Leaving London mostly melted after three months of heatwaves (getting through London to the airport with half the underground/overground out of action presented the most challenging bit of the travel) we head first to Edinburgh from the somewhat serene London City Airport. Edinburgh airport is heaving but we don’t have long till we climb aboard the Loganair service to Sumburgh with the friendliest of crew.
Landing in Sumburgh on schedule, we are met by Sharon of Jim’s Garage with our hire car and head out to Winnie and Joe’s at North Exnaboe who are hosting Jo, Jess and Chihiro. Then on to Bigton where Stu and I are staying with Audrey. The hosting is being kept in the family this time - Audrey and Winnie are sisters, and Audrey is mother of our main organising person in Bigton, Alice. There is also another connection - Chihiro (violin) used to live with Abi, who is the sister of Annalie - Shetland Youth Orchestra chief. Winnie is Annalie’s mother-in-law. It’s a long way from Japan to Shetland, but as ever, this is a small and connected world!
We have supper with Audrey, Alice, Jonathan and their daughter Elksa - partly catching up as its been 3 years since we were last in Bigton, and partly reminiscing about when we all first met in Unst as part of Tête à Tête’s Odysseus Unwound education programme.
It was 20 years ago - Alice and Jonathan were both working at Baltasound School and CHROMA turned up to discover not only had the pupils made their own film of the Odyssey (complete with school caretaker as Poseidon rising out of the sea) but the older pupils had composed pieces ready for us to record to be the soundtrack for it. Thus our introduction to Unst was this outpouring of creative work in a light-flooded school music room and fully equipped recording studio with the most stunning views, quite breathtaking. (I was joking with Alice and Jonathan that Mareel in Lerwick should run that Baltasound school Odyssey film as a the curtain raiser for Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, which is currently on show there!)
So wonderful to back amongst our Bigton friends. As Alice said when she greeted us: “it’s as if you’d never been away!”