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Island Blog – Everything a Touchstone

Another damn gale. We have many damn gales up here in the pointy end of two countries joined together at Gretna Green. It’s all thanks to the fact that there is nothing but Altantic swell for a gazillion nautical miles, which, let’s be honest, makes for the best playground. However, I took notice of something. It wonders me. Wind, at any level is actually silent. It just blows. But, when it hits something, a building, a person, a mountain, a ship, anything held by gravity, it can shriek, whine, even sing. Think of the rustle of leaves, the melody that comes through cracks, the siren scream around the corners of buildings, the blatter of bamboo wind chimes, and so on. The thwump of a wheelie bin toppled: the sigh and crash of a falling tree.

Power on, power off, power on again. It is island life, life in the land of the Scots, and across other countries in the northern spheres. When I talk with others who don’t live here, they are amazed at our resourcefulness and we have that in spades. We have known saving cows in blizzards. We have known endless winters and even smile at those who are filling flowerbeds in April. Our winter has a greater hold on these beautiful, exposed and rocky lands. Was Englandshire formed by ice age or volcanic eruptive chaos? I don’t know, but we were. Collisions, cosmic fury, undersea upthrusts, the moon in a right stooshie. That’s us, and do you know what? We are tough as nails, but more, so much more. Nails are rigid. We are not. We learn to bend with the winds, we laugh at the rain. It’s just rain, after all. So, when ‘Disaster’ happens, let’s say on social media (and god, those disasters are endless) such as when something isn’t delivered, or the nail surgeon has ruined nails, or the dress isn’t really silk, or Deliveroo didn’t, or the whatever didn’t whatever, I do wonder if a winter on a remote island might be a grand idea. Not in an expensive rental with all accoutrements and a live-in maid, but in one of those wee bothys with the best view you will ever see in your life, the seabirds overhead and the selkie singing you ancient stories: where the ferry may well not run: where the mail arrives when it can: where the skinny roads may not be gritted; where outlying farms and homesteads are way more than a bycyle ride away even on a good day: where the path is not perfectly gravelled, the door sticks a bit and the fire takes a bit to get going and the kindling is damp.

Where, after dark there are a million stars and all of them silent, and where you can hear all those words the wind never got to say.

Everything is a touchstone, or it is lost as nothing.

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Island Blog – Happy Thanksgiving

This day in many homes a thing is going on, a once a year thankfulness thing. If you consider the word ‘thank’, rhymes with spank, frank, dank, lank and with others, you may agree that none of them are pretty words, not in the wordsmith’s library. They all sound like a belly flop. However the celebration is a good thing because just maybe it has ripples. Maybe some will rise from the feast thinking, wondering, deciding that being thankful could be a daily decision. Can you imagine? If we all walked anywhere, everywhere, feeling thankful, not because everything works perfectly with our own plans, because it usually doesn’t, never mind all those things we find irritating or infuriating, those who argued with our own perception of how life ‘should’ be lived, we might accept and move on in kindness. I know that’s a long sentence. Took me a while to get the syncopation and melody into shape.

I know about thankfulness. it has saved me, found me in the dark woods of Dante, found me a new path over and over and over again. See, I think the problems we face are the rocks of doubt and blame and other words that rhyme. We can spend a lifetime, a wastetime, new word, hefting those rocks onto each other until we cannot see a damn thing, not the sunrise, not the moon nonsense, not the neighbours, not the welcome of community. And there’s another thing among things. I have heard and heard, until even my ears groan, that people arrive somewhere and feel isolated. I know, I do, that my own experience doesn’t compare with anyone else’s, but I do want to ask this. Did you actually talk to someone, the neighbour shouting about his fence or the one who sold you a newspaper, or the one who stood blowing a whistle to set your train on it’s tracks, to the street musician who played their guitar with ice on their fingerless gloves, the person who handed over a steaming latte, the old woman you see every morning as you dash for work, her rheumy eyes, the emptiness behind her? Or were you so caught up in your own agenda, your own angst that you thought of nobody else?

The thing about thankfulness is that it is a state of mind. Here’s my wee list. I am thankful for my ridonculous life, for the way it happened without my say so. How I learned my say so a bit late. For my beautiful grown children and for theirs. For the time I have now, the fire in my hearth, my belly, for the mischief in me, the tinkerbell. For the music and for the writing and for all those damn times both wake me at stupid o’clock with words and melodies. For the chuckle in me as I wake. The smell of coffee, for my car, my free-to-go, my community, my wonderful friends. For the daft weather up here, the gales, the falls the lifts, the laughs we have together. For warmth, protection, even for the loneliness because it renders me resourceful and dynamic. Bottom line is this. Love the word Bottom. Sorry, moving on…….

