BigMouth

Does the camera shop flog mobiles? There's a computer shop at Freefield.

CAFE bar deli. Sounds great. It would be good if there was a place in Lerwick that you could get a coffee and a snack in the evening.

Yes

Hydro shop is going to be a cafe bar deli

I seem to remember somewhere recently on the street being £2,000 a month. Greedy landlords are the largest part of the decline of the street. Coffee and Keetchin - preferred it when it was run by Cope. Service was a bit slow then, but great otherwise.

I remember seeing one of the more half-witted local teenagers, having faked his ID, then trying to use it to get on the bus for half fare. The driver wouldn't accept it as it said he was older than the half fare concession allowed. "But I faked the age so I could get into the Hall to drink" he bemoaned. He paid full fare on the bus that day.

Had an individual trifle from Da Kitchen Bakery tonight, bought in Alec Morrison’s, hidden behind the meat pies. A red jelly with trifle sponges, topped with custard then fresh cream with a cherry on top and a few chocolate sprinkles. So much better than the fake cream on most of the supermarket offerings, and a nice size for one. Well done! Yesterday bought a Walls bakery battenburg. Really nice marzipan on it. It tends to be too sticky. Bad news on the pickle loaf though, which seems to be getting harder by the week. What happened to the focaccia that used to be on sale in Lerwick on a Saturday?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR5EY6UpMlA

Watch out for a defibrilator apearing on a wall in the street. That's the giveaway. I have been splashing out on the street today. I went to Harrys to get a small measuring glass, looks like a shot glass. They are £2.75, but they didn't have them in stock. So I impulse purchased a dehumidifier box with crystals at £1.50. There was no holding me back, I was in spending mode. Happy to spend obscene amounts of money. The charity shop (almost) next door rescued me by selling me a shot glass for 20p. Da Street Lerwick needs a theme tune playing out from the speakers in the cross Life in the fast lane Surely make you lose your mind Life in the fast lane Everything all the time The Eagles got there before me. Or Golden Earring's Radar Love No more speed, I'm almost there Gotta keep cool now, gotta take care Last car to pass, here I go And the line of cars drove down real slow

Now, now. You're getting carried away!! You'll be suggesting that we go and live in the royal family's spare properties next. http://www.shetland.org/plan/areas/fetlar advises that the population of Fetlar is less than 100. I don't know if that means 10 or 99. Fetlar would be great if the agricultural possibilites were ramped up somewhat. Shetland could definitely be self-sufficient in turnips with just a little more effort from Fetlar. Turnips for all.

We don't need funding. We need to stop wasting money.

When you get your bill just remember the contribution towards the £45,000 per resident of Papa Stour per year to run their ferry service. De-population is the answer.

You make a good point John, teasing or not. This would be a perfect time (with ferry failures and general aging of the boats) to depopulate Fetlar. Huge savings are possible in the long term. It just needs brave and realistic sooth fok making the decisions. Put the residents in Yell somewhere. There's plenty of space for a Fetlar estate to go up.

Human papilloma virus is an STD that can cause warts and genital (amongst other areas) cancer in both sexes. There is a vaccine available for this, and in the United States young, mostly teenagers, of both sexes are given this vaccine. This is useful as it will control the disease in heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual populations. In the UK the vaccine is only given to females. Men lose out (again), but particularly homosexual men. Suicide is one area where sadly men are not under-represented. Twice as many men in Scotland committed suicide in 2016 as women. Every death like this is tragic. I was reading recently that volunteers are hard to find for kid's activities in Shetland. Going back to the Mum of three boys with no male influence, it was her that told me that there were no men in the local Cub's group. Men won't go into a system where it is automatically assumed that they are guilty of some ill-deed, a danger to children, and that they have to prove otherwise. Everyone understands the need for the children's safety, but most men have voted with their feet and decided not to involve themselves in children's activities. One rumour can ruin a man's reputation, so why bother giving your time for free with such risks involved? Why bother going through the clearance procedure? That leaves women to run these activities, but it looks as though they are choosing not to engage in these activities either, despite the risk to them being so much lower. I asked the local SNP why there was no Men's Officer - apparently women have more issues. Obviously not any of the main points I have discussed so far. I was brought up to hold open a door for anyone following me. The reaction from men is either: a thanks, a grunt or a nod. You never quite know what you will get with a woman. With a young woman it is all too often a sneer or an entitled look, with not so much as a thank you. Older women can be very effusive in their thanks, especially when I tell them that I am not sure if I should be doing it any more. On two occasions women have told me that they are perfectly capable of opening a door for themselves, or words to that effect. A bad day perhaps, period pains or just another vile feminazi? One never knows. So if a guy lets a door go in your face girls then blame the sisterhood.

