I’ve used more diesel in the past week than I usually do in a month. Kirkness & Gorie’s van is usually used for collecting goods from Hatston, for delivering multiple cases of wine to the restaurants we supply, and for dropping off occasional special orders or hampers around town.

Over the past week the vehicle has been put to work like never before, delivering hundreds of boxes of food and drink all over the Mainland and connected isles. And all the way up to the North Isles, via the depot at Hatston.

It’s a privilege to be out and about when most folk are cooped up at home. We’re lucky in being allowed to drive to Birsay or Burray, especially on some of the sunny spring days we’ve been having. It’s also a great pleasure to bring much needed food and drink to people who can’t easily go out to get their own. Folk are appreciative and thankful when they see their box sitting on the doorstep. In turn we are appreciative for their custom.

*Some deliveries are easier to make than others…*

There’s a lot of thinking time as you’re driving about, and several times Edwin Muir’s famous poem ’The Horses’ has come to mind. Published just after World War Two, he probably had nuclear catastrophe in mind when he imagined an Orkney cut off and stilled of its normal bustle. But it seems strangely appropriate for our current crisis too.

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.

The town certainly is extraordinarily quiet, with almost all the traffic gone. The countryside too is silent, except for the occasional tractor – and the birdsong, which seems louder than ever before. There is space to be afraid – of illness, of families and friends separated, of financial disaster. But most folk have now made what Muir calls a covenant with the current way of things: we accept them, and we try and live within the new boundaries.

The poem gives us a striking image of death and despair:

On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck.

It’s hard to read that without thinking of the cruise liners, dozens of which are still marooned around the world, some with seriously ill passengers and crew quarantined on board. Thankfully, levels of care are such that dead bodies would never be piled on the deck. But it’s a powerful summing-up of the destruction of an industry that – for better or worse, depending on who you talk to – made a real difference to Orkney in recent years.

Like the coronavirus crisis, Muir’s imagined catastrophe is so global that it’s almost impossible to comprehend:

Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.

For Muir, the arrival of the horses, and their acceptance of their role carrying loads and pulling ploughs, provides a welcome return to old ways of life, which are also more sustainable ways. It’s too early to say whether the current crisis will have any positive outcomes. Let’s hope it does, and that some real-life version of Muir’s metaphorical horses comes to us:

Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

*On Muir’s last visit to Orkney, shortly before his death in 1959, he spent an evening on the Ireland Road in Stenness, swapping stories and folk tales with farmer and historian Peter Leith.*

Edwin Muir’s poem ‘The Horses’ can be found in several collections, and on several online sites. A slightly shorter version of this diary appeared in The Orcadian on 12th April. Other diaries will appear weekly as long as the Covid-19 crisis goes on. I intend to post the diaries in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance.

Diary of a Shopkeeper, 12th April 2020