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Island Blog – Without It

I’ve just driven a bit, up a track and in my scomfies to find a signal. Since the last two storms with all the leaks and the salt-swiped windows, my wifi is dead. This is the 6th day and it feels like 6 weeks. My neighbours have wifi. The village has wifi. Not me and it is more than an irritation. It is complete silence. No contact with my kids, no music, no emails, texts, whatsapps, no emails, no blog opportunities. How much I have taken for granted. I cannot contact BT nor any other provider. Emails take to be read and responded to, the latter I will miss. I drive down the village or up to the hill above the graveyards and get some reception there. Mostly, I listen to an audio book, feel very alone and do my very best to love it all, knowing, as I do, that way back there was none of this dependence, nor the need of it.

I find that, in this short time, I don’t feel comfortable in my clothes, that time stretches like toffee, that this whole growing old thing is no fun at all. I look for the fun, I do, but anyone who does this looking for fun thing must agree it’s exhausting at times. I notice – I flipping notice everything within this silence. The wave of a skinbone birch tree, the passing of walkers, the way my front gate is about to collapse through rot. I notice the birds I feed, the perk of a robin, the flutter of ring doves, the dance of copper leaves on the track.

At this point, a man might ask me to get to the point. There isn’t one. This is a weird time and because it’s the weekend, I could be days more without connection or connectivity. I do visit friends but friends are couples and they all have lives and those lives are busy and connected. Perhaps that’s my point. When I go back to my lovely home with its wood burner and welcome I will say this, that I have become dependent on the ease of connectivity, even though I knew no such opportunity through my younger life, and it is very hard to be so completely without it.

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Island Blog – The Cusp and Check the Nuts

We’re always on one, a cusp, those of us who run too fast towards a something or a someone, or a dream. For now with my sensible hat one which, if I am honest, never did fit and always fell over one eye or both, we are on the cusp of a stormo dueblo. It dithers me, like you on the cusp of the unknowable. We will be here again and that’s for sure. We are already are, in a different dimension, among the squigilliounaria of the fictious confines and controls of social media. Most of it I can laugh at, but I am not 15 and lonely and rejected at school because I have specs, spots, big boobs, no boobs, white skin, black skin, big feet. Etcetera. Those kids are on the cusp every single day. Did we clock this as parents in our busy working lives? I didn’t.

Back to the storm. Today, I walked into an unnatural still in my friends, the trees. I stopped for a chat with the Horse Chestnut which always yellows before her sister a few feet away as if she thinks she is older, and she might be. She is also skinnier, older and grown in a water challenge. I admire her, and say so. Further up the track, and all alone, I meet stripped silver birch, hazels with few nuts. I have seen this before. A learned old guy told me that trees will produce what is required for the ahead of time, for the winter. No conkers either, or is it neither? So, in theory, there is less need for nuts.

I hear people talking though. Less nuts, oh dear, a loss, a fear. Honestly, I want to laugh. I/we pursued a dream and landed here, but even before that when we farmed in Norfolk, there were years of no nuts, no a lot of things, failed crops, the scant knickerless blank of fields failed. It was a cusp, of course it was. The horror of loss and lack and the fear of going again an almost joker in the midst. But we had really good workers, wonderful dynamic people who turned up every day on their own cusp, bringing their own hopes for being involved, valued and paid. We kept going, as we did up here in the tangles of island switcher winds and wildings and sudden capistrata. And I am glad we did. I remember the savings and the smiles and the come into the warm and the wild out-there crazy nights, the camaraderie, the togetherness, the sharing. What do we do when, as I hear, food will become short? Of course it will (duh), because thousands of fields burned in their wheat/barley/oat grow. Farmers are seriously on the cusp.

The thing that bothers me most is that far too many of us expect to be ‘provided for’ expecting that what we once had, the nuts and the fields of barley are somehow our right. They aren’t. I watch the sky, sense the birds and their changes, listen to the wild, walk into it. Check the nuts.

