Birdsong. The mellow and sweet of it. The shrieks of panic (about everything) and the stone silence after a successful hawk attack. The soar of a violin, be it inside a symphony or a saucy leap into something new that surprises. I like something new and the Something Newers, those who take what is the establishment thinking and cut it up like the icon on a stunning church window which still shows the old and the acceptable but with lead lines of distance in between. lead. lead. 2 different ways of saying that word. One a noun, one a verb. I’m kind of fond of the verb, although I still pay homage to the noun. I often mix my nouns and verbs, intentionally, because the rebel writer in me just loves a feisty dance, which is what it becomes, if challenged. I remember yawningly dull dinner companions, (whose ties were tied so tight they could never have done ‘feisty’ nor ‘dance’) back in the day when dinners were social events and there was this fricken great list of all those you couldn’t not invite, and they always came onatop. It meant that the ones you actually liked, the ones with music in the soles of their feet, got slewed off like stones from a melting glacier. My only consolation in that thought was the fact that the glacier will eventually melt, whereas the stones will not.

Music. I listen to it all the day long. Could be classical, could be wild music, aka, the sound of the islands, rebel songs and tunes, could be great poetry in contemporary songs or it could be those songs that make absolutely no sense at all because the writers were stoned and in the back of a van returning from a gig and just let rip. I find solace in music. None in talk talk or skinny chat about the weather, nor in Love Island (sorry) or anything that shows me the world has gone quite bonkers. I read books on how it was/is to truly survive. Backdrop could be Cold War Russia, downtown Calcutta, booze soaked Greenland, A Home of Well Concealed Abuse, all sorts, all fenced off with something Rabbit Proof that stretches for hundreds of sandy sun-burned miles. And why is this? Because I want to learn how to survive. I want to hear through music and hawk attacks how sharp-witted I need to be. I don’t want more dresses or new lampshades or even a personalised number plate on Maz The Mini. All of this is dust in the wind.

Now this is not doom and gloom but the truth, and our children’s children should hear about it. Not in a way that tells them how it was in the old days; not, this is my only shawl and we hope it will rain/not rain kind of way. Not in the melting glacier misery or the manipulation of huge corporations selling poison as if it was hip. None of that. We should be teaching them (girls in particular) how to change a tyre on a wheelbarrow. How to recognise wild herbs on the banks of the road; how to replace a door handle. What stones work best when making a boundary wall. How to sew a hem (for goodness sake); how to create food for 8 when you only have enough for four.

Now that is music.

The air is still, the sea-loch a mirror. Through my window I watch a reflection of trees, unremarkable hazels turned into art on a saltwater canvas, painted by a master. To my left a little bay curves like the back of a new moon. I see deer running through the shallows, kicking up the still waters into a playful fun, their heads tossing carefree on this fine summer morning. They move more slowly now, heads bent to the saltgrass, soft brown velvet against the green. A family of divers paddle across the mirror, making echo ripples that won’t make land for some time. I go out to feed the birds and Jock is here, as Jock always is. I sit a minute just breathing in the gentle sunshine air and he runs up to me. Each morning he gets closer in response to my welcome voice. He looks at me and then back to the food bin, once, twice, as if to remind me of something I may have forgotten. Bird breakfast. Ok, Jock, I tell him, you win, I’ll bring it out. He follows me, landing with what must be known as a crash in ‘blackbird’ on the fence, like a startle, just inches away. I’m glad it wasn’t you the hawk got yesterday, I say, and he chirrups his own relief. Even though I know the hawk is also hungry and with young to feed, I live in hope that hawks will turn vegetarian.

It thinks me of looking; of what I see and of what that means to me, of how it alters my inner eye, the one that so often chooses wraiths over benign spirits. Those wraiths are always available and not just to me. I can listen (yawning internally) more than often to someone with the thinking that everything has the potential to go wrong all of the time. And they are correct, it does, but it can also go far right, even if we have no control over either. Or do we?

