There is a moment when thinking is flipped like a sand timer, on its head. A moment when all I think I see and all I think I know unthinks itself. In a state of confusion the old absolute makes a dash for the door. I call after it DON’T GO! but it pays me no heed. The new light thrown on this old belief has dissolved it. I didn’t ask for this new light but, then, whoever does ask for new light when that which was already is curled comfortably up in the library alongside all the other absolutes of my life?

Once the door has shut on the old I turn, reluctantly, towards the new. Now I will have to work and the thought makes me tired. I never had to think much around the old guy curled up in a library chair. Now I have a bouncing babe to dress and feed and think about, and at my time of life! It’s a veritable insult and quite lacking in respect for my retirement plans. I know of many, now dead, who staunchly maintained their library of beliefs. Although it might have been infuriating to me, I could only hand over the invitation for an alternative look at something old. I often as not withdrew my hand for these old retainers retained with iron fists, their vast collection of experiential wisdoms serving them as well now as they ever did throughout a long life. I could, in more gracious moments, see the value they put upon what and how they knew any given truth. I could sometimes, in a state of higher grace, see myself as they did. Uninformed. Young, too young to really know what I was talking about. I could take that head-on-one-side patronising half smile and climb back over their boundary wall with only a slight turbulence in my heart. Sometimes. Although I do confess to you now that this was a rare event. How could they be so stuck? Why is it that, after 20 years of my father being dead, did his ruling still rule? Was my mother a child who could not think for herself? Just because he refused to let her sew whilst she watched TV with him, did that mean she was duty bound to maintain that rule? Did I have to sit there, my hands laid still in my lap and feigning interest whilst watching Countdown? Seriously??

It was her rule of thumb. Her security. It told me much about their shared life. Perhaps she, like me, had married someone she needed at the time. A father figure, one with a well-established set of ‘truths’, and, perhaps she picked them all up and made them her own because to think for herself could have been dangerous. Many women have fallen into this old trap, me included. It is easy to do and comfortable, safe. But, unlike her, I am curious as Alice in Wonderland and always seeking a new way to do an old thing. Sometimes I bin the old thing altogether. It’s falling apart anyway, for all the patching I may have done to date. It no longer has a place in my set of truths and its voice is just a squeak, and an irritating one at that Even when I can smell danger ahead, I quest on because the world is always on the change and I do not want to be left behind. Uncomfortable it may be but what I am learning is a revelation. If I don’t hold on too tight to my own experiential trusses, will the building fall? Well, yes, it might. But, then again, it might not.

This letting go of control is my egg timer flip. All my life I was taught to adhere without more than the odd lightweight question, such as Shall I Prune These Roses?, to the establishment truths. In the parental home, my school, college or job, my marriage and my family life. Sometimes this wistfuls me a bit. Had I been brave enough to sew defiantly whilst watching Countdown as a young woman, might I have known the real security of independent thinking and autonomy? Learning this flip thing as a sexagenarian is all very well but what difference will it make now to my life?

I cannot be sure of my answer to that, but what I do know is that this new state of flux is exciting. All day long old truths head for the door but I no longer call them back. Thank you I say, and Hurry up. My house looks bigger without them, more space for dancing, more light. It doesn’t matter that I am a late learner. I am bright and strong and healthy and I say I Don’t Know a lot to the questions asked by my grandchildren, my children, anyone in fact. And I don’t. Know. How can I know, when the world is always on the change? Instead I ask them – How Would You Do It?

There should be a museum of Curious Old Ways with a nominal entrance fee. On rainy days, young families could visit the exhibits and laugh together at the quaintly out of date methods I trusted and employed for decades. They might picnic in the grounds and return, after lunch, for more hilarity. It could be a real hit with the new generations. Old thinking always generates laughter in the young. It doesn’t mean we didn’t bring anything of value to the table of life because we did, back then, when our set of truths was a newborn babe. But now they are not all relevant, nor useful as they once were, and they need either modification or release. it’s a good thing.

