food

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Island Blog – Lucks Penny and a Mouse

There is a time in my day which isn’t what it was. Once, it was flaming chaos. Now it is chaos for endless others, but not for me. The time spans, approximately, the 4.30 to 6pm tilt towards lunacy. It was home from school, food preparation, feeding dogs, lambs., children, workers. It was welcoming guests back home all drippy, flush faced, possibly contused, all requiring reassurance, warm guidance, hot bath, drying room, dinner by the fire. All of that. I don’t miss it, but I am so glad I was there with the drippy, questioning, angry kids, food, endless food, thing.

That thing is no longer active. And, does anyone get this, it’s a huge empty space? Oh, we fill it with rememberings but there is small, if any, gravitas in rememberings. None of us want to go back, to relive, but and, that but is a butt in my thinking, there is an empty. In approaching this, I know about fixing. I know about that Elastoplast being totally inadequate when faced with a scarple of a wound. And I don’t just talk of my long family experience. What of the loss of a relationship, the abandonment? What of parental rejection? What of a whole lot more? The Gap is there. What we did, once. What filled this space, gone. It is scary, and we have to fill it all by ourselves. Well, that is so shit, btw. I recall running like a hare through the tilt towards lunacy, knowing that, eventually, it would calm, to a degree. Food. Always works.

So what to do, what to think, as that damn gap moves ever closer, as the clock ticks on? Well, I am no guru, but, I have found that being thankful for the laugh memories in my life, pulling them up, has changed my thinks. We did have such fun, such naughtiness, such crazy. Such lucks penny.

Today, I went to pull out a big pan to cook a curry. I pulled out the drawer. A wee mouse, raised, terrified, looked at me from within the big pan. I pulled back, whispered, I mean you no harm. She, it will have been a ‘she’, (only the ‘Shes do the hunting, just saying) rose up, her wee paws held together. A few seconds before she took off. Obviously, I scoured the pan and cooked on, but there was a gift in that encounter, and I call it lucks penny. Which, I have learned in this island place means a gift unexpected. I like that.

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Island Blog – Sun, Rain and I will Tomorrow

It may appear that, now I’m in Africa, I have less to say. Of course, it isn’t that, not at all, but more something to do with the sun, the beckoning, the light that opens up a day into a ‘let’s go’. It’s the same back home when the sun finds it in himself to show up at all, and we all respond, leaping into shorts despite the freezeback wind and the threaten of clouding somewhere over by. Kids want the beach, a picnic, play and more play, and thus everyone and anyone heads for the sea, or the river, or the pool if there is one in the vicinity. So, my musing will have it, sunshine and water are strongly linked. Very few will choose a cinema matinee or a visit to Great Aunt Granola in the nursing home. Not on a sunshine day. The film will show again, and she can wait a day or two as it is sure to rain tomorrow or the next, as it always does.

In Africa, rain is a blessing, and a challenge to drivers. I imagine it is also a challenge to those who live in townships, all those roofs fashioned from sheets of tin if you’re lucky, bits of tarp or bin bags if you’re not. But rain brings instant life to soil, fills water tanks, cools broiling bodies, eases tension. The drivers, as aforementioned, however, panic. Slippy roads stultify and confuse, it seems. Capetown, and other places, go slow, and I mean very slow, so that traffic convergence becomes traffic hesitation. Windscreen wipers swing like crazy and every other vehicle flashes emergency lights at any opportunity. It’s hilarious, unless you’re in a hurry, and a bizarre to me who knows rain in every state from slightly slippy road, through compromised vision to roadside puddles deep enough to sink my mini.

I walked again today down to the Indian Ocean. Sounds so majestic. She is warm and wild, her waves no hawking spit but rising above the horizon, backlit by sun, clutching kelp and shells in her grasp, to boom, and I mean BOOM onto the wide arc of white sand. She has a lot to say, and loudly. I felt it today as I read my book, the sonar wave shooting up the beach through me and knew I was connected, as we all are to all things, all the wild things we have, unfortunately forgotten in our rush for worldly gain. I watch dogs scuttle and dash in and out of the waves, their humans wandering besides. I see kite surfers fly above the crests, and canoeists paddle out to investigate rock formations. I hear children laughing as they tumble and shriek through the shallows.

