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Island Blog – Everyone Can

When my mind tells me ‘I can’t’, we have a conversation. I could be facing a load of wood or a confront of people and the ‘I can’t’ thing dives in, sets about settling, because it never comes without followers, all of which are obviously well paid. I’ve met this often in my life, even in early days, at school, in jobs, at socials, the ‘I can’t’ thing. It tore me away and down the fire escape many times whence I would land at the Ground Floor, in the dark ,and feeling over stupid. Later in my life I learned to challenge the thoughts, the immediacy of them, the arrogance. I would question thus……

Who says I can’t? To be honest, this was always met with silence and the scurry of disappearing feet, and, more importantly, no vocal response. No substance at all. Voices from the past, fears of the now, of the future, that’s who was telling me ‘I can’t’ and they have no substance at all because they are all dead. I was the one carrying them along and they were all probably fed up with me and had been for years.

So, here I am facing a screwdriver. I think it’s a phillips, or maybe a flat one, not sure. I need one just this size I think, for this saucepan handle, it’s wobbly. The tool bag is full of metal things which confound me, things with handles and specific tasks. However, there is only me here to unscrew and tighten back up the damn thing. I brush away the I can’t, although it rose high in my throat, I confess. Challenging the denial of my competence, I choose the right frickin screwdriver and tighten the handle until I hear it choking. Done.

I face a pile of heavy timber or a situation I used to sort out in quick speed, once. The ‘I can’t’ rises but I have it harnessed now and pull back. Too many fire escapes and ending up alone in the dark. I know how to build a fire, how to light it, how to work the kindling, feeding it gently in, building a cautious top, reading the indraft, sensing the upper air challenges, the swift windshape, I know it. All I have to do right now is to lift the timber inside. My olding fingers squeak and fumble. Ok, I say to them, nae worries, how about two hands for this one? We work together as we load a big tub, with handles. I can lift this, we can lift this, and we do. Tipping the load into the basket and setting the fire, hearing the clickquick of kindler giggles, the slower rise to power of the bigger logs, the breathing of the fire, the settling of embers, I know I can. And this knowing tells me I can do more than I can’t.

I think everyone can.

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Island Blog – Feeling Fine

I’m sitting here in the dark, the outside dark deciding it all. I have candles lit, a fire dancing flames. I have music, the Russians just now, such excellent rap in a language I cannot understand, a good backlight of rhythm and music, good spacing, good gaps. Count the beats. 8 to a bar. 7 is a challenge, key changes, ones which would have had my knuckles rapped in the olden days as a music student. Probably why I was expelled. I listen to my playlist in this warm darkness, this candle-lit surround, the quiet of the out there, supposedly. The division of walls thinks me. In here there is warming food, warm candles, warm fire, safety. Out there, it could ice up, blow a hooligan with a ridonculous name, trees could fall, anyone could.

We make up stories for our lives, who we think we are. As contexts change, as they always do, we fight to find ourselves, tripping over new fashion, dire straights, unexpected turmoil and then another blast blows in with ice teeth and closed arms. It’s exhausting, this whole living thing. However, it seems to me that the young have it. They aren’t peppered with the tracer bullets of my generation and perhaps the one below me. They are fresh and excited, confident and moving on in directions I certainly never knew as options. I like that. I hear them out with pals, celebrating, their love of study, see pics of their peer group, hear their determined hope for our future.

I feel fine about all of that.

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Island Blog – The Feckin Cold

You can say this. I have checked. If you swift off a vowel and pull down another, pull in an alternative and jinx with the ing of itself, a ditsy swing with the ‘acceptable’ , `you shift the lines.

I like to shift the lines. I have fat-battled with dictionnary confines for years and will continue to lift my sabre. ~~ I love the language, the english lanuage, it was my study for all my student life which, as you may know, wasn’t that long. But my draw to wordage, the melding and infuriation of words, those word which wanted to move forward, against a finite within the darkened and cloaked halls of the Official Dictionary, the word is pretty much spent. Nowhere to go with an ing at the arse of itself.

Back to the cold. I feel it, smell it, see the seep of it under my doorframes. I also remember Tapselteerie and that cold was pervasive, almost vindictive and it lived on for weeks, months. When that first ‘Spring’ elixered itself in, it brought no warmth. I do remember walking out with collies, with shivers, to check the dawnlight lambing, the frost like a stopping on the parks, each ewe lit up by my torch, icicles lifting from each fleece. I remember feeling shy about my feeling cold thing. It’s different now, for me. No sheep, no dawn walks, no need for me in the cycle of life here. My home is warm and I have no calls to be out there in the out there of anything. It is a loss for me.

