Letters / Viking spirit
I saw a splendid comment on the ROTI petition commentary section from an “exiled” Shetlander ‘quhaa makks use o’ da brain da guid laord gied ‘im’. I hope he won’t mind if I reproduce it here:
“I currently live in Spain, but spent close to 50 years of my life living in Shetland where I was born and brought up. I can trace one side of my ancestry back to around 1510 in Fetlar, and by inference back another five generations to around 1350, also in Fetlar.
That surely makes me a Shetlander, and while I don’t live there today, I keep a very close eye on what’s happening. I fully agree that Shetland and the other island groups now have the best opportunity they are ever likely to have to decide a future for themselves and for generations yet to come. I truly hope that Shetlanders everywhere, and anyone else who has the islands’ interests at heart, signs this petition to give the residents of Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles the chance to have their say in this very important matter.
John Coutts
12:16 on 28 Apr 2014″
True Shetland spirit.
I was also pleased to see John Goodlad tottering out of ex-Shetland Movement hermitage, reinvigorated, doubtless, by his fellow Burra Islander Ali Inkster’s Viking spirit, taking the Our Islands, Our Future crowd to task at the public meeting on Tuesday night. (LIVE: Our Islands, Our Future meeting; SN, 29/04/14)
We need more Ali Inksters and more of JG’s ‘old battle-axe’ comrades to wake up and ‘gird their loins’ for a war for which the SIC has no stomach – it would be churlish, after all, for SIC negotiators to carp during such convivial talks with such welcoming government ministers, notwithstanding, that we’ve persuaded the Scottish and UK governments to offer so little and, especially, since “no island coucils have ever before” been so flattered by such ministerial fawning.
In the best Shetland traditions “Dey didna laek ta say”!
La-di-da!
I’ve lived in the Western Isles and those Shetlanders who say they have nothing in common with those great folk know NOTHING about them. I felt very much at home there, with good island people.
Our Islands, Our Future was a grand idea and I’ve backed it up to the hilt, however, it needed people like Ali Inkster on the team – people who know about the oil industry and are not subject to the above Shetland injunction “We didna laek ta say!” – and/or a local referendum to give the campaign teeth.
Why isn’t ‘The Flea’ on the team; he was the one who kicked it all off with George Osborne?
Ah, of course, he might say something ‘off message’ like “er..Mr Bumble, ..er.., Salmond, please can I have some more?”
None of the above conditions for success is present. As I used to see written on toilet walls when I was a student, “UNCTUOSITY ROOLS OK”!
Prior to further negotiations, I would propose a rehash of the wording of Alex Salmond’s presumptuous ‘Declaration of Lerwick’ along the following lines:
“….. for as long as a hundred of us remain alive, NEVER will we….etc., etc..”
We hae, at laest, a half a dizzen an coontin’, onyboady else want ta stick dir heid abuyn da parapet?
Spaek up or forivver hadd your paece!
John Tulloch
Lyndon
Arrochar
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