Month: December 2022

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Island Blog – We are an I

The dusk falls like a cloak, rumpled, full of holes, quick if you turn away, look back and gasp. It is down now, this cloak, this wizard velvet, mouse-lit velvet rumple, allowing starlights to arrest my thinking, stop me, turn me as they poke through, thrust their death light into my looking. The sun, fighting still against his slip from stage right, thrusts a backlight so that those way-over-there trees, skeletal now and with limbs reach-stretched for maximum effect, stand silhouette against the indigo of a winter sky. I watch and watch as the new moon fingernails across the almost darkness, stars brighten and faraway, and this night, if I go out barefoot and goonied, I will see lace patterns in the wild space above me, above you too, although yous with streetlamps will miss a lot. I remember missing a lot whilst living in Glasgow and it was there I knew how the song came to be, Blackbird Singing in the dead of Night, because we had one of those, right outside our flat, singing and singing and exhausting himself and I felt a big shame for the wild ones who knew something once, for sure, and then became confounded by a change that might take generations to become okay with a species.

Transition is a fine thing for us, even when it sticks spikes into an ass every time you sit down in a place that used to offer ‘sit-down’ as a thing expected, normal and oftentimes visited. From one state to another. That’s how it defines itself. From cocoon to butterfly, from larva to god-knows-what that will eat your cucumbers and primulas and wonder you why you ever bothered planting the damn things. But who has a map for the bridges? The ones, like me, like you, we and many ‘I’s who must and will exist between loss and friendship, between existential pain and the light of new hope, between the doubt and fear of young age and a possible future, and the old agers who would love a rainbow beyond bent fingers, weakened wrists, and faulty legs. Both transition generations seeing what? A bridge?

There is no answer to that question and there may never be. So, we find our own answers, fumbling, faltering, seeking, searching and, in all my reading, my miles and miles of reading, our generational congregation is no different now. Centuries of searching for the absolute brings no reprieve from the ongoing thingy of human-ness. We can watch the sky and think our thinks. We can submit to sulks and huffs and the refusal to communicate within a relationship at home. We can reject or connect with ‘difficult’ children. We can walk the dog or let it die of the lack. We can dress in jewels despite the rain. We can lift old mothers-in-law into an evening of smiles, ask them of their memories, lift them back home into the empty bed of their lonely lives or we can hold to the fact that we don’t like her, nor ourself in her presence. We can enjoy a puddle with little children or claim tiredness and the need to be home to watch Countdown. We can decide to live out our whatever life, no matter what the inside demon tells us. We did not fail. We lived our best. Yes, we failed, made mistakes, have regrets, let no-one hide from that big truth. However, we can tell ourselves, even if nobody will ever tell us, that we did what we deemed right for the family, we were/are a character created, a personality shaped and formed, wonky and faltering. Or we can hide away from a anything honest and watch some celebrity nonsense on TV.

But we are an I.

We are.

An

I

And with an I lies all the power.

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Island Blog – New Year and Thought Control

Many, perhaps most of us feel less than intrepid as we move towards a new year. How will we live from now on through financial lack, winter’s toothy bite, without a someone who lived and breathed once and does so no more, through war that threatens our own safety, security and identity, governments and public bodies that can’t agree on what to have for lunch, let alone run a whole country wisely? This, however, is how it is for all of us. So how do we turn to bravely face whatever fears and doubts gather behind us, pulling open the back door of our hearts in an attempt to subdue even an heretofore indomitable spirit?

Laughter, that’s how. If we can laugh at the days to come we are making a strong statement. We are saying You Will Not Beat Us Down, not Us. Of course we do need to plan, to communicate within a home, to agree to make changes and to accept the initial discomfort of such changes. Naturally we must say farewell to some of our previous comforts but it is critical to the human spirit that we also pull in new ways to enjoy our lives. I am crap at not enjoying my life. It’s like walking in shoes full of holes and with a flapping sole. My soul refuses to flap even if I do feel cold and lonely at times. I tell myself, again, that a thought creates a feeling which puts me firmly in the driving seat because, although I cannot control my feelings, I can control my thoughts. This morning I awoke with decidedly negative thoughts. Soon my family will leave me here on the island and if I thought I was alone before, I was much mistaken. But, says Mrs Smartarse Sensible, You are strong, always have been and just think, What if something wonderful awaits you on the other side of this mass migration? I snort but she is persistent and, dammit, she could well be right. Consciously I change my thinking, sweeping out the gloomy self-pitying ones, those with big voices and absolutely no substance, like thin porridge, and equally as unsustaining. If I select my thoughts at all times of woe is me, it may feel like hard work but it does work. I refuse to let my thoughts think me because I am in the driver seat, not they. And, if I stand true to my brilliant imagination, I can host a wonderfully happy party inside my head, one that sends warming messages to my heart and body. I feel strong again. Nothing has changed. I will still be home alone in a few days but if I decide not to let those tosser dossers in, they can have no power over me, no hold, no control.

