Notes from the Outrun, Marc

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On the train to Manchester, passing redbrick houses and disused mills, I hear that a pod of orca is in Westray Sound, heading north. In the autumn, in a coffee shop in my small Pennine town, sipping a chai latte, I receive real-time updates on the ‘Papay Birders’ Whatsapp group of tens of thousands of redwing passing over the island. In the woods by my house, among oaks and hazels, I open a photograph of a great northern diver at the old pier.

Over the last decade, I’ve mostly not lived in Orkney: I’ve been in London, Berlin and now West Yorkshire, but in many ways I have continued to mentally reside in Orkney through all my online links. I can listen to Radio Orkney on BBC Sounds, hearing about SWRI meetings as I’m giving my Yorkshire-born children breakfast. I have a Tide Times app on my phone despite living miles from the sea. A quick search on my Facebook shows I am a member of groups including Orkney Past and Present, Orkney Farmers, Papay Residents, Orkney Beachcombing and Orkney Sky.

I am a digital Orcadian, like many of us in the Orkney diaspora: people all over the world, former residents, regular visitors or descendants who maintain family and emotional ties over the internet. Last year, I lived in Papay with my family for six months and now we are all keeping in touch, sending emails and photographs. Before I was hacked, I was active in a loose group of ‘Orkney twitter’ and got to know interesting and kind folk like historian Fran Flett Hollinrake and beachcomber Martin Gray, who I went on to meet in person.

It’s during the wildest weather that I feel the most homesick. Then, I can digitally monitor the wind speed on the OIC Harbours’ website and see photos posted of high seas at Skaill and Birsay.

When I left Orkney aged 18, I wanted to do things on a national level. I remember the thrill of the first time I got paid for writing for a national publication - £50 from The Face magazine. I moved to the capitals of Edinburgh then London, bigger and bigger.

Since my first book The Outrun was published in 2016, I’ve had many conversations with readers at book festivals and events and one of the themes people relate to most is about belonging, about questions of home and identity. Many people connected with me writing about growing up in Orkney with parents from England and feel that they too don’t fully ‘belong’ or that they are not doing it right. In a dispersed and globalised world, a sense of local place becomes more important than ever. There is a yearning for belonging and I too, often feeling adrift in the choices of the wider world, feel in need of the local again.

I’ve had a quiet ambition to write an Orcadian column for a while but imagined I wouldn’t be eligible as I’m not currently living in the islands so I was delighted to be asked by the editor. I’ve been reading the beautifully evocative and knowledgeable workof Bessie Skea - a new collection of her work has just been published by the George Mackay Brown Fellowship - a very longstanding columnist in this newspaper from 1961 until 1996 as ‘The Countrywoman’. I’m captivated by her ability to deftly move through time and decades, snow reminding her of great snowfalls of the past, her daughter leaving school linking into her own youth. I hope to be able to attempt something similar with space - distances collapsing thanks to the power of digital technology and language.

Today as I listen out for my first green woodpecker of the year - a marker of winter’s end in this Yorkshire valley, I hear of a rare Mediterranean gull feeding among the common gulls at Holland farm on Papay. I’ll be home to visit soon - and Orkney is always ‘home’ wherever I live, my heartland. I have come to realise that belonging is to some extent about where we choose to focus our attention and efforts. In this way, the population of Orkney is much bigger than the 22,000 or so recorded in the census. Like the gulls, we can be inclusive, international, expansive.