We’re enjoying the
deep darkness, and the
light from the stars
Alistair R Brownlie
The brigands have taken over
SR Extra
An essay for the weekend by Christopher Harvie
Scotland’s chance
in Abu Dhabi
Click here
The Cafe 4
There is no doubt that we are languishing in one of the worst depressions we have known. Fuel and food prices are as high as we have experienced, and many families are finding it difficult to make ends meet.
We are assured that one fifth of our children live in poverty, and that unemployment is dangerously high and growing. All the more surprising therefore to find that there never has been a time when more people are spending their hard-earned money on gambling, buying scratch cards, or participating in competitions which boast large cash prizes.
The National Lottery, the European Lottery, and the Irish Lottery occasionally provide financial rewards to winners which reach eye-watering heights. And, of course, the old stand-bys – the betting shop, the racecourse, and the dogs remain.
As a 50-year reluctant customer of Readers Digest, I have apparently taken part in countless lottery draws which have singularly failed to provide me with the smallest winnings, though I could paper my walls with the imposing certificates I have acquired certifying that I am a guaranteed potential winner, and I have fruitlessly stuck masses of stamps on documents of the highest importance, but to no end.
I stand constantly at my front garden gate scanning the street for the approach of the postman who, I am assured, may be bringing me news of my fabulous winnings which I have confirmed that I am perfectly willing to accept in cash.
Each evening on television I am told that if I care to telephone my answer to an infantile question (at a cost) to a mysterious phone number I may be richer by £1,000 when Big Ben strikes 10. But most remarkable of all are the ever present television get-rich-quick games of a life-changing nature in which we watch participants winning up to £50,000 simply for listing the names of pop singers, film stars, or sporting personalities. Even more remarkable, if that is possible, are the ‘Millionaire’ contests where invited guests must answer a series of questions, possibly assisted by audience participation, or by phoning a pre-determined friend. Yet equally astounding is the phenomenon ‘Deal or no Deal’ where a participant drawn in rotation from a specific band of carefully selected photogenic characters is bravely challenged by a maestro and an unseen anonymous banker to guess the contents of boxes which may or may not denote the rewards from 1p to £250,000 that the gambler of the day may possibly receive for accurate guesswork.
Have the cash for questions brigands taken over the entire economy?
Alistair R Brownlie
Islay’s Scotland
Mellow from Angola, busking on Buchanan Street, Glasgow
We’re enjoying the
deep darkness, and the
light from the stars
Howie Firth
I
‘The Arctic girl is out tonight,’ wrote George Mackay Brown in a poem in 1983.
(Come to the doors.)
She dances
In a coat of yellow and green patches.
And indeed Orcadians have been going to the doors these past few days to see her, as the aurora ripples and glows in the fine frosty winter evenings.
There’s a new excitement about this traditional sight, and the social media are definitely a factor. Facebook pages are full of beautiful images, showing how the night outside is looking right now, and the call to go and look is ringing out across several thousand northern screens.
There’s also a growing awareness of the value of the dark northern skies. There was a time in the 1980s when having a streetlight outside your door was regarded as an essential part of modern life, and those who lived just beyond their extent would write to the island council with words like ‘children’s safety’ suitably prominent. The resulting glow around the towns and villages has reached out to the stage when those who missed out are realising the benefit and enjoying the deep darkness, where you can go outdoors on a frosty night and see the light from the stars pouring down. Suddenly a part of the old Orkney is becoming a treasure in the modern world.
III
I was thinking back tonight to the days when North Sea oil arrived in Orkney, and the buzz of development as the long slow post-war decline of the island had ended and the so-called ‘drift from the isles’ – the emigration of talented young families – could end. The income from the oil industry provided the resources for a transformation of the Orkney economy – new fishing boats, food factories, restaurants, hotel renovations, leisure centres, craft businesses, arts festivals – and above all a kind of feeling that comes in the air when spring arrives after a long winter.
Today there are signs that something like this is happening again. Engineering companies are gathering in Orkney, bringing with them the latest wave and tidal power devices, and Orcadians with specialist skills are being recruited by local engineering and environmental companies. There’s a feeling of being at the frontier, and young Orcadians are in the middle of it, tackling complex designs for underwater turbine blades or analysing wave tank calculations.
One factor in the development has been Orkney renewable energy forum, where everyone involved with renewables, whether keen to develop new projects or concerned to preserve the environment, can meet round a table and work together.
Another factor has been the strong community involvement. The first few wind turbines were put up by outside companies, but for some time now the developments have been owned by the community or by individual farmers. It’s been estimated that such locally-owned developments have about 20 times the benefit to the Orkney economy as those owned from outside. That indeed is the model which has worked so successfully to the west of Scotland, on Gigha – and which can provide an island with a significant flow of capital to invest in social and economic development.
Why, I wonder, have not more areas in Scotland gone down the community route? All credit to HIE for forming the organisation that is now Highland Community Energy. But why in so many areas are all the profits from the turbines going to the big landowners? Is there scope for some kind of Scottish planning requirement, that a certain proportion of the wind generating units in any area have to be community-owned?
Howie Firth is by training a mathematical physicist, and by experience a teacher, writer and broadcaster who was one of the pioneers of community radio in Scotland
