Island Blog

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Island ~Blog – Thank you

My second fourth day in the cafe. Consecutive. It matters. It smiles me, the wondering of the whether or the not of this four day working thing at my age. I did wonder a lot, until I decided Oh to hec with this wondering flippancy. Let’s go. And I’m two weeks in. It thinks me about spontaneity, about random, about Hell yes. If I remember, and I do, those in my past, who did just jump, who did decide not to fade into beige, who, despite confines and restrictions, emerged in colour. And she is me. Now, I don’t want to say that only women do this colour-up thing, this stand alone thing, but I am a woman and cannot speak for a man.

The cafe was quiet a bit and then loud a lot, visitors coming in, all smiles and askings, and we were there. The baking and the soups are fabulous, the cakes high rise and flipping endless. I know because I am wheeching cake tins and spatulas and bake tins and whisks and bowls and scrapers and wooden spoons out from the kitchen and into the washeroo, a lot. It thought me, and this is nothing to do with the cafe, more my own life. Recognition for work in my day was not expected from a man. It isn’t now.

But now it is given. Thank you

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Island Blog – Take the Risk and Fly

The Rose Bay Willow Herb (I’m so glad my parents didn’t weigh me down with this name) is waffling, backlit with sudden sun. I’m watching it doing this waffling thing and I get it. You beautiful lot, all purple and strong and waffling down there upside of a sealoch, are stalk stuck. For all you sway, that’s the it of it for you. The next bit is a windthrip of petals and then the aftermath. I close my windows for that. A thousand piloted seeds float in. Any window open and opportunity knocks, although it doesn’t, not for the RBWH. Indoors is not a beginning. It’s more a load of sweeperoo, and even that requires a lot of dancing about with brush and dustpan and for days. But, when I stop to catch these seeds, hold them in my palm, I am brillianced by nature. These seeds, flighter than dandelions but with a similar modus operandi, can go for miles and miles. How clever is that! We stop and start at traffic lights. We queue politely (heaven help us on that nonsense). We pause before speaking. We say ‘Sorry’ way, way too often. We can float, we can, in silence.

Trouble is, we are grounded and within a thoroughly controlled environment, rules, queues, strictures, opinions, cultures, or we believe we are, and, thus we limit our lift and our fly. Of course, I realise that plants don’t have parents, nor do they go to school, nor work, and that trio can define and control us. And, we cannot fly, not like seeds, not like birds. However, I will challenge this, not in ‘realism’ but in mind belief, in dreams, in the longing of those who just know there is something more than the grounded This.

I am old. I am experientially so. I have lived a bajonkers life. still am. I see, still, an upper age control, at times domination. I see, still matriarchal and patriarchal chains suffocating. I see, still the confines of religious beliefs, the social expectation, the racial bullying. It goes on. What I would say is this, only this:-

If you have a dream, a real focus, no matter your place, your state, your anything. Take the risk and fly.

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Island Blog – Clockwise and Widdershins

I’m aware that July is easing out of view, note, calendar. To be honest, I feel she only just arrived. How the wheel turns! I thought this as I watched my washing machine do it’s thingy. It swished clockwise, paused, and then went widdershins. Ah! I said, I did and out loud, this is life. You think it’s going one way and then it flaming well doesn’t. I can’t blame July. All the months do this. And what surprises me, now I consider the whole wheel turn backforth confusative is why are we surprised at all? I find no answerers. These questions are mostly thrown into the void, where, which is rather alarming, there is nobody with an answer. It wonders me. Are these questions more a boomerang?

Ah, yes, they are. Although it feds me up a whole lot, I know it’s true. We answer our own questions. We think we can’t, that we need someone else to do this, and, sometimes, when deeply compromised, deeply lost, we do. I know that. I do. But what I know and notice is that so many of us, strong us, confident us, forget ourselves. Life will swipe clockwise and widdershins. Always did, always will. I ask myself, who do I want to be in this new month, new age, new moment?

And then, I remember. It takes a big re-jig, or it does for me. Times I know I am old, feeling it, pushing on when thumbs and hips hurt, because……and what is my because? No idea.

I know me, the who of me. Not one single other person in the whole of everything will ever know the me of me, the I of I. Nobody, not ever. Only me. So this flipshake of clockwise and widdershins, this whole July departure, and the next month and the next, the expectations of those cemented in some man-made control programme, not one of them can decide me.