If I watch horror and cruelty on tv, the chances are I will hold those images inside. They can and do influence my quality of sleep, my way of seeing the world, life itself and the colour of the day around me. If I decide not to infect my head with horror and cruelty, even though I know it exists, and everywhere, I can make room for light and bright which also exist, and everywhere. Reading newspapers or listening to the news are two things I abandoned years ago. I can tell you who the prime minister is (for now) but I would rather bury my nose in a good and well-crafted book, thanks all the same, than I would fret my teeth down to a pavement worrying about the state of things in this world.

What I choose to look at and how much welly I give to that lookingness is up to me. Staring across a tidal sea-loch can take up a whole morning, give or take a few snatched coffees and when I do turn away, the image glows like warm embers within. I carry that image with me all day long, feeding it with music, conversation, good books. This image calms me as I breath it deep inside, watch the embers flare into new life. No matter what wraithlike turbulence or self-doubt, chaos or disaster comes my way, I have prepped for them all. I have a dream world inside me and nobody can get their mitts on any of it. Nobody. And, like Alice, I step right in.

Hawks will come. But somewhere in between attacks, there is the chance of sunlight on my back and the wind beneath my wings.

That word took on a whole different meaning once Golam turned it into a destructive obsession. Ok, he was consumed by greed. Like the worldly world. Love of money and all that. But I think me about the real meaning of that word and it plumped like a sclatch to my stomach after I spontaneously offered to drive 3 of my little grand-daughters through to the local town for an ice-cream and to deliver one, the eldest, back to her mama. I thought….here I am driving such a precious cargo on a switchback road with idiot tourists who have no reverse gear in their smart cars and, suddenly, I am aware of ‘precious’.

I was headed for a lip and eyebrow wax and tint. Not the lips but the eyebrows being as they are, curved ghosts above my eyes. We arrived early and found a parking space near the ice cream parlour, originally the public toilets but, thankfully no more, although those who hope for relief half ways around the curve of the Atlantic harbour town might think differently. Ice creamed up, we found an newly relieved bench overlooking the boats. Sailing boats, fishing boats, weirdo looking boats and commercial sea trip boats all bobbed or sailed or motored passed us as we all tried to help the 2 year old manage her fast melting cone. She had a lot to say which doesn’t help. About the shells and the fish and whatsthat of everything including purple-hearted jelly fish and upstanding kelp trees that shimmy in the tidal flow.

Once mopped up and back in the car, I strain my eyes to see if there was a space nearer to the salon. Och, we’ll just wing it, and we did and there is a god of parking opportunities because we found one just outside our destination. In we go, much to the aws and aahs of those within, with their hair in silver foil or their fingers extended for a rainbow nail touch up. Well, my grandchildren are stunners with their carrot red and strawberry blonde hair plus the fact that they, as little ones, are always so very precious to the community. I remember arriving here from Englandshire 40 years ago and marvelling at the adoration of little ones. Little ones came to absolutely everything, however late that everything ran into the night. It was, and is, the island way and my own children benefited from it on regular occasions. In the throwout far-flung places of the world true family includes community and nobody is an island. We are, at first, caught in the web of it, we might struggle to escape, but, eventually we can see the milk, bread and brandy of such a life, one where if you don’t decide to do something then it just won’t happen sort of life because when the storms hit, everyone turns for home and we, out here, must work our own way. I love it now. and this place isn’t even remote, not by remote island standards. We get our post every day, in the main, but I know of women running households where it isn’t just the post that doesn’t arrive, but essential supplies for family and beasts, and that, for a whole storm born winter.

So, we arrive at the salon. The only one on the island and born from a dream of a young girl who has turned her business into everyone else’s. Even the men come for a haircut, into the warm and welcoming easy-osy atmosphere. It’s like a hug. We snake into the little room, holding hands, the 2 year old nervous. I lie on the bed. you look tired Granny, says one. Just wait, I reply, I am about to be messed about with. Tint is applied to my brows and wax to my upper lip. Hahahahaha, the girls laugh. Granny, you look ridiculous! And so I do at this point, with purple wax across my face, and black eyebrows good enough for a goth. All the time, the woman with a dream chats to the little girls, still holding hands, as she puts me through a few ouch-ouchies. And, I am done. Ridiculous now? I ask. You look beautiful, they say. Well, that is wise, as I am the one driving them home.

Precious. Moments. Grandchildren. The trust of a mother who let me be spontaneous. Precious, this life, these times, this moment. Precious ‘not to be wasted or treated carelessly.’

