Month: August 2021

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Island Blog – Very Blessed

This day I wake early, faff a bit, clean something, clear another. I like a tidy home. It was never tidy when I lived with a husband who didn’t do ‘tidy’. He scoffed, and said, oftentimes, that he considered it an affliction, like exzema or asthma. Even if it didn’t look like it I did honestly try to outrun his scoffing but it had faster legs and was canny. It could hide in corners and wait for my back to be turned. And it was very successful. In the end I gave up, to a degree, focussing on my innate skills and gifts and, to be honest, clearing up has never been one of those, even if I did, over time, morph into the extension of a broom, a mop or a dishcloth for decades.

I know what is happening later and I am so excited about the happening later thingy. Just a few weeks ago I would have cancelled. I know I would. I was very into cancelling and not just through lockdowns but way back into the caring years when I had lost myself. Everyone does, I hear it through the mouths of others, their tongues working out the consonants and verbs and pronouns and careful, so careful to halt the flood of emotion that could turn any sentence into a grammatical flood of nonsense. I can ride that flood with them, that wave, even if the words follow no particular order. I know, and yet I have no idea, how they feel. All loss and grieving is different, even if the name is the same. Mother. Father. Brother. Sister. Husband. Wife. And, God forbid, Child. But we can go into the rapids together, we can understand, to a degree and by more degrees than those who have not experienced such deaths.

There is a meeting of Bereaved Carers. How brilliant it that! The only people in the room will be, well, bereaved carers. I feel both safe and excited to meet whoever comes. I know the facilitator and she is like a sparkle, so we are all safe. We have a room to ourselves. We can talk out all the shit we feel, or not. We can go into awful detail without wondering if the rest of the room will barf and run. We know each other even if we don’t know each other at all. We drink tea, well they do, but it is strong coffee for me. A teapot lands on the table, a fat bellied old fashioned Derby, I guess, and it is warming, just the look of it. I managed to lose a teapot, I speak out loud. Me too, says another. How did we do that? We think in a communal sort of think. Well, I say, I reckon I must offered my teapot for a bigger group one day and then forgot to collect it. She, with the twinkly eyes and barely a wrinkle on her face nods. Maybe, she says, and we laugh. Actually we laugh a great deal, about caring, about death, about loss and emptiness. We laugh about the slow movement of time, the way we fill in the hours, the way we coped in the thick of caring.

It is delightfully freeing. I am certain each one of us leaves feeling humbled. There was she who dealt with that. She who coped with this, and not just once. There was the one who dipped and lifted, faltered and regained footing over a very long time. We may not see each other for a while but we will all remember this day and think of each other. Each one of us will remember the laughs, the gallows humour, the private sharing that will help us to heal lonely wounds. And, all thanks to the intuitive support we are offered. The Mother Hen. Argyll Carers. Support through caring, through the horrors, not afraid to take whatever gets yelled down the phone or straight to face.

I think we are very very blessed.

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Island Blog – Dreamers, Just Go

We are the dreamers. Did you know that? Dreamers are the ones who, if they believe in those dreams, can change their world, and, accordion to the ripple effect, change other lives in the process. I am not necessarily talking about the weird things that come into our heads overnight, nor am I a follower of those who say they can explain such dreams. What I mean is that, if someone can follow their dream, even if it is just for today, just a weeny thing that appears to have no import, then, if that someone takes action, even if it feels weird and a bit ‘out there’, then who knows what may come of that dream?

It can be powerful. Let me break it down. In this strangest of days, as I wonder who the hellikins I am having buried a strong, dominant leader of a man, I could fluff. I could be like a dandelion clock, just there for someone to blow away. But I know I have roots, even if I cannot feel the security of those roots in the ground. All I know is that I will not flop. Not me. I am not a flopper. So, this dream thing. I wake early and know, although I wonder who told me, I just suddenly ‘know’ that I need to walk out, and right now. Because I am used to someone else telling me what I ‘know’ for so long, I am somewhat confounded when the messenger comes to me direct. I am looking about for himself. Oh, he isn’t here. You mean me? Well, yes, I hear, and I am now facing this directive. I swither. But, but and but again. I planned to do this, or that. I can see eyes rolling and I chuckle. I haven’t washed the breakfast dishes I whine, nor swept the floor and I always do those things at this time and in sequence. More eyes rolling. I do pause to wonder how often eyes can roll without disappearing altogether.

