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Island Blog – Explosical

I just made that word up by the way, but it fits. In that word is Ex, meaning gone. Plose, as in ‘Boom’ and Sical as the arse end of Musical. Well, if Latin/ Greek scholars can derivativise words into minute parts, then so can I. Much as I respect the past of historical learning and memories, even remembles, it is high time we caught, grasped onto, and learned from the way language has changed flipping ages ago. We all have many new neighbours, new work colleagues, new dialects on our streets, among our new-met friends, in all social gatherings. And it isn’t just the pronunciation of a word, the tilt and lift and shift of the musicality of a well-established word. I know this, I have been confounded, felt the hesitation and the embarrassment as I tried to understand what the person across from me just said. I got the drift, but not the fulcrum. Even in my long ago youth, I remember that sweaty awkwardness, the wishing I was anywhere but there, trapped in a chair, sweating anxiety. Not now. Now I will respectfully admit to my own lack of understanding.

There is musicality in all languages, in the way they emerge from the iodine of whatever the familiar is to us, the old tunes, the stuck of it. It seems to me that the English, the British, are more stuck than they might want to be, perhaps with the legacy of owning half the world thick in aging throats, perhaps. But to lift into a welcome …..How about that? I am my father’s daughter and thus fixillated in entrenched wordage, but, and I do believe this, if he was still with me, and could still pontificate enough for me to bring him down to a whisky and a courie-in, he would get that, no matter the dictionary, which, by the way I have added to twice. Language is explosive and musical, and if we want to dance with it, well, we need to get out there and do just that.

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Island Blog – Tapselteerie and Widdershins

I’m watching my money tree. I’m not sure it’s mine, actually. I have no recollection of growing the thing. It just arrived, not as a gift, I’m certain of that, but, more likely, a cast-off from someone leaving. It would have arrived in some young person’s arms, all apology and hope, because what were they going to do with this damn thing fighting for life, in a pot of earthy mess?

Anyways up,….she’s here, and for many years now, a veritable bonsai beauty. She arrived as a spindly twinkle of life, all floppy, over-watered or, more likely the reverse and required a mother touch. I gave that. I always do. Now she holds proud right in my sight, in the window above my writings. She thinks me.

We live in a following. We do. We follow signs, orders, expectations, protocol, regimes. We go with the flow. And I am all about going with the flow, until, and that word is one of my favourites, one or some of us pause, feeling that we don’t want to continue on. And that’s a tricky one. I thought much about it today as I walked into the fairy woods, now considerably less wooded after the last storm-fell. (new word…..soon to be stormfell). How would I turn on this ‘follow’ thing? How would I find the courage to go widdershins against the clock of ticking inevitability?

Methinks this as I wander on my walk today, as I feel connection with the lift, of life, of sinking death, of all around me, that there is much I can do. I can take in a money tree and give her life. I can challenge this and that and make something happen. I can push through the desire to hide and chide and then go to the pub to meet friends. I can commit to this, take that on, because both this and that in my tapselteerie thinking means I am widdershins. And I love both words.

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Island Blog – Make it So

Blimey, it’s been a while since I tapped these keys. Life loughed in and I was busy being mindful and also going to the mainland which is mindfulness enough for any sentient and emotionally aware individual by the way because we never know when we will get off, nor home again and at what time and in what state. Anyway, all is well for now, until the next venture into a Neverland we islanders believed was something to do with Peter Pan.

Tapping away, I recall learning a qwerty keyboard. I remember it well the Pitman rise of keys, the required strength to punch the Q or the P, the Z or the Y or any other damn consonant rarely used and under the watchful glare of eyes, pin-striped, narrowed, judgemental (judge…..mental, now there’s a thought or two) of the Ma’ams who ran the show. One, wide-arsed and slow moving, her nylons sounding like frenetic waves on a shore as she marched between our desks, and the other prinky pink, sharp as a cut, glasses peaking aloft, holding tight to her edges, a bustier, a confiner, controlling knickers, something like that I was sure. She could barely breathe. I wondered about their love lives, but only for two embarrassed seconds, to be honest. They were old and I was recalcitrant 16 and knew it all. However, I was bright and surprisingly keen to get out of this place but with honours. I didn’t manage those, as others did. I watched the others who did. They were alight with the joys of being a secretary. check that word out. A secret-ary. You get it. I was absolutely not. Lasted a week in my first job. Second job, my ‘boss’ decided my pert arse was his landscape. I kept no secrets after that.

I digress. What I wanted to write about was fairy lights.

