SIC
Shetland Islands Council

I am sure this will not be the first council to be 'ahem' criticised on a blog. Well, its their turn now.

They are, basically, a bunch of wastrels. They are as happy as larry to spend taxpayers money on stuff that we don't need, while trying to cut the budgets on things we do (eg education) because 'it is a different pot of money'.

They recently paid a large amount of money for a review on the educational facilities locally, with several schools lined up for closure (including one secondary department on a small island with the huge total of 2, yes, TWO pupils, recently refurbished for about £80,000 IIRC) The result? No changes. They even decided to retain the secondary department (which has itinerant teachers flown in and out on a daily basis at huge cost per pupil) despite the fact that other kids of the same age have to leave their island homes to receive secondary education.

They are widely known to have certain 'officials' that will tell contractors to up their prices come the end of the financial year in order to use up money from the budget that needs used up - but that same department may well be overspent from a different pot.

Its crazy.

Apparantly they have a new education review going on at the moment. As well as one before the one I mentioned earlier - how much money are they going to spend on reviews before any 'savings' are made???

And the ferries - don't get me started on the two 'super-ferries' - at a cost of IIRC £1 million, they got two new ferries to go back and forward to an island with 1,000 pop (and leads to two others with a total pop of probably another 1,000 between them). One that they have been considering a fixed link for....

I'll leave the leisure centres and music venue for another vent....

For example, telling a bleary-eyed gay friend of mine 'you look buggered' isn't maybe the most tactful comment I could have made....

UKIP Shetland are looking at Shetland independence.

Its a funny one. Faroe has very close links with Denmark, but effectively runs itself. But Faroe has a population that is double Shetland's, and I'm not sure that it has had the same volume if 'incomers' that we have had due to oil. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing - the vast majority of people that I have met that have moved up in recent years are tremendous people that moved here because of a love of Shetland - its birdlife or its freedom or the chance to get away from the rat race. Some Shetland people feel that there are a lot of people coming here for 'the good life', because housing is cheaper than down the road and we have excellent services here. I have to admit to never having met them, and I'm not entirely sure they exist, or if they do, chances are they won't last.

You see, Shetland is a very peculiar place. It has incredibly strong winds, bitterly cold winds that combine with precipitation to create horizontal rain (yes, really). We have a limited high street - we have a boots, a somerfield and a co-op - but no M&S or Debenhams. Its not an easy place to live in many ways. We can get stranded here for days with weather, which also means that there may be no fresh food supplies coming from the mainland of Britain - or we might get snowed in for a week which is easy if you can walk to the local shop, or (like people that know the place) have enough food/baby milk/nappoes/medicine to see a week through - but sometimes people newly up from South sometimes don't appreciate the problems that the remoteness combined with the weather can cause.

Anyway, my point was - Shetland has also appealed to people that want to drop out of society, and get away from 'it all' (whatever 'it all' is, as we seem to have everything we need - well, maybe apart from an ice rink and bowling alley - and I'm not sure that we would have the amount of forward thinking, go ahead kind of people that would be needed to get independence for Shetland off the ground.

And would it be a good thing if we did....?

Shetland has its own dialect. Shetland, once upon a time, was part of Scandinavia, and was gifted to the UK in lieu of a dowry. As I understand it, we were supposed to be swapped for cash once Denmark could afford it (but I could be wrong) - it was hundreds of years ago and my memory isn't all that great....

So our dialect is partly derived from Norn, and it's partly Scottish. I am no expert - it may have other roots as well. One of the most common Shetland words you will hear if you come here is peerie - meaning small.

Shetland's dialect has funny idiosyncracies (is that spelled correctly) though -

We have two things we might say - one is 'I doot dat', the other ' I hae me doots aboot dat'. Literally ' I doubt that' and 'I have my doubts about that'. Same thing? Nope, completely opposite - 'I doot dat' is said if you agree with something someone says, while 'I hae me doots aboot dat' is if you think the information is probably wrong or false.

We also have our own past tense. Instead of saying 'it fitted well' - we would say 'it fat fine'. (well - sit, sat, fit, fat - it makes some kind of sense...) When I was young, these things were so part of how we spoke that it was really difficult to understand why they got marked down when you did english at school!

In fact when I was at primary school we were not supposed to speak in Shetland dialect at all - thankfully things have changed and it is enjoying a bit of a resurgence at the moment.

Shetland is the second-safest place in the UK, second only to Orkney, our slightly southward neighbours.

Its one of probably fairly few places left where you can let your children outside to play without having to feel you need to keep an ever-watchful eye over them - as such, our kids are generally active and healthy and thats a huge bonus in these days of mass advertsing of what is basically junk food for kids - full of sugar and fat and refined carbs. Don't get me wrong - our kids also love the Playstation/Gamecube/X-box, and will sit happily with their controllers welded firmly in their grasp for ages at a time - but as soon as the sun parts the clouds and the wind dies down the kids are out there on their roller blades or bikes. We know all the neighbours, and also know that should anything happen (I pray not) then we would find out quickly and they would be taken best care of in the meantime.

Its a great life for kids.

I heard today that a 17 year old lad that lived near me died suddenly last night. I didn't realise I knew him until about 12 hours after I first heard - as I only knew him by his nickname.