Ok, ok, I say, I will go walk right now, leaving the dirt and the dishes. Ok, enough already. I am pulling on my trainers and it is barely light. I wake the dog and drag her puzzled self out into the wild. She resists, a lot, digging in her small feets but I am having none of it. I know she is telling me that we walk later, following the routine. Yes, yes, I tell her but I am bigger and stronger than you and you will come. Her skids show in the track. I feel slightly sorry for her but if I know anything about the female of any species I know that we are very good at adapting. Eventually she concurs and trots along beside me. We watch early sunlight turn beech leaves to emeralds. We startle deer in the woods and they thunder away, their white scuts flashing. At the old pier the tide is full and still. Slack water, the pause between flow and ebb, the moment captured. I, we, are part of this moment. The tide is flood, meaning there is a full moon coming, but not yet. The water is very high and so clear. I can see way down. It is a while before the plankton bloom turns the sea cloudy. We are a part of that moment too. I see crabs scuttle, oystercatchers fly, geese swashbuckle in the shallows, curlews pipe overhead and herons croak like old smokers.

Then it comes, that flipjack, that effortless gymnast, the otter. I stand in awe, watching this extraordinary creature, king or queen of his or her world, dive, catch and eat, on the run. I hear the crunch of shell. He or she is only a few feet away but I am no threat. The kelp lies still, no wave action. The rocks, illuminated by saltwater, shine like varnish. The early sun lifts and pinks the clouds and here am I watching a dream. Had I stayed home to wash dishes and sweep floors as is my routine, I would have missed this magic.

Don’t miss the magic. If that dream nudges, then go.

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Island Blog – Find a Way

Today wakes me different. I rise in the lime green and pad downstairs. Today, I announce to nobody there, will be a good day! I have to do this announcing thing because if I left this day to my now feelings it would cascade into shards by lunchtime. It takes a while to work it out. Strong black coffee helps. I can feel things changing, making that shift I know so well, from thoughtless reaction to mindful action. It is, to be honest, a pain in the bouzouki but I know I must engage with this process for I am vulnerable to emotional collapse. Only vulnerable. Not collapsing. But the edge of error is like a chef’s sharpened knife blade, super thin and very dangerous. There is either a goodly cut or a deep wound. I swither on the rocks of this one. I have been on these rocks for some time and not just since my only husband died, but before that as I watched him disappearing whilst still in the room.

So my choice of action is (yes mindful) a daily choice, no, an hourly one because the clutching fear of nothingness is always at my heels. So I walk. Finally I get why people who are tossed out of the world they have known for most of their lives, begin to walk. I also get that they don’t know why. It is a compulsion, a need, a drive. But for what, to what, I cannot say. I just know it helps. And it sure beats sitting on my jaxy to watch the enviably vibrant together load of people go by, laughing and sharing and with a whole chatty afternoon ahead.

I set off at 7am, a grand time to walk. Most of the people I know never see 7am, never mind 0500. And if they do, its a yawning Monday go-to-work thing. So I am free to go, alone with the seabirds and the scutterbuck deer, the owls that are late to bed and the swallows who are definitely planning a trip. The trees are bowed, tunnelled with the night rain. I heard it through my curtains and said my always prayer of thanks. I know a continent of states that would give anything for rain, not least North Columbia right now. We diss rain at our peril. It is so so very precious.

I and the almost awake wee dog wend our way through the green that will not be green for much longer. I see leaves already turning. I tell the dog this and she stops to stare at me as if I am her greatest puzzlement. There is a young hedgehog on the track. It doesn’t move and there are greenbottles on its back. Oh, sweetheart, I say and hunker down. Are you alive? It hears me, or feels me, and lifts its pretty snout, eyes blinking. I can see you are sick, I say, nuzzling its face with my finger. We connect. I am not up for banging it on the head but this baby is not well.