Because I don’t go shopping, don’t go to the mainland unless I have to, I trust the google search on Warm Fairy Lights. It doesn’t always work, in fact it often doesn’t work. So I hesitate to risk purchase. I’m not interested in battery powered lights which are gold for as long as it takes to sigh and smile and turn away,and die very slowly and whitely and flickery. I have seen golden plug-in lights in family homes, other homes, I seek them like a drug, asking where did you find these and they all say, with a floppy hand wave…..Oh, I don’t remember. I want to pin them to the ground right then and to choke the answer out of them, but I won’t and I don’t, much like, on the back of the trust and hope and belief of my Secret – Arys, I really did see golden, the chance to be somebody, noticed, respected, a part of something growing and wonderful. I’m not saying it can’t happen, chance is always a thing, and I am still hoping for that chance, for plug-in warm, golden fairy lights that don’t lie about their lack and for secretaries to make it so.

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Island Blog – To Go Dancing

Where i want to be right now is dressing up for a night out, a dinner, a car lifting me there and back home again, all elegant and smooth, me looking marvellous, feeling confident, no baggage. A completeness. To go dancing.

Well, that’s a dream. Life is more dynamic, more twisty, colder, sharper, inviting, a compo of shitstorm, warm encounters now and then. We move through shapes and disguises. We actually work our way through what straggles us. We do. The straggles are just flip thoughts. always the pulls from childhood expectancy. always. And the twists continue as life changes, is blown apart, creates a chasm. It can, and does. As I know.

Thing is, everyone is delonculous about Halloween. Next, Christmas. and that’s fun. I’m right there. I’m just wondering if anyone is looking deeper.

I still want to go out dancing

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Island Blog – Inquillinate

I cut the slimy ends off my syboes until I get to the crispy green, the last addition for a salad. The potato is already baking, the fire lit, the tunes on, the stuff of an admin and action day done. The clouds are back lit, sunlit, fire lit. Just moments. If I move from one room to another I can miss the show. It’s all about noticing, about watching the passing of something, about holding the experience. Everything brings that, every action, each moment, the longing to be noticed. We all want that, if we are honest. Which, mostly, we aren’t. We spend so much time in an inquillination, we do. A place where we ‘dwell in a strange place’. T’is an obsolete word, not used since the 1600s but it’s a gorgeous word and means so much because we all spend time in the strange of a place. Over and over and over in our lives. Those times, say in childhood, when some friend who was always a friend suddenly turns on us when around others. What happened? The times when we presumed everything was just fine and ordinary in our life and something hit us, someone caused massive damage, just like that, in a second, just when we were annoyed about delay, about lack of response, about someone not showing up. When someone we always knew was there, suddenly isn’t. So much cloud hiding the sky. Looking back, well, there comes a clarity, one often too late for reparation.

Someone died. I knew her for decades. I worked for her when she couldn’t manage her beloved garden. She was so strong before she wasn’t. And she was determined. She was a friend. In discussions about any subject, she was a wisdom. She saw a foot slip in any statement and challenged it. Many round tables with her and we all waited for her to speak. She was commanding, but without judgement, confident, knowing.

When we moved to Mull, we threw an open dance ceilidh. Anyone, everyone, just come. Everyone did, including her and her husband. I remember seeing her in the line for Strip the Willow, in her synche-waisted dress, all wide skirt, all white and yellow, her eyes sparkling, waiting for the moment to reach out for a swing.

Rest in Peace my longtime friend.

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Island Blog – A Pining

I have them, now and again, in spite of, or because of (don’t like the ‘spite’ word) my olding hooha and the general strimble of downstairs sans a trip, and the forgetting of what I said last week about an important something. Seriously? You remember that? Well, go you and your mind. Mine is all heading off on wings of hope and the next moment, proffering itself as a wild opportunity for me to be wild and opportunistic. Just saying.

However, tomorrow a very big 200 year old Pine tree is being felled. It has to come down, split as it is from navel to tit and with the two sides dancing to different rhythms on windy days. We are talking many tons of crash, was this big beauty allowed to fall au naturel. It’s too near the road, too close to wires and sheep and fences, never mind all the dog walkers, the workers who come by daily. The tree surgeons who will make this whole thing happen, have a tricky task. I wonder if we who don’t have a clue about such skills, have, well, a clue. I don’t. They will have to clamp, climb, position, focus, watch the wind, catch the moment, pick their time to cut. My respect to them.

t thinks me, about loss, half loss, about those with skills who come in to make a situation okay, about the times We did, about the times I did. And I remember bits of it all. The awful times, the fears, the losses, the pain of them, the gradual lift back into the light of ‘Oh Fk’ another season. A tree falling was just an irritation. How immediate and how young was that thinking! What it meant was no delivery serv ice (not that it happened much), no school run access (yippee), no guests in all the wrong clothes leaving nor arriving. Lawny it was a fracking nightmare, and often.

