Diary of a Shopkeeper, 29th March
Broad Street, looking south; noon, Saturday 4th April
Kirkwall BID is holding its Spring Fling in Kirkwall town centre this Saturday. We’re promised an Easter egg hunt, live music, face painting and Highland dancing, amongst other entertainments. Many shops and other businesses will be coming up with their own special offers, new product launches, and treats of one kind or another. In K&G we’re holding a free tasting from noon of some of the exciting new wines we discovered at recent importers’ events down south. And we won’t forget something for the town’s cheese lovers…
All in all, it should be fun day. Let’s hope the daffodils are standing tall with their faces turned to the sun, and not bowed down by wind and battered by freezing rain like last Saturday. Daffodils are like canaries in the coal mine at this time of year. Not just that they’re the same colour, but that if they’re happily dancing in a gentle breeze, then the pavements of the town will be filled with happy shoppers too. Fingers crossed!
BID’s Spring Fling and dreefs of golden daffs are two sure signs of the new season. Another is the appearance of the first cruise liners of the year. Sure enough, Thursday 2nd will see the arrival of a Norwegian flagged ship, Viking Neptune, with 930 passengers on board. Two days later we’ll see the Bolette, sailing in from Stornoway with 1,338 passengers. Those may seem like large numbers of visitors, but experience shows that anything under 1,500 passengers hardly registers on the town. Several hundred passengers will spend most of the day stooring around the county on bus tours, and the rest will spread themselves out between the cathedral and museum, a distillery or two, all the cafes and pubs, and dozens of different shops.
Broad Street, looking north; noon, Saturday 4th April
It’s not that we don’t benefit from small cruise ships like these – we do, and have stocked up accordingly on the kinds of things their passengers love, from whisky miniatures to Orkney fudge. But the town doesn’t start to feel busy till there’s more than 2,000 passengers wandering about. And it doesn’t feel crowded unless there are about 4,000 passengers on the same day, which is planned to happen fewer than a dozen times this year. That is, if rising fuel costs don’t cause cancellations of visiting liners. So far there’s been no such bad news, but you do have to wonder if it might happen, if the attacks on Iran, and its retaliation, continue. The extra expense of putting 50 litres of diesel in our van is bad enough. Imagine having to fill your cruise liner’s tank: they typically burn though 200,000 litres per day.
Once again, as in Covid times six years ago, our small, peaceful islands are threatened by the winds of world events far beyond our shores, and far beyond our control.
One final sign of the start of spring is the end of something else. Saturday 28th was the final Lynnfield Lux of the season. Since October we’ve joined with the Lynnfield team to host 13 evenings of good food and – most importantly – good company, each Lux meal themed around the wines of a particular area. This weekend it was the turn of the Languedoc and in particular the area to the west and north of the beautiful old town of Montpellier. The farmers and vignerons of this part of the world are blessed with a glorious climate, good soil, and traditions of agriculture and winemaking going back to the Romans and beyond. The flavour of vegetables and fruit is turbocharged compared to what is available to us most of the time. Fish come fresh out of the Mediterranean and shellfish are plentiful in a vast saltwater lagoon called the Étang de Thau. It’s said that 20 different kinds of shellfish are farmed in the Étang, and the thousands of tonnes of oysters grown there supply most of the south of France.
A standout winery is La Croix Gratiot. They joke that their vines have their feet in the Mediterranean, and their vineyards are so close to the sea that it might well be a statement of fact and not une blague. The label on their bottles has a drawing of a fish swimming through the leaves of a gnarled old vine. Their flagship is an outstanding example of wine that’s becoming more and more popular in our shop: Picpoul de Pinet. (Will 2026 be the year Picpoul knocks New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc off the top of the charts? I think it might.) La Revue de Vin de France reckon La Croix Gratiot represent ‘the pinnacle of Picpoul de Pinet’ and it was certainly greatly appreciated at the Lux. It’s fresh and zingy enough to complement fish like the sea bass we enjoyed at The Lynnfield. But it has a generous, fruity body and the kind of intensity that makes memories of it linger in the mouth long after the last sip is swallowed.
Long may happy memories of Luxes and other winter pursuits linger, as we move into what we hope will be a warm and peaceful spring.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 2nd April 2026, so ‘this Saturday’ was actually yesterday. 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.
Sometimes it’s hard not to get depressed as a small shopkeeper. One trigger is local folk saying, ‘I’m avoiding the town this weekend. There’s a liner in and it’ll be far too crowded.’ We were told that more than once last week. Yet how crowded is the street on a liner day? I tried to explain in the text how even 1,500 passengers are virtually invisible when spread across the whole town, and the whole county. But a picture is worth many words, so I nipped out onto the street at 12 noon to take some photos. This is what a 1.500 liner day looks like in Kirkwall. Less crowded than the average supermarket aisle any day of the week!
We greatly appreciate all our lovely customers who came out yesterday to enjoy the Spring Fling, enjoy a tasty treat or two, and do some shopping. Please tell your friends that a few liner passengers are nothing to be scared of!