I concur.

I get throughly sogg-droggled walking back along the cliff path. Drops of rain are heavier beneath the canopy of trees but before I reach said canopy the rain is soft and warm on my face and I don’t mind getting wet at all. Ahead of me is a peahen. She notices me and keeps looking back. I am closing the distance between us. I can’t say it feels normal to go walking with a peahen in the rain on a path that runs from a lighthouse to the village, especially as this is not peahen country.

When I first arrived for my 2 day respite break with a friend, I met the peahen in the little garden, all freshly mown and protected by ancient stone walls that have probably kept the sea back since the lighthouse cottages were first built. There is no car access here, only a skinny clifftop path hewn into the rock face, one that rises into a sky that was blue yesterday and punctuated by soaring white tailed eagles. Today the sky is closed, yellowy clouds pulled across her face, not an eagle in sight. Only a peahen at ground level. But my friend does not own a peahen. This now bedraggled creature with a pretty face and a tantalising fascinator perched atop her head, just appeared one day. We feed her cooked chickpeas and boiled potatoes, although she would choose snakes and bugs over our offering any day. We tell her to find her own. Some day she will be captured, bagged and returned to whence she came, but, for now, she prettifies the place and is absolutely silent, unlike a peacock who would split the air with piercing cries and wake us all at dawn.

As I walk back through the rain, I think over the past two days filled with laughter and chat and a bit too much wine. It shined on us, the sun, and we sat on a driftwood bench in the warm garden talking over pretty much everything, including peahens. I also think, as I near the end of the 2k path, having met not one soul, of homecoming. I always need to come home again, wherever I escape to and for however long. Like the peahen I am out of my environment and that ‘outing’ revives me and alters my thinking. 2 days ago I was exhausted and diminished. Now I am feeling stronger and those things that burst me into tears just smile me. They will pass, after all, as everything always does. I will deal with the things I can and ignore the things I cannot and, although that balance is hardly Libran, I can choose to stand on the high side until the scales are level once more.

One day this peahen will be returned to the farm whence she came. What her story is, her reason for leaving is only a guess. She seemed happy there and this place is a long walk away. I think of those who must have met her on her journey and been surprised, astonished, even. It’s a wild place, this, all rock and ocean and skinny unpeopled paths. But she is here. For now. I look back and see her pick her delicate way down to the shore. And then, I turn, and head for home.

When a child is born, nobody can be certain of the outcome, of who that child will become. Children are not, after all, tailor made, nor are they clones of their parents. Some children go so far off piste as to be barely recognisable when they land on the runway of adulthood. A nice well-under-control parent pair can birth a rebel in tooth and claw with piercings and green hair, one who marches with banners in full view of the neighbours in bright orange doc Martens and a tassel frock. Sometimes a rebel spirit grows quietly in the darkness of her developing mind, speaking nothing out, lips sealed as she appears to worship at the shrine of Good Behaviour and Expectation with the rest of the well-under-control family.

Then, one day when nobody is paying much attention she revolts. I’m going out, she says from a decent doorway distance. It may be Sunday, when nobody goes out if they’re wise. Lunch together on this day is not a matter of personal choice. But that is precisely why she chooses it. She may face opposition, but she has made up her own mind, possibly for the first time ever. And out she goes, her back ablaze with fiery darts, her eyes on the horizon. Coming home again is a tad scary but she has shown her true colours and now everything changes. There is an elephant in the room. She can see it and so can they, even through the mist of hurt and rejection.

The first time I heard the saying ‘there’s an elephant in the room’, I laughed out loud. Just the picture in my head was enough to rise me a guffaw. Obviously, nobody in the same room as an elephant has the option to move. We are all, in effect, pinned to the walls unless one of us acknowledges the elephant, which is not the problem, although the poor thing may well consider itself to be just that. Elephants are free roaming, given half a chance, and are accustomed to their eyes on a horizon that may well be hundreds of miles away, a horizon punctuated by the odd tree, as yet un-elephanted. They are less at home if surrounded by armchairs and people who seem to be pinned to the walls, mouths empty.