We move on.

On the shore we find an otter, maybe ‘the’ otter fishing and watch him for a while. It is high tide, my favourite. I haven’t seen it here for some time. The thing about high tide is her hold on herself. She floods like she has no respect for any shoreline argument and once her power subsides, she holds. Hold, she says. Hold. I am here and I am important. I envy her sassiness and tell her so and we laugh together. She alone can give life back to the dried kelp. She alone can claim land that thought it was land until she came in like Lady Gaga. She laughs me. As she has soaked pretty much every sitting point, I don’t sit, but stand my full but diminishing height and look around me. Oystercatchers twirple through the air, curlews, geese and gulls, responding to my arrival. I see your hold, I say to the full tide. Respect.

Home again and now I must fill in the day so I write, I write about the missing, the freedom and the how the heck do I manage two conflicting thoughts? The death date looms. Although I am not in the least sentimental, I do find that anniversaries knock at the door of my mind, surprising me like I forgot it. Not this one. I can feel it coming like something I want to push away, defer, ignore. But it needs to come and I know that. I will not go to his grave and sob. This is not me. But there is a something so huge about his death that I cannot explain. We were we. Now we are not we. I like the I of me and always did, but this is different. It isn’t a game anymore. It is horribly real.

Give me time. I’ll find a way.

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Island Blog – Rain, Cloud Talk and Moving On

The garden drinks deep as it must when rain falls, a goodly rain, one that isn’t just a wheech of drops that barely land at all. I can see the flowers, the shrubs and the trees looking up, hopefully. Not enough, they say and I agree and then yesterday their looking and pleading brought the clouds to compassion which is an achievement when you know clouds. They are crabbit creatures, no, not just crabbit. It must be a big responsibility to have the remit of collecting droplets from myriad bodies of water and such a relief to dump what you have have been carrying for ages, as it is a relief for one of us to lay down our long held baggage. It thinks me and asks me this:- what baggage can you lay down you island wife? Well, where do I begin with all my guilt and shame and regret and failures?

Ach wheesht, come the clouds back. You think you are special or something?

Well, no, I say, a tad humbled. I was just saying.

Don’t say. Do!

Okay, I reply, hesitantly as I lay down my ‘Special’ fixation. It was quite heavy, although that is an oxymoron. Something cannot be ‘quite’ heavy. It is either heavy or it is light and the prefix ‘quite’ means absolutely nothing. It is a sort of burble, a mumble word in such a grammatical position. I could say, should someone ask me if this child is alike to his mother, Well, he is quite like her, thus meaning not exactly, but as a prefix it says nothing about the thing and everything about the person busy oxymoroning. Just saying.

Then I ferret about for other baggage. Regret. Hmmm. Describe that. I cannot. So I lay it down. I am beginning to feel light about the ankles, flexing, able to move more easily.

Shame. At what? Oh, well, at, er, at my past behaviours? I make a mistake turning this into a question. I am now at the mercy of the cloud response. One of them does, the big Payne’s Grey one with a truckload of wet just about to head earthwards. He looks like my dad in a fury. Are those past behaviours still an active choice in your present?

I resist the urge to remind him that, by definition, my present and his are the same. No, I say, firmly.

Lay it down, he barks, and then barfs rain.

Guilt. List your crimes, says the softer cloud butting up against the empty Payne’s Grey, now shredding into whisps. She says it gently. I wonder if she has some of her own to consider. She sounds empathetic.

At my choices, the things I sometimes say that hurt another.

Can you make amends? She asks. I like her voice. It’s warm like melted cheese.

Yes, I say. I already did.

Then lay it down.

I am now almost able to fly I am so light. The sky is clearing and so is my scurrilous brain.

Failures. She is still with me, the melted cheese cloud, but there is another big fat grey one right up her aspidistra. She sighs and moves on. I wait.

What failures? he asks, not aggressive despite his load.

Oh, general failures.