That library of old guys. I think I’ll move them on. I want the new light, the new books full of new truths. And all that room for dancing.

Writing this title tells me that Sudden has turned into a noun. I like that. How versatile it must be if you are a word to be able to traverse the grammatical genres. I employ nouns as verbs and adjectives as trampolines from which anything lighter than a giraffe can effortlessly bounce off into a sentence, landing just wherever it pleases.

Talking of giraffes…….yesterday evening I was sat sitting on the stoep, glancing from time to time at the longing shadows and feeling the sun soften into a caress (having attempted excoriation since 9 am), when something made me look up. And up. And up. A huge male giraffe was heading my way. His head bumped the sky and he towered over the acacia, now greening up fast. Behind him came slightly smaller huge giraffesses and a scuttling baby, still taller than most of the thorn trees. I gasped as quietly as possible and pressed the video button on my phone. I followed their slow and gracious walk as they loped along, watching them pause to strip the most thorny of the thorn trees. Those thorns are 6 inch nails and sharp as needles but not to their leather-lined mouths, I surmised. I saw the baby spread his forelegs in order to pick something tasty up from the ground; saw zebras drink from the water butt just a few feet away from me and smiled as two slightly less huge male giraffes, probably brothers, joshed with each other in a tease of neck bashing.

At one point a car appeared, returning to the house just across the bush from us, and stopped dead. I heard car doors open and shut quietly, low voices vibrating in excitement. The giraffes, spooked, began to wander away but, by now, the baby had taken himself off to the far side of the dirt track and was, in effect, trapped. I urged the people to move themselves and their car quick quick, but only inside my head. Eventually, on realising that their stopping had upset the whole thing, they moved away and relief flooded my heart as the ‘little one’ grabbed his chance and rose into what would count as a gallop in Giraffe. I followed their departure around the house and off off off into the depths of the bush with a great big thank you in my mouth, followed closely, I’m rather ashamed to say and on a different trajectory, with a curse for the uneducated tourists.

I don’t pretend to know exactly how to be mindful. Apparently there are loads of ways of getting it wrong. For example, just noticing a new flower en route to the M8 does not count. Well, it could, if you held the spirit of that flower through a line of aggressive drivers and the rain obliterating any chance of a decent view ahead; held that flower in all its sudden beauty, allowing it to infiltrate into your very being, mindfully, of course, until you float into the antsy grudge-infested and hungover bunch of colleagues awaiting you with that beatific flower smile, unwavering, on your face. Never mind that you stormed out of Wits End late after a ferocious altercation with that infuriating teenager who is actually planning to go to school in that stained shirt with that amount of goo plastered over his head and that patronising smirk on his face; nor that the woman you work beside just texted SICK and has left you with double the workload, nor that your varicose veins are playing up, nor, even, that you forgot your sandwich for lunch which will now go through a process of revenge, curling up at the edges whilst the carefully constructed and healthy interior will liquify, stink and finally end its life in the kitchen bin, accompanied by a thousand bluebottles. The flower smile stays on, if you are mindfully able to hold that flower within, if you are really able to let go of a deep need to control everyone and everything.

It asks a lot does this mindfulness. However, I am growing to like it a lot. A huge amount of our days come at us like a spray of bullets, and it doesn’t stop all day long. If we don’t control our responses to that relentless attack, we become a victim of circumstance. In the quiet of the night we may consider this, feeling unable to defeat the enemies who attack us. I know this place so very well. However, the most marvellous news is that it is never too late to de-victimise ourselves. Our minds are strong enough to change it all. Not overnight, but with guidance and with consistent mindfulness study.

That teenager will learn eventually that stained tops are not cool, that smirks just look arrogant and that solid hair looks ridiculous after football in the rain. The double workload may or may not be completed. I am only human after all, and my work hours are fixed. My colleague did not set out to dump me in the poo. She’s just sick. My colleagues can keep their baggage to themselves but I can be compassionate and ask friendly questions so that they feel heard. Chances are I’m the only one in their lives who listens without fixing. This, in no way means I take on their stuff. It simply means that I see their suffering and acknowledge it, even if I reckon that their suffering is nothing compared to my own and I feel like smacking them.

