by the
Germans on their way to occupied Norway
from their bombing mission of the Clyde, Glasgow .
The bomb hit the Neptune and a man, now aged 90, who was then, ironically, on
leave from Dunkirk, got injured. There were a lot of deaths; he tried to calm a
woman down who was screaming hysterically by slapping her around the face.
The harbour today, the past
brought to life by a scene of two workers smoking at the door of a pub in the
shadow of gigantic freighters, instantly evoked for me an age when Surrey Docks
and all the London
docks were still operating. Each dock seems to have a corresponding old office,
an administrative building opposite the entrance to the dock shipyard;
companies, shipping companies.
The expat Scot living in New
Zeeland said re. Nigeria
( He has a derogatory acronym or nickname like for anti-slave traders, for
protestors against oil and ‘progress’). He said they’ve moved on from the delta;
the whole episode seemed to disgust him. “If you meet a Nigerian, don’t trust
him”, was his parting shot.
In Aberdeen Art
Gallery Aberdeen .
We knew how to cut granite
perfectly, the herring trade then the paper trade and now the oil money goes
south, to Edinburgh then England ”.
She spoke about the golf
course, and I thought she was talking about the one slap-bang between the
University, Old town, and the rest of Aberdeen
and the shore. But it was the proposed new Donald Trump golf course on a piece
of land of natural beauty. There is a farmer who is refusing to leave. Mr Trump
described his farm as “a dump” on American TV. The second gallery attendant,
also a woman in her late fifties or early sixties, confirmed it was a dump but
that no matter what money the multi-millionaire had offered the farmer refused
to go. “They will use an obscure clause in the law to make him go; money
talks”. Oil money, she meant. The Trump golf course is a hot topic here.
The arrival of oil exploration
in the 1970s and its subsequent discovery meant that house prices soared, so
local people could no longer afford to buy; those working in the oil industry
bought up everything.
“The platforms are off the
coast of Aberdeen ,
none up here anymore. It’s where they process the oil, up in Shetland”, said
the Orkney islander as we stood staring at a giant tanker with a small heli-pad.
The men on the ship were reeling out cable in preparation for docking at Kirkwall .
I felt like saying,” no one I
know works with big machines/ big toys like this”. Then I thought of how they
were penetrating Mother Earth and extracting her life-blood, and how huge and
macho they looked. Nothing to do with gentleness,
The men drink; they are hard
northern drinking men. Not the soft southern shite down my way. There are big
hard eastern European men also. Real men, with real machines, doing hard real
jobs. Not just talking the talk in urban bars; bullshit-masculinity to impress
someone; something read about or watched on TV; these guys were its reality, in
the present and they don’t need to boast. (The last is conjecture). They may
boast.
This search is all tied up with
masculinity too. What is a man at his full masculine potential, (assuming that
truck driving, oil rigging, mining, steel working, army and construction are
hard jobs providing for the family).
“You won’t be meeting anyone in
Aberdeen who
doesn’t have a brother or cousin or someone who isn’t involved with the oil
business. Everyone’s hands have touched it somehow or other”. The couple were
strait-laced middle-class on holiday from Aberdeen
on the island of the husband’s place of work on the gas pipeline up at Sullam
Voe. Three weeks on, three weeks off. He was showing his wife around on a
limited tour of the terminal. “It’s not Disney Land
We had arrived at the same time
at the Lounge in Lerwick. Downstairs seemed a no-frills affair crammed with
local drinkers; the barman directed us upstairs and the couple followed.
Shetland had obviously
benefitted from the oil and gas. “Look around, no one is poor here on the
island, they were sheep farmers; everyone has at least one or two jobs”. I felt
he was being slightly defensive. Is it true that there is zero unemployment on
Shetland. Hotels and B&Bs would be making money from contracted workers and
local businesses also. “The pipeline goes down into the sea in another part of
the island and then the gas is sold on”.
The workers are tested for
drink and if they are over the limit, either off-shore or on when stopped by
the police then they’re, “off the island”. Sounds a bit harsh, ‘ off the
island; banished.
People protested at first when
the Americans came in the 70s, but now locals and mainland Scots are employed
they don’t complain.
Alpha Piper; look how young
they all were.