Growing olden, I am less and less able to accept an elephant in the room. Issues that used to be something ‘we don’t confront’ just irritate me out of sotto voce and resignation. I name the elephant. And then there is silence and a whole lot of empty room. It feels weird. I consider all those times I have let something go and I wonder where those somethings end up. Do they dissipate in the winds of time, providing they are kept quietly in the dark and not fed? I don’t believe so. I think they grow like mushrooms. When a person has the courage to name an elephant, they extend an invitation for talk, for conversation and resolution. It is extremely uncomfortable when someone names an elephant I have led in, so I know that feeling well, but it is tinged with relief. It’s out there now. The name is spoken and heard and the elephant desperately wants to get back to the tundra and the broiling sun. However, there is no going back for the people involved. There is only change afoot and it is one that can make or break a friendship.

I have often wished for more congruence in my life, more connection between the inside and the out but my historical hang-ups have strong monkey arms and no plan to let go. It is and always has to be a considered choice of action, a decision to be congruent. I remember asking a friend once if I could visit and she said no, it’s not convenient. I was shocked and hurt and yet now I see her just being honest, being congruent. It didn’t mean she was dumping me. We, as humans, are so easily hurt and that hurt can become a poor driver. We are always 50 per cent of both the problem and the solution and there are times when our hang-ups can have us believing the world as we know it has just ended when all someone said is no, it’s not convenient. We create a monster from a little hurt. It’s ridiculous and it’s human. Had she said ‘yes, come’ just because her parental teaching and expectations rose from their graves to crowd her head, she would have been false to herself and on edge with me. I would have clocked it regardless of her TV presenter performance. I would have waved goodbye to both her and the elephant and probably not called her again for ages, if at all, because she obviously doesn’t like me any more. Ridiculous indeed. However, that is not how it went and that friend and I are closer than ever.

Not being honest to self or honest to others may sound and feel like politeness but it drains and exhausts over time. Finding the self-love to name an elephant is not easy but so very freeing. Discovering that a friendship is no longer of value (too many elephants) is no discovery at all for it probably never was an honest one anyway. I just couldn’t extricate myself from it before because I was unable to see my own value. I knew this person made me feel uncomfortable, wanted me to be what they wanted me to be, but I thought so little of myself that this seemed like a challenge I ought to meet. Ok, I’ll be the person you want me to be. It’s ok. But it isn’t ok over time and we can barely see each other for elephants. And, remember, confined elephants will trample.

I like my sheets crispy. Towels too. Not for me a soft towel. I like things to snap when I fold them, like gunshot. I am a snap tight sort of woman and that applies to many things, things I can control. I like a tidy desk, not a muddle of ignored papers, pens that don’t work or those things found on the floor that tell me nothing of their usefulness. I have thrown much away during my lifetime, sometimes with a twinge of regret once I discover, after the bin men have been, that the red knob with the shaft of a screw is, in fact, part of a wonky chair, one that will remain wonky for the rest of its days. I am not perfect. I like honest conversation and find the murk and fog of incongruence baffling. I like clear sounds and clear vision. I like to know what I am doing next and then to do it without having to stumble through the mists of explanation and justification.

When things happen inside a life, bringing associated clutter, I feel the rise of claustrophobia. However, when a girl is in a relationship with another who has no problems at all around clutter, this claustrophobia demands middle management skills. Oh lawks, more inner work. In the olden days when I was young and full of a determined conviction that I could change anyone through adult negotiations, I ricocheted between frustration and hope. Now I know better. Leopards and spots.

The kit and caboodle needed for a failing body and mind is enough to halt anyone in their tracks, middle management aside. There are zimmers, grabbers, walking sticks, a mobility scooter the size of a small cafe, and a quad bike. All essential aids for as much independence as possible and quite right too, but there is one person who never uses any of the above and yet who must learn to accept their looming presence, the poor parking and what look like railway tracks etched into the shagpile. A small child could get lost in the furrows. Mostly, I can do it, be patient I mean, even if it does infuriate when the small cafe is blocking the back door and I want out. Fortunately we have other doors. The quad can be squinty parked across the shingle place for my car. It isn’t done to upset me, of course not, but just abandoned in the most convenient place. Sometimes I can’t even get to the bird feeders for abandoned kit. Lucky I am slim. However, this is not a moan but really an observation of what is. Others will feel as I do. The desire to make things as easy as possible for the disabled one is natural. They were independent once, after all, and all this stuff was for ageing grannies and grandads. It didn’t really affect anyone on a visit. But, living with it does affect, however marvellous a woman’s attitude may be. The most demanding part of caring lies not in the physical demands, but in the mental and emotional requirements for each day.

