Island lifeline

The ferry joys of living on an archipelago in the heart of the North Sea.

- Marsali Taylor

Storm Amy caused a fair bit of disruption up here. Not so much in damage - we're used to winds like that, and everything gets well tied down when the forecast worsens. However, our lifeline Aberdeen ferries and freight boats didn't sail for two days. This is pretty unusual; they do their best to go. There was panic over bread and milk at Tesco in Lerwick, and the Coop was short of fruit and meat; luckily, our village shop's always well supplied using local producers. No south papers or mail and a lot of people who'd meant to leave Shetland after coming up for Wool Week were stranded here.

I was due to go south on the Sunday night when the ferries resumed travel, having booked my cabin four months before. I'd had a text to warn me the ferry was leaving two hours earlier, to detour via Orkney to deliver passengers.

'It'll be jam-packed,' my husband Philip said, with his usual optimism, and ran me to the terminal so early that I had to wait there for boarding the Hjaltland, instead of walking straight on. A party of Norwegian oil men checked in ahead of me-flights were obviously cancelled as well, and they were taking the boat option.