"Off shore is like a little
island”, said his wife. To be honest, she glazed over when her husband launched
into his favourite subject; she ended up talking to another woman. I had the
good sense to leave after my cranberry juice. (And very refreshing it was too).
Had talk with a couple; he had
lived on the Shetlands for ten years and was returning with his wife. He worked
for the oil plant. “Shetland’s council is well provided for. They made a deal with
BP. A pound for every barrel of oil taken off the Island ;
millions of barrels were leaving every day. Shetland has leisure centres for
every small town. From birth to death Shetlanders are provided for; they
thought of their future, unlike Aberdeen
who got nothing. Provision for children, crèches and kindergarten, schools,
sports projects. Provision for the old. Shetland has no mains gas, the refinery
only separates sea-water from the gas then it goes off to Banf and Wales to be
refined”.
The skipper pointed at the herring
packing factory and said that those who made money live on the Fetlar in big
houses with big cars.
I’ve always wondered about oil.
Is it the blood of the planet or really the rotting detritus of ancient forests
and dinosaurs; mulch? Extracted from pockets deep in the ground at the
billions, if not trillions of barrels a day, what is it being replaced with?
Water, yes, water…Not satisfied. Micro-cosm: bone, marrow; bone marrow. We are,
they are extracting bone marrow from the earth or the magnetic fluid by which
birds and bees navigate… or none of these and it is a liquid mineral there for
the use of industry and of course cars.
Bjork on Radio 4 said she was
asked ‘what caused more pollution, the ash from volcanoes in Iceland or
oil?’ She said that Icelanders consider volcano eruptions as part of living on
the earth, a natural part of it and it couldn’t compare with man-made oil
spillage. “We are mosquitoes on the earth’s face”, she said.
There is a guy here with his
teenage son, an ex-RAF man, revisiting his former station Saxa Vord; He now
lives and works in Norway …in
oil.
There is something of an oil
class striding around the planet; comfortable life-style, party- line: “Oil has
bought a lot of jobs to the people of this area”.- latest cars, golf club membership,
parotting wives, middle-England or middle-Britain-bland and as dry and sterile
as Saxa Vord, an RAF station dumped unthinkingly and incongruously in the
middle of nature, the whole an eye-sore of city-street lighting and
disconnected architecture.
A man showing his wife his
former base. A man showing his wife Sullam Voe Gas terminal. A man, now in
oil, showing his son his former RAF base; Biggles, Wilbur Smith, Robert Ludlam,
Fredrick Forsyth, Jack Hawkins, John Gresham.
Just found out, the area of the
houses built for the oil workers in Brae is called Toy
Town
“Born Glasgow ,
grew up in Brae on Shetland mainland, father oil worker, on the depot. Aberdeen was a poor city
on the verge of bankruptcy when the oil depot came along. There were Americans
who would order a taxi for the whole day, attending a five hour meeting and
have the taxi waiting outside!”.
“Shetland Council useless; a
turbine could have been built to supply electricity, free electricity, to the
islanders, council said it would be too expensive.”
“Oil workers haggard, hard men
who beat their wives”.
“200 hundred wind turbines will
be built on ‘the least scenic landscape’, (the whole of the Shetlands is
scenic). Will Shetlanders get the electricity? No, a cable will be laid going
to the mainland, enough electricity to power quarter of Scotland .”
“If England
paid back the money taken in oil revenue, Scotland would be able to be
independent”.
He loved the Shetlands even
though he was Glasgow born, he was raised in the
oil worker community in sight on Toy
Town Germany ,
returned with his wife and had had another girl, Shetland born. “ I always felt
like and outsider. I am not a Shetlander being Glasgow born, but I love the Shetlands. People
take the time of day to talk to someone; that is a saying here. I have to teach
my girls when they leave home to go down South not to be so open; the Shetland
vulnerability.” Exploited like a child, I thought. There are very strong
parallels here with the Ogoni, a sub-culture exploited ruthlessly on the
Nigerian Delta.
“Shetlanders are seen as second
class citizens”.
Rain-lashed morning and a raven
returns to the gutted old Windhouse to her nest of bleached bones. Below the
Bod, Windhouse lodge, the old memorial. Windhouse is a vessel to a spirit, one
who, for some terrible reason cannot depart this realm. From the howling
aperture that once offered refuge, the tortured soul watches as skuas, big
brown scavengers the size of herring gulls
circle sheep; the moment after the delivery of a lamb they circle and swoop and pluck out
the new-borns’ eyes. Damaged, irreparably, those hideous kleptomaniacs turn it
inside out.