If we could employ thanking, thankfulness whatever, as part of our underwear, let’s say, like knickers, it would become a part of our everythingness. We would put it on every morning, decide to. So that, when something happens, something that irritates, confounds, arrests us, we would be a unit, me and thankfulness and we would respond together. Even in the dark times. It works, it really does.

There are so many lonely people out there.

Happy Thanksgiving to all xx

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Island Blog – I Rest There

It rained all day today, heavy stuff, non stop. Actually, no, it wasn’t always heavy. Just looked like it through my windows. And there’s a coolth in rainy days, even as it isn’t as cold as yesterday which was all slippy ice and still as a still thing. It just feels that way, all that wet and slam against windows and the wind pushing against the glass like a bully. It thinks me. Perception. Always a good thinkster. Let’s dance with this……

I see a rain day as an internal rain day as a VERY BIG RAIN DAY. Others not so. You, jolly old you who don’t give a rip snort about weather, skipping out on your skateboard, or heading off for a sea swim, or just happy in your life, or a kid who never sees anything as a stopping of fun and opportunities. See? Hence my thinks. If I awaken as I usually do thinking a couple of things, such as I am so thankful I have woken up at all, and in this beautiful cozy island home, or Oh dammit, I can hear the mice in the loft and it’s only 4 am and dark as hell out there, I have to decide how I feel about how I feel before I set foot on the bedroom carpet. If I don’t, the negative overtakes me, the fear, the alone, the self pity. I am crap at self pity and also very good at it. I read that two contradictory thoughts can be held in the brain, but nowhere have I discovered how to deal with that. No amount of googling. So, with lofty mice and gratitude diddling with my brain, I downstairs myself and into the day. It’s still dark and the rain drowns out my audio book and my thinks, until I settle. That’s when I stop to listen to what is actually going on right now around me, and I re-jig myself. I am Alice, I know it. Curious, adventurous, a bit wild, a lot wild, trusting, too trusting, saying Goodness! a lot, eyes bright and without fear, even if the Red Queen is just around the corner.

In this real life, I can see how damn tough it all is. We have made our families islands and there’s an understanding and a loss in that. We want control. We also want to make the change we want to see. I get it. Waaaay back we were the same. There’s no way there will be the restrictions on our kids, not yet even conceived, no way this patriarchal control will come into our plans, no way this, no way that. I’m smiling now, writing this. I’ve no idea if our plans worked, probably not, but I do know that, no matter the child, no matter the chaos he or she brings in, we just loved, floundered, got lost, spent nights without sleep, hoped, prayed, loved again, barely noticed if the broccoli was yellow, cooked something with gravy, baked bread, answered calls, washed clothes, hoped that school was ok and dreaded pick-up, barely noticed the day of the week, tidied bedrooms, thought thought thought of the best treat with the money and time available: on days of non stop rain, on days when the wind threatened to take out windows, days when I was late for pickup because the sheep got out and it was just me trying to negotiate with a dog who did not understand a thing of me, when the landrover broke down and I could do nothing about the damn thing with it’s huge tyres all fixed with a spanner thing that would defy a god strength. Or, when I am feeling so broken and don’t know why, and that’s why I just look blank at you as if I don’t know you at all, and there’s no treat and I’m sorry.

Basically we have no idea what we are doing, most of the time. The problem is we think we do, because admitting we don’t feels like a personal failure. It isn’t.

I rest there.

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Island Blog – Hoping So

I did Wordle today, got it in 3. Yesterday when Tuesday was actually Monday, in two. I tell you this because there’s a thing about olding, much of which, if not all, we who are indeed olding, know only too well. And here’s a thing. We wonder about ourselves. We do. Although we may be saggy, pouchy, floppy and wobbly at times, we still remember the dance, that one when we just dazzled, sliding effortlessly over acres of floor, so very confident. Many laughing mates gone, but that’s not the whole thing because there are the we of us who still have the fire. I do. Many do. And here’s the butt of a but. In this isolated life of this new life, new generation, the fire is there at times, yes, but not strong, or it seems so to me. So many work demands, the ownership of employees, the pressure of two working parents, the cost of childcare, the cost of everything. I have no idea how you all can. make this work in harmony. It must be super tough and you have my respect.