My walk here takes me through an underpass, meaty with kelp-throw, a rush of freshwater strictured after big moon tides and very gloopy to navigate. Then I meet the ocean, flooding like she has a load of tongues, no two with the same sweep. One ankle deep, the next losing most of my legs to the swirl. I chuckle. My feet are safe, sand locked, my frock hem-soaked. I read a while, watch a train chortle by just above my head, wish I had brought my swimsuit. (is that what it’s called these days?)

I will tomorrow.

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Island Blog – An Attudinizing Aptitude

Over the past couple of days, I was felled, like a tree, all credit for this going to a dodgy prawn. It isn’t often I can miscorrelate day, tree and prawn in one sentence and it makes me smile, not that I smiled much during the fall. However, in spite of the inner turmoil of collapsa dendrobranchiata, and of being thoroughly compromised by what was sorting itself out beyond my control, I knew, as I always do, that I have a choice. Not, t’is true, over much on a physical plane, but over everything on a mental one.

I gave in and up to it – had to – no choice in the face of a dodgy prawn attack, weaponless against the might of the small curly pink thing with vengeance on its mind. Who would have thought something so insignificant (or so I thought) could fell a big tree like me! I know the species has been around for about 400 million years, and could, during those endless hours of floating about oceans, have planned the odd grab for vengeance against being fished and dished, but the resulting result seems disproportionate to the size of the small curly pink thing.

Thankfully I was not on a plane, nor caught in traffic, nor alone. I was safe and cared for whilst the process processed, slowing down the hours and making me feel like it was never going to stop its onslaught. And, all the while, I decided my attitude. This will not last forever, I told myself, even though Forever suddenly looked like a million miles long. I am not alone, although I was, as life, sans dodgy prawn attack, continued outside my bedroom door, and merrily so. I am safe, I said, feeling about as unsafe as it is possible to feel. Choose, I said, probably out loud, as the stagnant silence around my sick bed needed a riffle through, and I did, choose.

Recovering, this thinks me. I know that my attitude to absolutely everything decides absolutely everything, whether I face the mild irritation of an encounter with bad grammar, or a disaster of disastrous proportions. I believe this to be one of my skills, learned over endless hours of floating about life’s oceans, and I am so very thankful that all that floating learned me such power, not over anyone, not over everything, not over that which is much bigger than I (like a small pink curly thing), but over myself. To allow what is happening to happen, without reacting to the piddly stuff, such as the ‘my way’ of doing, seeing and approving’ is peaceful relief, because I don’t even need to take a second look at any of those.

In the process of sickness, uncomfortable, inconvenient, alarming, discombobulating, I can choose to smile, albeit weakly. I can accept help and kindness. I can admit to pain without drama, humbly and honestly, simply allowing the process to process. The power in that will ‘well’ me again, and it has. I have been reminded, again, of my ‘weakness’ against such power – power such as sickness, world issues, bad grammar, small irritations, upsetting changes, all of these and more, and this ‘weakness’ fits me rightly in the world. What empowers me, however, even against a small curly pink thing with vengeance on its mind, is my choice of attitude.

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Island Blog – The Now People

November 11th and the Christmas Tree is up in the shopping centre. I know that Africa runs two hours ahead of the UK, currently, but this big-ass glitzy tree did stop me in my tracks. I am no sour grapes on this or on any other marketing decision, swallowing them and allowing a timeline settlement, plus the subsequent period of indigestion. In my day, this. In Nowday a very different this. Old people did it one way. The Now People do the same thing very differently. But do they, I wonder, in their hearts? Is this what the Now People want, this massive pressure on purse strings and expectations; the ghastly thought of all those hideous relations determined to arrive for the feast, with a suitcase full of grumbles and judgements? I sometimes/often hear folks my own age, teeth long gone, arches sunk, bewhiskered and still hoping their yesterdays will get better talking about the Now People as if they hadn’t a single scooby about how to live, work, raise children, break boundaries. None of us did, by the way, not one. We all fell at the first hurdle, and the second, and some of us, I included, fell at most. They got higher, that’s why.

Materialism used to mean, just saying, the gathering of cloth for a sewing class. I remember the feel of cloth, the weight of it in my palms, the soft ticklefinger of backthreads, the clogs and shawls saga depicted in the pattern. I thought of the initial design work, the dreaming and thinking, the thin lines spidering between one truth and another’s; the lift of a paintbrush or pen, the subsequent push of a needle point through virgin cloth. I saw the dying process, the scrape of lichen off magma rocks, salted and blasted by story winds from pole to pole. The beginning of mythos. I wonder about stories now, hoping, and I do hope, that the Now People ask about our time and the time before and before and before, because how life is for them in all that really matters, is not so different.

