Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I gave a short recap of the history of the London Bridge and, for Americans, described how to distinguish it from the fancier Tower Bridge. Sim, after documenting many miles of virtual walks in London, shared photos from her actual trip. Tina reviewed Living the Dream, a book about 20-somethings getting a start in life in London. Becky reviewed the 1968 mini-series of The Portrait of a Lady.

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The stars of Shetland are Douglas Henshall as Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, Alison O’Donnell as Detective Constable Alison MacIntosh (called by the nickname ‘Tosh’), and the dramatic scenery of sea and sky and landscape in coastal Scotland. Shetland dramatizes a series of crime novels by Ann Cleeves. She also wrote the Vera Stanhope novels that were the foundation of another series, that I loved, Vera.

I admit that I turned on closed captioning while watching this series. Without it, I was missing too many Scottish words and pronunciations. With it, I developed a fondness for the characters and culture.

An early episode let us witness an Up Helly Aa yule festival, complete with torches and a Viking longship. I also got a kick out of several episodes set in midsummer. Many of the characters complained of lack of sleep. There is so little darkness in the Shetland Islands at that time of year that hardly any one can get any rest.

All three series are available to stream on Netflix, 14 episodes all together. A fourth series has begun filming, according to Wikipedia.