At the Best Cafe Ever today, as we cleared and scrubbed and sorted all the flotsam and jetsam of a very busy season, I was aware that this tree is coming down tomorrow. I know it needs to happen, and I will wander up to watch the skills of tree surgeons. It’s 200 years old. I’ll still pine.

Not just for her

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Island Blog – There’s Something About…..

Having no idea who reads my blogs, nor who benefits. Never knowing what each new day will bring, a serendipity or a catastrophe, a gain or a loss, a fall or that moment when I will stand tall as a warrior. It’s as if life lives me, and, in a strange way, I like that, most of the time. I like danger, living on the edge, always ready to do my very best at outwitting. I am naturally spontaneous, a state which can, and often has, found me in a dodgy situation, mudswamp rising up my legs, the dark completing me, eradication. Until, that is, my eyes adjusted. They did, and they do, and once the ‘ayes’ have it, the house is quietened, and then comes sensibility. Love that word. ‘The quality of being able to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences; sensitivity.’

There I am, was, appreciating and responding to my highest level, and although this life is bloody exhausting most of the time, what with all this learning even when I left school decades ago, I still love life, the way it lives me, the way I live it. Well, not so much the latter to be honest, because I can still flounder in mudswamp and the dark. However the importance of the important is simple. It’s poopy in the mud. I can do dark but not for long. I love light, am light, bring light. And there’s something in that, the need and the strength to defy. Any something is an enough something because we know the opposite of that.

I have no idea where my children are. I have no idea what will become of me, ditto when the next gale will smash down most of our island trees, nor whom will fall sick, nor when this baby will be born, nor when I will see this person rising from the sadness with a smile on her face. I know not whether this shrub or that will survive the winter, nor when I might hear the Arctic swans softly talking from across the sea-loch. I don’t know when a still day with all its quiet glory will come, not after a torrential rainday, the sea all a-popple with white smoke and sprachle. I never know and there’s something about that.

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Island Blog – Etymology and Widowology

My Thesaurus is tired. I can feel it as I lift it from the table, the pages all autumn now and threatening a fall from the Binding tree. Undoubtedly there will be a new and upgraded version by now, because words are being daily introduced into the world of etymology. I don’t know when I bought it, yonks ago. Being a wordographer, a lexicographer since I was about five and very full of myself and my ability to show-off my newest words, ones that never got past my dad, but flew completely over the head of everyone else, including my ma, home life was a bumpy road. Just imagine that, being that mother with this upstart of a child. Must have been difficult. My voice was too pure, my confidence too out there. Being encouraged, as I was, by good teachers left me in a lonely world because at home I was just too out there, too sure, too much of a show-off. I get it now, but it still leaves the stain of spilled childhood on the garments of my adulthood, and, of course, as a result, I grew less confident, more absorbed in self-doubt, the inner questioning about whether or not (probably not) I would ever ‘fit in’ and it all grew loud enough to confound. I had clear memories. No, ‘they’ said, just remembles, the false memories of something. In came the mubblefuddles, the anticipation of something, everything, going wrong. I remember the falter, the doubts, the strong feeling that, no matter how well I showed off, I was, actually, invisible. Teenage years were ghastly, although I do know there were times of fun and inclusion and I can hear, if I really listen, myself laughing, really laughing without having to look around a group for any judgement.

So much tacenda, so many things to be passed over in silence; as if in acceptance, which it wasn’t in the main. I remember embarrassment, humiliation, rejection, judgement. And, bless me for this, those voices still ring. This is learning, I tell myself. I am not my past, I tell myself. I am not the girl/woman they saw, no. She is mine. I see her. I like her, love her with all her wordingness, her need to be seen, loving her chance to ‘show off’ but never to put another down, never that. Just me being me. I don’t need to hold the floor over others, don’t need to be better than another, don’t need to win at games, to be the best. It just isn’t in me. I just want, always did, to be the weirdo wordo that I am and to be allowed.

Many years ago, whilst living in Glasgow, when I wasn’t just me, we went to a well-known fish restaurant in Leith. On the river and well-established, this place was always booked up. We sat for a pre-dinner drink at the bar. The waiting staff were young and beautiful and very professional. the lights twinkled inside and out there, shining up the river in twinkles as the dark came down. An older woman walked in, my age now, but not then. I watched her, sassy at 70 and colourful, not hiding her wrinkles, not trying to be anything but herself. ‘Usual table?’ one delicious young waiter asked, smiling wide and proffering his arm. She dipped her head, yes thank you. He waltzed her to a small round and elevated table still in the bar and with a lovely view of the twinkly river and all who wandered by. She was so collected, so herself. I noticed, on her olding finger, a golden wedding ring, loose but there. She ordered a large glass of red and some water. Her clothes were cloth and colour, long and swirling. She seemed to have no problem being alone, but I did pick up a something lonely. Couldn’t explain it at the time, know it now. We were called through to the restaurant after that and I didn’t see her again, nor ask about her, but I do remember thinking this. If I ever get to that place of aloneness, I want to be like her, with welcomes and flirtatiously beautiful waiting staff who recognise and welcome, with a small table to yourself and with a view of others walking by and with the twinkles of uplit water just over there.

