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Island Blog – The Jist of the Dance

The New year’s Dance. I haven’t been for many years, wanting to but encouraged to scoff at the whole hogmanay hangover/hair of the dog thing. But I did go, lifted by my kindly young neighbours and thus chaperoned and only for the Children Bit, 7-9pm. The hall was buzzing with families and those, like me, who tend towards early experiences, finiting them when the big people arrive with a long night on their minds. It was wonderful. For a while the music was disco, minus DJ and I watched the children, all fined up and flutey, the girls with sparkles and sass, the boys stuck to the walls, eyes on their shoes, the odd flicker of uplooking. I smiled at the memory of my own children at such events, way back way way back. Now I am a granny on the dance floor and don’t let anyone police me off it, oh no. I am here to boogie, to ceilidh, to absorb every single wonderful moment of freedom, not just from covid restrictions, but from life, from wife, from my children leaving, from explanations. I am aware I may well have looked like a right narnia, barefoot, dancing, as I did with another granny, a dear friend, another creative, a woman who knows what it is to have experienced the joys of gain, the pains of loss, her heart, like mine, a mosaic of cracks and craiks and smoothed over and over by her own hand, the crafter of renewal, of necessity. To be such a woman, any woman, is to learn that heart breaking is not a final act but a daily one, perhaps hourly, but nonetheless inevitable.

So we danced, we grannies, a lot. And when the ceilidh band, young men, arrived on stage, I played man to her woman and we swung and spun and giggled and bumped and it was perfect. The lights twinkled and the young, soon to be dragged home by parents for the 9pm curfew, danced faster and with wild enthusiasm. I watched their faces, caught their sparkles, saw the boys unglue from the walls as if they knew it was now or never, their pressed shirts and shone shoes a waste of effort if they didn’t just go for it, now, quick.

And then I caught sight of a young man, a friend of my eldest, a wide smile on his face. He lives away with his family, but he was here and this was now and, like the curfew children, I was leaving soon. Dance? I asked and he smiled his warmth, reaching out his arms in welcome. What is this dance? he asked. No idea, I replied (so many complicated island dances). The dancers formed a ring. Shall we middle it? I asked. Yesss! he said, and we did and the joy of dancing without knowing a single step with a young man who only had the jist of the dance was glorious. We spun and jigged, bounced and twirled and all the time he held me safe as we middled the whole wheel with absolutely no clue as to the regulation dance steps. It has been very many years since I felt that safe.

I would say, even at this late stage that I have only ever caught the jist of life, of living, not understanding most of it, and I am glad of it for life is a deep thing, and wide and way too much for resolving. But to recklessly dive into the middle of the dance of it is a glorious sparkly thing. It may not sort out heartbreak nor last into the next day but if I know I can take that barefoot step once, even at almost 70, then I can do it again, and, if I cannot, at least I did and only yesterday.

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Island Blog – Fiddlesticks

On this, the first day of a whole new year, I awaken to snow. Not thick as in other thick snow places, but the ground it white and I very nearly fell on my aspidistra when walking out barefoot to feed the birds. That’s good enough for me and the world seems magical. Well, it is magical most of the time and in between those times I usually need to tell myself to get over myself. I was probably thinking too much on imaginary fears and the concerns of agism, such as falling downstairs or running out of firelighters or of driving into a moose in the darkness. In other words, nonsense. And I like that word, most of the time, but didn’t love it all when I had just told the longest story to my mother, all excitement, bright eyed, my arms flapping descriptively. Nonsense! She said. I might miss her but I don’t miss her astonishing aptitude for turning a firework display into a popped balloon. My husband had the same talent. Some girls can’t half pick ’em. I digress.

