OhFio

There’s something fishy going on. Funded to the tune of $500,000 by the Oak foundation ‘Hugh’s Great Fish Fight’ (Channel 4) with the great proletarian leader himself waving the revolutionary flag of middle class conservation is setting itself up as the great saviour of the Seas. The 3 programmes have set a hare running wild in terms of facebook indignation from fishermen and an alternative site ‘The Real Fish Fight’ with a slogan of Save our Fishermen is jumping with keyboard rantings from the reasoned to the rabid.   Fishermen as a united body is something of a misnomer – as the pursuit of fish has to be individual and competitive – collective solidarity is only seen in the interdependency of crews in mutual survival in a hostile element to ensure the catch is landed so everyone can get a pay. In 1974 fishing was of little interest to the UK government, but became a valuable nay essential bargaining tool for entry to the Common Market. A big interest in Scotland it meant lit...

I do so think I deserve a pat on the back, a little praise or small republican treat of some kind for my exemplary behaviour during the last week or is it two weeks?   In any case it’s finally becoming a fading mirage of discordant primary colours. You can tell a decent designer has been nowhere near the union jack.   When Charles and Di wed the world was watching it on telly and I chose to go to the only place just about in Britain (see I’m even conditioned into the lingo again) where you couldn’t get TV. It was a blistering hot day, strangely silent like Italian siesta time and I opted to do a solitary trek across the hills of Hoy only returning when I knew that it might be safe to do so and the inbreds had finally been coupled. Back then I was smouldering with barely controlled resentment and anger. But having an adolescent strop in public never looks good and the gullible that have been starved of knowledge and education and lost the ability to question all the truly bad...

In the 60s I would hear my father describe the Orkney in which we lived as a classless society. Then I didn’t know what ‘class’ meant. We were literally thousands of miles away from the industrial central belt, where the enormous shipyards, steel works and mines employed numbers which were in excess of our entire community. The Second World War made men of my father’s generation into union men, cementing their hatred of the forces hierarchy that was the badge of the pre-war Churchill world where workers won the war despite the blunders of the Colonel Blimps in command.   But in the isles unions and working class solidarity were a tenuous thing. The social aspirations of working people, farmhands, tradesmen and fishermen were predicated on the feudal patronage and allegiance to the mores of the Protestant Kirk, the Masonic lodge, and the acceptance that you would be Christian, subservient and thankful. In political terms Labour was a dirty word and socialist affiliations would ensu...

Here are a few sheep poems I wrote a while ago when I was working with sheep. Many solitary times in mud and on the hill mostly burying carcasses!

I always anticipate Digging a better grave than last I size it up A generous rectangle Of golden proportion Then after a tussle with the top turf (Those rashes are the worst) Only one spade down The rich black earth Gives way to ochre Then grey Heavy Clay The excavation becomes octagonal Even curved Ending up at best A primitive Cist

  Dead sheep in the mud Black kitehead of Primal eyes Goya horns The devilish demeanour of that Yow off her feet Stick of leg scratching The rooty rash-woven swatch of ground Too much clay Water logged I slogged through Sucking mud to reach The half sunk Dirt snorkelling shetland gimmer Already wholly dead beside the feeder Greying mould wretched dusty hay Put away too soon And fermented with such a Sorcerer’s vengeance With fronds of white Another time they would have pointed At the woman who put on a spell to turn it ‘See her at Seatter’ Whispering her away with Their deathly eyes

Carcass After two days only The flesh has gone grey Something has eaten out The innards A leg-bone shows Stripped it was A rat That burrowed up through The Rib-cage A neat tunnel reveals The clever rodent route to the larder of Rotting meat Like a bloodied purse In process of being secreted away Lies the liver And kidneys too That even richer stench Like silage almost sweet But nothing Can get the rotting stink of carcass From my coat My hands My nostrils Unguarded gasp The putrid air Spading in the collapsing wool To garnish A pudding of rot I force down the bared skull With the metal of the shovel It makes me think the rats are not to blame For the trenches in France And the simple thing that is Mud And flesh In all our war-ending wars.