I’m sure I am muddling mindfulness with other modalities but I don’t think it matters because the bottom line is the same. Let go, let it be, let them be, let me be etc. Let everyone (including those in my care) live their own lives. Let them find out for themselves. I just need to focus my do-gooding light on myself. There will be plenty of work to do after all. For starters I can teach myself to let go and that is just about the biggest of all asks. Meantime I won’t be going out in a stained top, nor with quick setting plaster slathered over my coiffure, nor do I have a sneer turning my mouth into a rumple of caterpillars – not since that flower en route to the M8.

I might forget my lunch though.

I love the long shadows, when the sun drops down a peg or two to welcome in the evening. The change of light notices me things I never see in the daylight. Cobbles of ground, unseen for hours, suddenly become my focus. That line of stones, the lean of that tree, the way the land takes in the silhouettes and shows me leaves against a concrete wall or stripes created, just for now, from the picket fencing around the deck. All day long I was oblivious to all of this. This beauty. This snatches at my thinking that, now, thinks me.

They have gone out for a meeting, leaving me with a hot dog and four game-on cats. One of the aft-mentioned who knows fine well she must remain behind the wire curtain, never to wander alone in this land of predators, zipped like a fly between my feet and headed for the bush. I yelled, I grabbed her by the tail and she lashed back at me, claws finely tuned. Never, ps, grab a cat by its tail and think you are in control. You aren’t. She went and I, panicked, shaken, and…….oh no…..I had left the wire curtain open a touch in my dash for a feline tail and another had ventured out like a press photographer to get the best shot. It was ungainly, ugly and very scary. If that cat had gone, she wouldn’t have seen the night through and I, well I would have died a thousand deaths, unlike her one.

I was reassured. This cat, saved from the street will never run for the bush, nor the hills. All she did was to cower beneath the decking to re-organise her tail feathers. A few soothing calls from her saviours and she was back, safe and sound.

This evening, all creatures that should be inside are inside and those out there, well who knows? it is early yet, still light enough to see the long shadows, still early enough to watch a spotted bush snake glide across the wooden slats and over the edge into a darkling safety. Still early enough to watch a family of warthog trot comically across the path and to disappear into the bush. I always hear Eddie Murphy’s voice when seeing warthogs. Their trot is, well, comedy on legs. I wouldn’t want to mess with those tusks, nonetheless.

Each morning more green appears on the Acacia trees and today I walked beneath a full-blown Jacaranda and smelled the honey petal fragrance. I had to stop, to breathe it in, this Spring that isn’t Spring for me and yet it is. Travelling from one season on a trajectory of cold and ice into one that is just waking to the warmth of Spring is weird. It only took two days in a plane or two, no, three, encased in metal and aircon and other peoples’ exhalations of air, trusting, letting go, watching a movie, sipping coffee, wine, water, smiling, endlessly smiling, even if the smile lost its elevatory energy at times. And now I am good with spiders, snakes, whatever, because I am here, right now, watching the pond shadows lengthen and waiting, as we all are, for the absolute dark of an African night.

Today I saw a rhino flipped over beside a garage. Not a real one, I hasten to add. I doubt any real rhino is flippable. This one is life sized and constructed of wire, affixed to the ground with, well, something that wasn’t enough. Enough to hold it down as a huge gust of wind barrels through on its way to somewhere else, leaving whispered stories in our ears and collecting more along the way. Winds are rumour gatherers for sure.

The gusts yesterday twisted themselves into fists and punched hard when they came. The strangeness of intense heat combined with fat cotton clouds created by a mountain range never fails to puzzle me. Where the hellebore did that come from? It was just like that. Swim towels took off like petals and the plains sand filled our teeth. Books opened and pages threatened to rip and disappear leaving the avid reader unsure for all time as to whodunnit. The breeze of the storm to come (that’s a line from a Capercaillie song) only it didn’t. Come.

