I hear on the local news that David Cameron spent a few hours in Shetland yesterday. He met with  some of the island’s mini-bigwigs, saw a few sites on the mainland and never came near Unst. Supposedly he is the first serving prime minister to come to Shetland since Margaret Thatcher.

I spent years of my life keeping up to date with the news. When a BBC correspondent I attended the daily news conference during which the day’s agenda was set. There was an assumed, yet unwritten, set of BBC news values that we all followed. What made a good story, what should we cover? Much of what later appeared as the news of the day was determined by government PR machines. This was especially true as elections approached. For instance, staged photo opportunities and sound bites were given priority over good, researched reporting. It was easy to gather and predictable.

So David Cameron coming to Shetland became news. Not national perhaps, but local and regional. Not that he did anything of significance or said anything important, he was simply here.

When I am painting or writing here on Unst much of what passes as news in the minds of metropolitan journalists passes me by. I catch up with newspapers on line and sometimes get yesterday’s Daily Telegraph second hand and a day late from my neighbour. I no longer recognise the names of celebrities and when I read the popular press on my computer whole sections of gossip are to me an alien world.

Yet interestingly my empathy with the suffering of the world grows as my knowledge of the ephemeral details of the news diminishes. My ability to spot a phoney story or a hidden agenda has increased in line with my detachment from the feeling that I need to keep up to date.

There was a saying I came across years ago that I rather like. Trying to understand the world by keeping up with the news is like trying to tell the time with a watch that has the hour and minute hands missing and only the second hand working.