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Island Blog – The Best Cafe Ever

On my way to work this morning to the Best Cafe Ever, two rainbows rose like double ellipses, I had to pull over for a photo catch. I couldn’t see their landing spot but I saw their launchpads. A field, just a field, of scarped silage, the huge lemony bags stacked and ready for the winter ahead. I watched the rise and flow of ancient grassy folds and thought about the old rocks beneath, the upholders. I like to get to work early. I like the set-up, the fill of the water dispenser, the lift of teaspoon jam into the tiny beautiful cups of hand-made pottery. I like the set up of tables, adding wee rubber wedges ‘neath legs which, being uniform, cannot accommodate the tapselteerie of old floor tiles. I like to wash up all of the huge pile of now freed bake tins, cake, scone and bun containers, the whisks and piping wotwots, the many scootcups of tried-out coffee until the maestro gets the blend just right for the day ahead. I tweak what flowers we have now and the lights go on in a welcome. In the summer months we can see many folk lurking beyond the doors, but not now. Now the autumn is here and, with her arrival, visitors few down. Our working hours are less, our visitors more likely to be locals, and we have the time to stop and chat, to hear about their lives. We have one week left and I will miss the connection with the team, with the couple who took the brave decision to make this cafe their own.

I am so glad they did. When I, with much doubt in my mind, asked for work with them in 2025, I really didn’t think they would take me on, old me, but they did and it made me realise I can be a right eejit about myself. I love every minute of my part in the team, a team they have created. Every single one of us work for them because of them. I realise, if they read this, that I am about to embarass them, but it needs to be said. Every step of the way, they have been gentle and kind and encouraging. They have, in difficult situations, found a positive way for us all to move forward. They are welcoming every morning and thankful after every shift, however long, however overwhelming, which has definitely been the case at times with a sudden and demanding rush. For such youngsters they amaze me. To be exhausted, as they must have been over the past two island seasons, and yet still to turn up, to find ways around confounding situations, and more, to keep tabs on each member of staff, to watch, to allow, to show respect and kindness even if that meant one member down, is the evidence and the truth of true leadership.

I look forward to next year, as long as it doesn’t come too soon! I can hear them say that. It remembers me of my time as a young ‘boss’ in the melee and unpredictability of visitors to where (as widely pressed in the press) has earned itself the title ‘The Place to Visit in the UK’. For now, or soon, we rest awhile, even though there may be weekends through December when the cafe welcomes us into the warm and the bakes and the chat and the laughs. And there is always that in the Best Cafe Ever. There is always yes we can do that, unless it’s impossible. There is always, there is a play area down there for little ones. There is always, yes please bring your dogs in, yes please move tables together, yes we will sort the water you brought in on your soaked coats, yes we can do a smaller this, a larger that. It is a Yes place. To work within such a team is inspirational. We need, we want to be dynamic and engaged every minute with full compass thinking and response because of them.

This place alives me. They do, the young leaders. I thank them.

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Island Blog – The Sudden

There’s a silence now and a shiftshit in the island air. I can feel it sniping through the cracks in my old stones. The afternoon sun is a dalliance, and then said sun dunks down into Australia, or wherever and turns into their friend, leaving shiver tails of cold. I light my fire. It’s up to me to do that these days. The light, I am watching it, tumbles into umber yellow grey, the wind rising. The forecast is compromising ferries, la la la. I tie down my wheelies, close my garage door. It’s only 56mph the morra, but it will probably arrive early like an infuriating guest for a party with a confident Halloo, when you’ve barely got into your corset, never mind the slinky dress.

I don’t think much of the outside world comes slowly. It comes suddenly when you’re busy with all the stuff of life, the noise of it, the intercantobulation of dealing with a thousand things in a single day, every day. I think about that in my singular life, in the soliloquy of just one voice, one woman, and even in that life there are Suddens, because everything changes all the time, no permission required. And they bring noise and alteration and acceptance, defiance, reliance. We have met that this week in the Best Cafe Ever. A small team because Why Not, it’s the end of the season? Not. This week we have experienced a surprise of customers. We were prepped, the chef and Jess there early, me clocking in at 0900, all in place, lights on, ready. But I know we didn’t expect the inflow of customers. They came and came and kept coming. The Suddens. Who were they? Those who come for Autumn; half term parents with wee ones, adventurers who love the chiaroscuro of this time of year, single travellers, many interesting folk. Were we ready? Did we have enough food? Oh we worked with that, talked about it, made decisions, wanting to make everyone happy. It is such a multicolorum. And that is a dynamic that all such cafes have to work with.

