It’s wild here. The tidal rise took fishing boats level, no, above the pier last night, challenging their keels, and the road flooded, fishermen, coastguards, police and firemen out all hours to save their boats, their means of income, their passion. Parking would have been interesting. My mini would have been challenged, her sump drunk on seawater. But, for all the danger warnings and over dramatisation of this whole who-haa in the News, we islanders get on with it. We have met this before, and oftentimes. I read the panic in the media and I snort. After all, we have been aware of a climate change for a long time, and pretending it won’t affect us is mindless stupidity. I am very thankful for all that I have already experienced on this westerly outscape and for decades, for it has brained me up, big time. We know, here, when it is safe to go out, when we might drive to the ‘toon’ for food supplies, how prepared we must be for (dire and dangerous)weather shifts, for autumn and winter moons, for gales and haphazards and everything in between. I know folk here roll their eyes at the loss of Common Sense, but it isn’t common and that’s not the people’s fault. It’s the denial, the pretence, the invitation to get lost in an instant fix, as if fairyland actually exists, as if by denying change we can stop change.

Today was wildish. I went out to clear up the fallen. Thank you, I said to those big-ass yellow things I never could name, but which entertained a load of bees, and for weeks, to the forsythia tree, felled because it grew too tall, to the maple, now almost stripped of leaves. Thankyou, because you stood tall for as long as you could, until the punch of power decked you. I cleared a coup of oak, a three-fingered limb, from the track. Touching it, hauling it out of the way for others, I felt the latent thrum of life and death. I’m cool with life/death. I’ve seen life and death, and there are different emotions attatched to each one, I am so glad I have done so. A lamb, an ewe, a calf, a horse, a parent, a husband. I started small there, you can tell.

So, when the bejabers are sucked out of me, and others at times, maybe gales, heavy rain, death, loss, frightened responses to scans, and other shit, it thinks me of people. On the island, we are many and strong, and from all sorts of places. Voices, accents, lifestyles come together before a whoopass island fire, warming, welcoming, a coorie doon.