I spent a merry morning dancing to Abba singing Happy New Year, avoiding my to-do list, the dusting, the hoovering and the photocopying of my last will and testament, although there’s nothing ‘testament’ about such a document. It says nowt about how wonderfully I have lived my bonkers life, nor of my achievements, nor (and this is ok with me) of my crimes and failings. So, Abba and I danced on, sang beautifully, or they did, and then, as the afternoon wandered in slow and icy and full-bellied with sunshine, Me and the Poppydog went a-walking. I startled and stopped at each spectacular view. The sun low through 180 year old Scots Pines, the shimmy of ice melt on bare branches, the trunnels of sunlight, pathing away into the woods, the brazen lime-light of moss, steady still despite the winter death all around. Tall grasses and reeds stand in stasis, held, held in the Ice Queen’s grasp and for some time to come until, that is, the next hooligan barrels in to lift my wheelies into the road and my frocks skirts flying out like flags most inappropriately.

Walking through the Fiddle trees, I watched them and for some moments, so absolutely still, so calm, so guiding. Thank you, I say, and Happy New Year, I say, out loud because this is not the Kings Road in London and therefore I am (currently) saved from being lifted. The ground is white in places, slippery as a threaten and beautiful, the ice forms like puddle art. In other places footprints and bike tracks muddy the track into lifts of rich brown, the rounds and slides of constant change. See here? Someone slipped a bit. There a size 10 I think, a man from the depth of the print, and here, oh look! A silent flow of deer tracks, one behind the other, followers of a good strong leader. We could do with one of them in parliament. Another digress.

I consider my occasional woodenness as I move through a whole grandeur of wood. It’s okay for you, I tell them, to be wooden but it isn’t okay for me to be wooden? How is that alright? But I know the answer, even as they say nothing back. You’re grinning, I tell one Lady Beech as I whack her midriff with my staff. In this life, the one we all have, this is what I believe. We need to think fiddlestrings, fiddlesticks a whole lot more than we do. Not as dismissive to any other person, never that, but to our burn thoughts, the ones out to pop our balloon. However, in saying this, I am very aware of how vigilant a soul needs to be. Many live in very de-embracing situations, dayfeels of unloved, unlistened to, uncared for, unnoticed, un, un, un. I know it. To believe in self when nobody else does minds me of the tale of the Ugly Duckling. Impossibly ugly until just one other says something. That’s it. So tell someone something that hears them they matter, they have a voice, a presence, an importance. Then go work on yourself. Eish…….that’s flipping hard, I know. Kicking my imaginatively embellished list of self punishments is like launching my small foot at a medicine ball and expecting it to fly like Tink. But there is always hope and she, Hope, is what makes us real, we non androids, we intelligent, beautiful, important changers, developers, powerful creatures, loving, soft, dangerous, wounded, broken, alert and learning.

I collect the fiddlesticks as the sun louers. Dry, brittle kindlers for tomorrow, the second day of the new year. Second fiddle, I think, and chuckle. I’ve been one of those for most of my life and it was fun. I never need to be first although that’s a lie. I will always be first to lift up another soul. Will you?

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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.

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Island Blog – Wordage, Fun and Mischief

I am noticing the words that leap from my mouth sans aforethought. What I am recognising is that we women seem to feel that details are always needed, descriptions the concise and careful constructivation of a picture. This, to men, in my observation, is enough to fall them asleep where they stand, or, if they can internally justify escape, they escape. We allow it without question. It thinks me. If the question is ‘Did Sally actually meet up with Melanie that day?’ A man might respond with a Yes or a No, then sit back in his chair because his job is done. If a woman is asked that question, you are going to know what both women were wearing, what perfume they do or don’t use, the state of their nails, hair, choice of clothing, their lipstick colour, the quality of their home life, the names of all 15 kids, oh, and grandkids, the colour of their hair, teeth, front room curtains etc, their relationship with their neighbours, mother-in-law, where they live, their diet, the colour of their car if they drive one, the weather, and finally coming into land with many opinions on all of the above. Meanwhile the listener has missed the shop, her birthday and is busting for the loo. It seems we can’t help it. In fact, without we women, there would be a minimalistic view of the world. It is raining or not raining. There are sausages or not, for supper. The radio is on or off. The mother-in-law is dead or alive. The people of the world, in short, are naked, mindless and quite without character, sometimes even a name.

