LOCAL NEWS. FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD'S IGNOBLE STRIFE. BUT NOT VERY.

People quite understandably think that that line is  from the Thomas Hardy novel, Far From The Madding Crowd, although it originates in the Grey's sublime Elegy in a Country Churchyard and refers not just  to  rustic seclusion but also to  Death's permanent exiling of us all, in far Eternity.

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way. It is not all plain sailing, however, in this particular, Northern vale of life.

The minister preached his horrid, scoldy Presbyterianism and now lies, his tomb enscribed in latin, segregated from  the common  crowding dead, ancient and modern, in its sea-threatened precincts.

Tranquil now, the Sound,  although when the gales come, when the tides are high, they maul and  claw at the stoutest sea-walls, undermine the road and threaten us with the sight of coffins bobbing away towards Norway, maybe America.  One of those big, freaky seas is all it would take. Funny how those closest to the sea underestimate its terrifying power, when  it is they, Tragedy's fools, who should really know better.

Never Morning Wore 'Til Evening But Some Poor Heart  Did Break. Tennyson.
Oil Painting by W. Langley, 1884, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
A once-upon-a-time  mariner,  I  have a print of this kitsch melancholy on  my wall, as much for the title as for the painting, an antidote to the serialised nightly sorrows on skymadeupnewsandfilth - murdered schoolgirls; doughty, fundraising cancer victims and now headless recreational martyrs;  Tennyson could simply have said Shit Happens but poets are ever showy and  extravagant.

The cause of our local watery imperilment  is the continued existence of the Churchill Barriers, 
 

causeways linking  the archipelago,

 built with slave labour 



following the incursion to Scapa Flow of Gunter Prien's 

 
U Boat 47 and his sinking of HMS Royal Oak with the loss of nearly all hands, 



men whose ghosts could not but question the value of their fateful service, should they hear Mrs May and Mr Grayling introducing measures which they fought and died to defeat; For Shame! they would shriek. One day, when God is in his Heaven, skeletal hands will, as he takes his fat leisure on the shoreline,  grasp the ankles of Villainy's stooge, Orkney's Big Al Carmichael,  LibDem MP, 



and drag him, spluttering bulbous lies and wormy pledges, down to Davy Jones's Coalition of the Doomed Locker.

The Barriers, though, were erected by Eyetie POWs, in a belated, post-Royal Oak attempt to block  the sneaky entrances to  Scapa Flow, as well as  to provide previously non-existent road links between formerly separated islands and seventy years on, our smart, successful council has not found the wit or the means to replace them and as well as endangering motorists crossing in bad weather, 

as well as needing frequently to be closed, marooning many on the wrong sides, the Barriers obstruct the tidal current; where once it simply rushed from the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea headlong into Scapa Flow it now hits the barriers and rebounds, gnawing at, scoring-away the coastline, eating farmland, threatening not only the grateful dead in the kirkyard but roads, businesses, properties and - inevitably - lives.

Coastal erosion is just part of life, as is turbulent and destructive weather, no use whining about it, unless, as in this case,  it is due to man's interference, and now, seemingly,  something which we must bear until it washes us away.

 Scotland, after all, has no experience of bridge building,

The Kessock Bridge at Inverness.

Over the sea, to Skye.

The Forth road and rail bridges.

 our civil engineers would struggle to span these vast Churchill Barrier distances, one of them as much as a few hundred yards long; Project Europa, after all, has no experience of funding massive post-war infrastructure projects.

Happy to slash at a skyline unchanged since the Ice Age, Orkney Islands Council, force-feeding us pious, nonsensical Greenery, welcomes carpet-bagging windmillers bunging small landowners bribes funded from their neighbours' inflated energy bills;  councillors  have lied shamelessly to public enquiries investigating dodgy windmill planning applications from former councillors, clad in Green Pragmatism's sandals they tell us it is necessary to shit on everything of value in order to meet facetious and irrlevant Green targets yet bleat helplessly about the irreplaceability  of these wretched barriers, as though it was still 1939, as though  we might yet suffer attack from prowling unterseebooten.

But then here, as everywhere, we do suffer the madding crowd's infernal strife; here,  retiring councillors awarded themselves thirty grand, as a reward  for doing the decent  thing and allowing new blood to come in;  here, the last leader of the council, Steven Hagan,

tried to fund his second home from expenses  and remains outraged that his fiddle was disallowed;  here, a career public sector grafter, 

Mr Albert Tait, retired as the council's Acting Chief Executive, immediately took up another lucrative public sector post, paying himself virtually tax-free via  a limited company set up solely for that purpose. Al's current brief is with the local NHS, wouldn't wanna pay any tax towards that, now, would he?

There is no escaping corrupt and staggeringly incompetent local government, no escaping the rank hypocrisy of the career public servant, no escaping his or her stout indignation when found-out. At least in Rotherham a partial truth may yet emerge; here, in order to bury the infamous Orkney Child Abuse scandal - which was, in fact, largely an import from England -  a local sherrif, acting far beyond his  legal powers, simply ruled that there was no case to answer;  a local councillor, a bloated, insufferable bully, Cyril Annal, he of the thirty-grand retirement bung, endorsed - on national television -  the threatening of social  workers, going about their entirely lawful child protection business, with loaded shotguns. Far from scrutiny all sorts of Shit Happens.

Et in Arcadia Ego, Nicholas Poussin.1637
Musee de Louvre, Paris, France.

There are as many interpretations of Poussin's et in arcadia ego as there are art critics and of such there is a pestilence.  The one I like is that Arcadia was ancient Greece's pastoral, rural community, far from the shore and her cities, far from the madding crowd and that the ego of the inscription was Death and corruption - Even in Paradise am I.

Quality of Lifers, Northbound, racing towards imagined Paradise, take note.