AS THE heat wave that covered much of Britain drew to a close yesterday, diners wanting to enjoy shellfish on the Orkneys became the latest victims of last week's high temperatures.

Crime/ 'Tandoori' killing

Pride revives the Flower of Scotland in its hour of need Ronnie Browne, artist, musician and celebrity supporter, explains what it means to be a bearer of the tartan

The Ayrshire report reveals familiar deficiencies in investigating child-sex cases, argues Allan Levy

BY JOHN ARLIDGE

Parents bitterly attack Ayrshire social workers whose reports robbed them of their children.

I was saying yesterday that writers are often a long way from the scene of their books when they get down to writing about them - that they have to withdraw a certain distance from an exotic locale to get it in perspective and feel the full effect of it. And that maybe the same is true of the way we should read books. That is, when you or I go to the West Indies, we shouldn't read a book set in the West Indies, we should read something set in Scandinavia. Which explains why I have recently spent a lot of time in Orkney.

TERRY BOON led the British team to a second successive victory in the Young Riders' European Championships, which were part of the Blenheim Audi International Horse Trials. But Boon's chance of repeating last year's individual win disappeared when his mount, Vital Decision, dislodged a rail from the penultimate fence in yesterday's show jumping.

GEORGE Mackay Brown's new novel, which was last week voted on to the Booker shortlist, begins thus: 'Of all the lazy useless boys who ever went to Norday school, the laziest and the most useless was Thorfinn Ragnarson.' This is pure Mackay Brown: an Orkney setting, an ugly duckling hero, the blindness of society to the qualities of the poet, a nudge of humour. The novel is obliquely autobiographical, the story of an unfolding imagination woven into an island's experience of change. It has the magic, but none of the fey rococo, of Virginia Woolf's Orlando.

SCOTTISH Natural Heritage is to recruit a human scarecrow at pounds 4 an hour to chase barnacle geese off farmland on the island of South Walla, Orkney.

CONSERVATIONISTS are to investigate the deaths of 40 seal pups amid fears of an outbreak of a mystery virus.

IT'S NOT hard to conjure up the image of a perfect family holiday in Scotland: messing about in boats, scrambling up hills, spotting eagles, pony-trekking in the glens, and long days rounded off by spectacular sunsets. But it's easy to go wrong in practice. There is scope for a horror movie based on being rained-in on a midge-infested island for two weeks with a houseful of children - who then decide that Scrabble isn't the most exciting game on earth.

DETECTIVES are widening the search for a gunman who murdered an Asian waiter at an Indian restaurant on Orkney. Officers plan to extend inquiries after the investigation into the murder - the first in 25 years on the island - failed to produce any positive leads in its first 10 days.

SATANIC abuse does not exist, a Government inquiry has concluded. A three-year investigation funded by the Department of Health has found no evidence to substantiate any of the 84 cases in which it was alleged that children were sexually abused during satanic, black magic rites.