THE BELLS!

One of the more amusing stories to come out of Lerwick this week concerned our Town Hall clock bells, which have been ringing out faithfully every quarter-hour for as long as I can remember, reminding the burghers of the passage of time whether they wished to be so reminded or not. Apparently, some visitors to our glorious capital have been deprived of sleep because of the nocturnal ding-donging from the Hillhead. So, in the true tradition of white settlers everywhere, they have been attempting to get the authorities to deal with this "problem". In response, in the time-honoured fashion of obsequious, forelock-touching tinhats, our officials have decided that the case of the incomers has to be upheld. Apparatchiks have been drafted in to bring computer technology to bear on the situation, and all sorts of catchy tunes are now going to emanate from the bell-tower, to add an extra campanological dimension to social events in the islands. Mamma Mia! I'm still not clear as to whether the bells will fall silent overnight.

The story reminds me of an event which was reported in the national press a few years ago. It involved a couple of city dwellers, who wanted to get away from the bustle, noise and other nastiness of the city, so they bought themselves a place out in rural Englandshire. Their new next-door-neighbour, as luck would have it, was a farmer, who kept a miscellany of the kinds of animals and domestic fowl which farmers usually keep on a farm. This included a rooster, which did what roosters do at cock-crow, which is - well - crow, on a regular basis. This racket, which was an unfamilar sound to the townies, resulted in a row erupting, between this real-life Boycie and Marilyn, and the farmer, and this dispute ended up in the courts. I did not hear the outcome of the case, but, if it was not decided in favour of the farmer, then natural justice is dead in this country.

I suppose that British settlers are only doing, in these instances, what they've been doing since the beginning of recorded time, which is to colonise. Anything which is not exactly to their liking in their new surroundings must be changed - why on earth should it be otherwise? And the traditional ways of life and doing things in this place must be sacrificed on the altar of these people's pursuit of "the good life". The trouble with colonisation is that the place colonised ends up as a carbon copy of what the colonisers were so desperate to get away from in the first place.

And these islands are saturated with these latter-day "pilgrim fathers" now.

I think I'd miss my nightly ding-dongs, if you pardon the expression. When I wake up on a dark winter's night, and hear a single bar ring out from the "toon haal clock", it's somehow reassuring to know that it's a quarter-past-something. I already have only memories of two sounds which used to echo through the heavy silence of a Lerwick darkness. One, which I do not miss at all, was the mournful "oob" (Look up your Shetland dictionary for that one!) of the Bressay Light foghorn, which kept me wakeful on many a misty night. The other was the explosion of the lifeboat callout maroons, which immediately alerted somnolent Lerwegians to the fact that lives were in danger at sea. Nowadays, in the era of electronic pagers for the lifeboat crews, these brave men put their lives on the line, without the greater population of the town even knowing of their situation. That's a sound I miss.