It is people who matter, not things, although things, and their acquisition, do seem to have topped the charts these days. On our yesterday wine cruise, through beautiful vineyards way up in the sharp-stoned mountains in an old tram with wooden seats, an open bus, also vintage, and ending on a trailer pulled by a more than vintage tractor (just like the one we used in the days of Tapselteerie), we met people. Guides, sommeliers, tram, bus and tractor drivers, waiters, other wine tasters……oh we laughed and talked and learned and said farewell. The dynamic day was done. We had tasted the best of South African wines, learned how one wine-grower amalgamates grapes, how another whose land stretches from sea to high peaks, plants vines to work with salt, with clay, with wind, with sun, with shade. But, the memories sugar spun into those encounters are what remains, because they are animiate, animated, alive, and inspiring. I watched black faces, white, coloured, bejewelled, simply dressed, awkward and easy, all smiling in the vine-world sunshine. I will forget the wines long before I forget that laugh, that smile, that little conversation with two women on the bench in front of me.

In my perfect world, life would slow down, marketing would calm its britches and those who demand complete ownership of workers in the workplace would be required to swap shoes with those souls for one year. Just one should do it.

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Island Blog – The Tomorrowlands

This morning begins, for me, at a time that bothers me in its insistence. No! I almost shout but don’t, modifying my shout-ness, even though there is nobody else to hear, this is no longer acceptable, this 05.30 lark when even the larks are slumbering on. And, yet, my body clock ignores my remonstrations with the tenacity of a teenager. I give in and get up. The light is the right light, the morning light, and the day is dawning whether I like it or not. I do like it for I am an inveterate morning person. What does inveterate mean? I forget, but it fits because other people use it around such subjects as chips with vinegar, reading crime novels and gardening, to mention but three inveteration opportunities.

I digress. Risen and with coffee on the brew, I wander into the conservatory which is cold. The nights are cold, star-backed and sometimes frosty, a relief from the heat of the sun. I am not complaining. Sun and heat are rare gifts in this island life and nobody with a modicum of sense moans about the odd times we enjoy both of these together. Oh we know the sun is out there somewhere, behind a depth of cloud cover that could halt an entire Scottish regiment, a feat most opponents have historically failed to achieve, but the ability to get the old boy to push through has confounded us longtime. Wishing doesn’t cut it, nor do prayers. Weddings can, and have, capsized a whole bride. Nonetheless, we island on because the beauty of this lump of rock is second to none.

The day slows down as I feared it might. Some days are tortoises where they used to be hares, way back when a clamjamfrie of children, not all my own, plucked at my skirts for biscuits and pressed for attention, then disappearing alarmingly, returning just in time and in dire straits, when food was required every 30 minutes and when life had her hand in the small of my back. Move on, move quicker, MOVE! Now there are no such demands, no pressure from life, in fact she is now telling me, the skeerie minx, to slow down, to ca’ canny, to rest. But even as I dislike this sudden, for it feels sudden, lowering of my sails, it is here with me now and I must needs welcome it as I welcomed, and thanked, the spirited life in my limbs. I decide to shift the limb spirit into my mind. It seems to work. Instead of bemoaning a loss of spirit and strength, I welcome it into my thinking. It decides my thoughts which decide my feelings which decide my actions. I have learned this from life coaches, a few of whom, or is it which, are in my family, and I have imbibed the truth of it and taken it as ‘read’. Funny that word. Read sounds like ‘reed’ and we know what it means. Read sounds like ‘red’ and now we are much confused. Heaven knows how anyone can ever comprehend, pronounce or employ such tiddleypom when learning English, especially the old English, a language quite beautiful to me but if I were to launch into it in, say, a Glasgow pub, I might not get home at all.

I’m still digressing. What I wanted to communicate was and is that my day was slow. It took me half hour stretches of resistance to restlessness, holding, controlling my desire to lift, walk, move, and it thinked me of the sea, the waves on the beach, fretting at the sand as an old woman plucks at the bobbles on her old cardigan. I read a bit, walked a bit, went to the shore a bit, made a feta and spinach dip, a bit, sewed a bit and la la la. I know it is right and proper for my children to have their own lives. I celebrate that. I know that it is right that my old china is dead. I celebrate that too, because it was always going to happen and could have been so much more upsetting than it was. I know I am perfectly tickety-wotwot alone. And, I also know that there are so very many other people out there who know exactly how it all feels.