I rise early, come downstairs and snap the house into order. Early, there is no kit over which to trip and in minutes my lovely island home is ready for the day. I breakfast, make coffee, feed the birds and tidy the dishes away. Soon I will hear sounds of life and himself will float down on the chairlift, down into the snap tidy house. And me? Well, I will go back upstairs to dive into a good book in order to immerse myself in someone else’s story.

A word. As far as I am concerned, throughout my whole life I have given you respect. that respect is not personally delivered, in that I cannot walk up to your door and hand it over like a present, but I have offered it, nonetheless. As ever, there is no response from you but still I give it. Now why do you think that is, hmmm? My favourite answer is that, although I cannot see you, I have a sneaky feeling you are there and not as a neighbour but as a man in control. Apparently you are everywhere and that is just a tad weird, not to say spooky. No other person I know is everywhere.

But I have issues. In my learnings about you, I have picked up that you only ever want us to be happy, providing we keep off any worldly addictions. Well, there’s an issue for starters. If we weren’t supposed to enjoy tobacco, why did you plant it? if we aren’t allowed any red wine, who stuck all those healthy grapes in the ground, and who worked out how to ferment and trample them barefoot in order to produce liquor? Don’t tell me that wasn’t anything to do with you because I don’t believe it for one minute. I hear that you are the voice within so I tolerate no flapaway excuses from you. And, besides, you are everywhere, remember?

Then there’s the issue of money. How come it is in the hands of the rich and not the poor? I am neither, but I still can wet my metaphorical pants as I watch the month slow to a crawl whilst the bills seem to turn into hares all cantering to the finish. If I am supposed to be happy, why can’t I buy 4 jumpers from H&M just because I am sick to death of the same old same old, all peppered with pills and yawling around me like an overworked sail? You, of course, are not even remotely bothered with the jumper problem. I doubt you wear anything at all being, as you are, an everywhere spirit. Clothes, as you have already set in print, scribed long time ago, are irrelevant, but if you can just imagine we minions stepping out in our birthday suits to do our Tesco shop, just one streetful of us, you might consider doing some serious editing of that particular line. It was okay for you in your flowing robe of linen to float about (above water, if you don’t mind) in temperatures that soared way over the 17 degrees we enjoy here, in a warm summer month. We need clothes and happy clothes, to boot. Clothes nowadays are made with short term in mind. Only the very rich can choose what they want when they want.

There’s another thing. You, apparently, inspired medical science to go bonkers. There is even talk of a replacement head, and I am not saying that’s a bad thing when you consider a person who really needs one. but, honestly, this whole deal of keeping us all alive until we are almost petrified mummies is not a good idea at all. Just think of the ones who are sort of okay with their heads and have to care for a person who….(or is it whom?) has basically gone anyway, someone who is not who they were and never will be again. Do you? Think of them, I mean?

I get, now, that life is a fight. I get that we minions learn loads when the chips are down. But the balance is all wrong. I remember, often, being sent back to re-do my homework, to think things through and to make changes. Although I can’t see you to say this in person, I am writing it in the hope that you might take a dose of your own medicine and do what you want the rest of us to do. All 65 million of us. As far as we know.

I’ll be back tomorrow with some more. Till then, sleep tight.

In the fairy woods, I find a black feather. Crow. I don’t find many of those as a rule. Crows rule here and nobody, it seems, fancies the taste of crow. I remember we had one, once, back in Tapselteerie days, a decoy for the controversial crow trap. Crows kill lambs, but slowly, the weak ones, the ones left behind by first time mothers who go through the whole pain of giving birth and then walk away once the pain has stopped. We trapped the crows back then, but now I know how pointless that was long term. Dispatching crows to Crow Heaven just makes space for other crows. It was a losing battle. The decoy, called Jim, smelled like a rotten fishcake and that smell filled the milking byre with a stink I never want to experience again. We fed him over winter then put him in the trap with something dead to lure the others in. Not a part of farming I am proud of.

