SILLICKS AND RANNS

"Sillick" is the traditional Shetland dialect name for the young of the coalfish. These small fish are abundant in the waters around the foreshore here, and are delicious fried whole in oatmeal, having been caught by rod and line from piers and rocks around the coastline. Sadly the word, along with a great deal of our language, is fast disappearing from local common parlance.

I cracked what I believed to be an enormously funny joke in a Lerwick chip-shop one evening. No doubt fuelled by a few noggins of Old Peculiar, and having observed that the fish in the shop's display unit were very small, I suggested to the girl behind the counter that they were sillicks. "I'll have sillick an' chips, please!" I ventured. Realising that what I'd just said sounded like "silicon chips", I laughed uproariously at my inadvertent play on words. But it was completely lost on the assistant and the group of stony-faced young girls sitting in the window. They had obviously never heard of sillicks.

Another Shetland delicacy is "ranns" (or "rawns", depending on which locality the speaker comes from). These are the roe of fish such as cod or haddock, which are a delicious supplement to the late winter diet. They are normally boiled in lightly salted water first, and can be eaten like that, or refrigerated and fried in breadcrumbs for a tasty and nutritional meal at a later date. Generations of Shetlanders have relished this traditional fare, which only used a tiny proportion of the spawning stock of the species, never threatening the future abundance of the fish. Regrettably the current politically pot-noodled generation of islanders do not seem to be acquiring this taste. On Radio Shetland's "Clear the Air" slot last Wednesday evening, one contributor expressed his or her horror at seeing ranns displayed on a local fishmonger's slab, and confidently forecast doom and destruction for fish stocks as a necessary result of this. Of course, the truth behind this is that fishermen are perceived as villains in some people's eyes, blinkered as they have been by the propaganda of certain quasi-scientific organisations.

While I almost wet myself laughing at this twaddle coming over the airwaves, the serious issue for me is that many Shetland traditions are dying out. The fact is that they have little place in today's centrally-heated, microwaved, vac-packed and instantly gratified society. No-one in his or her right mind would wish to return to the time from which these traditions hail, when each day followed the one before in an unremitting litany of back-breaking toil, just to put food on the table, fuel on the fire and clean clothes on the back. I am old enough to remember the sense of community which attended those times, however, and the sights, smells and tastes of these days will always haunt my senses pleasantly.