fiction

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Island Blog – Tearaway

We start with a plan. I did as a young mum with a tumble of kids. In my plan, in our plan, we were excellent parents, mother, father, we were. We weren’t. In the melee ensuing of business development, of invasive strangers, of things collapsing, falling in, stopping, as in water flow, of freezing pipes, of bat invasions, mice, cold, we did falter, our dream did sink somewhat. It felt boggish. But we were not going to go there because, even though we dreamed and thought deeply, we were above ground people. If you are a person of the land, the field, the marsh, the emptinessof soil and space, who know the fear of drought, of flood, of loss and gain, the singularity of joy, the sharing of it, then you will recognise something. Possibly more than something, because everyone knows what it feels like to sink, what it feels like to choose ‘above ground.’

I employ the above ground as an adjunct. Today was remarkable at the Best Cafe Ever. No, it was overwhelming. There must have been hundreds of customers, in line and for 5 hours. I did feel like sinking. I didn’t check with the others in the Servery because to be honest, we barely met beyond a pull back or let go in a narrow space as we served and cleared and tried to make the soup last. I did turn into the Washeroo thinking, I can’t do this. That lasted not even 5 seconds. I have great inner talk. Don’t be ridonculous, ya eejit, rise, RISE. It works.

I like to tearaway from, well most things if I’m honest, but on this one, from inner giving up. Too many do this, too many times I have been tempted. and then the Tearaway comes in, like thunder, like a smile from Joe the new postie, from a word of recognition, a smile from eyes really connecting with my own, and a tune with lyrics which stop me, the tune that takes me to my piano, makes me pay attention.

Tearaway. From old confines, from old controls, from old myths and mistakes. Tearaway.

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Island Blog – Just Flying On

I did my own housework today. It’s so damn boring, my own housework, whereas I am like a woman on fire when it comes to someone else’s. I am can-do, let’s do this, even if the job appears magnifluent with horribleness. What is that all about? I ask myself this as I lug stuff for washing to the washing thing. No answer comes beyond the flip dash of swallows madly encouraging their second brood to fly, ffs. I feel for them, not that I ever knew resistance from my kids, as they almost went without a lookback. I pulled myself back to myself, as they say in SA, and grabbed a hoover, then a bucket and mop and sorted things that needed sorting. I like my home to be clean even if nobody ever sees most of it. This is about me and how I care about me, my personal standards.

Bring that back, roll it right back to the core. I have standards, yes, but just for myself. I feel no judgement when I meet others who don’t share what I choose to be my level pegs. It doesn’t annoy me. I cock my head at this. Really? Well, yes, probably, but I contain it. I have five grown children with five grown partners. I have met walls and fences. I have learned. What haveI learned? Acceptance, obviously. Was that easy? No. So How did it become the normal in those relationships? Did you remember yourself in these new dynamics? Not always, no, although once I got to know the partners, I found myself loving them and that was me being me. How did you do that? Asking questions without agenda, just interested in their life, their own thoughts, the she or he of she or he. And, I interrupt my questioner, of continuing that through the years. Instead of the easy homey conversations with primal children, elevation is required, I have found. To show interest and to ask about the partner of my beloved, the one, let’s be honest, who took that beloved out of the maternal/paternal sphere and into a new ellipsis.

I made chappit tatties just now. It’s a Scottish thing you might need to google. I also made a salad and all of the before was delivered on Friday, fresh island produce. I can smell the island on the lettuce, salty, safe, wholesome. I love the ground of this life, the wild, the silence and darkness at night, the safety, the community, the song and strength of it, the way we move to help each other, the way we can step in or fly out when it’s an urgence. The way we understand that the earth breathes, the sea breathes, the world is changing. We don’t know what to do next beyond the fact that we don’t have a clue.

In the now of now, we are flying on.

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Island Blog – The Before of Us

I have a big pile of books on my kitchen table. If I wasn’t at work on a Tuesday, I would gather them up for a swap, but I am working and so the level rises in tales of other lands, other times, of those whose lives I have never lived, of whose pain I can only catch in sentences. Most stories talk to me in a voice from the past, of challenges and overcomings, of loss and mostly, of moving through and onwards. They all inspire me because of just one single thread, the one that securely connects most of us, all of us, to the before of us, to the insertion of a generational electoid in a daily script. I know this. I picked it up with my own children, spilling out rulings that often confounded me, as if I had no control of the spilling. As soon as the electoid had deflated, I regretted. This is how we learn. We make mistakes because we just do. Without our acceptance, or acknowledgement, we spin the same tale and, in a place of authority, we deliver it. I did. Do I regret? Oh yes. But the damage was done and flifflewaffle is redundant here. The before of us is what every generation must learn from. This one in this generation and in my experience is a lot about chasing money, no, fighting for it and against everyone; It’s about mothers at school gates looking beautiful, sharing tips on well-being spas, nail decorators, hair stylists, the answer to all internal dilemmas costing a gazillion an hour. It’s about looking beautiful. Looking. Beautiful.