I turn off the washing machine, hang my clothes on the pulley. Nobody has them anymore, not in the new world of everything aesthetic and clueless. I watch them dangle. They’ll be dry the morra.

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Island blog – The Plosive and the Fricative

The Cafe was bajonkers today. It seems to be a Wednesday thing, although I imagine, now that most of Englandshire is on holiday here in big vehicles with kids and dogs and a tiny wish they were on a beach in Spain, that Wednesday will not be the only bajonkers day. Serving excellent coffees, an abundance of quirky teas and hot chocolates, a fairground of colourful high rise cakes of many flavours and combinations, people thronged. In fact, there was so much thronging that all inside tables filled over and over again, thus sending those made of tough stuff out into the spitspot of west coast rain. Those ones ate fast, with good humour and in rainproof jackets. It was all smiles, it was, even when the queue was long enough to cause me pause on my return from sourcing more brown sugar lumps and another bag of ethnically farmed (and salted) hot chocolate nubbits, with a lot of excuse me’s.

What all this meant to me as the small and salty washerwoman was a deal of dishwasher management. It’s a great wee thing, maw of a young whale and a very hot wash in five. A purging, apparently, and one insisted upon by the gods of cafe standards. However, I have discovered that this delightful washhelper has her, or his, limitations. He/she is crap at sourdough mix. We all are crap at something, yes, but this dough takes the prize. Soaking, endless, stuck bits, concrete, drain-blocking, spectacular. The bread is gorgeous, so that makes it all ok.

I did notice, pausing more as my arms disappeared into the depths of a mammoth sink, the water hot as Hades, a rise of wordage in my gullet. Such an unattractive word. Picture me, in this cocoon, although I doubt the butterfly bit, surrounded in steam, endless dishes coming at me, and I mean endless. I noticed how I say nothing, just keep moving, keep working. I also notice how my co-workers, decades younger than I, do expel breath, plosive, after a huge rush of soups, quiches, pita with hummus, cakes, scones with this, without that, as they speak out the phew of a break in pressure, pulling back into the fricative when another customer appears and smiley welcome slaps on. They are so professional. And, then I wonder at myself, all quiet in the Washeroo, no plosives, not even a fricative. I know, of course I do. This is training, this is my learning. You just don’t expel anything young lady, not ever, and there is a huge weight of pressure in just that admonition. My generation, my time.

I love the new.

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Island Blog – Do You Remember?

I walk today in the Tapselteerie woods. After a refresh of rain, after yesterday moving through a thick of tourists and shoppers, there are no Excuse Me’s here, no need. I am alone amongst the hidden faeries, the ground-dwellers, the dripping leaves, alone in the glorious, yet musical silence, even though it isn’t silent at all, not with all this dripping and faerie chatter. There’s a thrum from the soft ground, I can feel its rhythm through my soft shoes, my toes connecting with the gentle buzz of conversation, nature speke. I stand awhile to listen, just stand, to take in the peaty smell, think ‘whisky’, laugh at myself, the sound caught up in the air, held in the massive branches overhead, then released back into silence. I see a broken limb, a huge one, and put my hand on the beech bark, murmer something, a thank you. You are old, you are fallen, I see you. My fingers, gnarled and bent look like my mum’s now. I never saw that coming, but nor did the beech limb, thrust out wide, fighting for light, tangled in it, too far, too high, too ‘out there’ to survive.

I move on and out of the woods, the only sound my rainproof jacket (awful noisy things) and begin my walk home. There’s a mist across the sea-loch, a smokey rub-out, a loss of definition. Everything is lush, green, ebullient, a disguise. In winter everything is clearly defined, the start and the stop, the contours of rocks and hills recognisable like a something laid bare, naked, a woman without make-up, just woken. I slow my pace. The rushing in me is like a burn in spate, a river, even, a tidal flow and this is not always a wonderful thing. I know that my life required a great deal of rushing, but not now, yet still I rush. To slow, to sit, to wander, to ponder, all can feel like anathema even as I see others who can and to wonder why I cannot.

I think back to the fallen limb, to all the fallen limbs I have encountered throughout my years among the Tapselteerie woods, as an islander. I remind myself of all the moments I have calmed and gentled others in turmoil; how many times I have heard said that my bright spirit has uplifted a falling soul, how many I have welcomed in with warmth and light and music and ideas. And then I remember how easy it is to forget the legacy of what I have given, of the who I am, of the how I eased life, of the when I showed up, stood tall, made laughter a bridge of opportunity for another. I did that, and I forget that.

