A friend showed me round her allotment this week, pointing out the various vegetables and fruits she was about to harvest. It had been hard work but so, so satisfying.
Tilling the soil is what humans have been doing for thousands of years. Most of us city-dwellers have lost our connection with the land and where our food comes from. But thousands of brave allotment-holders throughout Scotland are keeping alive that instinctive love of nature.
The allotment movement began during the First World War when spare pieces of land in the cities were “allotted” to families to grow their own food. There are some 6,000 of these allotments left, most of them still owned by local councils who rent out plots to lucky individuals for a small sum each year. There are thought to be 10,000 people on the waiting lists, and some have waited up to 10 years.
Gardening is a great escape from the pressures of our own lives but also from the troubles of the world. And speaking of trouble, we learned this week that President Trump is to descend upon Scotland later this month. He will officially open a new golf course south of Aberdeen that he’s built in memory of his Scottish mother. His cavalcade will be as big as any medieval monarch’s and the police are expecting their security operation to cost over £3million, which is what they paid last time Trump visited his other golf course at Troon in Ayrshire. Both Sir Keir Starmer and the Scottish First Minister John Swinney feel obliged to welcome the president to Aberdeen. Mr Swinney says he hopes to persuade Trump to drop his tariffs on whisky and salmon. Sir Keir will be looking out his best kid gloves.
Sir Keir took the gloves off this week when he suspended four of his own Labour MPs for disloyalty. They included the MP for Grangemouth Brian Leishman who was one of nearly 50 Labour MPs who rebelled against cuts to the welfare programme. In fact, Mr Leishman has been a thorn in the leadership’s flesh over a whole string of issues since he was elected last year: winter fuel payments, welfare reforms, cuts to the overseas aid budget, the slow progress on replacing the 400 jobs lost when the Grangemouth oil refinery closed down in April. He reflects a wider feeling in Scotland that this Starmer government is “not Labour enough”. It’s left the Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar with an up-hill task ahead of the Scottish elections next year. The opinion polls are showing the SNP with 30 per cent support, Labour on 20 per cent and Reform breathing fire not far behind.
Aberdeen is also in the news this week for hosting the Tall Ships Races. Some 50 sailing vessels are due to arrive this weekend from Dunkirk and are expected to attract a crowd of 400,000. However the “Russian” ship Shtandart will not be there. It’s been banned from entering Aberdeen Harbour under the international sanctions imposed on Russia after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The organisers, Sail Training International, say the ship was registered in Russia till last year and its captain is Russian. But Captain Vladimir Martus says he was born in Ukraine and is now a German citizen, and his ship has not been in Russia for 15 years. He and his crew of young trainees are now sailing off the west coast of Scotland instead.
There have been no such international tensions in Orkney where the Island Games have been taking place all week. Over 2,000 athletes have been taking part, from 24 islands, including Greenland, the Falkland Isles, Bermuda, the Isle of Man, the Western Isles and Shetland. In unusually good weather, the games were opened by Princess Anne and medals have been won and lost all week in athletics, swimming, sailing, golf, cycling and six other sports, including football with a derby match at the end between Orkney and Shetland.
Out on another island, Sula Sgeir, off the north coast of Lewis, the traditional “guga hunt” has been given official approval after being suspended for the last three years because of Avian Flu. For two weeks in the month of August, the “Men of Ness” will dangle over the steep cliffs to catch gannets and take them home for eating. It’s a practice that has been going on for 500 years but is now frowned upon by conservationists. This year the catch has been limited to 500 birds to ensure the colony survives.
The harvest of the sea is one of those connections with nature, like allotment holding, which runs deep in our human history and still calls us today.