However, one lone feather is compelling. It doesn’t stink but just lies there in the fairy woods catching sunlight and glinting blue. Crow medicine is strong. Crow is an omen of change. I could do with some change. Perhaps that is why I find the feather, although I don’t pick it up. it can stay down there on a bed of old larch needles and peaty earth. In my garden feathers abound. The young sparrow hawk, all gangly flight and poor timing makes a rush at the garden birds every day. Sometimes she is lucky. Mostly not. But she will pick up speed and improve her timing by the autumn. When she shoots like a bullet into the midst of bird breakfast, she sets chaos in motion. Birds of all sizes and creeds erupt like the ground just exploded, leaving feathers to flutter, curlicues of soft down, lightly onto the grass. Some birds hit the window. Some recover from that close encounter, some do not. I watch the hawk cant away over the field, my eyes hoping for empty talons even though I know she must eat too.

These feathers jettisoned in panic are obviously not critical for flight. It thinks me of what I need, what is critical for my ‘flight’ through this life. Certain that I need this or that for everything to suddenly be quite marvellous is foolish, and, yet, I am guilty of that. Spending money on extras like a new summer dress may be justifiable but not if it doesn’t work with the cash available. But, hang on a minute…….am I not caring full time for no pay whatsoever? Am I not deserving of a few ‘little somethings’ to make me feel less crow more peacock? I well might be, according to Disney. But there is no Disney in this tail of functioning feathers. There is only survival. Like all birds I cannot afford to be looking the other way when the sparrow hawk strikes. I must take great care of my feathers, all of them so that I can fly to greet another day.

Some days I am crow, the omen of change. Other days I can peacock my way through the fairy woods, lifting my colours into the world and making enough noise to scare off a heffalump. I read, once, of a woman who was transported to the New World in the bowels of a convict ship for stealing one peacock feather. I often wondered what became of her. Perhaps she was the start of something. Perhaps, through her, came the woman who invented barbed wire or the man who abolished slavery. Perhaps her journey meant something. She may have lost hope at times, felt abused and rejected, torn from her own future, but I choose to see her fighting spirit and her courage and determination as a force to be reckoned with.

In the goldfish bowl life goes around and around. There is no other way for it go. I never think goldfish have a happy life, all that circling and looking out on lives that go forward and back, up and down, lives that are always changing. And then, to add insult to injury, I get bigger, me, the goldfish, so that my circle gradually becomes a spiral. I’m dizzy just thinking about it. When I, the goldfish, swam as a free spirit, I could circle if I so chose, but there was a vast expanse of ocean laid out before me, one in which I encountered dangers, yes, but at least I was truly alive and free to roam.

It is easy to limit an ocean. Not out there in the real sense of ocean, but within the ocean of a life. Over time and when faced with demands that require a deal of circling, the woman can inhabit the circle, until she forgets what it feels like to go forward and free. She doesn’t feel free at all. She can spend days, weeks, months and years circling in stagnant waters without really noticing or caring. Until, that is, she spots her own tail inches from her nose. She has become a curve. She is the circle.

When I look out across the sea-loch, my horizon is a line of hills. But, just because I think that is where everything stops, doesn’t make it so. Beyond those hills are more hills, and beyond all hill-ness lies the ocean, that vast expanse of salt, cloud rain and meltwater that rises clear into the sky. And the sky goes on forever. Everybody knows that. But what lies on the other side of that horizon? Well, I can name a country, if that helps, like America for instance, Canada too, and if I twist my eyes north, Iceland, Greenland and Alaska. I fly out on wings of imagination in wild flight up and out into the nothing that goes one forever. Someone over there, or there, is looking back at me right now. Perhaps she has discovered her tail up close and has come to a sudden thinkstop. I don’t want to do this anymore, this circling thing, nor do I want these circular thoughts and limitations. I want ocean, danger and freedom.