I’m home now, and writing this, but my mind scoots back to the old beech. She gave and gave, proffering her strength for a ‘great place for a kiddies swing’ as she pushed and fought for light within the canopy. She struck out, braved herself, gradually over a long time, silently, determinedly, proudly, independently. I did too.

And so did you. Do your remember?

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Island Blog – Eyesotropy

I would have been thrown out of English Language class for this one, but, as I often was, I stand strong on this one. Back then, in the days of switch ruling and rigid definitions and absolutely no questions ever asked when a bright and (obviously) challenging student rose like fire in an actively cool environment, words were only acceptable if there was proof of their existence in the old dictionary. It was, I’m sure, born from the fear of the fire. Moving on…….

I’m just back from a trip to Specsavers on the mainland, meaning the rest of the world, btw. You are welcome to it, all of you who enjoy filling pavements and streets with a bosom and butt closeness which (never ‘that’, thanks Dad) ever has appealed to me. I need acres spare around me, an ocean preferably. I went for an annual checkup and I was, I confess, a bit anxious. Last year sent me to Glasgow for checks. I would say I am not a ‘fearty’ but I was, a bit. Degeneration is not a fun thought, and nor are the possibilities of ageing and the maybe loss of independence. Eyes are pivotal, important, essential, all of those and more. However, I have a son and his warm family to warm me in, over that sluice of water, that stretch we have taken for granted as almost an easy ride for many years, and one which is now a right pain in the arse. Mostly, it is true, because of an Incomplete of adequate ferries. I refuse to join the bang-on about that.

I join my grown-up grandlings on the journey over and am collected by their dad and delivered. The appointment is welcoming, efficient, fun. I’m still sort of waiting for the demise chat, the ‘I’m sorry to say that…’ thing. It never came. My eyes are, she said, very healthy for my age. No, she didn’t say that, she just said the healthy word. She showed my my twin planets, red moons, a few striations in gold. I was impressed. They’re mine? She nodded. yep. So, downstairs I go to sort new specs, and frames. Two for reading, two for better clarity driving, one pair tinted grey. So exciting, and we had loads of laughs about ridonculous frames and how I looked and so on. I think I held my son up with all this hilarity. Result, no further nothings until next year. Oops, double negative……

Off we walked in the rain for toasties and soup passing dogs and cyclists and kids and puddles. The chats altered as we moved up or back in the skinny group and I learned much about more, here and there. Snatchtalk. Home now and so thankful for my eyesotropic balls.

Just saying.

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Island Blog – Thinks and Inner Talk

Goodness but this humidity is something else! That, and the Cosmic Shenanigans, the Seven Sisters lining up a gazillion miles above our heads, the Moon playing Quidditch with them. Big Game in the sky. And, that’s enough capitals for now. Moving beyond……

I feel as if I am carrying said sky on my head, the biggest cloud-hat ever, but it doesn’t stop there, with just me. I see faces sweat lined, a stoop in shoulders, a trudge in steps, an Aah in voices. It thinks me. We on this westerly island are more used to slam and crash and wheelies taking off into another’s garden; or sun straight and clear, air fresh with clarity, helping our minds to scurry like mice, busy, productive, enterprising, aware. These few days of cosmic hoo-ha and all those sisters doing their aligning thing as if they plan to dance the merengue which will probably result in a load of noise we cannot hear, but can feel, has been daunting. Add mother moon and, well, I can’t go there. I just feel tired and here’s where inner talk makes an entrance.

If I say, out loud, that I am tired, it isn’t just the other person who hears my words, and, because I have spoken it out, he or she now needs to respond, hence commencing a conversation about the whys and whats and hows and whatnots of my particular type of tiredness. My computer brain has heard my voice and has recognised it as familiar. Good lord, I have started something, no, two somethings, neither one of which I want. Apart from a complete waste of precious time with a friend who now has the tired word blanching the storyline balance of his or her own life into a softness which is not quite edible, my own computer is going bajonkers on a ‘fix’ and coming up with endless plasters to stick over the ‘wound’, one I have just announced as a problem. All completely useless, what my friend says and the plaster. So, my question is, why do I speak it out, even to myself?

