I have never set foot in the Pier Hotel. Weird isn’t it.

I mean, maybe not that weird.

The Pier Hotel (and bar) has now become a kind of Gaelic Safe Space (which is brilliant) and they were talking to me about attending an event there. They mentioned a local guy and said ‘ach you know him, he’s always there’. At this point I had to reveal that I’d never been in. It used to be called Harry Dick’s and was a pretty Staunch Rangers pub but I was too young to drink for the majority of his ownership.

Anyway, I started thinking about why I’d never been in. I know most of the guys that usually drink there – their next port of call would usually be the Tongadale and then the Caley afterwards. I actually worked in the Caley as a teenager and then years later brought a Fringe Style theatre show ‘The Misty Island’ there and ran it for 6 weeks. Its changing to a less busy bar has been a great loss to those who live in Portree and North Skye. The Hotel still exists and there is a small bar in it but it’s never been replaced as the go-to, end-of-night venue. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, I know the people who frequent the Pier Hotel and the Tongadale and yet for much of my life I felt a bit of a distance between myself and them.

It has just struck me, as I am writing this, that almost everything I write for this blog comes back to the same point. This invisible dividing line between the two worlds of Portree/Skye/Everywhere(?). In our local context there are many things that separate the two groups but thew two I feel the most are Language and Class. I’m really struggling to write down what I mean by this so I think I’ll add a video / do a separate vlog, but will keep this post to remind me.