Edinburgh piggy-backing off Orkney and Shetland?

Has anyone else noticed the capital city’s recent borrowings from the cultures of Orkney and Shetland?

In the run up to Hogmanay there have been a series of street games organised in Edinburgh between the ‘Uppies’ and the ‘Doonies’ – those who live on the upper and the lower parts of the city.

In Kirkwall in Orkney, on Christmas Day and on New Year’s Day – tomorrow – there are the legendary Ba games – two on each day, first the Boys’ Ba, then the Mens’ Ba.

Each is between the Uppies and the Doonies (See what we mean?) and each is ‘played’ on the streets of the town – with the throw up outside St Magnus Cathedral, an agreed mid-point between Uppie and Doonie.

There the similarity ends between the couth and restrained neo-street games in Edinburgh – and the real thing.

As you walk through Kirkwall at normal times of the year you will see these odd vertical pairs of large diameter holes, tiered on either side of shop doorways and windows. Even car showrooms have their expanse of glass interrupted by pillars featuring these same pairs of holes.

These are holes made to take bolts to hold planks that would shame scaffold planks, in front of dangerously fragile structures – and there are few buildings in the town centre, commercial or domestic, that are not protected in this way.

The Ba games are full on events and to have been the winner of either the boys’ or the mens’ game is a once in a lifetime achievement that conveys celebrity and universal respect for the rest of it – lifetime, that is.

Think rugby and wrestling – all in a full contact scrumdown with breakaways that can last for a  day, pulled and swumg this way and that, with a mas of scrummagers pushed and pulled into doorways and windows, with no control and the possibility of crush injuries realised annually. This is why the ‘Ba boards’ barricading doors and windows are so necessary. A huge body of tightly knitted people crashing through plate glass does not bear imagining.

The Ba is a very special ball, hand made and specific to this game – hard filled and leather covered.

The object of the game is for each side to carry the ball back to score against an area in their own side of the town. The Uppies’ target is an entire gable end of the West End Hotel. The Doonies’ is something like a 50 yard stretch of the waterfront at the harbour.

Winning Doonies have been known to jump into the tide – and we’re talking end of December and the North Atlantic here – wide of the target area and swim out with the Ba, past the breakwater and come in to the shore from the sea – with the element of surprise.

There are terrifying photographs in John DM Robertson’s authoritative book on the Ba – showing an unimaginable press of folk on the harbour front, with the Victorian cast iron railings having given way under the pressure and with some dangling downwards holding on to rails that have come loose. ‘Scary’ doesn’t come close.

The Ba players have to know the byways of the town of Kirkwall so well that their opportunist use of them is automatic. The game can go anywhere and the secret os disguise – to get hold of the Ba in the middle of one of the informal scrums, work your way to the edge of the mass and, eventually, smuggle it away unseen. Winning by a smuggle is still a win but doesn’t quite carry the glory of a full frontal assault.

And the player who makes the single score than wins does not necessarily get the ceremonial Ba to commemorate the win. The players nominate the winning individual as the one they see as having played the best team game in the spirit of the Ba – so there is no advantage in smuggling for personal glory.

The Kirkwall Ba Game is a cultural heart beat. Orcadians come home at Christmas or New Year just to take part in it. There is no limit on numbers and there are no rules. Spectating is a series of risks all of their own. In these thin days of ‘health and safety’ there is something massively life enhancing about the full bloodedness of the Ba game. Edinburgh would never tolerate a street game so unbuttoned.

But it is nevertheless doing a little sanitised borrowing in the interests of its own – safe – image building.

And last night, as part of the capital’s three-day festival build up to the Bells tonight, there were thirty or so fire-torch bearing, armoured and helmeted Viking warriors inported from Shetland, from Lerwick’s spectacular Up Helly Aa, which takes place each year on the last Tuesday of January and ends with the firing of a galley followed by night-long dancing and, ahem, drinking.

This isn’t quite Edinburgh either but it’s still warming its hands at the uninhibited cultures of the north.

So are these borrowings no more than a cosmetic fashioning of a fictional culture of the Athens of the North, in the interests of generating filthy lucre?

Or is there a deeper game?

Is Scotland’s capital city drawing the remotest of the country’s cultures to itself to forge bonds as the indepdence referendum, whenever it happens, draws ever nearer?

In newsagents shops in Kirkwall, they will tell you that the papers are coming in ‘on the boat from Scotland’.

These are their own places – but no more so than every single area of a country so rich in diverse and deeply textured cultures. That’s the fun of it. You’re always at home and abroad at the same time in a country like this.

Note: If you don’t believe us – here’s a video of a Ba Game in Kirkwall.