Is that a military title? he asks then guffaws. I roll my eyes and say nothing. There are jokers everywhere. Go on, he says, once he recovers from his obvious cloud brilliance.

Well, I wasn’t the mother I planned to be.

Who is? he says, having not a clue about what being a mother means, but I go with it and bend to lay that one down.

Next? he asks.

I could have been kinder to my husband, particularly as he folded into dementia.

Well, he says, it is too late now. Lay it down. Is that it?

Pretty much. Now here is another nonsense response. Not quite an oxymoron, more just moron.

Move on, he says, as another cloud butts up against him.

Just Move on.

And I do.

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Island Blog – Alpha Beta and The Geese

I walk today, peaceful like. The wee track is even wee-er now after the rains have turned the bracken tips face down and dripping. Branches bow low creating a sort of trunnel for me to dip and duck through, the leftover drips cool down my neck. Sunshine catches diamonds like pearl painted finger nails glinting rainbows at me. I don’t mind getting wet. Although heavy (and, apparently dangerous) rainfall was prophesied, like many prophesies, it never came to bear and I risk setting off sans jacket, just free, a light cardy and walking trainer thingies that look like flippers but work just fine. After all, nobody is looking.

I just know that after this ‘dangerous’ rainfall and the subsequent hot hot of Father Sun, anything green is going to go crazy bonkers. The bracken, already over my head and, I am sure, burgeoning with bloodthirsty ticks, will soon turret the track. Bracken looks harmless enough but don’t read this book by its cover. It may look pretty with its green finger fronds and the way light can show through the forest it creates but underneath the ground it is a pernicious killer and will take over anything with hopeful shoots, stifling it until it breathes no more. Bracken is for Mordor not this lovely island, nor anywhere else for that matter. Just saying.

Me and the Popster walk to the shore, to the old pier where Alpha Beta slept. Perhaps she is in my mind once I heard that she featured on TV last evening with Gordon Buchanan. She, wonderful she, who safely transported so many people out into the ocean to find whales met with a very sad end. She took us to Minke whales, and on a really special occasion, Killer whale. Her body was strong, her engines pure and true. She had props all over the place for turning on a sixpence and for exiting danger quickquick. She carried hopeful souls on her back and never seemed to mind and she was as faithful as a collie. I stand beside the pier where, many years ago, she waited patiently for everyone to step aboard. It is a skeleton now, draped in dried kelp, blackened and hanging like witch hair. The breeze moves it a little and I can hear the crackle. The rocks are coppered with living kelp, a lie if you cared to walk across. You would sink. Or I would. Kelp looks so solid in such a mass. We move through a canopy of gorse and I remember how the old Sea Dog would cut and slash this now 8 ft high mass into submission. Cutting it down is good, he would puff, slashing and snapping the limbs. It will all grow stronger next year. It thinks me. It must be four years since he could walk never mind swing the slash-cut weapon without spinning into the brink. I stay with that remembering, holding the memories when both Alpha Beta and the Seadog were upright and strong, and I say to the skeleton pier, one the SD built, Thank you. You may look wind blown, wonky chops, and whitened by salt but I remember you strong and proud. I still see that in you. Thank you for your grace, your strength, your loyalty.

We sit on a flat rock having navigated the gorse forest. Pods are popping. I can hear them. They sound like a cap gun. It smiles me how life goes on going on with fierce determination. The sun is warm on my arms and back, my face. The Narrows sparkle, diamonds on the water which I think is just beginning to flow in again from who knows where. I ponder on the tidal flow, not just here but the one that circumnavigates the world. There are new stories coming in, I can smell them, those whispers of hope of pain of joy, all flooding in right here and right now. An otter pops up like a cork. He is fishing, I can see that. The fish in his grasp has no chance. He bites off its waggling head but the waggling goes on. He leans back, peaceful like, and floats while he eats the rest. Then he is off again, sleek, dark, fleeting, a gymnast. I watch him cross the Narrows in seconds where a few Greylags have landed for a splash. He threads through the group and they yell and flap at him. Returning to their bathing, once he is gone, I watch them lift water over their wings, bury their heads in the brine, lift their tails and then they begin to play. I know play and this is play. One hurtles at another, and another scoots off. Chase me, chase me…..

