Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie
James Whitmore, managing director at Postar, on his experience of falling on the wrong side of the media line…
Like my fellow MediaTel Newsline correspondent, Dave Brennan, I returned from holiday to find a pressing deadline for a comment piece. Like him, I have been in a media-less world. Unlike him, I have been in this country.
There is a sort of digital two-step going on. We pampered media types anticipate 4G, local TV and so on. We are welded to our pads, pods and all sorts of gadgets that have rapidly inveigled their way onto the list of life’s essentials.
For a great many people, life is not like that. Others have commented on the digital divide as it affects those with less money to spend. Lest we forget, this is an increasing percentage of the population.
For a very small number, it isn’t so much the money as the location that leads them to fall on the wrong side of the media line.
As part of my holiday I visited my mother who still spends half the year in the old family farmhouse, in a very remote part of the Scottish Highlands. Her experience is a partial indication of the world of those who live farming or working in the distant corners of the land.
The area is so remote that the telephone link is the major source of anxiety. The connection regularly fails due to the effect of the elements or the intervention of wildlife.
The internet is an unimaginable something for those pampered debauchees in the nearest village, a dozen miles away. Mobile phones work some times but not others and never well. I do not understand why.
Radio is screechy, aside from a clear BBC signal. The nearest poster site requires a two-hour drive to Inverness. While in the big city, one could also pop into a cinema – a deluxe double media whammy if ever there was one.
There is no terrestrial television. I am assured that satellite is expensive, indulgent and amoral.
With rural petrol costing well over £6 per gallon, a twenty-three mile round trip to pick up the newspaper from the nearest petrol station works out at around £4.00 per issue. This daily ritual is deemed affordable, essential and highly moral.
The odd thing about all this is that the situation has actually gone backwards in the years since I first lived there. Sure, the phone frequently broke, the radio was limited and there never was any telly. Other things were far less complicated.
Willie the Post would call three times a week, bearing newspapers in clusters, like buses. Now it is Louise the Postie and although she comes most weekdays, she brings only mail.
The village shop would visit weekly, in the form of a purple van laden with penny chews and groceries. Not only has it disappeared, the shop itself was killed by Tesco and Morrisons. The mobile butcher has gone the same way, as has the laundry lorry that would come each fortnight, all the way from Nairn, over seventy miles away. The wonderful thing about this proto home shopping was that it was all done on account (a sort of PayPal of olden times), which meant we lived in a truly cashless society.
Nowadays, the only option is Tesco. It is keenly priced but this has to be set against the cost of the required weekly visit to Inverness. This gobbles up four hours in travelling time, plus £15 in fuel. In effect, it takes the majority of a working day to do the supermarket run. They don’t deliver to the distant glens.
Progress brings change and a combination of the collapse of the wool price and the concentration of retail power means that working and living on a hill farm has long been uneconomic and impractical for most.
For this tiny rural minority, media access costs more – often too much – and shopping has gravitated to the big population centres. The digital economy has an impact but not yet on the essentials of life. As in the past, anyone with any vigour, leaves. Those left behind are either well to do or old and poor.
Even though the wool price has nearly tripled in the last few years, the hill pastures go un-grazed and the land is given over to unmanaged deer and English émigrés motivated to run B&Bs by indoctrinating property programmes. For the newcomers, the web is a boon to popularise their businesses and to save their sanity during the long winter months.
Some sympathise with Trainspotting’s Renton who, as he left the station at Currour, shouted that Scotland had been colonised by onanists. Others see the most recent English invasion as the opening up of the land to a new recreational economy.
I think it sad that few new visitors will ever have a walk interrupted by an involuntary step into a mound of sheep or cow poo. An experience that is not yet available on an iPad.