Diary of a Shopkeeper, 18th October

The first American I ever met was a boy called Jay, who turned up at our school in Aberdeenshire one day in the mid-1970s. He had a strong American accent, to be specific a southern accent, for he came from a place called Tulsa. His drawl was both exotic and, for the first few days at least, incomprehensible. None of us, crowding around him at break time, could make out the name of his hometown, even when he tried to explain by expanding it to Tulsa city. We thought he was saying Tall City, which fitted so well with our childhood vision of the US as a land of gleaming skyscrapers rising out of tumbleweed prairies that we found it easy to believe Jay was indeed a native of Tall City.

All this came back to me yesterday when a lovely American couple visited the shop. It turned out they too came from Tulsa, and I mentioned Jay to them, as well as another significant person in my life who based himself there for many years, fiddler and bandleader Bob Wills. Although Wills is long gone, Tulsa remains a town of great musical importance, being home to the official Bob Dylan Center, as well as the museum in honour of Dylan’s hero, Oklahoma native Woody Guthrie.

Yesterday’s Tulsa visitors were on a five-day tour of the Highlands, including two days here. They weren’t travelling independently, but as part of a small group on a Rabbie’s Tours minibus. That made them the second minibus tour we’d seen yesterday, with a group of elderly Californian ladies travelling with another company having been in earlier. The final cruise liner of the season may have come and gone last week, but that doesn’t mean the tourist season is over. Both independent visitors and small- to medium-sized groups are still here in numbers.

This highlights an interesting fact about tourism. Although cruise liners have become highly visible over the past 15 years or so, they still provide a minority of our visitors. Total numbers in 2026 are estimated to be about 450,000, with liner passengers making up 189,000, or 42% of those. Of course cruisers are highly visible, as they arrive in large numbers for a small number of hours – usually 8am to 6pm – and tend to travel in packs. The many independents and small-group tours slip almost unnoticed through our streets and monuments, simply because, though they may add up to a greater total, they travel in smaller groups so are less eye-catching.

In the experience of our shop, cruise passengers tend to spend most money. You might think it would be independent travellers, but many stay in hotels or bed and breakfasts, so have little need for our wares. (Hopefully they drink the wine we supply to restaurants and bars.) Self-catering independents sometimes splash out on supplies of cheese and wine, but disappointingly often we’re told, “We didn’t know if there would be any shops in Orkney, so we took all our food with us from Birmingham.” Lidl in Thurso is also frequently mentioned: the last food shop before crossing the Pentland Firth and the starvation that must surely await on the far side. Small-tour travellers are often on a tight sightseeing schedule, with little time for shopping. Space on the minibuses is also tight, so folk are usually reluctant to bulk up their bags with heavy bottles of whisky and gin. Our Tulsa couple yesterday were typical, buying just a couple bars of fudge. I felt compelled to give them a free pack of Tasty Jake’s Orkney Beef Jerky. The best jerky I ever tasted was from Oklahoma, and I wanted them to try Jake’s excellent version.

A few years ago, while researching a book about Bob Wills, I found myself in Oklahoma, on my way to Wills’ childhood home, Turkey, in the panhandle of northern Texas. I decided to have a bit of random fun and start my drive in the oil town of Duncan, OK, ending in McLean, TX, a once-thriving Route 66 stop, now a hollowed-out place of empty shops and low incomes. McLean had a ramshackle charm including the Devil’s Rope Museum, with its modest motto, “Think barbed wire is boring? Think again!” But the most memorable stop on that trip was at Jiggs Smokehouse in Clinton, OK, where I bought a brown paper bag of beef jerky so saturated in mesquite smoke that my Chevy smelled like a southern barbeque restaurant for days afterwards.

What did I contribute to the economy of Oklahoma that day? Five dollars to Jiggs for lunch carried out and gnawed as I drove, following eight bucks for a biscuits and gravy breakfast at the Daybreak Diner in Duncan. I must have filled up with gas (trans. petrol) at some point, so another $25 for that. Not much for a whole day in the state. And what did I take away? Lasting memories and a carful of fragrant smoke.

There’s no doubt that nearly half a million tourists per year take away happy memories of Orkney. Luckily for us they contribute more to our economy than I did to Oklahoma’s.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 22nd October 2026. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.