He was a good hearted lad, with a great sense of humour and he will be sadly missed by many that knew him - including those that are currently sitting exmas at school. I hope that they don't mess up their future by messing up their exams, like this lad messed up his future by messing up his life.

You see, he died while sniffing lighter fluid. People around him thought he had stopped it, but it turns out he was back on. Anyone that knows anything about it will know that it can kill very quickly and very effectively.

I ask 'did he ever have a chance?' because his background was very unsettled. He was around drug abusers growing up and never had the chance or possibly the motivation to move away from the people that were around him all that time. Someone that would have been very much a father figure to him took a serious trip on magic mushrooms not all that long ago (a year? two years? no more than that) and his neighbour called along him thinking that he was in a serious fight, with all the noise. No, he was 'doing Jesus' - stabbed himself, inserted objects where they should not go and was about to saw off his leg when the neighbour came in.

Maybe this sounds like the previus newspaper report was accurate, and that drug abuse is rife up her - but although it is a problem (as it is in many many places), these types of event don't happen any more or less than on mainland Britain. The difference is there is a higher chance of knowing the person, or knowing of the person.

I really hope that this does some good in making the other kids around him aware of the acute dangers of meddling with sniffing - gle, lighter fluid, aerosols, whatever. If anything comes out of it, I hope its that.

It's a sad day.

Way hay! Here up in the Arctic Circle (no, not really...) we have finally had some really great weather! Well - by really great I mean over 10 deg C. It has been shockingly bad this spring, but we have had a few days of sun, and the whole family has been out and about. Of course, that also means that my son now has a graze right down one side of his face from where he took a tumble..... nothing's perfect, huh!

A previous commenter was interested in knowing if the community spirit here made people happoer.

This is a difficult one to give a straight answer too, as Shetland has many different qualities to, for example, city living, and that has drawbacks as well as benefits.

So please excuse this post as it will most probably be very stream of thought based - I'll try and keep it coherent!

I spent some time last year in a very well-to-do area of England last year, for the first time ever. I was invited to an event by my friends' employers, which was incredibly generaous of them. I met some amazing people there - mostly public school educated, with an absolute air of confidence. They chatted away about nothing at all during the entire time. It was educational for me. They were incredibly generous with money and about the fact I was a fish out of water with people that lived in a world completely removed from anything I could ever have expected to experience. But it was a bit like candy floss. There was no real substance to it.

Socially shetland is more like puff candy (does anyone remember that? Its a more rustic version of a crunchie). No one here is really accomplished at the kind of small talk I experienced there, in some ways its much more honest in a 'rough around the edges' way.

I'm not sure how that translates to happiness. I was going to say that you know you can rely on people to be there when you need them, but I think that is also true of where I was. But I feel that it would maybe be in a different way. Up here I could go to my friends and cry and cry if I needed to, and that they would be totally there for me. And when I say friends, there would be quite a wide network of people I could call on if I needed it, and know I could trust, from friends I have had for years to parents of kids at my kids school to colleagues to neighbours to family and their neighbours. It has its downsides because you can't get away from people that you know, and everything you do can (and probably will) be scrutinised by others.

But you know, there is no fear here. A single woman can go home late at night without thinking twice about 'is the cab driver safe' or 'can I was through this park alone', without having to look back to hear where the footsteps are coming from. There have been incidents of rape, of drinks being spiked and of assaults. But they are few. 'Rush hour' here means that you might have an extra five minutes on your journey time (admittedly not community spirit related). I'm not sure if it means that people are happier, but it possibly means that they are more content.

I am surprised and delighted to already have two comments on my first blog entry!

Point taken though - I first came across the article due to a reference about it in my local paper, and I read it in the same light as the paper was written. It may not be an entirely negative view of Shetland, but it is certainly unflattering in the extreme. Shetland has many 'soothmoothers' that have chosen to live here, so it can't be all bad!

Having said that - there is much in the article that is actually not true or very much an over exaggeration - for example, the report of the oil industry having collapsed is blatantly false.

Interestingly, the journalist that wrote the article was quite willing to talk to our local journo's about the article, but the gentleman quoted was nowhere to be seen...

I was born, bred and currently live in the 'most depressing place in the British Isles' according to the Birmingham Post - although on the web they have changed the title of the article.

http://icbirmingham.icnetwork.co.uk/birminghampost/news/tm_objectid=16943968%26method=full%26siteid=50002-name_page.html

Much of the falsehoods and half-truths that are represented within the article are reported to have come from Roger Casemore, allegedly an academic, and someone that came to Shetland to set up courses in Counselling and Psychotherapy as a director of the University that accredits the courses. Surely that makes it fairly abhorrent that he takes reasonable statistic and twists it into something that it isn't - and what it isn't is unique to Shetland. 26% of Shetland inhabitants have had some mental health symptoms - which is what would be expected as that is in line with national figures.

Now, it is fairly obvious that he has taken a dislike to Shetland and yes, our weather for example can be absolutely shocking. But when you consider that we are on the same line of latitude as Alaska then its maybe not all that suprising - in fact it could be regarded as surprising that our weather is actually not all that bad in comparison!

So what can you take from the article?

Well, Mr Casemore doesn't like Shetland. Apart from that? I would take nothing at all, as untruths like us being in the Arctic Circle and that we suffer 'emotional poverty' when in fact we have a much higher degree of community spirit than many people on mainland Britain will have experienced makes the article in its entirety unreliable at best.