I know why I am tired. I work 4 days a week in the Best Cafe Ever (sorry, caps will come in) and I am not young anymore. I love it, you know that. but the number of days takes a toll. I remember Old Katy in Tapselteerie days telling me her bones were sore. I was decades her junior, made kindly adaptions to her work load, but didn’t understand it at all. I do now. Next thing on the tiredness thing. Over a few nights, all my smoke alarms have erupted into song. You knew about the first, I think. I binned that one, but the others shriek, and it is a shriek, picking the deathwatch (sailor’s term) hours to make a point, one which still confuses me. There is no fire, no gas escape, nothing. I ping out the batteries and try again to sleep. The batteries, just fyi, are new. I think this is all to do with cosmic hooha.

Back to inner talk. I believe that we are all hard on ourselves, no matter our history, and I say that because we blame too quickly, thus allowing ourselves a wee freedom. I have learned, am still learning, to take responsibility for the moment, for everything, actually, each step, every choice, regardless of bloodline or memories, or of what lies in our paths. Inner talk plays a huge role in this dance, this delusion, this rise or this descent. So, when I say to myself ‘I am tired,’ this brain of mine, devoid of emotive action, merely a mathematical robot, agrees. I stoop, I trudge, I tell someone, poor little me.

Well blow that right out of the water. I saw a young otter today on the Tapselteerie track; I went to church and found perspective; I watched a Peacock Butterfly on a flower, knelt down to see the sun through the backside of a Himalayan Poppy, lifted a Carder bee out of the sunroom, smiled with friends, drove past healthy black sheep, watched a toad pull itself through the green and saw the smallest moth perk atop my laptop.

Looking only at the beauty of whatever life anyone lives in, is not a plaster. It’s a re-jig of inner thinks. Every time.

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Island Blog – A Precious Island Life

The mist is definitely on a mission to smudge. I saw it first around 4 am, woken as I often am when the circus of the skies, the cosmos, opens for business. I know there are conversations going on up there, ones we need to hear and to understand, but, sadly, I only talk human, child and dog. I feel it nonetheless, and there is a freedom in that itch, that discomfort, because it connects me to more than me, to more than the solo and the loneliness, to more than ridondulous concerns about which wheelie to put out.

Work today was busy, wild at times, and tiring, until I approached my own tiring nonsense and sharpened it into a soft lead pencil. I can write my own next sentence. I always can. It felt a bit limpy, nothing for a while and then a big invasion of lovely customers, so smiley, wanting soup, quiche, cake, hot chocolate, iced latte, extra bread, focaccia sandwiches, and yet, do you know what all of them really wanted? A welcome, a recognition, a pull to forward, an invitation and a hallo and we are so happy you came, thing. Chances are, not one of them will get that, but I do, and so do the owners of this welcome cafe. They, the visitors, are spinning through life, escapees from huge pressure jobs and lives and here they are under the mist mission with a chance of blue. It must take time to process. Actually I hate that word as I have never consciously, nor knowledgeably, processed a damn thing in my 70 years. And then, these big and possibly powerful folk are gone back to the whatever of possibly powerful lives, leaving us with the mystery of mist mission, the lift of sky birds, the wild of spatter rain, the thrum of maybe thunder, the friendship in the pub, the people long here, grown wild from the nonsense and fun and hard work and deprivation of a precious island life.

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Island Blog – Go Mahousive

Ok, a new word, yes, but my family are right there on inventiveness. We always were. I do remember the odd altercational exchange with t.t.t.tteachers who stood resolute against any such inventive nonsense, stuck as they stood, like plastic, and holding out the Oxford Dictionary, which, even then was definitely well beyond its shelf life. So we, in that crazy Tapselteerie kitchen did invent. We did. Stories, chances, lifts and lufts, beyonds and togethers, all made a right frickin mess among pots and pans and plans and dance dynamics, not enough bread, squashed strawberries, an important delivery that didn’t arrive. And I am proud of that, The fact that in the face of endless structural collapses, we made our guests believe that everything was mahousive. And it was. To be honest, should I notice an unavoidable slimjink, I would move into the guest mist, performing, always performing, my eyes alight, bright with a tomorrow promise and an absolutely firm delivery of an amazeball pudding, with cream and liqueur and more wood on the fire.

It worked. It does now, I watch the do it now thing in the Best Cafe Ever. What might be a lack turns into an opportunity. In order to make everyone welcome, we, on the business side of the counter, behind the cakes, the swivel and twist, the real mahousive, the inner workings of a brilliant cafe are bright like the sun. Welcome, we say. How can I help? And there are so many incomings, I watch them. from behind my Washeroo. Hallo you, I think. Each customer is served alert and kindly, orders change, others in the group, the family, shift and change choosing this, no, that, no maybe two, no, one.