Men are stronger than women? Wrong. Some men are stronger than some women. When a woman needs to summon strength she can, but when there is something to lift at work, a table to move, I notice the women take a step back. As in most things, women choose not to. Most of what we do these days has some level of automation or mechanical assistance. Strength is less of a reason to be a barrier to a woman taking on a physical role, but mostly they choose not to. There is one woman working on the essy kerts in Shetland, the rest are men. It is unlikely that there will be many bags of rubbish that will exceed 25 kilos, judging by what I throw away. Working in this environment needs stamina and a robust spirit more than it needs strength, but with the alternative of working in a nice warm office, rather than being rained on and having the juice of rubbish bags running down your overalls and the risk of broken glass cutting you, and the hideous pong, I can see why women flock in droves to office jobs. Women are better at bringing up kids. Wrong. There is no reason why a man can't bring up children. Boys particularly thrive when they have good male role models. I spoke to a single mum with three boys to look after. She worked full time to support them, but she said that they didn't see a man from one week to the next. They were dropped off at school, where they were solely taught by female staff, were child-minded after school by a woman, and some evenings would do after school activities, including Cubs (or perhaps it was Scouts?), which was completely run by women. There was no boyfriend on the scene. I have no doubt that she was an excellent mum, but her greatest desire was that her boys had some male influence, she didn't necessarily want to be in a relationship, but could see the benefits and balance that men could bring. Only men discriminate. Wrong. I was in a meeting not that long ago where a female department head proudly announced that she had got rid of all the men from her department. This took place in front of a dozen women and two men. If it had been a man saying that about women I am sure that man would have been having an interview without coffee with the personnel department. Different rules depending on your sex. Domestic abuse is always caused by men. Wrong. As someone who has been on the end of domestic violence many years ago from a woman, I know that this is not the case. Women have a well funded support mechanism in Shetland along with places of safety. Guess what men have? Nothing. They go to Aberdeen if they are lucky. It's more likely that the man will say nothing about it, because he will be ashamed. Being a man on the end of domestic violence is not the norm. Society expects men to be strong in the same way that it expects women to be motherly. Men have no say in the life of the unborn child. All too commonly women will decide to have a discretionary abortion, a lifestyle choice. The man has no say. The woman decides to dispose of that child and gets away with it. If a man was to murder that unborn child he would go to prison for it. Women suffer the indignity of breast screening and cervical smears. Men suffer the indignity of prostate cancer. Somehow science can produce reliable screening tests for women, but when it comes to men's prostates - nothing. Men's sperm is a valuable commodity, so much so that men who have donated that sperm to a sperm bank have been taken to court for maintenance for a child brought about by an altruistic act. Men's sperm has been stolen from used condoms by women who wanted to impregnate themselves, when the man was unwilling to have children. This is a good reason why men need more contraceptive choices. Women can have the pill or implants, or a variety of other devices, but for men? Nothing readily but the condom. Society does not want men to have sexual freedom. To which the answer will be that men sleep around. To which the obvious response is that if they are heterosexual, then surely they are sleeping around with women? A man's career, his whole life can be ruined by an accusation of rape. Only recently a man was spared a court case at the final hour when the prosecution released evidence that showed that he was innocent. The accuser had made the rape up. If a woman can destroy a man's life so easily then the legal system should be putting the false accuser in prison. Desperate are the days when men are having to use their smartphones to record asking for permission to engage in sex with a woman. I recently asked a woman if she could explain why for every one hundred patients GP surgeries saw, sixty were women and only forty were men. Her explanation was that women's bodies are more complicated. Could the reality be that services are skewed towards women to the disadvantage of men? Political representation. I noticed that the SNP had officers for certain interest groups including: students, artists, women, disabled, etc., etc. It was odd that about the only group that did not have representation was men. I looked at the other parties and the same was true of them too. No representation for men, roughly 50% of the population are male. Women have long retired at 60, whereas men worked on, usually in less comfortable jobs until they were 65, if they didn't die first of some hideous industrial illness. This was despite women usually living eight years longer on average and usually in better health, and this has been true for many decades. That gap has stayed much the same The retirement age is now somewhere between 65 and 67 for the majority of both sexes, which brings us somewhere closer to equality, but to reach parity in the number of likely years in retirement, men should retire at 67 and women should retire at 75. There is a campaign - WASPI - Women Against State Pension (age) Increase. It's a group of women that have been most affected by the fact that the pension age for the sexes has been aligned. They thought they were going to slope out of their nice warm offices at 60, then swan about at home in retirement for 26 years on average, but equality struck and they are now going to be retiring at 66, and they don't like it one bit. The problem is that when women get real equality they're not so keen on it. If we went back to the days of conscription, (not hard to imagine in the current situation that the military are finding it so hard to recruit, despite being a force that is reducing in size), in a truly equal society they would be calling up young women as well as young men to fight and die in our wars of choice around the world. It won't happen though because society finds the idea of fit young men dying in some god-forsaken hellhole so much more palatable than a young woman having to die in the same situation. Men's lives are worth less. And when it comes to work look at the advantages given to women - one of their favourites is women only shortlists. That just a way of saying, we have men that are better, but the only way that any of you will get this job is by us not interviewing the better candidates. We are willing to accept second best. Men are yet again discriminated against. The trend has become more worrying when the BBC recently advertised a job where only applicants from black and minority ethnic backgrounds can apply. You're discriminated against if you are white. Surely male and female genitals are of equal worth? Nope. If someone takes a scalpel to your genitals where there is no medical need then it's called genital mutilation, but only if you are female. If you are male then not even the World Health Organisation will recognise that your genitals are being mutilated, but if you are a woman they will organise a worldwide campaign - Female Genital Mutilation awareness week. Of course there are those of us that like to ask questions, raise awkward truths, so we contact the WHO and ask when is the Male Genital Mutilation awareness week? Unsurprisingly there was no response. Why do married men die before their wives? Studies record the most common reason is because they wanted to! Guys, women don't want equality. What they want is advantage. They will say that men have had it for long enough. Well girls, if it's not right for us, it's not right for you either is it? If you want the good stuff then take an equal amount of the crap us men have been taking for years. Don't be telling me that your granny was down the mines digging nutty slack with a babe at her breast. Tell me what you are doing now, the suffering of loading that washing machine, tumble dryer, dishwasher, that long drive to the shops or the wait in for that Tesco delivery van. I want to know everything. Tell me about having to walk over to the other side of the living room to get the remote for the TV/Sky box or whatever. Putting the cup under that bean to cup coffee maker or having to ring up for a hair appointment, and they probably won't have the magazine that you like. The cost of lipstick, having to tweezer your eyebrows to death so you look like an escapee from the circus, piercings and tattoos. Highlights, lowlights, botoxed lips, diets, central heating, car boots that close themselves, no quinoa on the shelves, panty liners, tottering around on heels that make you look afflicted, offices that despite being overheated are still not warm enough for you, men in your department (doing the heavy lifting usually). Girls - you've got so it hard. I don't know how you do it!