In the Servery, when we met, we laughed and talked nonsense and rolled our eyes and cleared tables, separating the ones shoved together in order to allow new customers in twos to have their space. I met many beautiful dogs and their smiley owners, a blessed pause in the wheel of the work mill. I talked about words and their meaning, the way grammar was not taught to my children, the way words can upspell a mind, create curiosity and a skidder through the woods of learning. I brought up a word.

Subito. Means Suddenly. However, that word in Thesaurus or Dictionary is ‘strangled’ by the next word right beside it. Repente. repent. I am ‘suddenly’ ashamed of what I have sought answers from for all my years of writing.

We will laugh about that tomorrow as we lay place for whoever arrives wanting coffee, tea, cakes, lunch, company. What matters now is not grammar. It’s connection, and the fun this wee team can generate in a sudden moment.

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Island Blog – Fidelity to Self

I remind myself of myself, here, solid, living, human, but only after a turbulent ten mile hike with the shenanigans of ‘take over’, which I meet around AI. I wanted to book a train ticket. I also tried to purchase an online voucher from a clothing company, done before, many times with all the birthdays in my life. It isn’t straightforward now. With my train booking thing, I do remember, with a pastfull wistful sigh, calling Steven in the Oban Office, having a catchup with him and his life, asking about his mum and dad, great friends whilst he found me the best deal, felt me safe. Those days are definitely gone.

Talking to my son, he recognises that his generation, is it X or Y, I don’t know, is the one which is going through the greatest change, and I agree. As the eldest daughter of a father who returned, somewhat intact from the 2nd world war, I’m not sure that the X or Y generation is more of a changer than we experienced back then with silent fathers who weren’t the dads they might have wanted to be. I know there’s no comparison. One was trauma after war. However…..there are many who see AI as invasion as war. I don’t and it thinks me. Of course it can and will be abused. Even in my ordinary booking of a train ticket or my attempted purchase of a gift token for my granddaugher, or in the writing of my blog, or even as I choose music to suit my mood, AI invades. I decide to live with it. Many, oh so many of my generation, refuse and go hide in the dark cupboard under the stairs, as if that ever helped anything, which it doesn’t. I learned from an early age that the only way through is through, not around, not blind, not hiding, because what comes in such force, comes anyway, and those who hide just stay hidden. Even if I don’t know my way through the force of an ‘invasion’ I still won’t hide, because, and I realise this as I write, I want to be seen. It thinks me.

There grows a division between my generation and the X or Y of now. I’ll tell you what that means and what that invites. The first is an incremental division, a pulling away, a retreat back. Ok, you linguists, I just repeated myself there. A retreat is obviously a backward step. I’m leaving it here. But what happens is that the older ones, the ones you find hidden in a cupboard under the stairs are someones who have a lot to say beyond their fear of the way the world is now. They have stories. Has anyone asked them, taken the time, met them in their old and foggy memories and shown interest? Chances are you will learn something astonishing, pivotal to your own life and your own unanswered questions, for they have truly lived.

There was a wedding today at Calgary. I was delighted to meet the young bride and her son as they bought ice-cream yesterday. I looked in her eyes, felt her delight and her energy. It might rain, yes it might, but it didn’t and the day is beautiful and warm and sunny and I am thinking of her on such a special day. It seemed to me as she talked with Lou, the owner, that nothing and nobody could spoil her day. I also saw life lived already in those lovely eyes. It matters not her generational letter. She was a woman in love and excited and, I believe, being true to herself. I remember being that woman many decades ago and regret nothing.

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Island Blog – A Jigsaw Tangle Jester

I get home to a home bathed in light and sunshine. It was damn hot in the servery today and many degrees higher in the kitchen, what with all the ovens and toast machines and grills pumping hot breath into the skinny place. When folk come to the counter, I notice that all they want is recognition. No, not all they want, obviously, because they are here to order two kiddies meals, one toastie with beet, feta and walnut, one just cheese and maybe seaweed chutney, two soups, one with a cheese scone, yes, warmed please, another with something else. I find the ordering a wonderful stray into a new jigsaw piece, mainly because I have not paid due attention to what is on offer that day, this day. One customer confounded me. He wasn’t initially friendly, just ordered but, I noticed as we attempted to work together, him on the far side and me, glasses steamed up and suddenly just out of the Washeroo because everyone else had just gone somewhere, that he wasn’t that certain of himself. I believe that, on the far side there is one part of the puzzle of this whole running a cafe thing, one that can be drawn into place. Together with smiles and explanations, he ordered. I noticed that, after sometime, he and his wife remained seated, talking amicably. I set the jigsaw piece in place.