To be honest, I am glad I lived when I did. Oh yes, there was stricture and parental judgement and community blockings and school abusement and appalling selection processes and racial and class blindness but I didn’t know anything different. However, I did find myself at a red light at times, something not right here, I don’t like this, what is going on? But no voice as a girl, and absolutely no voice as a middle class girl. No power. When any of that shit happens now, I find the fire. I can’t change it for all, but I just might be able to say to one, Hey, hallo, I love your purple hair, your piercings really light you up, your smile at the bus stop just made my day, Thank you for the way you stopped and asked me about my coat, my smile, my short hair, my red boots. The way you showed me to my table and laughed with me when I said, Not there, maybe over there and the way you swished me lovely towards a window seat as if knowing me without knowing me at all.

This is new gro world. All of you living it. All of the constrictures we oldies knew are now yours. We were there, hippies, wars, Hendrix, Woodstock, Bob Marley, so much revolution and so much dance, so much fire, so much hope. I wonder, when I look at your lives, the protective, fear driven control to master it all and I wonder if anything has changed at all. I’m hoping so.

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Island Blog – Actually Tuesday

In deference to the olding of me, I get the flapdoodle assailment. I suspect it was always here but when I was dealing with immediate disasters, such as fire in the hold or a child dangling from a rope that fell three floors and yelling Mum in a screech beyond the beyond of sludgy sleep, his slippage a definite concern, my inner Dante could barely whisper. Ditto when there was disaster at lambing, or the horse was sinking in a freezing bog, or a guest was stuck in the bath in a locked bathroom requiring a deal of laddering and a lot of looking away. Nowadays with all of that a chuckle in my mind, when most survived, I have the silence of olding and widowing. I love a lot of it. It even funnies me at times, usually when someone I am talking to bursts into giggles. Life is ridiculous after all. No matter how we plan, how prudish, how strait-laced, how desperately we hang onto rules and restrictions for ourselves, our children, our husband, wife, partner, there comes a time when Life flips us like pankcakes without a safe landing. It always has and it always will. As we hold too tight, there is always slippage. The key is to teach that to our children, even as nobody does, holding on to the right of the times, the limitations, the fences and boundaries. I hope we learn one day. I really do. By the way the dangling son landed safe, the wee shite, after a deal of leaning over bannisters, proffering smoothing okays, being there to catch him.

Talking to my children, adults now, they tell me thank you for the crazy life, the wildness of it, the way they learned to accept life/death/life at an early age; the way you did this mum, sorted that, the way dad made us safe. We never doubted that. Pretty good, eh? I have all of this and so very much more, the convoluted vortex of it, not pulling us all down, but containing us in a swirling collective. The olding years show just me centre stage, and I have to confess, despite my siblings sniggering at my ballet moves, I feel proud. I make mistakes. Today, for example, I got all ready to go to the Library Coffee meet. It’s Tuesday here half way along the sea-loch, but not there in the village hall, I discovered. It’s Monday there, the hall’s wooden mouth clamped shut. I laughed at myself and drove home. I walked up into the woods just to say hallo and tripped over a willow root, apologised and rose again. I lit the woodburner and went to close the doors, the door closing handle breaking right off. I walked into the beyond of marvellous at 3 and met the hind and her calf, about 5 feet away from me. She looked up. Hallo Lady, I said, gentle and low. She looked a minute more, then ducked right back down to graze.

The clouds are umber grey just now, a bit shouty, pushing at each other’s backs, against a dying blue. Their tips are burnt umber, gold, rose madder, the hills below a silhouette. The day is leaving. I’m hoping tomorrow is actually Tuesday.

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Island Blog – Palimpsest, Ingress and Egress

I watched ospreys today, fishing in the sea-loch on a slack tide. To be honest, I didn’t see them actually fishing, too many bent-back hazels in the way, but I did hear the shrieks, warning shrieks, a rasping ‘bugger off’ I hadn’t heard before. The gulls were wheeling, all high-pitched and taking up all the air, filling it with the squeals of schoolgirls on a home bus. My alert alerted. Damn hazels, always in the way of seeing clear, even when naked. Now that’s a talent, I thought. The chaos continued as I moved on up the track, my eyeballs almost falling out with all the futile looking. I knew there was trouble down there, somewhere. then I saw the lift of huge wings, the power of that 8/9 foot flapation, three of them with gulls like midges pursuing them. Gulls don’t even fish, I said out loud as I almost fell off a rock, my eyes, still fixed, now rolling. Creatures just don’t get it, do they, although they do. These huge birds, birds of prey are floating about like cruise ships in the skinny waters of a tidal flow and the little boats just don’t want them here. They win in the end. Amidst a great diatribe of birdswear words, the ospreys lift and slide away, cutting through the sky, hardly flapping.

