Going Home (The Theme from "Local Hero")

It is now weeks later and I’m still smiling thinking about Shetland.  When the plane took off from Sumburgh the next day, Caro turned to me and said, “You want to LIVE here, don’t you?”  I really had to think long and hard about it.  Helen packed us off with eggs from her girls and sasser-maet.  This is a Shetland delicacy a bit like lorne sausage but with additional spices.  I had Ronnie over for breakfast that very next day and we ate it together.  This was after I added a fourth loophole to my vegetarian rulebook – 

• When someone gives me sasser-maet

And Gwyneth Paltrow can sod right off.

It was hard to say goodbye to everyone, even Louie the dog even though he’d managed to eat about four pairs of my socks in addition to the two toothbrushes.  Like all dogs of all time ever, he has the ability to put his head on one side, cock an ear and make you forgive him even as he spits out your sock.  Well, I say that.  Helen told us that Gary had taken him out in the car earlier in the year and Louie had spotted a rabbit.  He was off!  

Despite being a tubby little chap, it appears that Louie can really move.  Gary chased him up and down and through fields, getting steadily hotter and less good-humoured about it.  Finally, he saw Louie on the other side of a muddy patch of ground and advanced on him with a curse.

Only it wasn’t a muddy patch of ground.  It was pit filled with manure.  Gary went down.  More to the point, he went DEEP.  The pair of them, Louie and Gary arrived home some time later.  Louie, happy, waggy and pleased with himself.  Gary, less so.

“This is SHIT,” he announced.  And it was too.

It’s now several months later and I’ve taken way too long to finish this.  Sorry to have rambled on at such length but I’ve been reliving it in my head while typing and I just didn’t want to stop.  

As a postscript to this story, I met a chap at the pub last week.  He was the granddad of one of Caro’s workmates and a lovely old fellow who used to drive a cab in Edinburgh.  He regaled me of a story about a guy he knew when he worked on the ferries.  On a particularly wild night out in Scunthorpe of all places, the pair found themselves on the outskirts of the town late at night with no taxis, no cars and no way to get back to their lodging house.  

“Wait there,” said the other bloke.  He disappeared off, said this old bloke, and disappeared into a field.  “I thought he’d gone for a pee,” the guy told me.  “But he reappeared with a horse he’d got from the field.”

The pair of them trotted off on the bewildered animal and somehow got home.  “I’m not sure what happened to it,” mused this old guy.  “I think he might have hitched it outside like a cowboy.”  

Unsurprisingly enough, that horse-rustler was a Shetlander.  It all makes sense.  They’re a special bunch of people.  And I can’t wait to visit again.