Letters / Skewed views
I see that the contentious issue of coming and going from Shetland cheaply by air is back on the agenda again (Thousands back campaign for cheaper airfares; SN, 08/06/15)
Don’t you (7,500 and more petition people) understand that the economies of scale that make that sort of thing possible almost everywhere else in the world (with regard to air travel at least) simply aren’t applicable (or available) up here on Shetland?
Because the sole enablers of that attractive but artificial world-wide business model (i.e. the exotic and extremely practical high-tech big jets that make it possible) can’t take off or land from here, as a result of the fact that there’s no way to build an airport that’s large enough (anywhere on these islands) to accommodate them?
Are you all so far divorced from reality, and so enamoured of your imagined ‘rights’ to ‘having everything’ that the modern world has to offer, that your personal view has been skewed to the point of making you totally unable to see the truth of this assertion?
Don’t you also think that living on these islands (because you were lucky enough to be born here, or because you came here to live on them by choice, after having been exiled from the UK mainland by the utterly disgusting living conditions brought about by successive futile governments and their hidden agendas), is a tacit but flat statement that living anywhere else in the world is a rotten choice and a bad idea; as is leaving the place for any reason other than life-saving health care?
Which, to me, means that travelling to any other place (including for shoddy ‘free’ NHS treatment of any kind) has got to be a ‘must to avoid’?
Why are the valuable old-style occupations (followed by Bobby Tulloch and many others) not enough fun for the latest generations, as holiday or leisure-time activities?
Well? And most of all: why do you need to be reminded of these things by a disdained incomer?
Philip Andrews
Unst
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