A bit of a breakthrough
A bit of a breakthrough
but mine is not as big as some...
In keeping with Easter Bunnies, there are a lot of rabbit holes to disappear down in this blog.
There is no getting away from the fact that baking is not my strongest suit. Even with Orkney butter and beremeal there’s potential for breakthroughs of the unwanted kind - like the marzipan layer in the middle of my Simnel cake coming through the upper layer of fruit cake. Not to worry, a bit of lemon icing and eleven marzipan balls to represent the true apostles and no-one will notice. An easily fixed, relatively minor issue in the Easter feasting at our house.
An Orkney Easter story requiring more than a little ingenuity to put right has been gripping the nation - or indeed, I might even say the world. The northern isle of Sanday is one of my favourite days out (apart from the 07.00 departure time for the ferry). The flattest of our islands and therefore the most at risk from climate change, it has wonderful beaches, a lighthouse with vertical stripes (the only Scottish lighthouse painted in this way) and is home to seascape artist Bill McArthur, whose work I admire very much indeed. I can seldom visit without coming home with another painting. It was also the last home of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, a former Master of the Queens Music and founder of our St Magnus Festival.
Sanday has been in the news a lot in the past couple of months. First a large piece of shipwreck was either washed up or exposed on a beach and it was (as in all TV archaeology programmes) a race against time to try to save some of it from the wild winter tides. We are awaiting more information to be revealed from what was salvaged.
And then there was the Easter Egg story…
Sanday has excellent local shops. I know the community shop and Sinclair General Stores the best, but the latter is under new management since I was last out there for BBC Radio Orkney. Dan Dafydd, now in charge, has had a marketing breakthrough, turning his massive Easter Egg ordering error into a brilliant publicity story whilst raising funds for the RNLI lifeboat charity. Newspapers and TV programmes at home and abroad (and I mean further away than the UK mainland!) have been carrying stories of how Dan ordered 80 boxes of Easter eggs instead of 80 eggs. That amounted to about 1.5 eggs per member of the Sanday population. So Dan decided to raffle (everything that happens in Orkney has a raffle) 100 of the eggs in aid of the RNLI and that is how the story hit the headlines. The eggs were from Nestlé who couldn't take them back and so Dan ended up posting them to people all over the place who heard the story and wanted to help. Locals and people outwith our islands were buying eggs to donate to the Orkney Foodbank, with volunteers meeting the ferry back to Kirkwall to take them to the collection centre. Dan even had to re-order to satisfy demand. Once Nestlé realised what was happening they promised to match the monies that he raised for the RNLI one for one, and that gave him even more reason to keep telling his story. As I write this on Easter Monday I haven’t won the 100 egg raffle (phew!) and Dan has raised about £7,000 which Nestlé will double for the Lifeboats. There are still T-shirts, mugs and other merch (I’m a young person at heart) to buy on his Facebook page. Such a fabulous story.
The RNLI celebrated their 200th anniversary with a wonderful service in St Magnus Cathedral before Easter. To add the flavour of island life, neither the crew from the Thurso boat, visitors from the Head Office or the colours could get here on the Saturday as all the ferries were cancelled because of bad weather. The first ferry across on the Sunday morning was met by taxis who collected the flags and people and got them to the Cathedral in time for the colours to be carried down the aisle during the first hymn: well done the taxi drivers, legal or not! The marketing manager had asked Dan to attend the service but, a week before Easter with calls coming in from all time in support, he simply couldn’t get away from base.
I make no apology for mentioning the RNLI in two posts running. Nothing makes you more aware of the charity than living on an island but I learned from their marketing team at the Cathedral that they now have three boats stationed on the River Thames: it is not just around the coast that the brave volunteers save lives. Just as the public rescued Dan from drowning in chocolate, so it is the public who entirely support the work of the RNLI.