Looks fade. Just saying. My book pile is fingered and bented. Some pages are blobbed, twisted, stuck together. This is life. The sun is out now after twinglerain, sharp shards of it, the sun diddling about up there between cloudal shenanigans. It’s cold, it’s hot, it’s windy, it’s a party game t’ween the weatherness and our attitude. We must adapt, move on with new tunes, new attitude, new intelligence. As we must beyond the before of us.

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Island Blog – Emerging and Engagement

We are in a seasonal change. The mornings are cool, the light less light, less strong, the mornings darker. I love such changes, all of them because it involves me and my attitude. It also reminds me of my mother’s big ottoman on the landing, wherein she would carefully fold all summer clothes, bringing out the scratchy woolen jumpers, the thicker trousers, the warmer underpinnings. Not sure we can do that anymore, even if we do own a landing big enough for an ottoman. Nonetheless, the temperature does lower as Summer gathers up her swishy skirts and dances off to Africa. Seasons don’t stop being themselves. They just move on to do their thing on the other side of the world. I love that too and it thinks me.

I hear, oh god we all hear, the moans at the loss of Summer as if nothing will ever be right ever again, as if cool mornings heralds the end of everything. Such nonsense. We have all lived some years knowing that nothing at all lasts, that everything changes and never stops doing that change thing. I suspect that too much talk of ‘loss’ can, and probably does infect a community, a workspace, a family situation, There is nothing like a single voice of misery to bring down the most dynamic team. But this subject is on no more than a change in seasonal flow. I do understand a sense of loss, nonetheless. Those heady days of frocks and bare arms, of walking for hours beneath glorious sunshine, of taking warmth for granted, leaving doors open and not shouting about it; of dry dogs after long walks, of mud solidified enough to be just dust on boots; of standing for a conversation, of sitting on a balcony with a glass of chilled something-or-other and of trusting all of the above. I get it.

The thing I have learned is that attitude makes any change shift into opportunity. As those of us who are getting old get older, it is our essential choice. As joints stiffen and shout, as it gets harder to gauge the level of bumpy land, as the cold sneaks in knife-like, as self-doubts grow mighty and decisions flounder, we cannot help but remember how vibrantly we once swashbuckled through our complex lives. A seasonal loss? Yes, definitely yes. A different seasonal change, one of a life long lived. When we began it was Winter. Then we met someone and Spring began to flower up, cautious, yes, but little blooms pushed through the cold. Then came Summer, the crazy warm long hours of sunshine, the swing of it, the fragrance of hope filling the air, the dance of it, the wild long hours of daylight, of hope, of dreams. Then Autumn, golden, still warm, the light like a chiaroscuro, elevating what was already there, sharpening its edges, pulling the distant closer, reflections brighter, calls stronger out there in the otherness. Then Winter again, but a different one from before, before the commitment to the one, to children, to family, to decades of hard work and laughter and sharing and agony and loss and gain and goodbyes and hellos.

I like the word Emerging, not that I thought for one minute I would be still doing it, not at this age, but I am and my attitude is absolutely IT on this. I don’t like being alone. I don’t like being old. I don’t know anyone who does. Ok, so that’s the bottom line. Let’s think up. I do. I wake every morning and say thankyou to my bed. I won’t say I plan my day because, unless I have work in the Best Cafe Ever, I don’t. I just wake up and that’s damn good. I wash, dress, make-up my face, eat breakfast, clean up, look out. And whatever is going on out there, I choose to go with it, up the warmth if required, call for help if I need a big gas cylinder attached, download an audio book, hoover (boring), wave to walkers, plan supper, make hummus or something like that. I have the urge to emerge.

I can’t change the loss of me, but I can rise above everything if I choose to engage with change.

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Island Blog – A Lemony Sun and a Wiggling

I look at it, the lemony sharp of it within a cushion of grey/white flat, sky closed. It almost blinds me. I see the spread of it but it has no strong voice, no instrumental reach or so I decide. Way below, the flowers remaining wiggle a bit in the breeze like unsure dancers. Reminds me of a bad DJ and a faltering wiggly floor, half lit, mostly empty. The ‘dynamic’ left earlier and moved on. However it was a work day today and there was plenty of wiggling as we served and catered for and laughed together and criticised each others’ choice of tunes for the Best Cafe Ever. It made no difference, the sky-talk out there high above us as we sorted and accommodated the world below and that thinks me.