When I set off for work in the morning, I have no set picture, because I know a lot about business, over decades, and there is only tangle. There is also the Jester, the one which dances in just to confound. You think, we thinked, that, because of the weather, the time of year, the day itself, we would expect this. Well, ‘this’ never turned up. Never. Running a business may be a dream, as it was for us, but it is tough and unpredictable, diminishing and very personal and it takes many years to establish. I think, I remember, the fallouts, the doubts, and the Jester temptation to stop the whole thing. I remember the cold winter giving up. I remember the massousive effort it took to rise up and run again, skinny, empty of conviction, flayed with self-unbelief, over and over until the business recognised us and the Jester was just a snigger in the effluence. I remember.

It should be quieter now, so they say, but I am watching the weather and the fact that this island is rated as the best weekend retreat in Scotland. I can see evidence of this. Not a single parking space in the main town, not even in the flux car park by the harbour, and it is nearly September, so the whole ‘kids going back to school’ is no longer true. The weather is shifting, the planet shifting and time has moved verily on in terms of the predicts of the old jigsaw. However, there is opportunity in this if acceptance and understanding and facilitation are ready, like the three musketeers, ready to face up to what now is and thus to adjust stirrups, or maybe change horses. Whichever way anyone looks it, if they do at all, the jigsaw is no longer predictable. The tangle has come in, and the jester too. Even as old as I am am, I can see it and I don’t want to be blind to any of it, even if it takes me some time to research and to understand.

To be honest, I am sad for some of my peers. Like me, they are olding, but some of them are glue-fixed to how it was and, thus startled,, at the least, when a dynamic we have all trusted, or learned to trust from parents, is jestered away, like mist. The jigsaw is what we trusted and it worked for decades. No longer. I like the ‘longer’ word. It proffers hope and continuance and i will take it. Does it, I wonder, remove the word predict from our language as so many other words have fallen away due to lack of use? I don’t know, and the ‘don’t know’ of these times enlivens me. Learning, as I have for some years, to live alone, to work my own jester problems out, even in the dark months, strongs me. I won’t say it is my choice because it isn’t, but the what is of ‘is’ is where I am and I love life with a passion. Tangle? Jester? I still love the jigsaw, the pleasant picture, the endless blue of a seascape wherein the nightmare of a clock of deep sea creatures confounds me with the seaswirl of itself

There is always tangle. Always a jester.

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Island Blog – Fiddleplay and Deep Time

A beautiful day, all sunshine and squawks from gulls mobbing eagles over the tidal loch. Everything clear, sky wide and still, garden flowers heads up to the light giver, safe from wilderley gales. Still. I wasn’t and that’s me all over. I say I am not a busy flicktwit, fussing about dust nor to-do lists, but I am, I confess, a woman who was a mother at 20 and birthed 5 children and who outlived a husband and who now has no idea who she is. I was somebody once, I remember that, the buzz of it, the exhaustive demands, the have-to go here or there, the suddenness of immediacy. A boat in trouble, a guest overboard, another 4 for dinner, a crying mother from a cottage because it had rained all week and everything and everyone was cold and wet. I warmed her obviously, tumbled dried her towels and clothes and Himself went up there, into the hills and sorted the dodgy fire. All fires were dodgy on Tapselteerie. I have no idea how we got away with that, but I do remember many fine folk, mostly women (no surprise there) who knocked on my kitchen door with faces. I can see those faces now. And here’s my thought. They came, they asked, they were brave and they were pulled in to the warm and fed and watered.

One of them said she played the fiddle. She was beautiful, Irish, four kids. I asked her, bring your fiddle, and she did, and we danced a story from her past, one I recognised. The fiddle captured me in that moment because it is the voice of stories, of history, of deep time. And that thinks me. In my olding, many memories scoot back, slowered, rainbowed, probably nonsense, but I get glimpses of someone bringing in wild salmon, the fish caught on it’s way up to spawning, full fat and strong. I remember receiving this huge fish, welcoming in the fishermen, whisky poured, the laugh around us in that kitchen, the fiddleplay. Even in times when no fiddle played, the fiddle played. Deep time. Those fishers long gone. The wild salmon too. They were then and this is now.