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Island Blog – Lexicographer

We don’t ask to be born. How many times is that used as an accusation in the face of judgement? A lot, but it is true, and we didn’t, at least not necessarily into where we landed. We all want to be seen as who we are, and at every single stage of the who-we-are-ness which, I have to tell you is frickin tough for parents who are equally puzzled, and daily, at the transmogrification of what had at first, seemed like a wonderfully planned out life.

I came first, on the back of a howler. I’m sure, judging from photos in the album of me with hair tweaks and frilly frocks with matching bar shoes, all pristine and ironed to death, that I was the one, the perfect girl, top of the chart, a celebrity. That didn’t last. And why was that? Well, from what I remember, I was, well, different. I did conform, I did, and it was very wise to do so in order to avoid the slap, but what is it in a someone else, one who inhabits a ‘good girl’ even as she damn well knows she is on a slide to nowhere? I got brilliant. Please excuse the slanguage. I was best at performing, elocution (does anyone nowadays knows what that means?) English Language, Wordage, Dictionary expertise, the Study of Words, their history and their importance, once. And this was a gift? No, it was a loneliness. It felt like I was in some in-between space. I could see my ‘friends’ out there all happy with endless conversations about nails and clothes and fashions and horse riding and bejewelled parties around uplit infinity pools and I just wanted to sink into a bed of bluebells with a book and a like-minded friend. We would talk words, new ones, old ones, work out their meanings, laugh at our mistakes, be together on this lonely journey.

I knew one once. His name was Tom, and a bit older than me. We both worked at Lotus, watched the first run of the Elise around the track, which was right outside our big wide glass-filled office. He gave me lifts to and from work in his VW Beetle. It was the new age of seatbelts and we laughed a lot at working the whole thing out. We did spend time in the bluebells. We did talk words and their origins and it was a fire lit in me. I moved on, as did he. But I remember that glorious connection with words, with Lexography, with research, with the play on words, the way they change over time.

I’m glad I had that time. I can still see him in a stumble of trees, bluebells at his feet, laughing at some word I’d conjured from nowhere, the sundown at his back.

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Island Blog – All about Light

The light here is ridonculous, changing all the time. I can be not paying attention to the light at all, being as I’m all inside and split with the electric (as they call it up here) and caught in the spot of a standby red or the blue of a fading charger or the flicker of a gas flame, or the sudden of blue eyes, brown eyes, any eyes, any distracting lights. And then I turn to the outside of inside and see it, the change. From a lemony sun to purple, to grey, to blue. The whole place is blue, the hills, the trees, the whateverness. Then, incoming, zeon-neon cycling kits all wrapped around a couple just off their bikes, and I turn in once more to the standby red etc. It’s quite a brain swirl, I’m telling you, although you already know it for yourself. The key, I tell myself, is to keep a hold on the outside light changers because there is definitely something feral and organic about the way it morphs and swingles, evolves and full stops itself. If I was to step out on some mission, like those who ‘conquer’ mountains (Bens, if you want the actual definition) or who do any other conquering nonsense, to what…..capture the light change, get it so right, so perfect, I would be wasting my time. It is enough just to glimpse. Now there’s a clumsy word if ever there was one, although that maybe just in my mouth. You wouldn’t choose to use it in a song. But, a catch, a sudden turn, an eye-capture, that’s it.

Anyway, (never begin a sentence with that word) I’m home now, back from a fun, busy, happy day at the Best Cafe Ever. Loads of laughs and chats and learning that sourdough is a right shit to wash off anything, and that anyone arriving on the other side of the counter feels shy. It thinks me. These grown-ups are suddenly unsure, looking for a welcome, compromised if that welcome doesn’t come quick enough, the light of it. It’s all about light.

Now the fire is lit, the hills beyond the sea-loch have settled into a uniform brown, although, as a painter, there is nothing uniform about brown, nor any another hue. just saying. There is tinder, ochre deep and light, and medium, there is rose gold, there is burnt umber, tango orange, falafel yellow, a skid of drowned lapis, a whitish tense of skinny limbs, bared like my arms in defence, minus the lichen, obviously. I see snaps of old lost grass, a pecker of distant woodland. I see the light of the flooding tide, a slug slide, grey but there is no ‘one’ grey. Everyone knows that.

I’m watching the light right now as the fire breathes and the candles flicker. Out there is more than a closed sky. It always is.