Upon the bleak hills crofts,
roofless and devoid of life, stand like upturned carrion, the life that
throbbed and breathed around the blazing hearth now long gone. Each retains the
distant song of sheep, some dozen or more to each dwelling; two pigs, ponies of
the pure breed found only on these isolated isles. At the shores of the watery
boundaries lapped a boat for the gathering of fish; a catch to be harvested
with produce form the garden; potatoes, cabbages, onions, carrots.
Son of John, of Robert, of
Thom, of Anders, of Jamie, of Peter. Heads of families; subsistence with no
need of intrusion.
The predators would arrive
soon. In the form of avaricious self-titled and entitled lairds from the great
mainland, laying claim to each haven with their ravenous eyes on grazing
grasslands and wool, clearing the crofters through rules, tax, starvation and
privation of the God-given land for the lust of money. Reduced to miserable
servitude for bales of wool, many treated like vermin beneath the arrogant
stomp of the new Stewardship.
For a trifle many were sent to Australia , many more dragged their ragged
carcasses to the filthy holds of ships bound for the New
World and their roofs of moss and heather caved in around cold
stoves. The sound of children playing in the warm glow of the fire, chasing the
prize pig bought indoors in winter- no more. No more the hum of stories and the
stones singing with songs, a welcome lure to the approach of guests, come from
neighbouring crofts to catch news of relatives in other parts of the islands
and to catch again the tales of Selkies, the seal people, of Traws, the small
dark hidden folk who kidnap fiddlers for their services at year-long
festivities for their subterranean banquets, though in this world, they are
gone for but one day. Tales of the Brigdi, sea monsters whose fins the
fishermen flay at helplessly for they are able to leap clear from the water and
predict death to man or fish depending on the direction of their descent. Only
an amber necklace has power against the Brigdi.
They arrived in a clatter of
doors ; and me in my long Johns. Murphy
, grey hair in short-back-and-sides, well-lined face, late forties, button eyes
brown flecked with yellow, small nose, fine mouth, celtic in look, broad
Edinburgh brogue. Diesel, early to mid-thirties, stocky, unfit where Murphy is
lean and fit- sturdy. Diesel has shoulder-length strawberry blond to blond
hair, likes to drink cans of cider and beer.
They entered in a storm of
military packs and baritone voices. They are fishing buddies, complete with
rods. Murphy has been visiting a different island for the last eighteen years.
They had come from Lerwick to Walls with a view to taking the boat to Foula an isle Murphy Aberdeen on Friday. They
have decided to go to Grieve House, a Bod on the Isle of Whaley, millionaire
island where the wealthy from the herring fishing industry live; they are going
to fish trout.
Murphy has a breadth of
knowledge of these islands. “I want to get to know my own country”. He said.
“There’s a great big full-scale picture at Grieve House of Hugh Macdiarmid aka
Christopher Grieve staring at you”. There is no electricity at the Bod. “He’s
like Frankenstein with mad hair glaring down at you”.
The rain came down this
morning, a fine slanting rain now, tough, the wind still blows less fiercely than
yesterday. The sun is struggling and succeeding to break through; it is cold.
Tourist radio Shetland is on a
loop as this morning I heard the same features on various aspects of Shetland
life and geography as last night. People make Programs in their homes and send
them to the radio station; social cohesion; that’s lovely.
Murphy said that the
Shetlanders are not community-based; they are family orientated unlike Orkney
islanders where you hear the same accent everywhere, on answer machines, in
shops etc. Here not; there are outsiders, ‘soothmooths’. I gather the crofter’s
independent family existence in isolated crofts makes for nuclei-independence.
I wondered why in the in the Last Frontier Shop in Unst people did not stop and
chat with other islanders.
Taciturn, Ice People, independent
people, survival. Long, long winters, holding on to what one has one has; a
subsistence. Lean, one’s ain folk only; An economy of speech and company and of
energy. Yet there are social occasions, dances, but maybe among close family
ties alone.