In the short term, I will take it all in, the vast load of laughing grandchildren, my own beloved children, their voices, faces, stories shared, moments collected in the air between us and I will tuck them into my heart. I will reflect on their youth, the wild and crazy fun we had, the adventures they, and I, are yet to experience, all of those year books inside my head and I will pull on my shoes and walk my walk. I have never walked alone before. How exciting! For you, wherever you are, whatever you find tough or thin or overwhelming, I say this. Keep walking, eyes forward, hope in your heart and love on your lips because there will be something that needs saying or doing no matter your path and every new path can feel scary until it is walked. And think not of loss but of the, as yet, unseen gains that will spring up like flowers along the banks of a simpler life.

Happy New Year to you all.

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Island Blog – Langtangle and Shoe Laces

As life moves on, moves me on to my 70th year, I have time to ponder, reflect and consider. I have the mind for it too, because it seems to me that now I am looking in a different direction, one I have never known before. When young and full of family life, its accompanying chaotic joys and disasters, my eyeballs swivelled every which way, conscious of what was about to happen, what had just happened and what the hell I could do to stop it happening again. Nowadays the happening thing is mostly my own choice. Setting aside responsive reaction, say to a burst pipe or a postal delivery, I am the Happener, inhabiting endless space and time, able and sometimes unwilling, to ponder, reflect and consider. My thoughts wander over old mountains, some conquered, some the conquerors, over wild moor and vast expanses of desert sand. Some pondering lead me to old crimes, my old crimes and I squinge with discomfort as the memory builds into a certain prison sentence. I retreat quickly because I know well how false a memory can be, constructed over time, bridges built to connect two sets of circumstance that never came together at the time. It chuckles me as I banish the imaginary ghoul of mismemory. Away with you! I say. You were never thus.

This morning my thoughts, floating like tumbleweeds over tundra, billowed by a backwind, turn to what we leave behind and the list is long. Physical and metaphysical knowledge, recipes, familial data, skin flakes, nursery rhymes, stories of this and that, music, poetry, habits, opinions, demands, mistakes, gifts, DNA, clothing preferences, reactions, attitudes, diaries, kindnesses and so much more, our legacy. Such an unattractive word I think for such a potentially wonderful thing. So what do I want to leave behind when I am no longer here? A cloud of gas or a flight of light and beauty, peppered with humour and fairies? I know my answer to that and if I want to achieve such levity I must needs make certain of it because it is my choice and nobody else’s. How I choose to enter this part of my wonderfully ridiculously rambunctious life is a daily consideration. Not for me a decline into the grumps, nor the moans, nor the fatalism I had witnessed in my own now dead forbears who, bless their loving hearts, probably didn’t think they had any choice at all. My full of nonsense mother once said, and firmly, to me “There was no such thing as positive thinking in my day.” And she really believed that. However, these days we know different, that attitude is everything, regardless of circumstance, blight, long winters, loneliness, loss and no sourdough bread left in the village shop. We may not be able to ice skate upright, open jars of jam or lift a sack of potatoes but we can always laugh at ourselves, accepting that it is not our time for such shows of prowetic strength and besides we can always ask for help. Perhaps this time of quietening down is fulsome and maybe necessary for our young. In this age of Granny or Grandad, we can observe, soothe, stravaigle, consider and encourage, even if we barely understand what it must be like for young folk in this fast-paced, sometimes dangerous technological time. But we can teach observation, ask gentle questions, read together, wander over ancient ground, speak of the land, the sky, the sea, the winds with stories on their backs. We can show the mysteries of life, teach rhymes and songs, gift our time, time and more time because we have time now and they do not, not yet, not whilst life is a dash and a hurry, a fight, a competition, a langtangle of skids and slips, of leaps and crashes, of information invasion.