I’m not so sure about now, but, then, I am guessing that in deep time, not many felt sure about their now. Olding is not fun. I should qualify that. It still isn’t fun but there are options and choices. Things hurt, bones mostly, but could be more. Thoughts slow, take time to land. Hearing might grow cloudy. Concentration striates, shifting all over the place, like a seconda on a harley with no map. I meet many of us, all bright and brittle all can do and all doing this olding thing, feeling sore and tired and bloody determined.

One young woman, younger than my youngest, said to me yesterday this…..You inspire me. You are so ……

That was just what I needed to hear. On i go, fiddleplay lead on.

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Island. Blog – The Insprits and the Mostly

Life is mostly ordinary for us, We might think it is different for those with solutions to everything, but, in truth, nobody does. Rich or poor or in between we find solace in the ordinary. In this ‘ordinary’ things work, wifi connection, light bulbs, fridges, washing machines, bus times, clocking in to work, locks on outer doors and systems we trust. Night is night and day is day and daffoldils are early spring and bins are emptied on the right morning. Mostly, it works according to. Mostly. And we like ‘mostly’ because we can ignore any inner doubt, any mind-fiddle that awares us of the fact that this is not as stable as once it was. And this we ignore, mostly. But there are nivits in our world now and I have met a few. Actually they have been here for many years.

I watch the tide rise bejonkers, too soon for the full moon. It slips determinedly over grass and rocks either side of the sea-loch. The Insprits are here. To be honest, it twinkles me because there is no sustainable ordinary in island life and I know this. I have lived with them for many decades. Mostly Folk could not live this way, but this way will be the way one day. The weather decides ferry access to the mainland. And, since Covid, there are many happy homes here, those who love the. shenanigans of the Insprits, who work from home, who dance with the ditzy dynamic of everything ‘island’ and who are patient.

I’m looking out at a full tide, the rise beyond itself. I hear the call of whitetails, watch a canto of buzzards, see the black lambs cajink over new grass. There’s rain coming, again, we all know that, but there are those wonderful moments when it stops and there’s a sunblister in the grey and then we see all the beauty beyond the insprits. They were always here and always will be. The sudden upsets, the unexpecteds, the terriblest awfuls.

If we can hold to loving the ‘mostly’ but prepared for the insprits, and we can teach our children this, well then, we are wise.

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Island Blog – The Q uiet People

I had jotted down, as I always do, a trickle of thought, one I wanted to capture. I wrote ‘I love the quiet people’. and there is more to write on that. However, inside my ongoing of a day of preparation and my departure from my beloved island on transit to another beloved place which currently is racking up 40 degrees, I confess to Q. Questions for others, for myself. The facing of the awful Q through check-in, security, passport control. So I decide to find Q in my trusty and ancient Thesaurus. I find Quiddity. It’s an old word, you will know. Not one that finds a place in ordinary conversation, but one that intrigues me for its meaning.

Quiddity is the ‘whatness’ or ‘Who-ness’ which makes something or someone distinguished from others, the universal nature of that thing or person, including quirks and eccentricities. I know why Q came to me today. And in the Thesaurus, it’s in Section 1. ‘Existence’. I have never, in decades of writing ever been wheeched back to Section 1, but as I read down the lines of the first page on Abstract Relations, I feel I have landed. I am Q. So is everyone but most of us don’t get that, until we do. It’s all about the questions and the quirks and the quiddity, but not just that. The Q person has to recognise themself, or is it ‘selves’? A Question for the rainbows.

Packing for Africa whilst I shiver under a panoply of thixotropic cloudage is extremely tricky. Shorts, skimpy frox, teeshirts I have completely forgotton about and which give me some grief as I pull them from hibernation. They’re all laid low right now, swacked and contained, rolled and suppressed and somewhat sat-upon and my case is not full of the ‘right’ clothes. It never was. I never looked as they did. I was a Q although I didn’t know that, and didn’t want that. I wanted to be any other letter of the alphabet, whatever got me into the inner halls of Them. I know different now. When you are a Q, you learn to be one. It’s lonely as hell. It’s dark and unfriended. But if you want to be who you want to be, Own the Q and find support. You’re a Q. You know the way.

