In the first of a series on the behind the scenes work of arts people in the Highlands, ANDY ROSS reports from a busy May at the Wind Dog Café in Yell in the Shetland Islands.
MAY HAS been a busy month in the Wind Dog Café. The tourist season has started in earnest and we are busy with cooking, events, and lots of art.
Thursday 1 May 2003 Drama Group meeting. Following our successful first entry to the Drama Festival, the next set of plays is due to start. Red wine and easy conversation led to the creation of a programme incorporating our Drama Festival entry, a murder mystery dinner and the start of the pantomime rehearsals. I will, by the end of the year, have a broad overview of what we can do each year and what is expected for each of the events in which we participate.
Contributing Editor, Andy Ross (Shetland)
Friday 9 May Wire Knitting Workshop. We quite often host meetings for other groups and it is always a delight to have crafts and arts groups using the space. Dot Sim and Hazel Hughson came up to work with a small group on creating sculptures and jewellery using very fine silver, red, green, gold and blue wires. The cafe was open throughout the evening workshop and I had a go at making something with an antique bone crotchet hook. The detailed work required was too fiddly for my eyesight so I served tea and coffee, and chatted to people using the cafe on their way through the ferry terminal. It was a very relaxing and enjoyable evening and I am still finding bits of wire embedded in the carpet!
Thursday 15 May The Wind Dog Cafe Readers’ Group meets once a month and we have chosen a different format for our meetings than most groups. Each person who comes along brings a bottle of red wine and a book. We then swap books and have a brief discussion about those we have just read. The evening always goes with a swing and is the highlight of my month, every month. It is interesting and fun to hear what other people have to say about favourite novels, and good to read books that otherwise we would never have picked. I am currently reading a set of short stories by Native American authors, and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
Saturday 17 and Sun 18 May Across the water from the cafe, Belmont House ((External) www.belmontunst.org.uk ) is being redeveloped in conjunction with the local groups, the Belmont Trust, and Historic Scotland. Belmont House is historically very important in that it is the most complete building of its type and age in Scotland, surviving with original paintwork and fittings, including some by Thomas Chippendale. I had been asked by the Trust to go across and look at the house and in so doing, I was struck by its potential to be used as a small-scale, high quality arts venue with recital room and accommodation as well as food service areas and function rooms. These meetings were to look further at the ideas and I have now been asked to develop a business plan, in collaboration with the interested parties, to turn this house into such a venue. It is an exciting project and one with which I am pleased to be involved.
Tuesday 20 May I am always looking at helping people to have new experiences and this wine tasting was meant to be just such a thing. It was scheduled to be on the following Monday, a bank holiday, which would have brought more people in, but as it turned out, the company that does the tasting was in Shetland the week before. It was a small, select gathering, but the wine was very good and it was relaxing to not have to organise anything aside from glasses!
Thursday 22 May A local pianist and accompanist, Alice Mullay, and I are having a recital on the 30th May of British Songs including works by Britten and Vaughan-Williams. John Laughland, a composer from Unst, the next island north, has also written three pieces for us. We are performing in the Town Hall, Lerwick. This is the first recital of its kind in Shetland for a very long time, perhaps one hundred years, and we are very much looking forward to it. Our rehearsal was a complete run-through of the ‘Songs of Travel’ by Vaughan-Williams, and some Britten folksongs. Folk stayed in the cafe to listen and we had good comments back from them, so hopefully it will be a full house on the night.
Friday 23 and Saturday 24 May The Lerwick Choral and Lerwick Orchestra were here for the dress rehearsal and performance of the traditional May concert for the choral, which I conducted. The evening was excellent; well attended and very good singing from the choir. Songs from Shetland, sea shanties and local pieces were all performed, while the orchestra played two pieces, Pergolesi and Handel. It was my last conducting of the choir as I have too many other commitments in the cafe to be away from it for any length of time, and I have enjoyed the chance to learn a new discipline. The experience has also taught me to sight-read multiple lines of music and to work with groups of people to rehearse and perform a concert.
Tuesday 27 May A meeting of the focus group on branding Shetland. The cafe was closed for the afternoon to enable this meeting to convene. I was part of the focus group looking at making Shetland into a marketable commodity in terms of exports and tourism. It was an intelligent and informative discussion with contributions from salmon farmers, artists, craftspeople, local community workers, tourist providers and the like.
Saturday 31 May The eclipse. This week saw the biggest number of people through the cafe that I have ever seen. There is an eclipse of the sun in the early hours of today, so I am dashing back from my recital in Lerwick, catching a few hours nap, then watching the spectacle from the hill behind the cafe before opening up the venue for cooked breakfasts. As the sun will be eclipsed for an hour from about four o’clock until just after five, I expect ravenous spectators and lots of coffee to be drunk! Which is just how it turned out. We were lucky enough to see the beginning of it, as about one third of the sun disappeared, but then went behind clouds. It was lovely to see the event though, and I returned to 21 hungry people wanting breakfasts, so was busy from six until nine o'clock!
Andy Ross is a baritone who moved to Shetland in 2002, where he now runs the Wind Dog Café on Yell, an arts venue and cafe.
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