So, what do I do next? I can’t change what is, after all. Or can I? Whilst I circled without conscious thought, just going round and round each day in the same direction, seeing the same things from inside my bowl of ever stagnating water, I went nowhere, saw no-one bar the carers, the nurse, the doctor and social services. Declining invitations, avoiding group gatherings, music nights and friendships, I have turned myself into a circling goldfish. How dull.

Once noticed, nothing stays as it is. It simply cannot. Knowledge changes everything. Nervously, I reach out. Do one thing differently. Straighten up for starters. Book a break. Call a friend and don’t be surprised when she can’t remember your name. Just remind her, gently. It isn’t her fault you disappeared into a carer blackout. It isn’t yours, either. Try sending eyes beyond the horizon, looking eyes that sparkle. Someone on the other side is looking back at you. Life is a very big thing, not a series of goldfish bowls even if that is all you can truly believe in right now. Try eating goodly things from earthy soil, grown strong in sunlight, their thirst quenched by heavenly rains. Try slowing down. And read books for a glorious escape into brave new worlds, into someone else’s story. And, most important of all, tell yourself every minute that you are strong, beautiful, kind and important. And no sniggering or eye rolling at that. Keep looking out until your eyeballs bulge, for an imagined view is considerably more exciting that your own rear end.

I tell myself all of this. I think of a Greenlander in her fishing boat, fur-clad, her fingers frozen, her eyes on the nets. I see her look up and out, something catches her by surprise. It’s just her horizon, or so she thinks. But on the other side of that horizon, I know better.

The morning begins. Eventually the morning will stop and the afternoon will elbow her way onto the stage. In between them, like a child with elbows pushed right out, is lunchtime, or noon, or dinner time. This child has many names but no specific time slot. I can eat lunch at 11.45 if I am hungry and the morning has barged under my eyelids ‘twirly’. Strictly speaking, 11.45 is still morning, but teetering on a cusp. All you have to do is walk twice around the house for it to become afternoon. When a builder says he will come after lunch on Wednesday, a person could still be waiting for him at 5pm which is obviously ‘after lunch’ although I do wonder at his domestic arrangements. You could lose days this way. If lunch is that far beyond the child with elbows pushed out then I won’t be inviting him for supper. I’d never get to bed at all.

It thinks me of my old friend Perception. How I see something, how you see something, how some people never see something their whole lives through. It makes for a rocky terrain. Then there’s the way that disaster, bereavement and loss can flip my own perception on his back leaving me looking down at him and seriously considering leaving him there. All those learned rules from the ancients rule book, things I was taught to think, ways of doing things or the timing for lunch. Stay down there a while you old master. I’m off to walk round the house twice for a little think.

In a life that runs on efficient timings, behaviour patterns, polite responses and high rise buns for the village fete every summer, a girl can be blind to her own real feelings. They have probably been suppressed for decades whilst the parents, society, school and church attended most diligently to the outside of her. She might have felt rage. Well, that’s not ladylike. She might have wanted to tell the village fete organisers to go boil their heads. She hates cake anyway, baking, more so. She might have had a controversial opinion about something now and again. We don’t do ‘controversial’ dear. In fact, if you check, it isn’t even a word in our Dictionary of Politeness. She might even have said God is the biggest twit of all, but she probably won’t say it out loud, never mind twice in one lifetime.

However, something snarly and sharp-toothed can rise in her when Perception lands on his butt, when her life is stolen from her, the one she imagined would always be as it always has been. She turns feral. Of course, she has no idea what to do with this feral thing because she has dressed pink and polite and kind and obliging for so many years. She hopes she will get over it, like a fever. She just needs to rest a bit and it will all come back to her, that sweet gloop of a sugary woman who offends nobody and always says yes to everything. And, yet, this toothy pixie will not be quiet. It will nip and pinch at her, discomfort her when what she craves is comfort once more. Go Away Pinch Pixie. And, yet, somewhere inside this woman an ember glows. The glow, like a sunshine morning, rises into flame and she is warmed from within. Nobody bothered much with her ‘within’ till now, not even she. But this heady warmth, this rise of Pinch Pixie is intoxicating. Say NO! the Pixie hisses into her inner inner ear when someone asks her if she can do something she doesn’t want to do. What? I’ve never not done what I didn’t want to do.

My point, precisely, smiles the Pinch Pixie. Welcome to You.