I hear moans about the summer. Too hot in Englandshire, yes, I get that. Not enough sun in Scotland, no, I don’t get that. To live in Scotland is to choose a new map, particularly on the West Coast. We stick out, just saying, way into Neverland and take the consequences, or we don’t choose to live here. I moved my pelargoniums just today, into the flash of the lemony sun, for about 30 minutes, because they said, the pelargoniums, that they will not flower without more sun. Well, I tell them. I did. What’s wrong with your attitude?

Attitude. So important. I read, today, a beautiful acknowledgement in our local monthly paper, of a dear friend gone. I think about her inspiraship. She was a community nurse, she was mother of four, she was a wife and homemaker, she was a friend. Her influence was never lemony. It was more a golden glow. I remember her with little kids, like my own, meeting by chance in the then Coylumbridge Hotel, on Autumn half term and joining her, laughing over drinks and stories. A fixed memory for me. Her smile, her love, her natural beauty. I had no idea, and nor did she, of what was to come.

Time passed, life demanded, it is at it is. We both saw lemony suns and found it harder to wiggle but know this. In the eyebright of anyone stays the story, held and stored and recognised, no matter the falter, no matter the doubts, the forgets. The gone of someone is never the end because lemony or not, the sun shines on that life, long lived, long-loved. I will always remember her and I was far away as a star. But I saw her shine and wiggle.

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Island Blog – Liminal Dilemma

We all have them, the dither on the cusp of a new thing. Summer and Autumn obviously feel the same. Autumn comes in with a bag of chillswag in the morning, clouding windows, cold to the touch and bringing shivers into the house, the snatch and pull of a warm cardigan around a human body. I can hear her chuckle as I do this very thing. And, as the day moves on, the temperature rises until I am here at almost 5pm barely frocked and with the sun almost burning. It thinks me.

I have dithered many, oh many times, on that cusp. Trusting that whatever I did or didn’t do would breach the void, move some situation on. I have stood there, often, skidding on the rocks of slippery, hesitant, wondering, doubting and very much alone. But there is something about being there in the first place. What brought me here? a question requiring an answer and, from what was around me at the time, nobody else was in answering mode. Is that what it comes to……..nobody but me to step across the void, to acknowledge there is no-one there at all? Perhaps. It’s lonely though.

On the obverse side of this I can see that it isn’t just me who make decisive choices plus impact and, possibly, initiating chaos. Even as a young mother, I did face all of that. I was the one who found myself, discovered myself, on the slippery rocks, and who stepped on. Looking back to my then situation, there was nobody else who would have even got there, nor wanted to, the whole maintenance of equilibrium, the status quo, being an absolute. For so many years I doubted myself, this crazy skidder on rocks, the one who yelled Enough! and worked on the change. Maybe it’s a generation thing. My peers conformed after all. I was born different. All through school I disagreed, and was silenced or expelled. Now I live with that self and can see her as before her time, the rebel, the one who actually did make a difference in so many ways, in business decisions, in the lives of my children, in the community, in my own life.

So, I recognise Autumn, the proud mother that she is, and welcome her. I also feel a great affection for Summer as she, unwillingly diminishes. I have loved her light and her warmth, but she needs her rest now. However, the combination sisterhood of these two proud seasons does bring the most glorious of surprise light. I think I love the cusp, the liminal dilemma.

Perhaps I see myself in this.

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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 – The Cafe, Keeping on, Q and Clouds

Someone said the Q word this morning. It isn’t allowed, and we all flinched as it spilled through lips and took off like a jester cloud, filling the whole place. It was gentle for a while, coffees, hot chocolates/what type/marshmallows/cream, bespoke teas, cakes, scones with jam and cream, blueberry bakewell, still warm, chocolate cake so full of chocolate as to dynamic the most miserable of souls into hopefulness. Peanut butter brownies, gluten free flapjacks, and so much more. WE are so much more, the team who work here and that’s a good thing because of the Q word earlier.

Around midday they came, and kept coming. The Washeroo was swamped with plates and cups, water glasses and pots and pans and all things kitchen. I don’t even know what half of this equipment is for but it does produce excellent lunches so I don’t really need to do more than to make sure all of it is thoroughly scrubbed. We welcomed dogs, children, families, couples and we never stopped at all, clearing, chatting, welcoming, delivering great food. I ducked out at times, just to escape the high piles of plates and cups and cutlery and pots and the endless parts of a new mixer. I changed the water many times in the deep sinks, so scurrilous did it become. I remember pulling back at one point and looking at the greasy brown swirl of it and thinking this. I don’t want anyone to think that I would ever countenance such water in my sink, not staying there like it was an ok staying there thing. I pulled the plug often.

