In The Clouds

Today the island of Hoy has been inside a cloud, a persuasively island-shaped cloud that hugged it and camouflaged it into the sky, a pleated cotton wool sky that joined onto the sea. I wonder what it was like to live on Hoy today. Did people use flash lights to get their children home from school? Did they crawl along the roads at 20, headlights set to Fog?

Then, late this afternoon, Hoy re-emerged, poking out its high hills, highest on Orkney, and looking faintly complicit, like something secret had taken place.

The gas flare, incidentally, marks the spot of the oil terminal on Flotta, which sits in front of Hoy and processes 10% of Britain's oil. Hoy, meanwhile, an island lost in a cloud, is happy to process 90% of its weather.