I stopped off to fill up the van with diesel. As I unscrewed the cap a ‘good isles car’ pulled in on the other side of the pumps, and out clambered Willie Pickle.

‘…and that’s why you should never eat spoots on a Tuesday!’ he shouted back into the car, then slammed the door.

‘Hi aye Willie,’ I said. ‘Got the kids with you?’

‘The simplest bit of common sense advice and they don’t want to ken!’

I squeezed the trigger and waited for the fuel to flow. ‘So, what’ve you been up to since we last met?’ I said. The pump spluttered into life. ‘The weather’s taken a turn for the worse, anyway.’

‘Which is why I’m glad I haven’t succumbed to this mania for hair cutting,’ he said. ‘You ken, DIY barbering on YouTube. If I’d shaved all this off – ‘ he pointed to his shaggy mop – ‘ I might have died of hypothermia by now. Or at least got brain freeze, which I had last summer when I ate too much ice cream in the parlour there. I paid the price for that Stenness Monster, I can tell you.’

‘I got my daughter to cut my hair,’ I said. ‘She started off well, but as she got close to the bone things started to go wrong. I must’ve said something to bug her, because she pushed the clippers too hard above my right lug and made a nearly bald patch. So she had to go over the left side again to even it up. Except she accidentally went in even deeper there, so you could actually see my skull shining through! Then it was back to the right again to make me symmetrical. And of course she then had to do the same at the back: bald as a billiard ball.’

‘And the same on the top too, I see.’

‘Actually Willie, she didn’t take anything off the top at all. That’s all Mother Nature’s work.’

‘Well you’re lucky really. You could have been like that fellow up in…where was it now? Sanday? Stronsay? I don’t mind the rights of it. Anyway, it was just last week, and this fellow had been in lockdown for two months, and his beard and his hair had grown so long he looked like General Custer. So there he was, doing exactly what I’m doing now.’ Willie pulled the petrol pistol out of its holster and shoved it into his ar’s tank. ‘Except his hair was so long, tied up in this pony-tail arrangement, that it got caught in the nozzle and he pushed it down into the tank as the petrol gushed all over it.’

I laughed. ‘Wash rinse and repeat!’

‘It wasn’t funny, beuy. Not when he got back in his car and lit up a rollie. His whole head went up in flames like a roman candle at Shopping Week!’

‘My god, that’s terrible. Where did you say this was?’

He looked down at the back of his car for a moment, squeezing the last few drops out of the dripping nozzle. ‘It was either Shapinsay or…I’m not right sure. It was Inga who told me all about it – she got it off that social media thing, you ken.’

‘Where is Mrs Pickle, anyway? I haven’t seen her for ages.’

Willie banged the lid on his tank shut. ‘I gave her a bit of a haircut,’ he said, ‘And she’s self-isolating till it grows back. You won’t see her for a month. Or two.’

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 11th June. Other diaries will appear weekly as long as we are living life in Covid-19 wartime. I am posting them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.

Diary of a Shopkeeper, 7th June