Nonetheless this rhino is all wonky chops beside the road, its precious horn stuck in the greenery, its latter end pointing to the stars. It thinked me of the close relationship between Create and Destroy. A warm breeze can soothe. So can a cool one. Wind dries the washing, carries the sun over acres of eager wheat, sends the leaves on the trees into a tremble of beauty, music and colour. It can lift the sea into diamond ripples or it can stir it up into 40ft waves that demand lives. It can flip a rhino.

And it is the same within each one of us. We can create or we can destroy and sometimes we have no idea how to control that dichotomy, that immense power. Those of us who admit to being creatives without any hope of not being creatives, even for five minutes, have a duty to self and to all the other selfs who share our world. We know just how destructive we can be when we turn away from our gift. With every gift given comes a duty. To abandon that clear sense of duty will lead many into the slough of despond because any self-confessed creative will, by definition, be extremely powerful, loaded with charisma and in the public eye, whether we like it or not. We don’t have to write a best seller (loathe the overuse of that term) nor paint a masterpiece, nor discover a new way to harness the wind. We might live in a cave and never go out, but be sure that many folk will know exactly where that cave is situated. A self-confessed creative may try to hide but the thing is that there are hundreds if not thousands of other trainee creatives who need to learn from us. There is no option for bushel hiding of our light. It just isn’t allowed, not when we are the recipient of a gift. I didn’t ask for it. It drives me round the wahoo most of the time, but no matter how much duvet I pull over my head, someone will always pull it back.

When that creative gift is ignored for longer than an acceptable forty winks, it turns nasty. The best analogy for this dangerous state is manifested in Gollum. His gift, the ring, could have changed his life for the better had his heart been good. It wasn’t, and he didn’t and he ended up living deep underground and crunching on auks. It is not so different with we who live above ground and in the Now. I see it all around me and it makes me sad. Many of the loveliest of men and women I know, unborn creatives who were never encouraged to follow their hearts and who opted for a settle-for life, are deep in the dark and crunching on auks. Alcohol overuse, retreat from the world, living in incongruence, miserable and full of questions and regrets is not really a life at all. We think, mistakenly, that if we opt for a life that pleases others, makes them smile, this will be enough. It isn’t. It cannot be enough and it never will be because each heart has its own calling and there are more gifts unused than used. I hear people say, laughingly, in passing, There’s Not a Creative Bone in My Body. I snort and put them right, but, for many, it feels too late to go wild, to actually listen to all those messages from their hearts left unopened on the door mat. It makes me deeply sad. We only get one life, or that’s what I believe. I don’t fancy coming back as a rhino or a bluebottle anyway and the very thought of returning as a human makes me want to go straight to sleep.

I don’t think it is ever too late to listen to the guidance within. It takes practice, but so does everything else a person learns in a lifetime. Nobody knows how to make a perfect omelette without practice. We are happy to study and practice if it relates to our work but completely disinterested in practicing at being ourself. It’s bonkers, but true. However, bear this in mind. A creative flow, if left to flood the plains will only bring destruction in the end, and the creative flows through each and every one of us, regardless of parental or peer put downs. What do they know, after all? Are they me? Are they you?

Have a listen inside, ask the questions, and wait. I promise you answers will come from the best friend you will ever have.

Sounds dodgy, but only if I consider mind control as to be in someone else’s hands and not in my own. But the key, I am learning, is for me to control my mind all by myself. That way nobody else ever gets access. As a creative I am hyper sensitive to my own self-doubt, particularly when it is reflected in another person’s opinion clearly stated, sounding, at best, as a confirmation of my own lack, and, at worst, the truth, one I sincerely hoped was nothing of the sort.

A creative, and there are millions of us, may not realise that this is in their DNA, in their very heart and soul. If such a creature has had the crazy knocked into shape over decades, perhaps from childhood on, it is quite understandable that the process of natural development has been stopped with the dam of authority, each little trickle of escape allowed to dry up under the fierce sun of control. We think we are dangerous because that is what we have been repeatedly told. We are possessed by some evil genie, unable to guide ourselves, untrustworthy if left to our own devices, something we are rarely left to, if at all. No surprise, then, that we default into adulthood wearing all the wrong clothes, learning the wrong things, thinking conflicting thoughts and always exhausted at the fight of it all.