It was the same for us, many many years ago, and we remember the turmoil of growing up. Now we are growing down and I knew it yesterday as my eldest son walked into the church to watch the children’s nativity play. I used to be a foot taller, I thought, as he loomed over me grinning. I am shrinking. Good. That is fine with me and it means I can hide under a table with the children, with the giggles and the shushes and the chance to tie the adults shoe laces together.

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Island Blog – I Can Still Do This

I couldn’t get the whizzer bits out of the hand mixer today. I was making butter icing for my marvellous cake because, although it wasn’t dry at all, a slow cook cake with wild brambles (blackberries to you English) apple and slow gin reduced and quite marvellous, there is something I important. New verb for you. I look at something that thinks it Itself and I itch to challenge it, even if that challenge is only butter icing. So I do the whizzing bit and apart from filling my open cutlery drawer with icing sugar, all goes well. I slice Itself and it flops a bit. I hear myself saying things like Pull Yourself Together as I spread bramble jelly first and then, with at least 3 palette knives and a lot of swear words, there is the cutline, this challenge to the Itself of itself ness. Am I losing you?

Back to the point. After covering the kitchen with flicks of butter icing, after 3 bowls employed, all of whom were laughing with delight as I pulled them out of their usual unused darkness, I glanced at the before wash side of the draining board. Oh frickin dear or is it deer at this time of year……everything gloopy covered with butter icing and flicks and la la tiddleypom. No matter, because unlike a gazillion people I have hot water and soap and it thinks me of the gazillion who don’t. Washed, stacked, cake still sulking with a fatling girth of jam and butter and sugar, I go to release the whizzer bits. Ah. problem. It’s a button release and a strong push required to free up these stainless steel dancers. I press. Again. Both thumbfingers. Nothing. For a short while I go through the whole ‘Old age sucks thingy and This is It for me and Downhill from Now and all that awful shit until even I yawn and roll my eyes. So I abandon the clean hand mixer who is p*ssing me off big time with her holding on to her whizzer things, which, I remind her sternly, are actually mine, on the table. We will talk later, I tell her. She says nothing the smug little madam.

I walk, good lord it was tricky and a miracle I didn’t land on my ass a few times. Ice rain on resident ice is quite a challenge but I always need to get out, rain, shine or ice. Breathing in real air, not home air is so very important to me. There are stories on the outside air, something, a new idea, a new seeing, a new encounter, although encounters today were all staying home but I can feel their echoes, hear them as I slip and slide around the Fairy Woods. All those people, those meetings in the wild woods, their voices, smiles, shared moments, are the butter icing on a cake. When I came home, wet and upright, I focussed on the mixer, all sassy and white and sitting there and holding tight to her whizzer bits. A challenge. I walked right up to her and with both my whizzer-freeing thumbs I spat those babies wild. They scooted across the floor. I laughed out loud. I can still do this! That’s what I laughed out. I can still do this!

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Island Blog – Still a Light

I watch the days and the nights. The sharp twist of frost overnight, the sun big as a baron in his barony, wide smiled and warm as a beacon. A light to guide. Jack Frost holds on as long as he can, but even he is no match for that burning fire star. Beaten, for a few hours, Jack slinks back to Winterland for a chilly snooze, biding his time. The switchback road is icy or it looks like it despite the gritter of last night, for it is still zero degrees. The sky is cerulean with whisper clouds, the ground flat and brown and decorated with frosted grasses. Sunlight catches the icy spider webs, diamonds in the bog willow and heather. I meet no cars at all. Ah, the perfection of island life in winter!