Murphy; the Fisher-king with
pearls for eyes at the bottom of the pool of knowledge. “ I was in Sandness,
there is a south side and I made it over. I waited to cross to the other side to
the west side, but the tide was in, separating the isles; I was trying to get
to the beached whale. I knew it was over there because of a great circling of
crows in the sky. For the briefest moment I was able to cross the watery
bridge. The whale was in a state of putrefaction. I cut one of its rib-bones
away and wrapped it up in plastic and bound it in masking tape. But on the
train back to Edinburgh
it began to leak and stink because the blood was still in it.
Every body on the train was
looking around for the source of the smell and I pretended to read my book.
When I got home I unwrapped it and stuck it in the ground so the blood could be
drawn out by the soil in the ground”.
Murphy collects bones. He has
them displayed all over his house.
-
The inverted world, a dolmen of
whale bones; memory running down inversely. The bones of bards, running up
through stone. Elephants’ graveyard; a cauldron of memory. Elephants touch the
memory of bones, a record of its itinerary and kinship.
In the whales’ marrow the
memory in bone, the whales song, the seas; its vast journey.
“There is an African tribe who
build there houses of elephant tusks”. Murphy said.
Murphy is an old pagan of
Carlton Hill in the 80s, The old man of Stour ,
Skye. Murphy of the raven and of the nest of bones. About fulmars he told me, “ You don’t want to
get the oil regurgitated from the gut of the Fulmar on your clothes; you’ll
never get the smell off, ever; you might as well throw them away”.
The earth takes millennium to
build up its memories; these are the sum and culmination of her journey and the
journey of those who lived upon her surface, who walked, crawled, swam, flew or
grew; liquid memories, marrow beneath her bones.
We drill down to her memory
cortex and extract her evolution and render her amnesiac; burning the records
like the slaughter of bards who held a cultures’ store of memory. Dementia.
I went for a long walk along
the coast of the bay. Gulls had dropped thousands of mussels, opened and
disgorged of their flesh, they litter the ragged boundary between water and
land. Flotsam lay on these shores reached by the currents and tides. Old
fisherman’s ropes, a diver’s clove, huge black buoy, various plastic bottles, a
pack of pills some still in their foil, undisolved , gun casings. Driftwood
above the waterline, testimony to someone having combed the craggy beaches in
order to salvage this rare kindling the only source of wood on the islands.
The nesting birds now gone, a
few, a few terns piped and whistled to defend their territory. The solitary
gull, but most, by this time of year had headed off to warmer climes.
Breaking news of an oil spill
112 miles off the coast of Aberdeen
on a Dutch Shell platform. The extent of the spill is not known yet. If serious
it will drift in and ruin hundreds of thousands of seabirds on the Orkney and
Shetland coastline.
“ Everyone comes and
wants to change things, change the Shetlands,
tell us howto run things, but we’re still here”.
tell us how
At some later date two new
southerners moved to the island, one at Hurdiback, the other an immediate
neigbour on the hill directly across a bay to the Christian fanatic rehab organic
farm a former hippy community. Following the refusal of the new-comers to attend
church the two families feuded and it ended with the devout Christian throwing
a bucket of dog poo over the head of the heathen new-comer.
Out side The Scotsman Newspaper
offices a billboard reads;
The Scotman Edinburgh 15 August
A shell platform North sea
Assurance under control
Gannet Alpha. 112 miles east of Aberdeen
Shell respect thousands of sea
birds at risk
Spill about 100 tons in size
’19 miles by 3 miles. (bigger than Papa Stour)
At this time of year young
guillemots, puffins and razergills from colonies in Orkney and Shetland and Norway are particularly vulnerable in the North Sea
ROV and preparing divers.
There will be a bigger more
devastating oil leak very soon, days if not weeks after this one. This next one
will be unstoppable if my dream of standing on a platform (years ago I had this
prescient dream) is correct and they usually are.
I feel I should return to the
Shetlands or the Orkney islands for the clean
up operation.
The Scotsman writes that
Shell has only revealed the leak at the
Gannet Alpha Platform 112 miles off the coast of Aberdeen five days late, now 216 tonnes of
oil has got into the sea; this is 1,300 barrels of oil. Shell had previously
lied saying it was only 100 tonnes. Shell are being tight-lipped about the true
extent of the disaster.
So, dilemma; tell them at Saint Andrews to expect an oil slick; to halt golf
tournament, the beginning of university. Oil, the bloody gits who work for the
oil industry may be hoisted by their own petard, their off-spring will probably
know the stench of it wafting through their halls of learning.