I can hear them still laughing as me and the popster wander home.

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Island Blog – Fragments and a Pattern

Today begins me twirly. It is light, I concede, but a greenish light, not a full morning blast from Father Sun. Even when he, Father Sun, is cloud compromised, the ok morning light is still His and when I see it frame my blackout curtains that don’t quite fit, I know it isn’t twirly. Not 4 am. As I flip back the covers, knowing, just knowing that there is no more sleep here for me in this little room, I wonder what I will feel when Winter grabs the world by the goolies and holds tight till April has deferred to May. No matter. This is so not a goodly thought for this lime green morning. I go downstairs leaving the wee dog curled like a donut and as asleep as I wish I was. Coffee, music, lights on, warm and deluding with me that the day is begun in a normal sort of way. I sit in the semi dark conservatory and peer out. I can see the outside, more or less. It looks eerie, sleepy. Now it is 4.15. Good lord, how on earth am I going to fill the hours? I make a plan, writing confidently on my pad. I will this and I will that. This one is something I have to do sometime today because last evening in a moment of enthusiasm, I thawed some prawns. Risotto, I decide and ferret about for the ingredients, lining them up like soldiers for when I am dressed. Of course, I could easily make a prawn risotto in my jim-jams but it doesn’t feel right somehow. I am too professional for such sloppiness.

Now wait a minute. Who said that? Why can’t I slop my way through a prawn risotto? Like, who says I cannot? After all, the outside of me has little to do with my culinary skills. Is my dead mother here? My dead father? Well, no. So who is talking at me as if I was a child? Oh, it is me. It is I. Well something needs to be done about that, but what? This voice, these voices of judgement seem to have travelled with me right up to now and my now is a 68 year old woman of considerable strength and skill. Just saying. I speak it out loud and turn around to face my ‘judges’ but they have gone, disappeared. Oh. Ah. Now what? Well I will tell you Now What. If I cook in my jim-jams and fluffy dressing gown, it will be impossible to affix my pinny around the extra bulk. In my frocks, no matter how many layers, I can affix with ease and affixing is important because I always splash, spill, pepper and blob myself when cooking. I am way too enthusiastic with the process and now I know why chefs wear whites. So I trip upstairs to find the light yellowing nicely around the ill fitting blackouts and the little dog still being a donut. As I wheech back the curtains, she opens one eye and I tell her, Stay. I am just going to make a prawn risotto at, now let me see, 5 am. She lifts herself, rearranges, curls again and slumps down with a warm sigh to sleep some more. Prawn risotto is not her thing.

I am quite alone in this evolution of light, from lime green to yellow warm, cooking with garlic and wine and herbs whilst the rest of the lucky world are either deep in slumber or waking twirly and dreaming of bacon rolls or Eggs Benedict or muesli and fruit. The prawn risotto is not pleasant once complete and I consider the vile coloured mess of rice and prawns, tasting and rejecting, adding and rejecting. I have invested much thought and considerable imagination into finding some way of ‘saving’ it. There is no saving. Now it laughs me and also fragments me. Once I would cook this in jim-jams or frocks because it would have been a meal to share. Now there is no share. I know it is the way it is but after so many years of sharing, I can get it wrong. Actually I am delighted I got this one wrong because it is a huge pan of risotto and there is only me and a very small drawer offering a freeze. I will offer it to the hungry creatures out there and they will be grateful.

Alone is strange to me. It also frees me. Like a mosaic of fragments, it will show me a pattern. One day.

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Island Blog – Grace of an Otter

Life comes and goes in waves. That’s what I think, but as I think the think, I wonder what I mean by that. Life, by definition, as long as I am alive, is a constant. More a line than a wave, like a path I walk each day. It is my nature to deviate as often as possible, but even my deviations are visible. Oh, yesterday I must have pathed off this way and last week, accordion to the way grass has grown back, I meandered that way. Unless the path is well-trod and regularly, grass will grow over quickquick, beginning it all over again as an opportunity to head off piste and, perhaps this is good enough in the limitations of my deviousness.