The thing about running a very popular cafe is that the populous will come. They come because they hear it is a lovely welcoming space and that the food is healthy and fresh and prepared daily. Of course they do. And reputation will grow because people will recommend and new visitors will come because of that. I know that the owners of this cafe have got it so right. I also know that a business takes years to learn its wingspan. I remember growing a few and the early years were also cloudal. I remember doubt and judgment and loss of confidence. However, I am glad we kept going because now all around the world the work we did is used in protocols around sea-mammal research. There were clouds aplenty in the long years of that keeping on thing.

Home now and the sky is a big nudge of clouds. Not a flat sky, not lying down, not at all, but there are stratonimbus and a dwindle of cumulous and a load of feathering interruptions going on in the conversation. I hear it loudal. It moves all the time, shifts, blends, pulls back as if in outrage. Below, I have a baked potato and salad for supper.

The Q word? ‘I think it might be Quiet today”

Enough said on that.

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Island Blog – What we Give

I walked today, a bit wobbly, a bit sore, a bit doubtful. After a stupid fall, a small one ,the capital of which can make all subsequent letters lower case. It was a bump, just that, but the old of me denies a quick revival, as it might not a ten year old. I walked today, a small one and decided I would notice everything along the way. I had to get out and the sun was warm and the sky kind and my thoughts were doing me no service at all.

I started out on the Tapselteerie track, unsure, just me. Well, it is always just me so that’s not unusual. I turned at the fork and headed up the track, the original for the grand guests back in the day, and stopped to watch Painted Lady butterflies on the wild Scabious. I stood awhile, unmoving, just watching as they sipped the nectar. It thinks me. Oh I know it is instinct but go with me here.

We teach out children. Most of us think it through. Most of us us want them to learn the stuff which will help them even though we know that their generation is a somewhere we will never have the language for. Did I know that in the 70s/80s when I was mum to five? No. Even though I had the taste of the 60s, I went blind into motherhood, as if nothing would change. How incredibly stupid.

I look, now and then, at photos of me as a young mother. I don’t recognise her. I was so so young. And yet, this very day, one of my kids recognised his childhood and how we taught him. He had been through a challenging time and was so thankful for what we had taught about survival, about a can-do positive attitude, even in fear, especially in fear.

And I remembered myself, that young mother in a wild place and thought this. We don’t know what we give.

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Island Blog – To be Seen

I was working out something, no, somethings, as I worked today in the Best Cafe Ever. Not just me who thinks that. about the Best Cafe Ever. I hear it all the time, and more so today when someone said just that. Not to me directly, but to one of the Calgary Girls, we who serve and smile and pet dogs and clear tables and oh goodness, forgive me, there are men in this mix and it matters to them too. One the boss, t’other the Tuesday Chef. Both marvellous men. It’s just that mostly, it is the Calgary Girls who work the dynamic in the cafe. Although we are all, without doubt, deciders on inhabiting the sometimes awkward space the servery, we are the inviters.

Remember times when you arrived for coffee on a platform, or in a cafe, or in a clothes shop when the one who could bridge the gap across a counter did, or didn’t and the difference it made, not just to a possible purchase, but to how you felt for the rest of the day? We want to be seen. We really do. There is the very possible to interpolation, of a little smile, a welcome, a warm conversation. We know we are one of many, that the welcomer is fed up, has her/his own life stuff, but that smile can change our whole journey to work, to trouble, to tough decisions, to whatever. For me, this is the gift I can give. I have no idea about the life of anyone who orders one cappuccino with oat milk, one without, and one blackcurrant muffin, one slab of chocolate cake, two plates, two forks. I don’t need to. I love serving, making an experience a very happy one for them. They are people.

I looked into the ‘inter’ word. It’s so easy now with Google and AI, but in my day it was a downstairs scoot to the Huge Oxford Dictionnary taking up hours and dusty inches in the sitting room bookcase. A word came to me, found me, no idea what it meant but the way the letters connected, the way they fitted, caught me. I like it. I hesitate here. It seems as though interfusion is invited and, perhaps it still is. I am old now and still wondering, and yet, and yet, when i get a welcome from a barista, eyes on me, or a eye response to my hallo. I get it. We need to be seen, ultimately to be heard.

So, let’s start on this. If we step out there, traversing the wild of our imaginings, keep walking, keep telling ourselves we want to connect, no fear, no fear. I have walked beside someone who nudged me away from any possible connection on the streets. I won’t do that again.

Everyone needs to be seen.