I did not join the village WhatsApp group so much as become absorbed by it.
One minute I was a respectable private woman with a reasonable expectation of peace. The next, my phone was buzzing on the table as though I had been appointed communications officer for matters of terrible local unimportance.
It reminded me of the time Mrs MacLeod declared open hostilities over Mrs Fraser’s honeysuckle advancing across their shared fence. As I was friends with both parties, I received regular briefings from each side, which I relayed, in the interests of public accuracy, to the woman at the garden shop.
But this is how they get you now.
Not through gossip, but through a notification.
“It will help you stay connected,” said the friend who added me, with the bright expression people wear when they are about to involve you in something that will shorten your life.
I have never trusted the phrase “stay connected”. It sounds wholesome, but it usually means someone has found a new way to interrupt me.
Still, I joined, because I am not unreasonable. I understand modern life. I have a mobile phone. It contains my contacts, photographs of the grandchildren, two weather warnings, a torch I cannot find when I need it, and an app that claims to know my location but has placed me variously in Inverness, Dundee and once on an oil platform in the North Sea.
The WhatsApp group began gently enough.
At 8.14am, someone reported that Morag was missing.
Morag is a cat. I know this because the message included nine photographs of her looking judgemental in different rooms. She is black and white, although in one photograph she was mostly contempt. She had last been seen near the bins, which seemed to me less like a disappearance and more like fieldwork.
By 8.27am, the village had divided into search parties.
One woman was checking sheds. Another was checking under cars. A third had seen a black and white cat near the burn, though “it may have been a carrier bag”. Someone suggested leaving out tuna. Someone else said tuna attracts foxes. A man who had not spoken in the group since Christmas wrote, “Foxes are misunderstood.”
I made tea.
At 9.03am, Morag returned of her own accord and was described as “traumatised”. In the photograph provided, she appeared to be licking butter from her paw and looking as though she had successfully completed a covert operation.
This should have been the end of it.
It was not.
By lunchtime, a suspicious van had been seen.
There is no creature in the Highlands more powerful than a suspicious van. A stag may stand on a hillside. An eagle may circle above the glen. A seal may appear in the harbour with the expression of an elderly solicitor. But none of them can move a village to immediate military footing like a white van near the hall.
The van was described as white, silver, grey, dirty white, possibly beige, and “not from here”.
Nobody knew what it had done.
It had been “driving slowly”, which in the Highlands can mean criminal intent, sheep, potholes, tourist confusion, poor visibility, or a man eating a bridie while trying to change gear.
A photograph was posted. It showed half a wing mirror, a hedge, and what may have been the corner of the van or possibly a wheelie bin. This did not prevent fourteen people from enlarging it, sharpening it, and discussing the number plate as though they were working for Interpol.
“Does anyone recognise it?” asked a woman.
“Yes,” said someone. “I saw Dave driving.”
There was a silence.
Dave, who had been reading all of this, then wrote, “I was delivering logs in a hire van.”
The village thanked him for clarifying.
Then someone asked why he was driving slowly.
At 2.16pm, the first dog poo message arrived.
There are sentences that change the emotional temperature of a community. “Could dog owners please be mindful” is one of them.
It looks harmless. It is not. It is a grenade wearing a cardigan.
Within four minutes, every dog owner in the village had taken personal offence, including people whose dogs had been dead for years but whose loyalty remained active.
“I always pick up after mine,” wrote one woman, which immediately suggested that someone else did not.
“Not everyone does,” replied another.
“Some of it is foxes,” said the man from earlier, delighted to return to his subject.
A photograph appeared. It was captioned “Not acceptable”.
I do not wish to be delicate, but there are things a woman should not have to inspect before she has finished a biscuit.
By three o’clock, the village had formed factions. There were the dog owners, the non-dog owners, the responsible dog owners, the offended dog owners, the people who like dogs but not dog owners, and one retired man who kept asking whether anyone had considered pine martens.
The matter was not resolved.
It was merely buried beneath the planning application.
Someone had applied to convert an old shed into holiday accommodation. This news entered the group at 4.42pm and by 4.51pm civilisation had begun to wobble.
The shed, according to one neighbour, had been “part of the fabric of the village for generations”.
This was news to many of us, as the shed had been leaning at a forty-degree angle since 1998 and was chiefly known for containing two tyres, a broken lawnmower and something under a tarpaulin nobody wanted to identify.
Another person said tourism kept the shop alive.
Another said young people needed houses.
Another said visitors would park in the wrong place.
Another said nobody should be building anything until the drains were sorted.
Someone asked whether the shed had broadband.
Someone else said broadband was not the point.
Broadband is always the point. Even when it is not the point, it lurks beneath the point.
At 5.08pm, during a particularly tense exchange about soakaways, one woman sent a prayer emoji.
Nobody knew what it meant.
Was she praying for the shed? For the drains? For forgiveness? For the objectors? For the tourists? For the dog owners? For Morag?
The prayer emoji sat there in the middle of the planning dispute like a tiny golden bishop who had taken a wrong turn.
No one dared mention it.
Then someone sent a thumbs-up, which made things worse.
By evening, I had turned off notifications. This is modern life’s little joke. You join a group to stay informed, then spend the rest of the week trying not to know anything.
But silence did not suit me either.
What if Morag vanished again? What if Dave drove somewhere slowly? What if the shed acquired decking? What if the foxes were blamed unfairly in my absence?
So I turned the notifications back on.
This was a mistake.
At 7.21pm, someone was trying to locate three roof tiles last seen heading east in the previous storm.
At 7.34pm, someone needed jam jars.
At 7.48pm, there was a warning about the bins rolling down main street.
At 8.02pm, a man posted a photograph of a cloud and wrote, “Anyone else seeing this?”
We were all seeing it. It was in the sky.
By 9pm, the WhatsApp group had become the noticeboard, the shop counter, the bus stop, the post office queue, the kirk hall, the public inquiry, the confessional and, on one occasion, the lost property office for a single glove.
The old systems had faults, certainly. The noticeboard got damp. The shop counter involved waiting behind someone buying stamps. The bus stop was cold enough to remove hope from the bones.
But the old systems had one great advantage.
They had opening hours.
WhatsApp does not.
WhatsApp is a village hall with no roof, no caretaker and everyone speaking at once while holding photographic evidence.
And yet, I cannot entirely condemn it.
Beneath the madness, there is something rather tender. People want to know what is happening. They want to protect the place. They want the cat found, the road watched, the bins looked after, the drains repaired, the dogs controlled, the shed explained and the van accounted for.
They are lonely, some of them. Worried, many of them. Nosy, most of them, but that is not always a sin. In a village, nosiness is simply a sign of a happy community.
The trouble is that modern technology has taken the old Scottish habit of keeping an eye on things and given it a camera, a keyboard and the ability to panic at scale.
Once upon a time, you would say, “Did you see that van?” to one person over a gate.
Now thirty-seven people receive a blurred image of Dave’s wing mirror, including Dave.
I considered leaving the group.
I truly did.
I had my thumb hovering over the button. Freedom was one tap away. I could return to the old ways, where news travelled by gossip but was distributed responsibly.
Then a message appeared.
“Does anyone know whose hens are on the road?”
Well.
One cannot abandon society at a time like that.