However, there is good news. If a creative can find just a teensy bit of self-love and build on it through careful and mindful study and research, it is entirely possible to regain the self. I know because, even at 66, I am doing just that. I have found a wonderful guide in Daily OM (Google it) and am discovering that the ‘naughty’ and ‘difficult’ child I was is still available to me and still looking for affirmation and support. I had learned long ago about the importance of re-loving that little girl and had brushed it away as so much nonsense. How on earth can re-loving a girl, long lost to me, bring me fulfilment and peace of mind? I think, as is so often the case, that I imagined it to be hippy fluff and candles and essential oils burning in grates with no real application for the now. I know, now, that it is simples. What I was doing was bringing the same critical assessment to the thought of such a process as had my parents, friends, teachers, husband and the rest of the world. But if I just let that little lonely girl walk into my mind whenever she wants, merely observing her, then all I want to do is play. In other words making it fun, light and fresh and spontaneous.

We take the world, ourselves, way too seriously, as if life is a test and as if it matters more than anything that we impress others, look good, sound like a success, know exactly where we are going. If I throw all of that out the window, how do I feel now? A bit like a weirdo at first. After all, here I stand on the inside of me having just chucked out everything I ever learned from the guides in my life. I stop and look around. There is no clutter holding me back from forward motion. But which way is forward? If I walk this way, is this forward, or it forward behind me, beside me?

I don’t know and saying I Don’t Know, doesn’t sound all that scary. Allowing myself to begin again might sound like that’s my last marble lost and it may well be true. But if all I need to do to free myself from the mind control of others, and, if I have never done this before, then I need to give it a go because it is high flipping time I found out who I really am beyond the reflection of myself in others’ eyes.

Sounds like delicious chaos to me. I am going to walk back along that river flow until I find my source, not the one I was told was mine, but the one that frees me once and for all, the one that lifts me in a burst of sunshine fun. It will have nothing to do with worldly success or worldly failure. It will bear no relation to my financial state, the shape of my body or the way I eat spaghetti. It won’t be aggressive, defensive or compliant. It will be kind and loving to others as I always want to be and as I believe I am deep inside my core. Instead of saying ‘I have no chance, I will now say something like I have no socks, or I have no bananas. Everything changes with one word.

But, first, it will be me learning to love me. Me and that little lonely girl.

This is how life is meant to be lived. Up with the sun, the sounds, the rise of life in the African Bush, and, then to bed when the almighty dark floats softly down like a mantle. Well, not quite then, to be honest because the dark time is for relaxing after all that fierce heat. That’s the time for conversation, for wine and food and music. It is also the time to hear the sounds of the night creatures, the predators. But, we are safe inside the wooden railings of the stoep, and there are candles and oil lamps flickering to say We Are Here, we humans, we of whom you are always afraid, unless, that is, we break the rules and decide to go for a walk into your domain, which, needless to say, we don’t. Not in the dark.

Spring is holding back. Around some of the homes, green shoots look almost unreal. Watered ahead of schedule, they bring giraffes loping through the acacia to browse and munch a piddling snack. Most of them stay beside the river for now, but one just wandered over here, it’s head higher than any tree, eyes on a small patch of green, one that was stripped in seconds.

Like the high walls of a fortress, the Blue Mountain range shoulders the clear blue sky. Ridges and lines of ancient sediment show me pinks, greys, terracottas and a peppering of low-lying trees. It looks like an easy climb from here but I know different. I could be lost forever and within minutes, not to mention flattened by heat exhaustion and baboons. But I can watch them from a safe place, see how the light changes their flanks as the sun lifts higher. A catch of crystal, a softening of green in new shadow, the dark pock marks along a ridge, caves where creatures rest and wait in expectation of a badly timed passing by. Badly timed for the passer by, I mean, not for the expector.