Slow days, they come, but the joy of living in this funny, clever, resourceful and dynamic community is something I treasure and will treasure again at 05.30 in the Tomorrowlands.

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Island Blog – Repeat Daily

The way I see things when I am tired, stressed or fed up is never how they really are. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. In certain moods or when pressure feels heavy as a truck on my head, I slip into a weird world, one full of victims with me being the biggest. I am at the mercy of whatever comes my way; my seeing becomes slanted, ditto my hearing and my poor underused brain turns into an untethered disco ball. Instead of being inside this body, I am all over the place, running here and there like a headless hen.

And then the next day comes, the next songbird dawn, the new light, and what happened yesterday seems small and insignificant, solvable in a few simple steps. Why I couldn’t see it that way yesterday beyonds me. Yes, I was tired of repeating things, gently; yes I was upset about the rain getting into my post box; yes I was lonely and wondering when life would begin and yes I was pitching for a fight. I guess the nice lady from the Council, just doing her job, is fortunate I didn’t get to speak to her. I have no idea what she called about, beyond a vague and fluffy explanation (and even that word is too long to describe what I did learn). Are we still shielding? Are we allowed to see anyone and would that be from Now or from July 31st, and are we still getting the food deliveries? I know the answer to the last question having just learned it from a friend, but the rest, himself nodding and saying No and Yes and then No again could mean he has signed us up for a pilot mission to Mars. I guess I will find out eventually, if a space suit arrives by carrier.

My point is that, in my strong and right mind, I can see all the mild irritations and the intense enfuryments as just things colliding with my just thoughts and just feelings. I can step back, breathe, observe and quantify, deconstruct and take appropriate action. When in a compromised state of being, it looks and feels as if I am under attack from a mysterious, invisible band of mercenaries, with me in their sights. Of course, it would be impossible, being an ordinary extraordinary human woman, to sustain such a peaceful equilibrium at all times and in all sets of circumstance. life isn’t like that for any of us. Tsunamis will rise and threaten to destroy; rain will seep into post boxes, mushing paper and packaging, days will feel trudgemonkey and food will go off in the humid heat, just before I go to re-heat it for dinner. Life is not plain sailing and we all know that. But, if I can set up an inner programme of self-encouragement, write down uplifting affirmations to stick on walls, seek conversation with friends and read good guide books – if I eat well, exercise, laugh a lot, show kindness, share love and think more often of others that of myself, I will have prepared myself for anything that might come my way on any given day.

Which is what I am doing this day. One day at a time.

Repeat daily.

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Island Blog – The Circus, Night Fairies and Life

I have baked a honey cake and drizzled it, put a wash on, changed a bed, dressed, applied slap, made a cauliflower cheese for supper, wished a grand-daughter happy unicorn birthday, swept the kitchen floor, prepared a salad, ate breakfast, fed the birds and the dog, danced to Ronan Keating’s new single and it is now 7 am. There is something manic about me, I am beginning to believe. Residue automatic morning-ness from when the tourist business was up and running, endless children, many of whom I didn’t know, also up and running, and food food food required by hundreds kept me cartwheeling from first light. Half the time there was little point washing up as meal demands bunched together like giggling girls on an outing. I whisked, beat, baked, stewed, roasted and steamed mountains of produce. It thinks me I am unable to step out of those running shoes, even now, when days are slow and gentle, mostly, with the exception of the odd crappy day wherein I cannot run for the life of me. My legs are leaden and my mind is a roundabout on speed. However, I am happy to report that such days are rare, not least because I can’t be bothered with any sort of sickness, mental or physical, disallowing either much space in the room. Be off with you, I say, but don’t go bothering anyone else because you are just not welcome. Try outer space.

Mornings bounce me like Tigger. I wake with the birds and absolutely cannot turn over for more sleep. Despite my passionate love for my recycled plastic bottle filled duvet and my feathery down pillows, I have too much energy fizzing through my veins to lie a minute longer. I have to be quiet, though. Himself won’t rise till about 8 and my kitchen is a floorboard below his bedroom. I don’t think they lagged things much in the 1870’s. I tiptoe through my tasks, interested, excited, curious and particularly curious when I discover that the washing pile is gone. Who has gone-d it? There is only me who washes in this house. I discover it a little later through a downstairs window, bobbing like bunting on the line. I have no recollection of hanging it there. Perhaps I didn’t. Perhaps the Night Fairies did it for me. How sweet they are. I remember them from my young harassed mother-days. They always surprised me with their kindnesses but there were times when I would rather they told me what they’d done because I might then have avoided wasting precious time in search of something I knew I had left just there the night before. Just there stares back at me emptily. I began to suspect collusion with the Night Fairies. Once, when I was certain of a pile of bed sheets awaiting a spin in the belly of my washing machine, I found them half way up the stairs, draped into an Aladdin’s cave and with two guilty looking collies curled up inside, each one enjoying a bowl of muesli.

