THIS past week, I indulged in what we, in this family, fondly know as “a good go mach”.
To give something the “go mach”, in Gaelic, is to get rid of it. It can be used for normal rubbish, but around here a good “go mach” is next level, a proper clearance, getting rid of something that should have been jettisoned a few generations ago. “Mach leis”, or “out with it,” is the instruction.
It also works for something particularly displeasing. It would have been lovely, for example, had Nigel Farage been given the “go mach” on Thursday. Sadly, it was not to be, though Count Binface did his best – and who better to try?
Our own clearance this week needed considerably more than a bin, so we went the whole hog and borrowed a skip. I timed it perfectly – the skip arrived as my sister, her husband and three kids got off the boat for a break.
No good deed goes unpunished in an island community, and no family holiday to your ancestral home should go without at least one day of hard labour. It’s the law. Well, it is around here, anyway.
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The “go mach” this time was my own collection of rubbish generated by the realities of croft life – old feeding, containers, dead tools, broken things and stuff long past its natural life-span, topped off by a roof.
You read that right. We have been talking about taking the roof off the building at the end of the house for years, probably since I arrived home in 2013. It is called the Pump House, on the basis that it housed the pump that took water from the well to a header tank in its rafters.
In my father’s time, it was half wash house, half dairy, with a store for tar and paint and the other things associated with a working croft. In my time, it has been a store for everything you could think of, including, for a while, quite the colony of rats.
The roof, put on 100 years ago, was felted and tarred in the traditional way here, and throughout my childhood, our visits home involved tarring it to maintain the waterproofing. It was a sticky, unpleasant job which required good weather and which no-one is sorry to see the back of – especially my father.
Most of the roof was dangerously past its best and collapsed at the mere sight of my approaching tractor arms, although one section put up quite the fight. A replacement, if there is to be one, will be plastic-coated metal sheeting. I threw the last of the tar into the skip too.
Tradition be damned – we tarred that roof because that is what was done, and what was done was based on a time when there was nothing else available. By the time there was something else on offer, the tarring had stopped being a solution and become a ritual. It’s not one I feel the need to keep.
Crofters are renowned for keeping stuff. It’s in the blood, and it makes total sense. When you are four hours offshore, without easy access to country stores and hardware shops, and there’s not much spare cash rolling around, you keep anything that might be useful in the future.
The problem is that without careful cataloguing, the exercise quickly goes feral. Unsure where the item might be – although convinced you have it somewhere – you keep another one. It too ends up buried beneath things, and you keep a third, and so the cycle continues. If there is an empty croft shed to be found the length of the Hebrides, I would question the crofter’s credentials.
Back in the days when your Council Tax paid for something, there was a skip in each township, and every summer throughout the 1990s, my dad wore a trail to it, carting the rusting collections of the generations to its welcoming chasm. Sometimes things left again, off to grace someone else’s collection. The community skip is a distant memory now, no doubt a victim of health and safety laws.
My grandmother was not a fan of the “go mach”. For her, everything held a memory, and those memories were associated with people whose departure caused her great pain.
My father, thankfully, has reacted against her approach and is an enormous fan of the exercise – on the croft anyway. We say nothing of his books. Over the past week, the tractor, with its loader arms, has moved more rubbish in a few hours than he would have managed over a summer. Not all progress is bad.
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One of my difficulties with the Britain Farage is forever selling (and I have many) is that it borrows my grandmother’s feeling and attaches it to things that, while nice, are not things which are particularly useful in 2026. He uses fish and chips, a decent pint, a flag and a vague, cosy sense of how it all used to be to convince people that their country is being hurled into a skip against their will. I don’t buy it.
My grandmother kept a chair because a person had sat in it. Farage is selling you a chair nobody ever sat in – probably an expensive one – and swearing blind that Granny loved it.
Farage gave up his seat in July with the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards looking closely at his finances. He loudly denied any wrongdoing and said he wanted the voters of Clacton to settle the matter rather than the press or the parliamentary authorities. Every other party declined to play, so in a record field of 34 candidates, the thing he ended up being judged against was a bin.
Unlike the roof-tarring tradition, I rather like the tradition of the joke candidate. It goes back to Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party, and beyond. Unlike the fish and the chips, the joke candidate has a very clear purpose. That purpose is to stand next to people who would very much like to be taken seriously and make them wait while the numbers are read out.
Farage took 63% on a turnout of 44%, and he will call that a mandate, which he is entitled to do. Sadly, he was not standing next to a bin in Clacton Leisure Centre to hear it.
He claimed that Essex Police had warned of an organised campaign to disrupt the declaration, and he had already told supporters he had won fairly convincingly. The Count himself took 9455 votes. His best result yet – and I don’t believe for a moment that all of those votes cast were joking. The commissioner reopened his investigation the moment the result was declared.
When I moved home in 2013, this new phase of the great “go mach” began by taking the innards of the house to bits and rebuilding it. If this week tells me anything, it is that with crofting blood coursing through my veins, that “go mach” will no doubt continue until I am in my own version of a skip. After all, why have a shed and not fill it?
It’s a harmless enough vice when the shed is yours and so is the cost of keeping it. It’s a darn sight less harmless when Nigel Farage is filling it on your behalf and calling the contents your heritage.
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