Through all this nasty wintry weather I have been communing with my garden rather more than I would like. Our bathroom needed to be re-fitted and I asked the builders to do it while my sons were away with their father. 

To their credit they achieved exactly that (and how often can you say that about builders). On Sunday afternoon they ripped out the old bathroom suite. On Monday they scratched their heads over the rather weird plumbing routes through the house. Over the following two days my new bath, sink and loo were installed. These of course are not new at all (don’t be silly) but are even older than those they are replacing. I am now the proud owner of a rusting enamelled metal tub, a chunky ceramic sink whose hot tap drips and a grass-stained loo. In their defence, they came “free to a good home” out of someone’s garden. And aesthetically they please me like yellow plastic just never could. 

The work was “finished” (this is builder-speak for a job that is 90% complete and mostly functional: when the finishing touches will be achieved is anybody’s guess) the evening before I collected Miles, Dale and Fenning. At 10pm all I had to do was apply three coats of varnish to the new floorboards. I managed the first coat by midnight (there was a lot of dust to hoover up first), the second coat at 5am and the final coat at 10am before zooming down to the pier to catch the ferry. I could have stomached the rough crossing if I hadn’t been suffering a varnish sniffer’s hangover.

According to the instructions on the tin the newly varnished floor was not to be subjected to “heavy traffic” for 24 hours. In my estimation three small boys and their incumbent plastic dinosaurs etc. qualify as heavy traffic so I denied them access to the loo for a day. This was easy because a) they like peeing in the garden anyway and b) when we got back to the island that evening we went straight to a dance.

The dinner-dance was the annual “Harvest Hame” – a self-explanatory title. Ticketed to start at 8pm, the boys and I arrived fashionably late at twenty past to find everybody already seated and tucking in to the main course. A hush fell as we wended our way between the tables searching in vain for four places together. Eventually we were squeezed in but it is obviously not the done thing to arrive late.  I’ll know next time.

Dinner was followed by speeches. The boys weathered these with amazing patience given that not all of them achieved what the first speaker suggested was the measure of a good speech (“akin to a dress: long enough to cover the subject, short enough to be interesting” ho ho). Finally, after much clearing and shifting of tables, the dance began. 

Orkney dances are wilder versions of Scottish Country dances. Rather than taking it in turns everyone whirls around at once. As the majority of folk here have been dancing since birth, they know the steps and can keep the rhythm however much hooch has been imbibed. I won’t tell you what time I got the boys to bed but I will admit that they were still happily dancing at midnight, and the varnished floors had plenty of time to themselves.