Perhaps when life has been a circus for long enough, the circus becomes the life and each performer becomes the circus. I think I have. And I don’t mind one bit. I think the circus training has kept me bouncing through all sorts of horrible, kept me mostly up and taught me that nothing in life is going to get me down for long. I just wish I could share this with everyone else. Life is such a precious gift, and always too short. Living it right up to its end is the only path to happiness.

After all, stumble stones can always be turned into building blocks.

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Island Blog – A Crescendo of Growth

I can see it coming. The new shoots pushing through cold ground, like babies being born. One minute, safe, warm and dark, and suddenly thrust into the light, sharp, blinding. Flipped by the wind (or the midwife), smacked by the rain (ditto) and cold, so cold. It is understandable, the heartfelt desire to return to B4, but that option has been taken away for ever. Moving onto A1 is what Mother Nature insists we do, all growing things. If she is always moving on, then so must we. Instinct drives, timing is life or death. We must comply.

This, sadly, also goes for bodily hair. I think we women will all look like scarecrows with moustaches and caterpillar eyebrows by the end of this enforced lockdown. Unless we have a family member who can offer us smooth passage and who happens to own salon scissors. Ah…….there may not be many of those who inhabit such fortunacity. My word. But sticking to the subject, I wonder how we will grow through this time. The people I have talked to on Skype, messenger, WhatsApp and the Alexander Bell are all thinking we will grow better. I am with them on that. I know folk who have faced down death and returned to live a stronger, more focussed, more sensitive life, letting more unimportant stuff go and ferreting around for the things that really matter, but felt like ordinary and uninteresting. Before this. In a way we are all facing down death right now and it will teach us many things.

As I come down the stairs to see the moon face to face instead of letting her think that her sneak through the cracks in my curtains will ever be enough, I am thankful for the stairs holding up. There was a time when holding up caught a fever and wobbled a lot, requiring skilled assistance to de-wobble. I am thankful for my washing machine, car, ability to scrub the inside of those flaming mugs that will not let go of tea tannin, go for walks with my frocks always at odds with the capricious snatches of the west coast wind. I watch primroses push out more colour, a siskin or a goldfinch on the nicer seed feeder, the way my dwarf willow dances flamenco on the hilly back garden. I am thankful for the postmistress #suchacrazytitle delivering mail in her disposable gloves, smiling and joking with me through the window as I stand on the laundry basket from Nincompoo Laundry, Calcutta. I’m thankful for that too.

My finger nails have never been this clean. Neither has my husband. What I am learning in this time is what really matters, such as looking after him myself. I am cooking good food once more having absented myself from any meaningful connection with pots, pans, process and palavers. For what seems a long time I have served him one of his ready meals (good quality) from the microwave and then boiled myself pasta, added pesto and salad. One of my granddaughters was horrified, not about her grandfather’s ready meal thingy, but my pasta on repeat thingy. Granny… she admonished. This is not like you! But it was like me, back then. Now I am purposed up, my extra busy imagination coming up with all sorts of marvellousness just as I did when cooking for five hungry kids plus hangers on. There were always plenty of those, and nobody on this island ever sends anyone home without something in their bellies. It just isn’t done.

Now I am about to start finding out how to make face masks. This should be interesting. I wonder if I will be able to stick with the J Cloth plus ribbons rule? What…..no macrame flowers or beads and bobbles? Abso- flipping-lutely NOT. Rats. I am also knitting dog blankets for our dog. She is currently the lucky owner of 3 colourful/wool and easy wash blended reaches of bonkers colour. The easy wash part washes, well, easy. The wool part is obviously sulking and retreating into itself, so that a part of the blanket looks more like a ploughed field, but Poppy doesn’t seem bothered all that much. She just turns a few circles and flops down on the easy wash, resting her delightful black nose on the ploughed field, so she can see out all the better.