I would like to hardly flap. I walked on, could feel my heart rise into a rap sort of beat as I re-met the ordinary. It thinks me. We get these bajonkers lifts, insights into otherness, and in the during of it, we shock solid. Then, when the gasp is done and the spin is over, there we are on the same track, in the same place, as if we never just visited Narnia. It’s a gift. Unwrapped it goes on forever like Pass the Parcel, when the size of the thing makes all eyes sparkle with anticipation until, at the very last a very small dinosaur, or car, or lip salve appears. Is it a disappointment? Yes, sometimes. It’s life and a learning. Tough but real. What is learned then is vital.

Our own tidelines are written over many, many tides, some when we were just learning and later when we are most vulnerable because of that learning. Thinks. Do gulls just harry, parry with and infuriate other birds just because they have beaks enough and don’t quite remember why they have them all, or are they just bullies? I stop myself there because I can’t believe anything or anyone is just just. I know the palimpsest of old, and I also know the truth of such a laid out truth, that it is constantly rubbed out and amended. And that’s a good thing. The ingress of old thinking, the restrictions, particularly for women but in no way exclusively, seeps like damp over a gazillion decades. But, and there is definitely a but here, we all have the power to egress, to say NO and then to take action.

Those big birds chose to lift, knew their power, held their voice, just lifted. I recommend it, no matter the gulls, the bullies, the ingress, the old rules.

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Island Blog – This for me

The thing is this. I write for me. It’s a need, nudge, more than that, a have-to. How did I get here? Good question. As an embryonic writer, I hid my words, doubted them, my face-up down. The thing about a writing urge, no, need, is that I was completely alone. I was a nobody, an Island Wife, immediately secondary, supportive, the second fiddle. When I look back to other female writers afore my time, they who really fought for a voice into the Voice Acceptable, as if the crowd ears had no way of hearing a female voice. Good G we have lived with this for hunnerds of years. And still now, here I am unsure about my voice out there. Women, we know, still battle the patriarchy, and it may just be that I am, in my mind and my teaching still running for the coal skuttle to wrack up the fire, or to the kitchen to create bacon butties or something instant because in my life, instant was the only way to feed the men. Longer than an instant and they were gone.

I know it should/could be different now, but is it? This writes me and thinks me. And so I write on. Life changes and shifts dynamics, and punctures and whips away and demolishes completely. There’s a post apoloclypse here and an ok there. I’m in between. How the feck do I cope with that, those, them? It’s sunshine one place in in one life and in one time and then the cold wrack of the worst in another. I’m on a rock inversive where the Atlantic comes in and goes out but never quite proffers a dry walk to shore.

This is why I write. I write for me.

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Island Blog – The Real Friends

Over my many years, I have thought about friends, noticed how many are fleeting, well meaning and basically pants. You must come to supper sometime. We might plan something for this or that. I’ll drop in one day when I’m passing. Nothing comes of that nothing throwaway nonsense. A real friend sticks, not like something you want to rub off, but a ‘just there’. That person whose eyes tell the truth, no sliding, no judgement, no agenda. Asking, yes of course, but not again with an agenda, but instead with a naive and wild interest into a world of a person whose life they have never lived. They step into it. There are few of these.

I have many now. I could never have imagined this. Mostly women, but men too, and doing things, community things, lunches, orchard things, so many other things I haven’t ‘thinged ‘with yet.

Friends are not the likes on your pistogram, in the workplace, in the schoolyard. Friends come in the one who says hi when no-one’s looking and who stays at your back when things tipshit.

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Island Blog – Moody and Beautiful

I love to watch the headlights moving around the backside of the sea-loch. Where have they been and where are they going to? I love the bitey catch of coriander when I open the pack to snip it over a green salad. I love the fall of the dark, when my twinkly winkly lights show themselves, a string of golden positivity. I love the disappearance of my whole garden, the emptiness of birds at the feeders, the slink-silhouette of a cat on the track and the way it suddenly looks up at me, the movement of me, the momentary connection.

