“I’m pretty sure he identifies as a toucan.”
The sea-chilled wind pummelled our faces, making it hard to hold the binoculars steady against my glasses. The coastal air smelt like salt, damp grass, and a parrot cage left too long between cleanings. On a jagged clifftop across a short stretch of silvery sea, a squat white lighthouse stood amid a cluster of other small buildings. Overhead, what seemed like a hundred different species of seabirds circled, squawked, and defecated indiscriminately. The only other sounds we could hear were the sea rhythmically slapping against the cliffs beneath us and the strange growling calls of the puffins.
“They sound like they’re pretending to ride motorbikes,” Rafiq said. Which was a perfectly accurate summary, if you discounted the noises that definitely sounded like farts.
Our guide from the Shetland Birdlife Trust, Marcia, crept up alongside us on her belly, like an extremely earnest Tough Mudder contestant.
“Remarkable, aren’t they?” she said, in the hushed tones seven decades of David Attenborough on our TVs has taught us to use around wildlife. “It’s still early in the season. Over the next few weeks about sixty thousand puffin couples will land on Shetland to dig their burrows and lay their eggs.”
Cue appreciative noises from Rafiq and me.
“Who are all these other dudes?” Rafiq asked, pointing at the screeching, circling chaos of feathers above us. Marcia, clearly delighted to be able to show off her expertise, began pointing out individual birds.
“That’s a guillemot,” she said. “He’s a razorbill. Those are fulmars. That’s a kittiwake. And that one there, the one with the bright yellow on the beak, that’s a shag.”
“A what?” Rafiq said.
“A shag,” Marcia repeated patiently. Marcia, according to her bio in the press pack, had dedicated her entire adult life to studying the birds of Shetland. Marcia must have already heard every joke Rafiq was about to make.
“Is he a good shag then?” Rafiq asked.
“That one’s a female, so no. But she’s a very healthy specimen.”
“Is she looking for a good shag, then?”
“Actually, yes. That’s exactly why she’s here. See the bird behind her? That’s her partner. They’re a pair, and they’ve come here to breed.”
“She wants kids? Get out while you can, bruv!”
Marcia politely laughed, then reverse Tough Muddered her way back from the cliff towards the relative sanity of almost any other group of people. It was a testament to her fortitude that she Tough Muddered backwards and not forwards over the cliff to her death.
“Have you ever actually been outside of London before, Rafiq?” I asked.
“You gotta have a laugh, innit?”
I turned my binoculars along the clifftop towards the other reporters. Sunny had paired up with Brody O’Sullivan from theSun, and the two of them were in fits of laughter about something. The probability of shags being involved was, let’s be honest, high. The sun shone through Miller’s wind-ruffled hair, making it dance like flames of gold and copper. So much beauty all around us—the cliffs, the birds, the sea—yet I found myself staring at Sunny Miller, wanting to understand why he had been so beastly to me, then unblocked me on GayHoller.
“Oh, get in, son!” Rafiq yelled, right in my ear. I turned my gaze to see what Rafiq was so excited about and saw that our shags were, in fact, shagging.
* * *
We had two more enjoyable episodes of wildlife voyeurism through the afternoon, one with seals and one with otters, and then what was meant to be a press conference about the government funding protection for all the endangered species we’d spent the day hanging out with. But with no minister around, Torsten fielded our questions. It didn’t matter. The whole thing was mostly a reannouncement of Sunny’s otters-are-the-new-beavers story from the previous week.
That evening, we wrote our stories in a cosy restaurant that had been booked out for the press group. The sun setting over the North Sea had been spectacular, hued in pinks and oranges—like God was adding a slice of grapefruit to the inky-blue cocktail of the sea. Now, we were back on the coach and heading to our accommodation for the week.
“To get a real Shetland experience, we thought rather than put you all in the same hotel, we’d put you up in some of the island’s famous bed and breakfasts,” Torsten announced. He was standing at the front of the coach wearing a headset that piped his voice through the speakers. “The coach will pick you up just after nine tomorrow. Be breakfasted and ready and waiting outside your accommodation. Make sure you dress warm. And you willneeda weatherproof jacket. We’ve got something rather special lined up for you.”
The bus stopped outside a B & B, and Torsten called out the names of the four reporters who were staying there for the night. It was Annabelle Statham-Drew from the BBC and Brody from theSun, and Astrid and Terry, the photographer and cameraman. A minute down the road, the bus stopped again, and two more reporters got off. Another minute down the road, two more jumped off.
“OK, stop four. The Otter’s Den,” Torsten said. “Miller. Boche. This is you.”
The last thing I needed was to spend a week cooped up in the same hostelry as Sunny. This was some top-shelf bastardry. Sunny picked up his shoulder bag, walked past me down the aisle, and got off the bus without making eye contact. I collected my things and, when I reached the front of the coach, quietly asked Torsten if it was possible to swap with somebody else. He looked out the open door towards Sunny and back to me, then switched off his microphone.
“Afraid not, Boche,” he said. “The driver dropped off everyone’s luggage this afternoon. It’s waiting for you in your room already. Your hosts are expecting you. Off you pop.”
He ruffled my hair like I was his kid brother. My options were to either make a scene—thereby embarrassing myself in front of everyone in the bus, making myself and my relationship with Sunny the subject of gossip for the rest of the trip, and, worst of all, losing the moral high ground—or suck it up and try to make the best of it. I decided to be British about it. Stiff upper lip. Just because we were staying in the same B & B, it didn’t mean we had to spend any time with each other. We were sharing a roof, not a room. Christ, we weren’t sharing a room, were we?
The answer to that question came about five minutes later, when the proprietor of the Otter’s Den B & B, the remarkable Mrs Gallacher, showed us to our rooms. Plural. They were separate but directly opposite each other. Sunny and I stood in our respective bedroom doorways as Mrs Gallacher ran us through some house admin. She was a grey-haired, bespectacled woman of the tweedy-tartany sort you meet at riding stables and the Chelsea Flower Show, but with one notable exception.