I come down the stairs just to come down the stairs. I smell the old ways, It comes from my right, up there, somewhere, The rut is over, the hinds are safe, Sheep wander like numpties, grazing. I see a good mother hind, her two year calf with her, her one year boy with nubby felt horns. They graze without fear, just there. I tell them, I ak no threat. Their heads go down. They’re not afraid of me.

I fry mushrooms in garlic, boiled linguine. I am warm in here.

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Island Blog – I remember my Bear

Finally I reconnect to the interswirp. It feels grand, altogether. Initially this whole not connected thing was a very big thing until i settled into it’s itship. Then, on all those mornings of dark and silence and no connection to the ferocious and destructive and illusionary twufful of that connectivity I heard the owls, tawny, saw their flight, heard their focus on prey. I heard the burn in spate, the rush over stones, the power of down water, the reflect of mountain springs deep down, always there. I heard the first blackbird, the feisty robin. I heard gravel sqinch at the first early lefting for work beyond Tapselteerie. I noticed a tap drip. I heard the squink of a sudden. And when I was amidships in all of that, I remembered my bear. I had him for so long, through school and well beyond. He was there along the Tapselteerie story until he wasn’t. He meant so much to me. He was bare of fur, naked bear but so precious.

I was always, always, ok, more than, about breakages. There were plenty in our life. But I do remember My Bear, when a pup, I forget which, tore him apart. I remember the moment in the Tapselteerie kitchen, the stuffing all out and about, the wee dog with no clue what he/she had done. It thinks me.

I forget many things, many many things, but I remember my Bear.

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Island Blog – The First Monday

T’is the Oneth of the Month and tomorrow will be another oneth, a morning when I won’t be prepped and ready for work at the Best Cafe Ever. It feels me weird. For so long a Sunday has trumpeted the song of the week, or, to be more accurate, a diffusion, collusion of songs, all collected, collated and dissed or hissed at, applauded or deplaned on first ascent. We play that gyball in the Servery, snidey at ‘gross’ choices, lifting at other Great Bangers, whatever the hec that means. I have brought some of the latters and they even stayed on, played on. Even the very young connect to the ‘old’ it seems.

November is a quiet one. I can use that word now, the one never spoke within the tricolour of wheels, running, turning, always getting most of us somewhere into the onslaught of tourist invasions, and still upright/uptight/alright. It’s a team thing. When you have others who step in as you confuse the electronic till thing into a tangled forest, who proffer a gentle I Can Take Over, thus saving your face from utter collapse, you know you work within a great team. They did that for me, the younger ones, and (let’s be honest) they are all younger, quicker, brighter, bouncier. When did I last ‘bounce’? I forget, but I do remember bouncing and without any belief that I would ever not.

Welcome all to November. It is sunny here and crispy ish, the sky blue, the clouds tipsy with relief after being blown apart in the storms. I wish you all a beautiful and thinkfull autumn. There may be trouble ahead but I have learned over 7 decades that trouble is a weak infiltrator and can be decked so easily with a well aimed attitude swipe and the boots to step over it.

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Island Blog – Without It

I’ve just driven a bit, up a track and in my scomfies to find a signal. Since the last two storms with all the leaks and the salt-swiped windows, my wifi is dead. This is the 6th day and it feels like 6 weeks. My neighbours have wifi. The village has wifi. Not me and it is more than an irritation. It is complete silence. No contact with my kids, no music, no emails, texts, whatsapps, no emails, no blog opportunities. How much I have taken for granted. I cannot contact BT nor any other provider. Emails take to be read and responded to, the latter I will miss. I drive down the village or up to the hill above the graveyards and get some reception there. Mostly, I listen to an audio book, feel very alone and do my very best to love it all, knowing, as I do, that way back there was none of this dependence, nor the need of it.

I find that, in this short time, I don’t feel comfortable in my clothes, that time stretches like toffee, that this whole growing old thing is no fun at all. I look for the fun, I do, but anyone who does this looking for fun thing must agree it’s exhausting at times. I notice – I flipping notice everything within this silence. The wave of a skinbone birch tree, the passing of walkers, the way my front gate is about to collapse through rot. I notice the birds I feed, the perk of a robin, the flutter of ring doves, the dance of copper leaves on the track.

At this point, a man might ask me to get to the point. There isn’t one. This is a weird time and because it’s the weekend, I could be days more without connection or connectivity. I do visit friends but friends are couples and they all have lives and those lives are busy and connected. Perhaps that’s my point. When I go back to my lovely home with its wood burner and welcome I will say this, that I have become dependent on the ease of connectivity, even though I knew no such opportunity through my younger life, and it is very hard to be so completely without it.

