Returning to Caithness is a far cry from Middle East missiles
Wick man Chris McIvor has spent his life travelling the globe working in the aid sector. Here he reflects on a recent return trip to his home county
When I was 18 years old I left my hometown of Wick and headed to the far south of England to commence my studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
I raised a few eyebrows when I responded to the question as to where I was headed. Why so far? Why pick a college at the opposite end of the British Isles?
Depending on who I would speak to I would either admit or conceal a significant reason for doing so, namely that I had looked for a place that was the farthest away from Caithness that I could find. I suppose I thought that distance meant I would be better able to escape.
That was almost half a century ago. Yet I do not think that there has been a year in all that time when I have not come back, sometimes for a few days, often longer, most recently a month when I visited from Jordan where I am now working.
For a good while I was inclined to believe that it was because of my parents who remained here. Family duty and filial obligation were what prompted me.
Yet even after my father passed away some seven years ago my annual visits to Caithness have continued. It is almost as if the county I once so cavalierly dismissed all that time ago refuses to disappear from memory and insists on reeling me in.
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For all my working life in the aid sector, first with Save the Children and more recently with HelpAge International, I suppose I have always thought of myself as something of a nomad with varying stints in Sudan, Algeria, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Jamaica, Cuba, Mozambique, Egypt, Sri Lanka and now Jordan.
I used to think that being a nomad meant you had less attachment to any one place, that home was always elsewhere than where you found yourself at a particular moment in time.
But perhaps one of the consequences of being a rolling stone is that you learn to see the first place you started out from in a different light, and that it is only by making such a break that the qualities you once failed to appreciate begin to manifest themselves.
There is a theory that the cities and towns that Marco Polo described in his extensive travels in the Far East all have features of Venice only half concealed within them.
Maybe a reason why so many Scottish place names appear in the far-flung corners of the globe, including in the remote mountains of Sri Lanka where I came across an ‘Inverness Estates’, is that the people who labelled them could feel closer to the place they once abandoned but could not quite leave behind in their thoughts.
I won’t begin to list the several things I have since discovered after leaving Caithness that now pull me back. But perhaps I can relate a conversation on my just concluded visit that points at one of them.
I was sitting in a café in Thurso where I met an elderly gentleman who was quite happy to talk about the county and what has changed in recent years. I asked him what it was like to live here now.
“It’s nae bad but it’s awfy quiet,” he replied, and added that after my extensive travels I probably wouldn’t want to live in such a place and would need something more cosmopolitan and noisier to keep myself and my young children occupied.
But I remarked to myself that some few months ago I stood outside our residence in Amman and watched the night sky light up with flares, listening to what sounded like scores of motorbikes driving across it.
It wasn’t a meteor shower, and it wasn’t passenger jets landing at the city airport. They were missiles fired by Iran over Jordanian territory in response to events in the Middle East that I am sure this newspaper’s readers will all be familiar with.
As I return to a region beset by troubles, conflict and unresolvable tensions, I thought to myself that “awfy quiet” sometimes has a lot going for it.
