gr8

gr8 is one of those handy text abbreviations that saves you two keystrokes and a couple minimiligigs or whatever of memory - easy enough to grasp with the same mentality that we used to approach penny-a-word telegrams (see Dog Sense in an earlier posting.) I had reason to use this little shorthand text recently while waiting for the ferry from Gills Bay to St Margaret's Hope, Orkney.

In 1496, James IV of Scotland - a keen harbour and ship builder - sent for a Dutch ship's captain to establish a new ferry service across the Pentland Firth from the northern tip of mainland Scotland to the newly enthralled islands of the ancient Norse domain of Orkney. He was particularly keen on getting a Dutch mariner to run this new service because of their reputation for fine seamanship, sharp business sense and dogged determination. And who better in Holland to provide this maritime entrepreneurship than the de Groot brothers - or so James IV's envoys reported after some heavy negotiations in an Amsterdam alehouse.

And so the de Groots ran the royal ferry to and from the Orkneys for over two hundred years charging a groat a ride for most of that time and becoming well established local landowners into the bargain. The head of the family in the early 1500's was Jan de Groot who had seven sons all competing for a slice of the by now lucrative family business transporting dried fish, whisky, wool, hides and beef from this northerly natural pantry to points south. At one annual de Groot family dinner, held every year to commemorate winning the royal contract, a nasty quarrel broke out over the seating plans with each of the de Groot boys demanding equal access to their father's favours. The salty old mariner sent them all packing and told them to come back to next year's AGM feast and he'd have a solution to their dispute.

Jan spent the intervening year devising a solution that was ingenious, entirely practical, wholly egalitarian and yet loaded with low cunning - James IV would have expected nothing less from his Dutch CEO. When the brothers arrived armed with their reports of another year's successful trading, they found that the old man had spent his time constructing a new octagonal house complete with eight separate entrance doors and an eight-sided board room table. The sons took their seats suitably impressed and mollified - Jan, Oh Gr8 one of them muttered - or John O'Groats as it has come down to us over the years.