I love my shower, the way it changes me from one day and into a solace. I love to sort and prepare something interesting to eat. I love the window dark of my rooms, the blindness of looking out. I love the pop of a cork and the glass of red wine, the way my speaker bigs up my playlist. I love that I got through today, that I walked into the wild, noticed, stomped, trudged, faltered, filled in time, did some admin, all of that. I love that I assembled a tapestry frame, after many attempts, that I changed my bed, laundered bedding, cared enough to respect the linen.

I look around my warm and comfortable sitting room, see the fire licking flame, feel the pushed out warmth, hear the tunes, and it thinks me of the other side of this I love thing. It isn’t an ‘I hate’ no, because I don’t believe in black and white as parentheses. I believe there are many greys in between. So, (don’t ever begin a sentence with that word) Sorry, dad, but I am doing just that beginning…….If there is, and there is, an whole nother to an I love beginning, how does it begin?

Perhaps it is honesty and doubled; perhaps we find it hard, if not impossible, to allow the truth to spill. Because why? Judgement, tick. Failure,tick. You are young, made mistakes. You are menopausal and angry most of the time. You are a young man who was told at a vulnerable age to pull yourself together, to stop snivelling, to man-up. You are a young woman who doesn’t want to do what her parents think is ‘best’ for her. You are sure you don’t identify with the sex you were born with. You are olding and furious about the tiny and daily losses of sight, of movement, of where you put that important receipt, or of who will help you stack a ton of wood, your fingers gnarled and weakened. The Lonely in all of these can be black as an island night.

Perhaps it’s because I am old and doing this looking for receipts, or trying to work out a way to see better in winter craft work, that I can see the love in the lack. Living so long gives a person a ‘so long’ on the angst of things whilst holding tight to a tryst with life. I am still trying to rein in the Lonely, a really feisty and bloody-minded colt, all spurs and twists and moody and beautiful.

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Island Blog – Left of Right in the Dance

There’s a silence at this time of day, when the sun has set behind the hills and the dark, greedy and heavy is bloody determined to win the game. I think about that game. It’s gone on for a gazillion years and yet these two keep on keeping on. We adapt. However, I notice that at certain times of the year those two fighting for space, early themselves. On a cloud-sworn cover up day, the dark finds an invenue and grabs it full force so that, say from about 2/3pm it is effectively dark. The school run is all headlights and avoiding those horrid blue-lit-light cars which confuse and diffuse clarity of vision. Or, they do for me. I’m pulling over thinking Ambulance.

This morning I knew I was going to collect my beloved mini who has been in the operating theatre for almost a week. I was up twirly, Dark still holding like a control freak but obligingly (or maybe because Moon is stronger than Dark), hoisting a crescent moon into its sky, and that light showed me big frost. Oh shoot. I de-pyjamad myself after a couple of strong coffees, black. I did falter. The sun will be low, the courtesy car frozen up, the switchback road possibly an icescape. Then I calmed, ate something and set off. I got as far as my neighbour (8 yards) and could see nothing but black, even with switch-eye shades, the visor down, nothing, no road, no concept of a landscape I have known and trusted for decades. It was gone. I did falter. I could go back home, explain, they’ll understand, I’m old and a fearty. I could. But I didn’t. I stopped, parked, thought ‘what is the left of right, and what is right? It jinked my thinks. I love movement, the physical, the mental, the way we can shift in a dance.

And I remember the dance, the way I went to the left of right with a partner who was making a collision mess of such a simple swing, couldn’t count, legs flying, hands barely gripping. My feet knew better than I ever did, and I saw what might happen if I didn’t guide this galoot back into formation. It’s the same inside my own mind, the crazy galoot, the dark and the light and the whats are there for me to hold onto when the dark oppresses, the light is quiet and hesitant and the galoot is a wild tom on the hunt?

In the silence, now that this island comes bome to itself, there are bare roads, plenty parking, no holidayers, some of whom expect more than they might if they just got the whole island thing, the way we have to go left of right, a lot. I’ve met plenty who’ve come here, and they love it. I do, I confess, have a squidge of an issue with the expectations, as if here is the same as the ‘there’ they have come from, with everything perfect. Island life is far from that. Instead we learn to go to the left of right a whole lot. Here it is all about acceptance, understanding, a gentle acceptance of the way that every single one of us do our best. And, all of us can keep up in the dance.