One of the most infuriating, at worst, or thought provoking, at best, sayings is ‘I always do it this way, or I usually walk this way, or I always have lunch at midday and so on. I work on not falling into the always and the usually, simply because of my desire for deviation and also because it heralds a setting in of routine and the shutting down of curiosity and imagination. Living this way is living in the past and not with an eye on the future, in my opinion.

Today I set off for my ‘usual’ walk. Oh, Hallo. As I wander up the track towards the sea, I stop to locate the sudden of fragrance, stand quite still and just breathe it in. Honeysuckle tumbling over a long fallen pine trunk. I watch the bees disappear into the cream and yellow trumpets, whizzing like an electric egg whisk pulled from the froth of albumen, and then emerging laden with pollen and free to fly. I notice brown leaves beneath the Horse Chestnut and find my eyes looking for conkers. No No Silly…….not yet (please not yet). These leaves just fell and turned brown on the track, that’s all. There’s a soft warm breeze and I shuck off my jumper to feel the sun on my skin, nice skin, brown skin thanks to these glorious summer days. My tattoos catch my eye as my arms swing. Each one marking an event. This one, Pegasus the Flying Horse, affixed in Glasgow when Himself was airlifted into the Uk after a massive African stroke. I had to do something that flew me above it all and Pegasus came to life. That one, the dragonfly curlicues, on a visit to Edinburgh with a lovely friend. She bought a lighthouse and I, a tattoo. This is my favourite. The artist so talented. There’s a Butterfly, a Quill, another dragonfly and I am not done yet. I have a date with my niece in Glasgow to visit her tattooist and, although I cannot go there yet, I enjoy searching through designs and placings. It matters not to me that my skin, my lovely skin, is wrinkled. Not one tiny bit.

I turn down towards the sea on a sudden whim, open the gate and read the sign affixed. YOU ARE NOW ENTERING…….and then nothing. I enter. Walking through thrift and wild grasses we reach the flat rocks, smell the salt and the kelp. I sit whilst the wee dog bolts in and out of the shallows barking at nothing. The tide is flooding, the air warm, the sun hot, the peace complete. There is nobody here but me. I remember things, like the whale-watching boat departing from the pier just behind me, returning with happy visitors, day after day after day. I hear their voices, their laughter, their whoops of delight if they had encountered whale. You will sleep well this night, I told them, and they always did. I remember Himself, all grizzled and strong, the Whale Father, the cantankerous hero. Suddenly a head pops up, sleek, black, fleeting and is gone again. I watch the water for some time. A young seal perhaps, a big otter? I am not sure, it was fleeting.

I am just about to leave when the sleekest finest dog otter rises effortlessly onto a rock not 12 feet away from me and the wee dog. She doesn’t see it and I grab her collar to stay her with me. The otter rests on a rock and crunches away at something. He is so clear to me but with his poor eyesight, he doesn’t see me. I watch him complete his meal, slide back under the kelp and reappear moments later with another crunchy thing. He is even nearer now, looks straight at me, but still doesn’t see. The wee dog makes a small bark and he looks at me square, holds, holds, then goes back to his meal. I can hardly believe my luck. I watch this wild creature, flow like liquid, sleek dark, effortless, easy in the tide tow, the flood and ebb, the wild and calm of an ocean. Elemental grace. I totter carefully away across the rocks looking back again and again. The otter just keeps being an otter. It reminds me that my very best bet is to be what I am. A woman aging, a woman strong, a woman who likes adventure, deviation and tattoos. A woman open and wild. A woman who cannot take on an ocean but who surely can take on her own life, the tide tow, the flood and ebb, the wild and calm and with as much grace as an otter.

