The Shetland Way - Marianne Brown

March has been a month of recuperation and minor disaster - my purse was either lost or stolen, but either way, cards were used fraudulently and it;a been a massive pain to sort out, though god bless my bank who both alerted me to the issue and made it as easy as possible to fix. 

Meanwhile I haven't managed to finish many books, although I've started quantities of them. I'm struggling to stay awake in the evening and concentrate beyond work at all in the aftermath of whatever infection made the end of February so miserable. Things are starting to come together again though, and today I finished The Shetland Way which I have been reading for weeks. 

I enjoyed The Shetland Way but I also think it's a bit of a mess of a book, one that can't quite decide what it wants to be. Marianne Brown is the daughter of the late potter Bill Brown (I have one of his herring gull jugs and wish I'd bought a few more pieces whilst I could). Her parents split whilst she was quite young, and her relationship with her father was obviously not a straight forward one. In 2019 he became ill, his funeral was in Shetland not long before lockdown started, Marianne, her husband and young child ended up staying for 8 months rather than the few weeks they had planned. home is normally in Devon. 

During that period of grieving and lockdown Marianne is re-evaluating her father, reconnecting with family in Shetland and starts to learn more about the Viking Energy wind farm, a divisive project that continues to be a contentious issue in Shetland and is conveniently not much talked about elsewhere. Marrianne is an environmental journalist, pre publication at least this book was billed as being more about the effect the windfarm has had on the islands; in fact it's much more of a biography framed against the development of the islands, and this is where I think it falls down. It's trying very hard to do two different things, and the one that feels important - the discussion about how we produce energy in the future comes off second best. 

Marianne tries hard to be neutral and she's broadly sympathetic to the people who see the windfarm as a negative but it's also clear that she's broadly in favour. What could, and possibly should have been the central question of the book - if not here than where? is raised but not addressed. One of the final chapters touches on racism in the islands, my impression reading it was that it's a justification for change, but the experience of 1 person isn't enough to make a point. 

There is a growing body of evidence for the negative impacts that wind farms have on health, and this really is an issue in Shetland where inevitably given the long narrow nature of the islands the windfarm gets closer to houses than guidelines suggest. We need green energy, but if we're to change how we live we really need to live with the means of production and not ship it off somewhere out of sight and out of mind for the majority. Change won't happen whilst ot feels like business as usual.  

Bees & Honey - Steve Minshall and Rachel de Thample

Thank god for antibiotics - after almost 4 weeks of feeling like crap I'm sort of human again. I vaguely remember a time when cold and flu type bugs didn't floor me, and that however snotty I was, I could at least still read a book. I can't do that anymore. I sleep, and when I can stay awake long enough, I go back to work, come home, and sleep again, hence the lengthy absence from posting.

I saw this book at work yesterday and pounced on it with an enthusiasm and energy that definitely heralded a return to full health though. It's been a long wait for a new River Cottage handbook, the last one came out in 2020 (there has been the not quite a handbook guide to Christmas in between), and I'm wondering if Bees & Honey has had a considerable rewrite at some stage in the intervening years.

It differs from the previous books in that it does not assume you want to keep bees or even to eat honey if you're vegan (the chicken book definitely assumes you want chickens), and it strongly suggests that keeping bees might not be the best thing you can do to help them. What we can all do, even if a window box is the only option, is plant better and understand more. It might make sense to create bee friendly habitats for wild species that you wouldn't take honey from and instead buy good quality local honey, use less of it, and appreciate it more.

The recipe element of the book takes a less is more approach on how to use honey and honey products, which I like. Honey is a strong flavour that needs to be treated with respect and a light hand, and I will admit I'm particularly curious about the not quite a recipe that's a spoon of honey with black coffee. There could be a lot of fun to be had finding the perfect bean and blossom matches. 

Overall, it's the combination of information about bees, bee related products, and what's good to eat or should be left alone (pollen, bees need it more than we do) and how to make a better world for bees which makes this book so good. And if it's bee-keeping you really want there's all the information you could need to start down that road too. 

I have loved this series from the outset, Handbook number 2 (Preserves, Pam Corbin 2008) came in the first flush of my enthusiasm for making my own jam and Marmalade, Handbook number 3 (Bread by Daniel Stevens 2009) taught me how to make all sorts of breads and is still my go to guide. They are consistently useful and inspiring - I hope there will be more to come, or at least one more to round out the numbers at 20 volumes. I have a lot of cookbooks, but nothing else comes close to this series in looking at food holistically.