And on it goes. I did spend a while today standing and thinking. There are only two words in the Oxford Dictionary beginning with mah. One is mahogany, brown and well, brown. The second is mahout. Elephant friend, those who, back in the day, cared for those poor creatures who were forced to carry queens and other eejits with delusions of grandeur through streets, into wars, way way out of their natural and familial environments.

So I officially add Mahousive. It means bigger than anything. I’ve done this adding thing before, by the way. I wrote a piece for BBC Wildlife, a gazillion years ago, about a whale, so called stranded in a sea-loch, Isle of Lewis. It was a nonsense. The whale was fine. It was February, so damn cold even that word wasn’t enough. I, and Janine timed the breathing of the whale as it took on the loch and the captive fish, I watched the surface lift in response to the hailstones. The loch ‘poppled’ . It did. However that word did not exist, I challenged that. I find it now in the dictionary.

Go Mahousive.

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Island Blog – Thinkfull Traverse

It began gently. We worked on this and that in the almost empty cafe, tables waiting, our voices echoing in the space, rolling up and over and down again back to us behind the counter. We commented on the bajonkers of yesterday when folk arrived in bulk packages, and the difference this day. Someone, I won’t name her, said the jinxword ‘Quiet’. And that was that. In they rolled, those with children, those on a tour bus, those in couples, singles, triples and more. The sun shone on them until the clouds snatched that chance away and even the roof builders, noisy nail-gun-toting buildmen, with voices and shouts and good works and noise, had to demur, to capitulate as the heavenly water threatened to dilute their egos.

Meanwhile, down in the depths of cafe-ness, everything changed. Suddenly, and it was ‘suddenly’, we were serving lunches, quiches, soups, baby chinos, scones with or without cheese, cream, jam, foccacia sandwiches with beet, green stuff, hummus, quiches, fresh, intelligent, spontaneous, ice creams, cakes so soft and so spectacular, I do marvel. These bakers appear to bake without effort, all bonhomie smiles of welcome even if they are mid shift on a pastry or spongeal bonkers. When something runs out, they say, Ok and go back to make another fabulous.

I am dunk-sunk in the Washeroo, my choice, definitely my choice. I like it in this bubble, even when the temperature rises to silly high, all that steam from the dishwasher and the hot water required to make everyone safe from whatever they imagine is out there. I am good at my job, I know that, even as I remember the washing up thing back in my day when the process was often all about the visual and less about the temperature of the water, the cleanliness of the scrubber (not me, the thing that scrubbed). Different now. I also remember Health and Safety appearing, she in a suit (so very obvious) having driven up the long pothole track to sit alone at dinner, like a bird, her head pecking left and right, her judgement the next morning, clear. She knew there were 4 collies in the kitchen, 5 children dragging in brush and mud. and vibrant stories, a husband who never cleaned up for anyone and who, for sure, had a chainsaw to mentor with oil and spray and gloop in the cooking kitchen, or a lamb to deliver in the warm because the alternative was hypothermia and death. But she had her remit. I sat with her, I did, I could hear her stockings rasp as she sat, as she moved and I did feel for her feral self. I’m sure there was one, somewhere. inside.

Today did think me. My thumbs hurt, I stood a long time, it was humid pre rainfall. I did feel it all. But I felt all of this before my cafe work, all on my own over many widow years, and then at times the sore thumbs, the ones which have served me for over 7 decades, took on a magnitude, when other bollix, olding bollix, rose into the ‘it’ of a day, and on and on until I, even I grew sick of my winging as if this was how it would always be, and from now on, the olding crone whispering a downfall. So, instead, ignoring the olding crone, the sore thumbs, the souciant eruption of care for my thumbs, hips, old legs, slower arms of me, I rose. I did. I remember doing it and it recalled me, the doing of it many times before, although I was younger then.

It doesn’t change, that choice, that attitude. Nobody has to turn in, if they don’t want to. I’m going to turn up every day no matter the what, the which, the who, the when of anything. Feisty, Fairy, Failing, Freeing, Focussing, Free-ing up, Friendly, and, trust me, all the other F words chuckling me in this daily throw of the dice, and that also shuts me the f up on my sore bits. We dance together, work in a dance dynamic as we serve and serve, clear and clear, smile and smile. In short, we have found a home. I really think so.