Here comes a wind change. A door slamming, fly curtain whipsnap sort of wind. Puff clouds rise above the Blue Ben and the sea-loch ruffles and skids to the shore where, if I could hear it, there would be an argument with the rocks. From up here I can only imagine it, unhook the fly curtain and retreat into my home. Changes. At times infuriating, at best thought provoking. I like the latter best. I will be an otter inside my life of changes. I may have to swim faster or hunker down within the safety of rocks. I may enjoy sunshine kelp slip and slide days when apparent threat just observes me but does not confront. I may face off fears, imagined or real. I may bask in family or feel completely alone. None of these are in my control but I am. I. Am.

Think Otter and take on your ocean. It works.

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Island Blog – Swanlift, Labels, Honey and a Captain son

This day I drive the switchback to the harbour town. I only go there these days on a specific mission, never to wander nor to dawdle, as once I did. As I heft right down the steep brae and see the tongue of the Main Street sticking out like thirst, it is coloured up with tourists, the many who are here for a longing, an escape from lockdown. I am so not joining them. They wander, holding ice creams, takeaway coffees, bags of shopping, children, all loving the tidal sweep of the bay, the seagulls fly, the fisher boats, the chip van. I swing right into the harbour car park and meet a tailback. There are just so many places for the parking and I get it. You arrive and you want to park. That’s all, but it is not enough because all the spaces are taken so we tailback, hover, pause, exercise patience and not patience. I am here to meet up with my captain son as his boat is in the harbour for a couple of hours before turning seaward once more with his passengers. We bench sit for I cannot go aboard. He brings tea, a chef made biscuit wrapped in a paper napkin and delicious. We talk of our lives, his young family, my aloneness. We watch the in and out of boats, of visitors in yachts, of locals checking their own launches and sailors. We say hallo and I watch faces. Of the ones I know as friends, I see the toll Covid and isolation has taken on them. Some visitors come too near and my mask hand twitches. They laugh, cough, move on and here I sit scared as a mouse, even on a bench in the sea air.

What happens to us in such times? It thinks me, much, of those (including me in the past) who felt scared just being around people, never mind an invisible virus. We were labelled as those with mental health issues. Now, I am one who would fight to the death to blow all labels into the stratosphere, no matter the smug relax of those who choose it at some committee meeting and then tootle home delighted with the fact that they don’t fit the confines of any label. So, right now I am afraid. And then I am not. This fear is tidal. It rises, full moons itself and then subsides into seaweed and sand. It is real. Very real. But I would stand at the gates of Challenge and shout ‘ Don’t label us!’. I would. And I will tell you why. Any label fixes a person. It might be on medical notes. It might be a long term tenant in someone’s mind. Oh, he, or she, has mental health issues. How ridiculous and how wrong is that! Does this mean we who have gone down like a swan in a swamp, cannot find a way out? Of course not. We can fly again, lift from fear again, become wonderfully white and light and flighty once again.

It is a thixotropic place. In the language of honey spinning, that honey gift from the bees, this word means honey that refuses to spin. It is mostly heather honey which is why it is common to buy heather honey in comb squares, wax included. In life it symbolises the same thing. A refusal to spin, to melt and demur. What I find in these times is that I oftentimes need to remind myself to relax my shoulders, raise my neck, breathe and go forward, especially en route to what I consider the Big City, bubbling with way too much busy life, a life I felt so easy peasy in before. Suddenly it presents menace. My honey refuses to spin. It is still there but affixed in a wax hexagon that will not let it free. I am not saying I like it. I love to flow. I love people, connectivity, chance encounters, but now I am confounded, afraid and my body is telling me she is not happy.

I know that I am bereaved broken. I know that learning how to live alone after almost 50 years is not going to turn me into a confidently independent woman overnight. I know, because of this, that I have mental health issues. Fear, accentuated; sleepless nights; hypervigilance; squewed thinking. of course I flipping do. It thinks me of anyone who is so labelled and who feels less-than, diminished, isolated because of that awful label. (all labels are awful). When any one of us is in a dark place the last thing we need is labelling. We are not what ‘they’ tell us we are. We are just in a dark place, a dark well, looking up at the light and just a bit terrified of moving towards it because we have no idea of what that light might throw on who we really are now, in the aftermath.