The rain is horizontal, black, glutinous, staining. Powered by a ferocious wind, it makes your eyes smart and the pungent stink of fuel clogs your throat. A photographer is using me as shelter while he tries to snap what we have braved peat bog, police roadblocks and possible explosion to see: a dying ship.
Winter, 1993, and the tanker Braer is a few yards away from stranding on the southern shore of the Shetland mainland. I have seen shipwrecks before, but never anything like this. The huge vessel, hopelessly unpowered, unanchored, unsaveable, bobs and wallows and lumbers in a chocolate-brown maelstrom. Already it has started to destroy the delicate fringes of the place I love more than any other.
Next day, the beach round the point from where the Braer grounded, once so unblemished and golden, is a morass of black slime. Hundreds of dead fish and birds lie coated in bunker fuel. Grief rises suddenly in my throat and, as a dreich drizzle begins, the tears start.
Some things change you. The wreck of the tanker Braer made many Shetlanders who are dependent on King Oil for their livelihoods begin campaigning for the protection of their home. And last week, the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions acceded to one crucial demand: the stationing of an all-weather salvage tug in the Northern Isles this winter.
We are not talking Tommy the Tug-Boat here. These ships are capable of hauling and holding a drifting tanker in the middle of a gale that would send Home Counties weatherpersons diving for the executive bunkers.
There are still areas of the seabed around Shetland that cannot produce edible shellfish because of the Braer's poisoning, but on the whole we scraped away from that near-disaster with minimal damage - although the salmon farming industry has never recovered the premium it once had because of the islands' reputation for some of the cleanest seawater in Europe.
Earlier this year the chemical tanker Ascania caught fire in the Pentland Firth, causing the evacuation of three Caithness communities. A tug from the oil terminal eventually managed to get her under tow. But given different circumstances, different weather, she might have been unsaveable.
It is all very far away from the sensibilities even of the democrats in Edinburgh, let alone the ruddy-faced clubbable drunks of Westminster. But at last something seems to have penetrated the claret-dulled minds of those who have our protection dangling from their purse strings. "No more Braers" read the stickers on many local vehicles, some of them left daily in the car-park at Europe's biggest oil terminal, Sullom Voe. At least this winter we know that a mean, ugly, powerful little ship is standing ready to stop the oil we need being deposited on the shores we love. I never want to see that sideways black rain again.
