Diary of a Shopkeeper, 17th October

For a moment I thought there’d been a military coup, and troops from the Peoples’ Republic of Kirkwall were invading the shop to requisition supplies.  Then I recognised Brian Brass’s angry ginger eyebrows above his mask.

‘Aye aye,’ I said, and nodded at the five stocky guys behind him, all wearing camouflaged jackets, breeks, and buffs.   ‘Who’re your friends?  Have the SAS rented your airbnb?’

‘Shooters,’ he said.  ‘Over from Italy to have a go at our geese.  They’re loving it.  And I’m coining it.’

‘From the accommodation?’

‘Aye, but the guiding too.  I lay out the decoys, take them around in my pick-up, and keep them supplied with ammo – at a premium of course.  And I show them where the geese are.’

‘The geese are everybloomingwhere!’

He laughed.  ‘They don’t ken that.  They think I’m a genius goose-finder.’

The Italians were rummaging about in the whisky shelves.  ‘Ciao signori,’ I called. ‘Posso aiutarla?’

‘I didn’t ken you spoke Italian,’ said Bruce.

‘I don’t really.  But I can say, ‘Hello, can I help you?’ in seven languages, eight if you include American.  Not that I’ve needed to this past couple years.’

‘Hard times,’ said Bruce.  ‘I used to show cruise passengers around the wildlife sites.  Not much income from that since the virus, so I painted the pick-up green and brown and take shooters out instead.’

‘Now you swap your hi-viz at the depot for camo gear?’

‘I just take bookings for when I’m on late shifts.  It’s a good peedie side-hustle.’

‘I’ve got a side-hustle too,’ I said, ‘Selling cheese and wine.  Sometimes I worry it’s interfering with my real job, standing around the shop talking nonsense all day.’

‘You need to get organised,’ said Bruce.  ‘We go out at six, so by the time I’m due at Hatston they’ve filled their bags.  And then it’s time for some r’n’r.  Hence the need for the drams.’

The shooters had ignored my offer of help.  I was tempted to go over and start showing them my selection of top-notch Italian wine, but I learned years ago that the last thing visitors want is to be shown food and drink from their native area.  It makes sense: if I was on holiday in the south of France, I wouldn’t be too excited about seeing a shelf of specially imported oatcakes, no matter how high the quality.

‘I often get woken up by folk shooting around us,’ I said.  ‘The first time it happened I thought the wife was bursting bubble-wrap in my lug.  Pop pop pop!  Now it’s so common I hardly notice.  Not that it seems to be reducing the goose numbers much.’

Brian shook his head.  ‘It’s a plague.  Rats with wings.  They do more damage to the grass fields than ten busloads of tourists yomping around Brodgar.’

‘At least they’re making you a bit of money,’ I said.

He nodded.  ‘You have to make a positive out of a negative,’ he said.  ‘I don’t like the tourists but they’ll pay a lot for accommodation, so I’ve got the airbnb.  I don’t like the liners but you can make a pretty penny showing the passengers around.  And I don’t like stotting about in the dark with a load of hungover continentals with Winchesters.  But we’ve all got to make a living.’

I was going to say something about his depot job surely being enough of a living for most folk, but one of the shooters rustled up to the counter with a beseeching look on his mud-smeared face.

‘Please,’ he said.  ‘Where I buy miniature Scapa whisky?’

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 20th October. Other diaries continue to appear weekly. I am posting them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.