The floor of the bush is sand yellow and littered with stones and fallen thorns. Yesterday we walked the new puppy a short distance in what passes for shade and my eyes needed to warn my feet to go canny. Those thorns are long enough to go right through a foot and out the other side, however dead they appear to be. The car was like a furnace on our return and yet we had only been out of it for 20 minutes. I watered the house plants this morning, ebullient in their early growth and promising to burst into a storm of colour and density as the Spring moves ever closer. It feels weird, as it did last year, to have left a garden dying just two days ago, only to arrive in one about to be born, so connected am I with the natural process of a seasonal rise and fall. However, I have always been able to adapt and this sunshine sure helps. When I was packing, unpacking, packing and unpacking, it was very hard to think sunshine and warmth. Laying out shorts and swimwear, skimpy frocks and sandals just shivered me. I can’t tell you how many times I dressed, undressed, dressed again for the flights. I even idly wondered if there was a dress code for business class. My daughter put me right on that. Who cares Mum? she said and she was right. I saw many different assemblages of clothing on my fellow passengers and nobody looked at me or anyone else for that matter. Long journeys tense the calmest of us it seems and all we think about is ourself, about whether or not we will manage the fifteen miles between gates, be delayed enough to miss a connection or get sick on the plane. At 0400 in Dubai airport, we are all islands moving together and apart in a communal sea. Who, indeed, cares what anyone is wearing? But the foolery inside my head managed to bother about that until I almost missed my ferry.

No matter, I am here now and here long enough to re-root in the one country I would live as second choice. It bizarres me that this Africa, so rocking with corruption and fear, with huge warm hearts and welcomes regardless of colour or creed, could ever call to me the way she does when rain is in my blood, mizzle mist, stout boots and the familiar call of seabirds canting slight on a westerly breeze. But she does. Africa does. Somewhere in my veins there is a remembering, an ancient call home. I like that.

And for a few weeks I will watch Africa rise into her Springtime before returning to my little homespun bubble. And, I might just pack a thorn to burst it.

We all need to do that now and again, for there is a huge world out there if we just keep our eyes and our hearts open.

Right this minute I am sitting on a soft comfy chair in a vast expanse of lounge with a load of friendly staff being silent but vigilant in the peripheries and a seriously marvellous cold and hot buffet at the bows. The Ladies, alone, proffers facial creams, fragrances and enough room for a private shower, plus real towel and real flowers in the corner. I idly wonder if the Gents proffer the same.

I am, unbelievably, at the airport. Glasgow Airport. My first time in Business Class. I just know the whole experience will change my travel plans, my long haul travel plans, for ever. Not only was I collected by a delightful chauffeur in a grey Mercedes from the door, but, then, he saw me, all flaky and wrong-footed and everything shoved into a basket, through security, where, to my astonishment, I was not sent home with a report marked COULD DO BETTER.

After a couple of miles gently, and politely, gliding through an immovable concrete shoal of group travellers, I found myself walking into silence. These people went left. These, right, until there was just me with my overfilled basket and jump shoes looking like (yes I did) an ageing and displaced hippie. Finally, Emirates ~Lounge. The doors opened and my name was mentioned with a welcome. Flip me……..I showed my ID and that was that. No matter how much my basket overflowed I was welcome. The well-cooked food, the smiles, the space, the peace and comfort….well none of that I have ever experienced before and I am glad that, this time, I have.

I consider the word Traverse. It actually means ‘crossing’ like a rock face or something you need to cross but sideways, like a crab. If I think of caring for dementia as a traverse, it makes perfect sense. Although the strong rock face of a relationship, long term, is, well, strong and rock-faced, I now need to traverse it, like spiderwoman because otherwise I would fall into the cracks and be lost. I must keep versatile and adaptable. So I move to the outside of something I have always been deep in the inside of. It has felt like abandonment at times, that pulling backwards, that moving outside of the rock base, and, at times, I had no idea I was doing it, but, now, I see the sense of it. I want to survive this, and not because I can see a new life ahead, but because I can’t. And I need more wildlight for looking; a red dawn, a stomp of grumpy grey, a rise of snowhills, a lazy stretch of maybe clouds, a moonface, backlit, upsetting my sleep.