However, to be a member of the woman clan can mean she is drowning in words, the need to tell it all a cumbersome weight. Unless she notices and refines her innate need to ‘babble’, she is unlikely to feel silent and deadly and I am keen to learn silent and deadly. But this learning thingy takes considerable mental work and a honed focus on the lips and teeth. It also begs something we women might find tricky, the pause for thought. I was not born with that particular talent but nor was I born with piano fingers. I had to learn and I am curious enough to become a student in wordage. Although it might take me the rest of my days to answer a simple yes or simple no, I do love to refine and hone. Breath is of essential value in this refine and hone palaver. Just one or two slow breaths when someone asks if Sally did actually meet up with Melanie that day can result, not in a simple yes or no because I am a newbie in this study course, but it does give me time to slough off the fact that I know Melanie can barely breathe in those support knickers or that Sally’s secret passion is to work with elephants in South Africa, or that those two women have loathed each other since primary school. All irrelephant. However, it does seem to me that the less I explain, or justify or whatever, the more powerful I feel, not over another but over my own babbling self and I like that feeling a lot.

Saying sorry is another loose lipped load of tiddleypom. Not when there is a definite culpability but all those other times, like when someone bumps into us. There is no sense in that but we do it endlessly, such as stepping into a taxi with a suitcase too heavy, in the rain and without assistance, thus keeping the lazy arse of a taxi driver waiting; asking a waiter for more water in a busy restaurant; changing an order in a bakery when the queue behind us is champing to be served; taking too long to pull out a pound coin or 3 for a bus trip with cold arthritic fingers. I have even watched a woman lift herself from a park bench with a sorry on her lips because she knew a whole family were eyeing that very bench, her own need for the whole of it a nothing much and clearly stating that she is a downright sinner for lowering her butt onto said bench in the first place.

Suspecting, as I do, that in my new land of weirdohood I think a lot more about things that never crossed my mind before, when external demands yelled for immediate attention. I am curious about behaviour, choices, patterns of old and the fractal un-patterns of the new, my creation of self now un-boundaried or even influenced by a.n.other. Sometimes questions arise that might have come from the mouth of a babe, questions deep and wandering as if I am just a little outside of everything I thought was a fact. In fact, I will question facts the most and there is a skip of mischief in my doing so. Someone says something that comes with a backdrop of irrefutable evidence. It’s even printed in a book as words are printed within the dense pages of a dictionary, their definitions set in ancient stone. And that, my friends, is where mischief finds her playground because language is always changing, developing or falling off the edge altogether. Basically I am having fun and at no-one’s expense. I am Mrs Malaprop intentionally and playing with words, turning a verb into a noun or talking like Yoda whilst still communicating the sense of my words. I am only sorry there isn’t an online course on imaginative speaking, on having fun with sentences or of finding new ways to illustrate what I want to say. Perhaps I’ll constructicate one. Sentences have rhythm, a beat, phrasing just like music and there is a wonderful freedom in playing games with what is supposedly the Right Way to Speak. The other good thing about jumbling up sentences is that my mind must be very quick indeed, well ahead in the race with my mouth, and one of the first lessons I wish to mistress is ‘Don’t say ‘sorry’ for every damn thing’. Instead I might say ‘oopsadaisy’ thus immediately bringing flowers into the situation and that is always a good thing.

I guess those diehards will be rolling their eyes at such subversion but taking life and language and a million other challengeable and changeable things too seriously just ends a face up in wrinkles. Laughter and a light touch lift mountains.

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Island Blog – A Crap Day Imagined and a Good Start

Waking in the night for no good reason, I took a peek inside my head. After a few moments sorting through the dross and toss of thoughts, reminding me of my merry days when five kids lobbed their dirty washing altogether in the laundry basket leaving me to sort the blues from the lingerie, an idea for a writing exercise stepped proudly up to the lecturn and announced today’s reading. A Crap Day. Well, I said, this isn’t a crap day and I haven’t had one of them for a while now, no, for ages, because the day is never all good nor all bad but only in bits. However, the challenge was on and I am meeting it head on, feet beneath my desk and to the accompaniment of raindrops plopping through the hole I made in the ceiling with a barbecue skewer, and into a big green bucket.

