Author Alice Albinia cracks the mysteries of The Britannias

A CURATE’S egg – what is that, exactly? Is it the one your granny sucks? You know, the egg she’s forever being taught about, straw in hand. No, that can’t be right – she gets them from Tesco, not the local vicar.

Now I’ve never known a curate – some curators, yes – but no vergers, no “yes, your reverence” types, no assistants to the clergy. Shame really because they might enlighten me on this egg business of theirs.

Is it something about a thing being a bit off but good in parts? But what’s that got to do with the church … or Alice Albinia, for that matter?

This brings us to her book on these islands of ours. Let’s tap its shell and crack it open.

Albinia explores the “dim antechambers of British history”

by visiting several key offshore sites. Their importance is related in chronological order.

She starts with the neolithic stories of Orkney and finishes with the modern significance of contemporary Westminster, as an “island”.

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Albinia stresses the tension today “between the islands’ overlapping layers of internal and external control, their fiscal and political autonomy, their individual freedoms and strength as a whole”.

Albinia lived in Orkney for a while and hymns Maeshowe as tomb, as womb. She notes the egalitarian flavour of life locally, the people who have moved there “in search of a better life”.

She hears in passing that George Mackay Brown “is too highbrow for Orkney”, that his “fancy prose suits Soothmoother tastes”. Said commentator, diplomatically, is not named.

When Albinia gives us history her book is deeply informative and well-researched.

She’s fascinating on Anglesey with its druids, Rathlin Island and its horrors.

Likewise, the stories from Iona – Saint Columba and writing as revolution, its scriptoria, its Sheela-na-gig still embarrassing the prudish – all intrigue.

On Iona, she also encounters a weirdo staring at a seashell “for 24 hours until she saw infinity”. I’d liked to have learned more about this person on a “vision quest” under the guidance of a North American shaman. Indeed, I bet said shaman could advise me in my own quest to know more about curates and their oology obsession.

With Staffa in sight, we hear she is shown a “Stargate”, a “portal to the otherworld”. Helpfully she warns us: “Those squeamish about modern-day spirituality should look away now.”

In a prescient diagnosis on Suella Braverman types, she visits Brexitland – Thanet, Margate etc – and notes the locals “rail against newcomers; then we become them, and they us, and then we turn our gaze back across the Channel again, deflecting the new ones with our stare”.

NORTHWARDS next to the Hyperborean folk on Shetland, our Viking pals who only became Scottish in 1469. Here Albinia meets Norwegians from Bergen who (blimey!) have rowed across. There are tales of fishing scandals on Whalsay, macho shenanigans during Up Helly Aa.

Men don’t come out well in The Britannias. Albinia admits her marriage dissolves during the narrative, and one might detect a whiff of misandry in her telling.

Even King Charles gets it in the neck when he steps out of a car: “My blood runs cold at the sight. There is something truly oppressive about being ruled over by a man, in this day and age.” The italics are hers.

Albinia’s anger about tax dodgers in Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man is bang-on. Her celebration of Ossian, of Finlaggan on Islay, of waulking songs on Barra, cheers. And her assertion that “in England, the level of disapprobation about Scotland had long been racist” will raise eyebrows.

But there remains something yucky about the yolk of this book. Some notes chime with the ghastly antics of Keith and Candice-Marie in Mike Leigh’s Nuts In May.

We hear pals called Will and Guy – financed partly by “aristocrat patrons” – singing ancient songs about coats made from martens’ pelts. Then there’s someone called Leonie who “began thinking of islands as emotions”. Or Rose who was “thinking of care for the world and each other”. There is skinny-dipping, there is talk of dreams in the soul.

Now, perhaps it’s the mycoplasma I’m trying to shrug off, but this stuff would gie ye the dry boak.

Maybe I’m just a bad egg at heart. Merry Christmas!