Over the past several months this newspaper has reported on a fourteen-lane road, a food court at 1,245 metres, a school that went from six pupils to 207, an owl hunting at one in the afternoon, a car park larger than the town it serves and a man who walked down the same path twice.
They resolve, almost all of them, into a single question, and it took until roughly the fortieth interview to see it.
The question is not how many people come. It is who is here in February.
The February test
Apply it to anything in this year’s coverage and the answer arrives immediately.
A fourteen-lane road carries nobody in February. A gondola does not run. An aire with 40,000 pitches is a field. A village that is 63% second homes has, in February, sixty people and no bus, and the school has fallen below the threshold for a second teacher.
Now apply it to the things that worked. Fourteen houses held by a trust and let to people who work locally are occupied in February. A shop that trades all winter is open in February. A guard who has worked the Far North Line for nineteen years is at Wick station in February, and so is the train, mostly empty, running anyway.
“Everything that has gone right here was built for the fourteen of us who are still here when the road is bad. Everything that has gone wrong was built for the eight weeks.”
A trust director in the north west
Why the distinction keeps getting lost
Because almost every measurement is taken in summer. Visitor numbers, occupancy, spend, footfall, traffic, the photographs in the brochures and the slides in the relocation decks are all August.
Policy responds to what is measured. What is measured is the eight weeks. The forty-four are not counted by anybody, which is how a country ends up funding a car park in a glen and not a house for a teacher.
The test, in one line
- Ask of any proposal: who uses this in February?
- If the answer is nobody, it is a tourism asset, and should be honestly costed as one
- If the answer is the people who live here, it is infrastructure
- Both are legitimate. Confusing them is how the last four years happened
The last word
It goes to the woman in Sutherland who was asked, at the end of a long interview about a road, what she actually wanted.
She thought about it for some time and said she wanted the shop to stay open, the bus to run on a Wednesday as well as a Tuesday, and somebody young enough to take over the hall committee.
Then she said the thing that this newspaper has been trying to write down all year.
“Come in the summer. You are very welcome, and I mean that. But when you are deciding what this place needs, come in February and ask us again.”
