Our progess through the paved streets of Stromness would have been slow and leisurely had it been a sunny day, but as we emerged from the Pier Arts Centre and headed on through the town in very VERY wet rain, and spotting Khyber Pass, we might have thought we were actually in Afghanistan...
and to be dashed past as quickly as could manage...these little lanes that led down to the open sea and which were like intermittent wind-testing tunnels...
But never mind because we got there in the end and Stromness Museum didn't disappoint...in fact nothing disappointed us about Orkney. It is containing its tourist industry well whilst holding onto its character.
I re-read Letters From Hamnavoe while I was there, and how much more relevant it is to read when you are actually in the place. These are a collection of George Mackay Brown's weekly columns for the Orcadian newspaper, and in a piece written in 1973 he ponders how Orkney can possibly compete with the allure of the Bahamas and the Costa Brava and attract visitors when...
'There are no beaches where you can grow as brown as a nut through long, sun-drenched weeks. There are no amusement arcades where one can wander in a daze of noise and novelties...'
Really I have to say this is Orkney's blessing, because instead it has something far more precious...
'The essence of Orkney's magic is silence, loneliness, and the deep marvellous rhythms of sea and land, darkness and light.'
And I had wanted to visit Stromness Museum ever since I had seen that picture of the whale's eardrum there, in Kathleen Jamie's latest book Sightlines, and see it I did...
It's a bizarre thing, and was it Kathleen Jamie who wondered what that ear may have heard..I can't find the quote, but that thought was enough to leave me standing staring at it for an age.
Stromness Museum opened in 1837, and I hope they will forgive me for saying this because I mean it in the nicest possible way, it is a perfect example of my new favourite word...a sort of orderly gallimaufry, and a museum as we love to see it. An old, unmodernised setting cluttered with whales' eardrums next to hairballs from cows' stomachs, and everything else inbetween that will nevertheless give you a remarkably clear picture of the life and history of a community, the essence and what mattered to them.
In fact take a little tour yourselves and see if you get the gist...
and reading my new best friend's Orcadian newspaper column for October 21st 1971...
'The other afternoon as I was sitting reading in the rocking chair there was an unusual sound - a rattling,stottering, surging. hissing noise sweeping southwards along the street. I should have known what it was by the preceding gloom and coldness. I looked out of the window and the steps and doorways were firnged with grey sleet.'So,' I said to myself, 'here comes winter.'
and there it was around the next corner in the Stromness Museum...George Mackay Brown's chair, not the sleet that is, though it could easily have been winter outside.
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