Literary Skulduggery from Shetland, courtesy of poet Chris Tait

                   From Alaska to New Zealand

                                                                       

                              It's time to meet Finstown writer extraordinaire Kate Barrett

Kate Barrett was first published in her school magazine at the age of twelve and has hardly stopped writing since. She knows how to walk the walk. Her first book, 'Orkney on Foot', was published before anyone else had thought of the idea and has personally walked all of the walks featured in the book.

Since then she has written 'Handmade', 'Orkney Murders and Mysteries' and numerous poems, as well as offering an historical tour of Kirkwall.  When life settles, she  plans to offer a tour of her travels: 'Alaska to New Zealand'.

                                                      Orkney Colours

                                                                                    by Kate Barrett

I had forgotten that during our first holiday in Orkney at Swanbister we were impressed by the quantity and vibrancy of the wild flowers growing in abundance. Now, our first spring living here, I am astonished at the green-ness of new grass, like young lettuce, and the primroses growing in profusion in the verges and bluebells beginning to flower.

It isn’t only the foliage though. Kingcups dazzle brilliant golden yellow, richer than lemon rind, more brilliant than banana, more like the colour of a seaman’s oilskin, and they never seem to bloom singly but like to be in drafts, crouching in ditch bottoms like shy rabbits hiding from the hunter.

Delightful too is to view a stretch of farmland on a dull day in its dun, khaki and russet colours and catch a flash of sunlight on a distant hill all gold and greeny – an emerald jewel set in bronze.

One evening the sea was all different shades of grey. The sun was setting over Evie’s hills and caught silver streaks in the bay, but they were striped with pewter, gunmetal, flecked white like quartz and misty gossamer, chiffon streaks near land and just before a sliver of ghostly white, a woolly mohair strand as though someone had laid it down to line the headland. Water is never the same twice. How boring it would be to see it forever reflecting the Reckitts Blue of a clear summer sky when one could choose from turquoise, penny bright gold and tin silver and never ever plain, always streaked, mottled, spotted, flecked and moving.