‘ Yesterday was definitely a crap day. It began when one of my contact lenses took off on a round the eyeball trip. I could feel the damn thing floating behind my nose like a lost dingy at sea. I wondered if it would stay there for ever or come back around again, or if I would blow a hole in my tissue after a sneeze. It might hit someone I didn’t plan to hit, ping them in the face, a tiny frisbee. It might hurt or even damage. I apply another lens and this one is on its best behaviour, remaining more or less in position even if it proved more difficult than usual to apply make up in all the right places for all the swimming water between me and the eyeliner. Dark mornings are bad enough for such shenanigans at the best of times. I check my bedside clock. Damn, I’m going to be late. I head for the stairs, catching my bare foot on the head of a nail which, overnight, has twisted free from the boards. Blood. It drip, drip, drips as I yell abuse into the empty house and attempt to hop down the stairs holding tight to the bannister. Into the kitchen, just time for a coffee, I flick on the kettle. Nothing. Curses! I check the big fuse box on the wall. All switches up. I bang the plug further in the the kettle begins to hum. While I sip the black strong brew I apply a band aid, pull on my socks and shoes and go in search of my car keys and phone. No phone. Where is the damn phone? I dial my number from the landline and hear it ringing from the sitting room. I see the light of it from the sofa, slightly hidden beneath something, a something that turns out to be a cat which startles me as I don’t own a cat. Thomas, how the hell did you get in? My eyes go to the window. Ah, it’s open just wide enough at the very top for the slink and slide of him to relocate his favourite cosy place. My neighbour’s chuck him out at night for some daft reason as if the poor old fellow is expected to catch his weight in mouse, just so the parsimonious bastards don’t need to haul up from the sofa and go for Whiskas.

My foot is aching now but I can still drive, even if I am now a walking dead woman about to succumb to tetanus or sepsis. Will anyone bother to visit me I wonder as I pull out into the rain-soaked traffic. Nobody wants to do this driving to work thing. I can hear their fury as easily as I can hear their angry horn honks. I don’t honk. I don’t even know where my horn is. Nearly there now. I indicate into the carpark and find no space beyond the ones for The Chairman, the Director, the Manager and the yellow ones for the disabled of which there are none in this crummy office. In a fit of pique I swing into the Chairman’s space. He never comes in anyway unless there’s a board (bored) meeting or when Marian from Hair and Make-up is in with her rolling bosom and her packet of chocolate hobnobs, and that thrilling combination only occurs on a Wednesday. Today is not Wednesday. I lock the car, spin on my sore foot and swear. Running for the front door in order to avoid certain drowning in this vicious deluge of cloud water, I punch in the combination and explode into the foyer. “You’re late Miss Moneypenny.’ he says, without even looking up. I hate it when he calls me that as if he thinks he’s Bond himself. He is very far from Bond, I can tell you. ‘Sorry.’ I mutter and pelt for the cloakroom. All this rain stimulates my bladder. ‘My office for dictation!’ he barks to my disappearing back.

The morning is arduous and painful. My swimming eye makes my shorthand almost illegible and the coffee is both disgusting and cold. I have left my delicious packed lunch at home with the cat and by 2pm I am fed up and tearful with all the extra work bloody Daphne left me because she couldn’t ‘make it in today’. My time of the month, she told Reception but I reminded Reception that she had already had one of those just 2 weeks ago. Perhaps she has run out of excuses to ‘not make it in’ After all, her rabbit can’t die twice, her mother break 3 legs, nor the 7.50 from Kings Cross derail again. The rain rains on, transparent tadpoles against the windows almost wiping out the view of the park, my sanity on work days. Finally it is time to go home and I cannot get there quick enough. I head for my car and my heart sinks as I see the wheel clamp. Damn it all to hell! I scream out causing some passers by to rearrange their glum wet faces into either sympathy or smiles. I march back into the office and demand an explanation. Reception looks at me blankly but I know she will have arranged this. I march up to his office, whack open the door and, to my complete surprise, give in my resignation. I quit! I yell and then I tell him to stuff his job and his completely ridiculous Bond fetish somewhere dark and smelly.

