the corner office

I visited Lerwick during the week as well, before the storm rolled in on Friday.

Arrived early, visited a greasy spoon (as is my wont), just off the harbour. Ordered breakfast at the kiosk - including tattie scones, not quite hash browns but when in Rome, etc. "Would you like tea or coffee with that?" "coffee, please", "there you go, help yourself to milk" as the lady plonked a spoonful of instant coffee into a mug of hot water in front of me. (I resist the urge to type her accent phonetically; I couldn't do it justice, it was glorious)

Thus fortified, I headed out for a stroll around the town.

Now, it's a weakness of mine that sometimes - not often, but sometimes - maybe - I overthink things. A little. And I had been (over)thinking that while I'm always taking photos with my phone, and enjoy doing it, perhaps all this photographing and documenting of things gets in the way of just taking in whatever it is I'm looking at or experiencing. And so I'd decided that I'd not take photos in Lerwick. A safe place to do it, I bargained with myself, because in a world with Street View, urban areas are pretty much there to be seen whenever you like.

And so I started out, not taking photos. But I was WhatsApping my dear wife as I walked past the lodberries - the sea-front houses just off the harbour - and some pressure was applied: "where's my photo of Jimmy Perez's house?" "Ok, just one" - did the touristy thing and took a snap or two when nobody was watching, put phone away.

And then I got a bit further up the road, and was standing, looking across the sound towards Bressay, not taking photos, when a delivery van pulls up. Young dude gets out, scraggly hair, baseball cap. We greet. "Isn't that a lovely view," he says in an Irish accent, "I think I'll take a photo of it." And he does, says goodbye, hops back into his van and drives off.

And I took a photo too, and then I took many more after that.