Life is just rush, rush, rush nowadays. It’s one mad dash to work, from work, to the shops, to make the dinner and then to bed for a few hours before we start rushing all over again. Somehow these busy lives that we all now have are so frantic that they are blamed for everything from forgetting birthdays, not renewing the car tax to ignoring people in the street – even if we really did not want to speak to them anyway. No-one protests when we claim we were too busy to notice them or call them in their hour of need. It is the ultimate excuse. Busy is the new rude.
No-one from the Isle of Harris is rude. Or busy. Most of them are called Donald. Especially the men. They are often found driving slowly along the Golden Road down the east side of the island, very slowly as I shall explain later. Hearachs take things easy. So it is not every day that one of them gets stroppy but a Macdonald Donald, who has loads of hotels, has had a go at some of our hard-working members of the Scottish parliament accusing them of making a political pawn of the business he built up. A Hearach housewife I know well got the wrong end of the stick completely because she thought the comments had been made by another polite Harris businessman. Easy mistake as he is also called Donald. He is also a Macdonald. He has no hotels but he does run the post office on Scalpay. She wondered how the former councillor had the time to attack politicians when he should be behind that counter counting out pensions. I put her right.
In return, she dispensed her usual health tips saying that in this cold weather I should be wearing two trousers. It made me feel strangely young to be scolded by an older woman. Hmm. Anyway, she went on to praise the first Macdonald Donald saying he was a fine man who only wanted to build houses and a supermarket in Aviemore and should just be allowed to get on with it. His point exactly. Before he eventually got the thumbs-up, that Donald thinks, opposition MSPs were rubbishing his £80 million bid with time-consuming hassles as they tried to trip up Alex Salmond. Such shenanigans could spoil Scotland’s reputation as a place to invest in and create jobs, he reckons. Plenty of important people have lined up behind him. A canny Hearach is too fly to name names but they will know who they are. Are they listening?
Whenever a Hearach has a good idea, you can be sure a Lewisman will claim he too thought of pretty much the same thing, only bigger and better. Lewis is bigger than Harris, you see. It’s an island thing. It’s just the way it is here, so don’t go on about it, okay? On cue, up pops our adopted standard bearer for the big and better island. Okay, the Trump Donald is just a half-Macleod but his mother was born far enough to the north of the Aline River to make him one of us Leodhasachs. He is from Tong and that is that, even if he would rather invest in dreariest Aberdeenshire rather than turn up with a thick wad to make dreams come true for Sandy Bruce, the golf club captain in his own far-flung, heathery island homeland across the seas.
So the Trump Donald was not happy either. Alex Salmond’s handling of his £1 billion golf resort bid for Menie Estate is also getting pelters from the time-wasting also-rans in the noisy corner of Holyrood. They used to hold power but now they hold grudges, it seems. They are accused of slinging mud at the SNP for the sake of slinging mud at the SNP. The Donalds fear that the Lib-Labs do not even care about the endless inquiries and hold-ups they are responsible for which could mean that the jobs to be created are put at risk. If the Donalds were not a full-Hearach and a half-Leodhasach respectively, they would ship out, they seemed to be saying.
Many agree that the Donalds have made a cracking point. Maybe it should be looked at carefully, but not too slowly. Unlike a car that was driven by a Harris housewife on the single track down to Geocrab last weekend. She drove with almighty care and attention at a constant 12mph ignoring the speed king behind who was foolhardy enough to want a breakneck 15mph. I was chewing the steering wheel for miles before she let me past. There was no point in remonstrating. We were in Harris and I had not wasted time because this was Harris time. And there was plenty of it.
As published in Press and Journal on March 12, 2008