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Island Blog – The Cusp and Check the Nuts

We’re always on one, a cusp, those of us who run too fast towards a something or a someone, or a dream. For now with my sensible hat one which, if I am honest, never did fit and always fell over one eye or both, we are on the cusp of a stormo dueblo. It dithers me, like you on the cusp of the unknowable. We will be here again and that’s for sure. We are already are, in a different dimension, among the squigilliounaria of the fictious confines and controls of social media. Most of it I can laugh at, but I am not 15 and lonely and rejected at school because I have specs, spots, big boobs, no boobs, white skin, black skin, big feet. Etcetera. Those kids are on the cusp every single day. Did we clock this as parents in our busy working lives? I didn’t.

Back to the storm. Today, I walked into an unnatural still in my friends, the trees. I stopped for a chat with the Horse Chestnut which always yellows before her sister a few feet away as if she thinks she is older, and she might be. She is also skinnier, older and grown in a water challenge. I admire her, and say so. Further up the track, and all alone, I meet stripped silver birch, hazels with few nuts. I have seen this before. A learned old guy told me that trees will produce what is required for the ahead of time, for the winter. No conkers either, or is it neither? So, in theory, there is less need for nuts.

I hear people talking though. Less nuts, oh dear, a loss, a fear. Honestly, I want to laugh. I/we pursued a dream and landed here, but even before that when we farmed in Norfolk, there were years of no nuts, no a lot of things, failed crops, the scant knickerless blank of fields failed. It was a cusp, of course it was. The horror of loss and lack and the fear of going again an almost joker in the midst. But we had really good workers, wonderful dynamic people who turned up every day on their own cusp, bringing their own hopes for being involved, valued and paid. We kept going, as we did up here in the tangles of island switcher winds and wildings and sudden capistrata. And I am glad we did. I remember the savings and the smiles and the come into the warm and the wild out-there crazy nights, the camaraderie, the togetherness, the sharing. What do we do when, as I hear, food will become short? Of course it will (duh), because thousands of fields burned in their wheat/barley/oat grow. Farmers are seriously on the cusp.

The thing that bothers me most is that far too many of us expect to be ‘provided for’ expecting that what we once had, the nuts and the fields of barley are somehow our right. They aren’t. I watch the sky, sense the birds and their changes, listen to the wild, walk into it. Check the nuts.

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Island Blog – The Best Cafe Ever

On my way to work this morning to the Best Cafe Ever, two rainbows rose like double ellipses, I had to pull over for a photo catch. I couldn’t see their landing spot but I saw their launchpads. A field, just a field, of scarped silage, the huge lemony bags stacked and ready for the winter ahead. I watched the rise and flow of ancient grassy folds and thought about the old rocks beneath, the upholders. I like to get to work early. I like the set-up, the fill of the water dispenser, the lift of teaspoon jam into the tiny beautiful cups of hand-made pottery. I like the set up of tables, adding wee rubber wedges ‘neath legs which, being uniform, cannot accommodate the tapselteerie of old floor tiles. I like to wash up all of the huge pile of now freed bake tins, cake, scone and bun containers, the whisks and piping wotwots, the many scootcups of tried-out coffee until the maestro gets the blend just right for the day ahead. I tweak what flowers we have now and the lights go on in a welcome. In the summer months we can see many folk lurking beyond the doors, but not now. Now the autumn is here and, with her arrival, visitors few down. Our working hours are less, our visitors more likely to be locals, and we have the time to stop and chat, to hear about their lives. We have one week left and I will miss the connection with the team, with the couple who took the brave decision to make this cafe their own.

I am so glad they did. When I, with much doubt in my mind, asked for work with them in 2025, I really didn’t think they would take me on, old me, but they did and it made me realise I can be a right eejit about myself. I love every minute of my part in the team, a team they have created. Every single one of us work for them because of them. I realise, if they read this, that I am about to embarass them, but it needs to be said. Every step of the way, they have been gentle and kind and encouraging. They have, in difficult situations, found a positive way for us all to move forward. They are welcoming every morning and thankful after every shift, however long, however overwhelming, which has definitely been the case at times with a sudden and demanding rush. For such youngsters they amaze me. To be exhausted, as they must have been over the past two island seasons, and yet still to turn up, to find ways around confounding situations, and more, to keep tabs on each member of staff, to watch, to allow, to show respect and kindness even if that meant one member down, is the evidence and the truth of true leadership.