Eventually, after paying a week’s wages for the unclamping of my car, I arrive back home and breathe a sigh of relief. Although I am now badly in debt, without either job or reference, I feel free in a sort of lunatic way. Perhaps, I muse, as I light the fire and sip a glass of red wine, everyone needs a crap day, that ultimately crap one that makes a person finally get up off her arse and make the change that will change everything. I can apply for jobs, any jobs. I’ll go to the job centre tomorrow and chat with Daniel. I like Daniel and haven’t seen him for weeks. Might be a good start.’

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Island Blog – Nothing So Finite

The birches glow purple across the sea-loch as dawn hefts night over her shoulder and away. No, not purple, not just one colour descriptor. There is wine in there, the deepest darkest Rioja, some indigo (how come that rich word does not demand a capital letter?), amber, chestnut, a little, ebony and ivory. Not just purple, never ‘just’ anything. However, all that aside, the flow and blend of faraway birches in winter colour, arrests me. I watch them for a bite, even though they’re not going anywhere, rooted as they are to the whatever of whatever. The sky is blue-grey like our young heifers on the Tapselteerie hills, and, like them, refusing to be contained. Every time I look up, the dynamic changes. Flat and apparently peaceful, they erupt into crescendos and subside again, fooling us all. Feeding those female heifers took all my courage, the blue-greys I mean. Like rebellious teens with a strong sense of self and a kick-ass attitude to any authority, they would bound like puppies. However puppies are usually afoot whereas these wenches powered over me, canting and taunting with way too many kickerly hooves. One sent me flying once, the little madam. I got too close to her girly bits and she lashed out. I caught it on my knee and, in slow motion, flew miles, or it felt like it, before crashing to the unwelcoming ground in a most ungainly heap. Needless to say, as I slowly came back to myself, the whole playground had come for a looksee. 20 noses puffed sweet silage breath into my face and all I could see were legs, legs with hooves attached, far too many of them to make sense of the nose count. I touched one, wet and soft and like rubber. I looked into enquiring eyes. A child’s eyes.

Walking today, the wind is coldsome and from the east. It thinks me. What countries lie east of me? Ah, yes, the cold lands, the Swedish, Danish, Norwegian lands. Oh the stories I can hear as the wind brings them in. Tales of hardship and cold, of desolate winters in unbroken places that could break a person in the end. Tales of survival against odds I will never experience, the harsh honing of a human body, the dark, the endless winter dark, the pervasive cold, the snow children moaning at loose window panes, the biting teeth of a wind that will not abate until the very last minute. Of frozen lakes, no fish, of impassable tracks, no food supplies, of harpies and wood sprites and other complex variables that can, and will, derange an isolated mind, break a body, fracture a family. Of course, any environment can do that but my imagination likes to fly and the very thought of only 3 hours of light in a whole long winter shivers me. I have read the stories, the memoirs and the fiction and I can see how easy it might be to capitulate and to sink. We only have laden clouds to winter us through and very different stories to tell. Today, I might say, inside a story, I took my wellies off for 5 whole minutes, dancing in the freedom of toe escape. I scrubbed the mould off my legs and clothes and basked in the lick of flames from the fire we all fight over because A, it is pathetic due to the wet wood that would so love to dry given half a chance, and, B, there are way too many of us doing this basking thing. Plus, the smell of wet sock, unwashed feet etcetera is only for the desperate to endure. Some of us slink back to the cold. I have done this, lived this and, with hindsight, loved that I did.

The track is coppered now with beech leaves, a warm colour, a lie but I love that lie. Is it a holding on to the last warmth of summer past? Is it a transition, yes it is definitely that. Standing here, watching not the birches, purple or not purple, but the skerry, pumped like a lunatic with rising salt and spume and flying birds and danger, it thinks me. Do I like transition? Hmmmm. Nope. Who the hell does? Only those who think too much before they answer that question and I smile when I hear that think translating into Politely Positive Response. Way too much blah coming. The sky is darkening and is putting on a spectacular blue-grey show. There’s a moon landing ahead. I watched the moon this early morning. She’s a crescent just now, clouded in puffs of those lower in the ranks, those fluff balls loaded up until their bellies birth, and all over thee and me.

How extraordinary life is. How transitional. How small we are. Purple? No. Nothing so finite.