Mairi McFadyen

IT has been a season of music up here in the north. Blas Festival – a celebration of the Highland language, music and culture – hosted gigs, events and ceilidhs in village halls from Aviemore to Barra, Strathy to Stornoway and Skye. We had a ceilidh in our local hall here up on the hill too. In defiance of the dark and the cold at the back end of the year, one of the most human things we can do is to gather together to enjoy music and song.

FOR so many in today’s world, there is an alarming disconnect between the food on our plates and how it got there. We know so little about where our food comes from and how it was produced. Since the 1950s, farming practices have shifted away from localised, traditional methods of food production towards mechanised industrial-scale chemical-intensive monocropping.

THIS month I have been on a journey from Shetland to Dumfries reflecting on creativity, community and cultural commons. In the last of the summer sun I sailed north across the whale road to a conference organised by the Centre for Rural Creativity, University of the Highlands and Islands, in partnership with Shetland Arts, at the Mareel.

THIS month I was on the west coast for a first-time visit to sunny Isle Martin – a small uninhabited island north-west of Ullapool, closest of the Summer Isles. We were there to join the island’s Open Day festivities, celebrating 20 years of the island’s community ownership.

WHETHER we want to admit it or not, climate breakdown is already upon us: there are record-breaking heat waves, flash floods, wildfires. Climate change does not cause all of these things to happen, it amplifies them. This is not happening in some far-off place, it is the weather where you are.

THE story of land is fundamental to our past, present and future. With a renewed sense of urgency in the context of climate breakdown and a growing awareness of landed power and its malign influence over our democracy, the case for land reform is coming again to the fore.

THIS month I was at The Ceilidh Place in Ullapool for the annual adult Fèis Rois gathering, a three-day festival of tuition in traditional music, song, dance, Gaelic language and culture alongside fringe events, gigs and late-night cèilidh sessions in pubs all over the north-west’s cultural capital.

I VISITED Timespan in Helmsdale recently. The gallery is exhibiting a display called No Colour Bar: Highland Remix: Clearances To Colonialism, which aims to reconcile the local history of the Clearances with the colonial framework of Empire.

SCOTLAND’S future path is uncertain at the moment, but one thing is certain: the United Kingdom is broken beyond repair. It was a welcome antidote to the political farce of last week to join a gathering of researchers at an event organised by the Intercultural Research Centre at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh on Wednesday.

A HOT topic of conversation where I live is the proposed pump hydro storage scheme, given the moniker Red John. With a generating capacity of 400MW, this plant would generate enough to power more than 400,000 homes, making use of the natural resources of Loch Ness.