I look forward to next year, as long as it doesn’t come too soon! I can hear them say that. It remembers me of my time as a young ‘boss’ in the melee and unpredictability of visitors to where (as widely pressed in the press) has earned itself the title ‘The Place to Visit in the UK’. For now, or soon, we rest awhile, even though there may be weekends through December when the cafe welcomes us into the warm and the bakes and the chat and the laughs. And there is always that in the Best Cafe Ever. There is always yes we can do that, unless it’s impossible. There is always, there is a play area down there for little ones. There is always, yes please bring your dogs in, yes please move tables together, yes we will sort the water you brought in on your soaked coats, yes we can do a smaller this, a larger that. It is a Yes place. To work within such a team is inspirational. We need, we want to be dynamic and engaged every minute with full compass thinking and response because of them.

This place alives me. They do, the young leaders. I thank them.

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Island Blog – Perhaps

I remember being young. We all do when we aren’t. However it isn’t always helpful, often is not. On facebook and my blog there’s this daily beckoning to look back as if ‘back’ is somehow better than ‘now’. In my daily quest to interrogate the efficacy of looking back with all its etceteras is in question because the wishes/fishes automatically arise when they have no right to. Once the western world decided to possibly but not always gently, rub out the ones like me who are old in years, and to effectively stop us doing all the things we still want to do instead of fanning what flames we still can generate, it doesn’t promise much for the middle aged, never mind the young of today. I should tell you that being old in years has zip to do with being ‘old’. Old people can still dance and when they do, let me tell you, there is admiration for their efforts. The sore bits, the discomforts, the whateverness of their current lives do not stop, don’t even hesitate in the thrum of life, the thrill of it, the desire to make fire, to make music, to dance. A word to the middle aged. Stop right now with your ‘stopping’ tactics. We made a huge difference once. We danced on tables, knocked back the shots, sang in public, sorted issues you may never encounter. We fixed boats and planes and household equipment. We fought for justice, made peace with warmongers, cleared a million tables and lived on barely any income. We tamped fires, delivered calves at midnight in January. We negotiated deals, sussed out falsehoods, calmed storms on a daily basis. Too many excellent humans are tidied away just because they can’t see so well, or hear, or who have become tripeds, or who forget to shave or who can only manage soup.

Looking back reminds me of what I could once do without any effort and of the loss of that. This is why I work at the Best Cafe Ever and want to keep doing so if that is an option. I can see how things are in this western thinking wherein, it seems to me, the bottom line is everything. People have considerably less value. Driving home today after work, my thinks were on this subject. Everything about a really dynamic life, regardless of age, involves people. Yes we are infuriating with all our allergies and quirks, our beliefs and skewed parabolas. We throw hissy fits over ‘stuff’ and we demand when we might just ask; we storm about in temper or acquiesce ourselves into a puddle; we spit when we might polish; we are selfish, damaged, awkward, grubby, weird. Of course we are. We are human.

In any work, any life, there are options. Will I choose to be arrogant, dismissive, ‘up myself’ in this one life, regardless of past influences however strong? Or will I make myself anew and at every age of my age? I ask myself that daily. It’s a good question because the answer and the actions thereafter are all under my control. I meet kindness and interest in my cafe work. I also meet the opposite, but I tell you this that, once welcomed and faced with a big display of cakes and the island teas and the magnificent coffees and hot chocolates, I sense a softening. It wonders me, this. Perhaps kindness and time and a big smile and helpfulness is all it took to melt that armour. Perhaps.

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Island Blog – Looking for Parsnips

An ordinary day. Go to work, work hard, come home, iron things, manifold them because it is a right shite humping a wee iron across the surface of a set of overly decorated and bedazzled super-king duvet covers and then submissioning them into a shape any woman, and it is usually a woman, can manage without personal harmage. I know that ‘housekeeping’ requires this effortitude, but I do wonder how many recognise the work involved. I do not include my bosses because I did elect to take this (small you would think) pile of laundry to help my team at the Best Cafe Ever. A doddle, you might suggest, but not if you are me with my standards, Had you watched me with ‘my standards’ you might have seen my head shake. My recall? Tapselteerie Kitchen, everything dark, all asleep and me ironing bed linen, napkins, table cloths, I could not go to sleep until my standards for me were accomplished. Stacked and warmly loved, I did climb the stairs. It’s my thing and still is.

This ironing thing….a few duvet covers, but with lips and otherness I never had experienced before….. duvet covers were squared off or rectangled off and with no lips or other suchness. They just fitted the damn duvets. Nowadays they need their own voice. Also, they don’t have poppers or buttons. They have folds and inserts and what is happening to this world, because it sure sucks for the housekeeping crew. No question mark required. Is it an aspiration for elevation, as if we look better for all the faff and unnecessary folds and flaps and buttons? I pass on that one.

I like ordinary. There’s a connectional direct with whoever I meet. We are raw, scared, wishing we had done things differently, all that and we meet on a colding rainfold street, looking for parsnips or the daily paper or for a delivery from the island vet or just to connect. Or just to look for parsnips.