I am driving, not Miss Daisy, god bless her and RIP. By now she may appear recycled as a sardine tin and I sigh at the thought. So not how she would ever have seen herself. She may have had rusty underpinnings and found it a bit hard to fire into life of a chilly morning, but she was a strong spirited old girl and kept going till a very definite end. Out, as they say, like a light, which she was. It thinks me, about my own life, the light of it for me and, hopefully, for others. To remain in memories long after your drive belt, or shaft, or whatever has broken is a very uplifting thought. As we grow old, with rusty underpinnings and the struggle to fire up, we have a choice. We are sentient beings, spirited and intelligent and we can make that choice, no matter how crap we might feel, no matter our anxieties, aches, botherments and tiddleypoms. And they are, for the lucky ones, very tiddley indeed. As we readers and curiositors know very well, there is always a choice on how we present ourselves. I know of those, as you do, who have faced, are facing very dire internal horribles, whose lives are actively under threat and yet who still decide to be cheerful. I have nonesuch troubles but I like the ethic and choose it for myself. Ideally, I would like to live a good long life and to have my drive belt snap politely in a beautiful place with eagles soaring overhead and close to home, inside it, ideally. Miss Daisy almost managed the latter, but not quite. Her life ended just as we turned down the hill to home, thus allowing me the relief of knowing that we could freewheel all the way into the village. It could have happened on an upward bend, in snow, with the gritter coming at me like a huge yellow monster, but it didn’t.

This day I drive Miss Pixty, a sassy mini cooper who is a bit of a speed freak if I’m honest. I need to rein her in quite often, but she is great at turning on a sixpence, parking in tiny spaces and responding immediately to whatever I need her to respond to. She will outlive me, this teenager, and we have become fast friends. She is going for her full service, which means, I tell her, that handsome mechanics will be checking her personals. She blushes. It’s okay, I say. They are good lads and it will only take an hour or so. I meet an old friend for coffee. Neither she nor I admit to ‘old’ for we know that there are doddery old 90 year olds about, but because we have known each other for over 45 years. We laugh about getting older, learning acceptance, wisdom and humour at the various small demises we both encounter such as forgetments, bent fingers, slower walking and the strong likelihood of us walking through the town with our frocks tucked into our knickers. Together we can laugh. Alone we blush with embarrassment. We agree that connectivity at such a time is reassuring, uplifting, allowing us to feel we are not the only one going through this process none of us prepared for, one that came so quick, like a thief in the night.

I wander to various shops run by those I knew as children, not five minutes ago, those who now have teenage children of their own. It wonders me. Time, though an illusion, has such power to confuse a mind. She, Time, can scoot the years whilst also managed to dawdle an hour until I am screaming for the clock to hurry up and arrive at the end of itself. The smiles of welcome are heart warming. I wonder what they see as I fankle with the door handle, burst in, laugh at my fankle bursting thing. I surreptitiously check my frock is not tucked in anywhere and straighten, re-aligning the arrangement of island made soaps and candles and creams that almost toppled at my inburst. All well. We chat, I purchase and move on. More chat, more purchase. The island shops are wonderful, offering not Scottish Tat, thank the holy grail, but island-made, inventive and inspirational and I am proud to be an islander in a world that seems to have swapped quality for plastic.

Mis Pixty awaits me and she visibly relaxes as I say hallo and take my seat. How was it? I ask her, flicking on the engine. She growls a bit, then a sassy note comes into her voice. I know that sound. Although she has suffered various underskirt poking and proddings, she has also had her throat cleared and she is raring to go. Steady, I say, Gently, I say and then Let’s Go! And we do, driving round corners, hugging the road and meeting absolutely no-one. As we pass the graveyard, where Miss Daisy died quietly I look across at where Himself lies. The sun catches the stonewords, all of them, not just his. You all lived good lives, I say. Some hard, sometimes hard, some easy, sometimes easy. You had days of dire and days of ire and days of fire and sunlight when a child’s laughter, a moment of intimate love, a glass raised at Hogmanay lifted you above and out of yourself for just a little while. You read a book that smiled you, spent an hour in the pub with a friend chewing over old time, old memories when you were someone else, younger stronger, vibrant and fluid. Then came Time to fickle you. You didn’t invite her in, nobody ever does, but she came anyway and dulled your wits, challenged your dignity, unalughed your laugh. I hope, I continue, that you chose to present the great untruth when someone asked How Are You Today? Or, more unfortunately, and please take this one very seriously, How Are We Today? Eish, never ever ask that one. And, the great untruth is a wonderful light to give out because it lightens everyone you speak to. The bumbling, faltering slide into old age is no news to we bumblers and falterers. We know it, it wakens us in the night, it reminds us of itself all through the day but my questions are these:

How do you want to be thought of right now?

How do you want to be remembered?

What do you want to say about growing old?

This last is important. Young people say they don’t want to grow old, as did I. Now I am here. And I am still a light.