I’m in Heathrow now and watching a gazillion people flow by, all joined up in line like a very long and colourful caterpillar. I am not comfortable at all around crowds, fast-movers, noise, cities, people in excess and yet I am calm. I won’t be, of course, once my gate is on the board and I have 15 minutes to get from A1 to Z46 by train, but I have done this before and still arrived in Africa for Breakfast with another Q. My son.

Talk soon from the Spring of Africa, among the Quiet people.

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Island Blog – Now and then

It’s cold, the wind an iceslice with bitey teeth like a ferret, not that I know a damn thing about ferret teeth but I can imagine. Tiny sharp incisors and no filters in the mind of the owner thereof. I was bitten by a mouse once, the tiny rodent I was trying to save from being sluiced down a push of rainwater. I grabbed it, no thoughts of teeth in my own mind and was hurt and upset until I understood an instinctive reaction. I could have been a ferret after all. However, and this is irrelevant, the wound rose red and its subsequent pulsation required a switchback trip to the doctor because I was basically carrying a balloon on my forefinger, thus unable to text, employ finger recognition, or point an accusation at anyone without inviting ridicule. Irrelevant.

This time of year is yahoo Spring although it isn’t yet. I do know, of course i do, that Spring up here on the butt of the west coast of Scotland with the wild Atlantic wheeching up huge waves and making a great big noise about it, munching old rocks into pivots, and flipping sands into a beachy confusion, is to be expected. I remember lambing in April in the snow. Not me, the cheviots. But I was on the early shift and for weeks. 5am, swallowing mouthfuls of darkness and cold, looking for colour. Not moon, or maybe moon, such a fickle light. I’m searching for those undercover, the ewes who take their hideaway in cowers and coppice, under hedges, in the brack and barm of stone dykes. Twins or triplets definitely a challenge. Too much for the exhausted mother. Delivering, shifting tricky ones coming arse first, all out, all ok, pulling off the sticky stuff out of tiny mouths desperate to breathe, sucking the stuff, mouth to mouth, blowing in whisky breath probably, the wriggle and pulse of life in my hands, the shouty thrill of it, in the early dawn. The crows are not awake yet. My job, to deliver if I can, to make safe if I cannot and to leg it back home to wake himself. I can’t do that one, this one. He was exhausted, had walked the fields/parks all the day before right up to Crow Sleep Time. He rose, still clothed and smelling like days of unwashed and sheep. The daytime walks I couldn’t do. Feral kids, guests, dinners, bedroom changes, cleaning, phone calls about cottage bookings, calves to feed, cow to milk, stable mucking out, hens to organise, eggs to collect. Enough. We did well. I know we did, the clueless We who had never done a single thing on that list before. Lambs survived, mostly, children definitely did, guests returned to the Quirky Hotel and now……well, now I have none of that other than what I’ve learned and that is a powerful and energising gift. This is what I did, what we did.

Now, when I still swallow mouthfuls of darkness and cold, I remind myself of what I have achieved and, therefore what I can still achieve, not in the same context, nor genre, nor situation, but I still can achieve. And here’s how I do this achieving thing. Any time the alien thought marches in tooting a trumpet, all important and (somewhat ridiculous) I shake my head. Ah, I smile, no thanks. You think you define me now as, yes unsure, yes with less self confidence, yes a bit wobbly whilst hanging heavy curtains, yes in a dither because my car computer tells me I have a stop alert when I know that everything mechanical is quite fine and always was before computers made us all doubt our own intelligence. I am grafting myself off this failing tree, because I realise I stuck myself here. And, it is so good to notice, to realise, and then to take action. I have strength, huge strength, maybe not physical although don’t tell me I can’t lift this, nor carry that because I damn well will. I have wisdom, experiential wisdom. Not many care to connect with that in these sad times when oldings are written off as a right pain in the arse, and that saddens me. I learned so much vital knowledge on how to cope with life, the world, the isolation, from my granny, my parents, and, I am happy to say that my ferals and their kids do connect with me, asking things, smiling a lot and with no understanding at all of how life was without the internet.

Talk to your granny, grampa. Your wisdom guides. They really never thought they would ever be a pain in the arse. Trust me.