Anyway, 2000 years and witch
burnings. The old seers go underground; the inevitable will happen. The full
extent of the disaster will be revealed. I will observe the prime directive’ not to get involved in the course of unfolding events seen through clairvoyance.
There is an oil exhibition here
in the next few weeks. I was in a bar off Markey Street chatting to a regular
about Edinburgh
hiking hotel prices up 150% during the festival and he revealed the same
problem of inflated prices during the exhibition and how you can’t get a cheap
room. The bar regular’s father had been a light house keeper on the Shetland Islands , Esheness, before automation.
In the Scotsman there is a feature
entitled ‘Shetland Shows the Way to Oil Wealth’ extolling the wonderful use of
oil tax by the Shetlanders. This is obviously a feel-good piece. The word,
‘liar’ kept springing to mind. I can’t be bothered to name the slimey toad of a
journalist and guess we are constantly being served some company line or big
oil feel-good story to distract from the fact that our beautiful planet earth
has gas companies pumping a dozen or more very poisonous chemicals into her and
that her living marrow is being sought and sucked out, sent to various surfaces
of her anatomy and syphoned away to be consumed;... mother earth is being
incrementally incinerated. Every now and
then the puncture mark on her skin erupt and the marrow... She looks on in
horror as something that should be firmly on the inside... like a piece of
intestines escaping a colostomy bag’. If Mother Earth were a woman she would be
Billie Holiday 5 months before her death, arms, belly and legs and neck and back
punctured and lesions in number uncountable but sickening to behold her needle
jabs, less like Venus de Milo. Or like an overworked, overused overwrought Judy
Garland or Amy Winehouse; you makes your money; you pay your lip service;
beautiful silver car, lovely golf clubs and course, fine supine shopping wife,
mesmerize the locals with pristine empty leisure centres, crowded shopping
centres, the various bags they carry
under their arms; The Sleepwalkers.
Men, ‘ It’s a man’s world’
engineering, machismo, biggest fallacy; pub, football, snide remarks, please
dad, "They’re haggard and hard, get drunk and beat their wives".
Oh wouldn’t it be just
hilarious when the slick (they’re calling it ‘sheen’, oil industry-speak for
aesthetically beautiful oil spill!), comes in to Saint Andrews Golf Course, stinking all the
way down from the coast of Aberdeen,
stinking and the golfers unable to play, air so unbreathable; the ever-present
Arctic skuas and herring gulls dripping oil on to the heads of the oil-rich and
oil-mesmerized inhabitants of Aberdeen, the blotches on the course, on the
golfing whites, Mrs Oil’s petunias, on the bonnets of so-and-so’s Jaguar,
people hop-scotching the puddles and slip-sliding into the too numerous new shopping
centres sticky with newspapers lain down to soak up the oil; that’s what your
money bought you.
He worked for Exon and was paid
to spin for the company. I made out I was a disinterested tourist. He’d been
down to London
to advise on the oil spill; it is going north. He used the word ‘emotional’ to
describe a sentimental view on nature or applied to those who had any
attachment to nature whatsoever. “All they see is the emotional side; who gives
a fuck about a few penguins”.
After that comment and after
having seen the wild life on the Shetland islands ,
whales, seals Puffins, guilletmots, skuas, terns, otters, gannets. So,
‘emotional’ were they? and what was he? He was a industry-produced automaton.
Money, money, money justified the slave-trade and its whole-sale slaughter.
Money and greed now justifies defacing and polluting nature. "Emotional" it
reminds me of something patronizing a misogynist would say to a woman. These
oil guys, and from the mouth of an adviser who is sent to allay fears. So,
Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Save the Arctic, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
and any other organisation or individual who might care for the absolute beauty
of a clean clear beach, watching the gambolling of seals lying on rocks, or
watching, between islands, whales
dancing together...Well, anyone who wishes to enjoy nature and the many animals
that share this planet is, in the eyes of senior oil-men, simply being "emotional".
Had a strange dream where I had
a job involving wildlife, in the wild, a fierce jungle gorilla came down out of a tree toward
me; in arrogance and fear I killed it. Beheaded, looking at me with kind light
brown eyes, it said, “Take out my eyes so I can remember all this in the future”.
