ON BEER AND MARKETS

People from the mainland are always curious about what you miss from life back in England. In the first years, I missed pubs and decent beer. As a student, my consciousness was raised regarding the merits of real ale, and I have fond memories of CAMRA festivals and sampling many examples of the brewer’s art. Moving to the Highlands, I had grave doubts about being able to find a decent pint.

One of my earliest writing jobs involved a trip to Orkney to interview the people who had recently established the Orkney Brewing Company at Quoyloo. I can’t remember their names now, but I do remember the master brewer had come from Boddington’s in Manchester and I will never forget the pint of Red MacGregor I drank there, straight from the brewery tap. Fantastic stuff – strong, hoppy and full of flavour, it reminded me of the London bitters I used to love, like Fuller’s ESB and Young’s. I have never seen it for sale from the cask since, although you can get it in bottles, which isn’t quite the same.

Nowadays we have the Skye Brewery and its excellent Young Pretender bitter and the Hebridean Brewery, which does produce cask ales but you can never find them – at least not here. And there is always something hand-pulled on offer at the Carlton, which we still call The Whalers, so real ale is not something I miss so much anymore.

But one other thing I still miss from the mainland is shopping in the market. Bradford and Leeds both had great covered market halls, and every Saturday we’d go there for our meat, fish, fruit and veg. I think the only things we bought in the supermarket were loo rolls, dog food and baked beans.

There’s an atmosphere about a market that doesn’t translate to the supermarket. It’s so informal and cheerful, and there’s the constant element of surprise – you never know what you’re going to find, and you can pick up great bargains. I can remember leaving one of our favourite stalls one Saturday near Christmas with a box of asparagus for the princely sum of £2!

On another occasion, I went to Leeds market with £10 and strict instructions to buy food for the weekend. But Leeds market is an eclectic place, liable to overcome sensible intentions. I came home with two boxes of mushrooms – fabulously cheap! - six punnets of strawberries – impossible to turn down! - a carp – a shoddy attempt to divert my fisherman husband’s attention from the fact I had failed to fulfil the brief - and a wok – think of the future possibilities, the next time I went shopping and actually bought food that could be turned into meals!

I’ve always loved cooking and the shopping was - should be - an important element of the enjoyment of preparing a meal. Chatting with the market traders, waiting while your fish was filleted, the buzz of a busy hall filled with people, is definitely a lost pleasure. Our butcher, Mr Hare, was a brilliant consultant on cuts. During my first stint as a professional cook, he introduced me to Pallas Ribs – lean slabs of beef that required long, slow cooking and made the most amazing stock for French onion soup. This cut was also perfect for spiced beef, an extremely old English treasure that takes a week to make and was a great centrepiece for buffets.

Great as Tesco is, and grateful as I am for its presence, it doesn’t offer the conviviality of food shopping amongst a welter of stalls with piles of vegetables and fruit, meats, cheeses and tiny little speciality emporiums like the Polish and Italian delis and West Indian food booths that were tucked enigmatically into the jolly chaos.

Now, our beloved Bradford market is no more, although the one in Leeds still thrives. In these days of shrink and plastic-packaged food, where everything carries a health and allergy warning, and we are increasingly restricted to what the supermarkets decide to supply, we’ve lost that sense of fun and excitement, and the possibility of being surprised, that used to be so much a part of our food shopping, especially in a multi-cultural city like Bradford.

MAKING IT  

Having moved to the Outer Hebrides, how do you make a living – especially if you’ve decided you don’t want a proper job, you have three pre-school children, and you live over 25 miles from town?

Working from home always seemed like a sensible solution - no commuting, no daily slog up to town – however lovely the drive might be, plenty of time to juggle work/children commitments and nice scenery to look at while you’re working. Perfect!

Well, not quite. In the first place, no daily commute means no money coming in – or at least, not at first, and when it begins to arrive, it isn’t enough. I make my living as a copywriter, so the first thing I had to do was build up a client list, which meant lots of letter writing and trips to the mainland. In some instances, it was necessary to explain what a copywriter actually did. I knew this was bad news. It’s hard enough trying to sell your product in a foreign environment, without the added complication of your target market not understanding what you’re talking about …

Never mind. That was 1994, before the days of email and long before the days of broadband. For the first three years, I did all my work via fax and telephone. How quaint that sounds now.

But there were plusses, not connected to technology. One immediate impression was that it was a lot easier being freelance in the Outer Hebrides than it was on the mainland. On the mainland, most advertising agencies in need of additional copywriting expected me to go and sit in their offices to work. That meant a worse travelling schedule than having a day job! I am big on not having to drive miles at either end of a working day if I can possibly avoid it. There are other things I’d rather be doing. Moving to the Outer Hebrides was the start of a new way of life – if I was going to end up commuting, I might as well have stayed in Bradford.

But the Highlands and Islands culture is used to long distances between destinations, over sea as well as land. So it was expected that I would work from home, unless I was required to do face to face interviews. This was a refreshing and practical attitude that suits all sides of the equation. For the agency, it makes economic sense – no expense accounts to pay and efficient turnaround of work – and with nowhere to go except my desk, it’s time efficient for me, too.

I was lucky I had a skill that could come with me. But even now, while it still provides our main income, it’s only part of the household economy that keeps us going. If I love anything about living here, it’s probably the fact that life is continually surprising – just when you think you’re stuck in a rut, something jolts you out of it.