Tomorrow I will land in the bush, in Africa where my son will spin me round in his big strong arms and I will be safe as houses for two glorious months of crazy insects, colourful birds, a new tattoo and loads of warmth and space and reading and dance and music and Spring.

Bring it on Glasgow, for you and me…..we begin the traverse from here.

I can’t shut my suitcase. Most of what is in there is irrelevant. Sun cream, malaria stuff, tapestry wools, gifts and a few clothes. In fact, the clothes give the least resistance being soft and foldable. Laying things out on the bed for a few days prior to the panic pack has soothed me. It doesn’t look like much stretched over the length of a human plus width but now, now, I try to contain it, it becomes a monster. I sigh. I shout. I begin again. Chuck this, forget that, only one pair of shorts because I can wash shorts overnight and they will be dry in minutes. I can even leave them out overnight, but that wouldn’t be wise. Who knows what creature might huddle within a fold or a pocket? Creatures out there have stings and teeth and attitude. Ok, less frocks. I always wear the same one or two anyway, the ones that allow no body escapes which works well with the culture. I never saw any African escaping from a frock.

Back here, Autumn twiddles her fingers. The starboard shore of the loch shows me rocks and kelp rising into a well fertilised grass field and then on, up and up, to the felled forestry that leaves a landscape of ghosts, ridged, bland, dead, for now. Ben Mhor is a cloudhead, it’s sharp peak lost in what looks like Einstein’s hair.

The tide flows in, moving from flatwater, that in- between time when nothing moves at all, then bursting into action. I can see the waters flow, feel the fish slide in, know that the gulls will come, that a seal and an otter will become one with the flow, their eyes on supper.

David and Linda walked by just now and I beckoned them in. 50 years they have been coming without a single break. Once, in Tapseteerie days, they stayed with us and we became friends. This evening, the evening when I am travel-anxious and considerably less frocked up, we talked of birds and skies and other marvellous things and I am glad. A dip into what appeared as flatwater suddenly lifted into action because of their visit. It told me this.

In the real truth of life, we only ever need people. Things will follow, but things will only ever be things. People, on the other hand, are never ‘only’ anything.

The sea-loch is so still as to be a mirror to the sky. A loan of sheep wander along the very edge of the far shore showing their tapselteerie reflections so that they look like more than a loan. From here, they seem to be walking on water. Above them, banked in between the hills and following the high-rise hill road, a whispish mist leans against the hillsides, hiding bits. I can see so clearly how the ancients thought eerie. These mists can float over water when two colds meet, one greater than the other, arguing for place. I know that if I turn away, and then return, the sun will have played peacemaker and sent both back home to think again.

The day blooms into warmth and sunlight after rain. This time of year is almost fiction. One minute you know exactly who does what and then all it takes is for lunchtime to call and you look again and are left in wonder. Right now, it is almost time to cook supper and yet, and yet, the sun calls and the shadows are timely long and it seems rude to turn indoors. Everything shouts for just another minute of this glorious retreat, this promise of a red sunset, a red sea-loch, a lone seal lit up like a Christmas bauble and the twist of a turning tide.

But needs must. I am nearly packed for Africa and the broccoli needs cooking for himself by 6 sharp. I have laid out, packed, unpacked, packed again. Does anyone else do this? Will it be too heavy, will I have the right kit, should I just take one of everything? I have to return to the cold, remember, and that needs a wee consideration or two. Leaving everything I possibly can think of in place for my 2 month absence means diddly squat. I will have forgotten something.

And, then, I think this. The tide will still turn. The light will rise and it will fall. The rain will come and the sun will heal. And all of this whether I am here or not. Whether I am long dead or very much alive. Whether, weather, whether.

So, broccoli already late, I am heading out to watch the sun turn the sea crimson. I won’t be seeing her for a long time. She’ll be fine. She knows her way, my old friend.