On this historic day, spare a thought for the men in society. It will be them driving the cesspit emptying trucks, sweeping your streets, emptying your bins, dying in the front line of wars, doing the dangerous jobs. If there is a death in UK industry, there's a 95% chance it will be a man. Men will spend less years in retirement, men die earlier. They are more likely to lose their kids in custody battles, will be imprisoned for crimes that a woman will not receive a custodial sentence for, will have fewer choices of contraception, and will end up bearing the financial responsibilities long after a marriage has dissolved, even when the blame is not their's. Men will be unsupported in violence in the home, seen as weak if they are ill, and generally get the crap end of life's stick. To all the dads, uncles, sons, grandfathers and brothers out there, remember equality works both ways. And when you raise points like this as a man you risk and interview with your employer, even when you wrote it outside work on your own computer!

Not been in personally, but have heard reports that it is good. Are you suggesting there instead of the Fort Chippy!!! But hardly anyone lives there!

Not until the local loop is unbundled!

This will happen all the time BT use coverage to mean the percentage of people with access, and not the percentage of the land mass covered. BT are the reason we have such turd broadband in this country. They won't do any infrastructure work without government handouts, so we the tax-payer are paying BT to give us crap service.

The Scottish Government give them the power. SNP bad and all that.

That's true. Plenty have closed including the travel agents, Geordies DIY, the IT place plus those above, and others that have been lost in the mists of time.

Has someone gone for a P

The coffee shops are busy. I hear the staff moaning about it on the bus.

Weather should come as no surprise to any of us, but it is another excuse trotted out by many to avoid walking. There is no such thing as bad weather, just poor clothing choices. I put some waterproofs on if I don't want to get wet. Anyway, we are all waterproof, and our clothes will dry out. More first world problems. What I want to know is how close is close enough when it comes to parking? Perhaps we need zoning. We could introduce a local road tax. Those willing to walk a bit further pay a bit less. Blue badges give free parking. Fines from driving in the restricted zone without a blue badge could help fund it. Sorry to hear about your health condition Mr Brown.

Ghosty said - "No argument with any of that, but it doesn't stop those who perceive a part of the public road is their own personal carpark from giving the earful - You don't need to have that in your life as well as having to be in the toon...." Just ask them if they forgot their meds! I know what you mean about being in the town. Hellish place full of people! A cattle prod would often be useful!