I am daily delighted by all the entrepreneurial posts on social media. People are doing things they probably always wanted to do, but didn’t consider their work to be of notable value. Now it definitely is and this is what the human race is all about. I remember, as you will, the oldies saying that what the world needs is a jolly good war. Although there is nothing jolly about any sort of war, they had a point, one that now makes sense to me. What they meant is that, during wartime, a family, a community, a village, a city, a country, the world has to pull together, as we are all now doing. How does it feel to you? I think it is marvellous partisan excellent quiddity. In fact, I am quite astir just thinking about how wonderful folk are. We are learning to care outside of our boxes and demonstrating that care in ways that fulfil and nourish the givers as much as it does the receivers. In short, we are finding a new currency.

Hats off to all of you doing whatever you are doing for others. I am just waiting for that balmy summer evening inside a city when all those musicians, isolated in their own homes, communicate with each other, fix on a song or a piece of music and open their windows to delight a whole street, to lift, just for a short while, the anxiety and the fear, turning them into birds and butterflies and telling us all that together, we will grow through this.

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Island Blog 148 Dark and Light

 

Dark room wisdom

 

 

We were talking, my small-panted grandchildren and I, about the dark.  Was I, Are you, Button Granny, frightened of the dark?  I was having a ying tong at the time (ying tong piddle etc) and she, the smallest pants, burst in, quite the thing with this fairly big question.  Well, I said, thinking, or looking like I was…….I used to when I was little, and then, later, when I was bigger than little, yes I did.  Why?  she asked.

Good question.  They ‘why’ bit always throws me unless it’s obvious, such as Why did you not put your fingers in the fire Button Granny?  I thought more, albeit in a slightly compromised state (I can still think at such times, being a woman) and said, Well because I know the dark now.

How?  she continued.  Oh dear.  Well, I said (what would we do without that wonderful word of delay?) I think that I know that, that……there is nothing to frighten me in the dark anymore.  Oh, she said, and dashed off to complete her Angry Cabbages Puzzle, which, by the way, I do wonder at.  If cabbages are angry in her little mind, then what hope is there?  I had, earlier, read both herself and her bigger brother a story about an Elephant and a Bad Baby, who, together, stole two pies, two pork chops, with no thought for the poor pig, nor, I might add, the butcher, two ice creams, two buns and two apples, so I guess Angry Cabbages are small fry by comparison. I am consoled greatly to know that their parents think the book ‘dickerless’ too.

The dark is just the other side of the light.  I remember my lovely dad saying just that, as I shook him awake, about yay high, my little heart beating like mad, my feet light and running all the way to his side of the marital bed.  He rose and guided me to the bathroom, his voice soothing, regardless of his broken sleep, sleep he badly needed for his busy working day, yet to dawn, and laid a towel on the edge of the bath.  He turned on the taps to run tepid water into the tub and then lifted me onto the towel so that my feet dipped into the soothing water.  He talked about this and about that whilst I calmed, and then, softly dried my feet and lifted me back to bed with a gentle voice saying gentling things.  I don’t know if he stayed till my eyes grew heavy, but I do know that I never saw him leave.  He never asked me to tell him of my fears, just seem to understand them and then he washed them away.  I thank him for that, although he is now long gone, a Marine Commando, another dad who never talked about the war he lived through, at least, not the dreadful bits.

As a teenager I was still afraid.  Not outside, bizarrely, but within the walls of a house.  Once, when invited at stay with a schoolfriend, the daughter of a pig farmer, for the night.  I lay in the guest room, weighed down with warm bedding and I just knew there were rats in the room.  I said to myself, Don’t be Dickerless, but the rat-knowing part of me stayed resolute. Then, as I began to doze off from complete exhaustion, the house around me quiet (which meant the parents were in bed too…..) a rat ran over my blankets.  I saw it and I felt it.  I spent the night in the cupboard and cried so much at breakfast that my poor mother had to come and collect me, effusive with apologies and, no doubt, embarassed for ever and a day.  But I Saw the rat!  I wailed.  Uh-huh, she said.

The dark is something personal.  To each one of us.  Maybe it isn’t the night sort of dark, although it can be, but perhaps the inside dark stepping out.  A fear of something or someone.  Doubts can bring the dark.  Crime on television just before bed can continue to play out and develop in our dreams.

Dark is the other side of light.  As adults, sentient adults, we know this.  But knowing something and it settling into our bones can be a universe, a lifetime apart.  I know that when I am troubled, my dreams bring more dark than light. I have downloaded a Sleep App on my android phone (get me) by someone with the most boring voice I have ever heard, whose control over the english language would have sent my english teacher, Miss Machoolish into one of her dizzy spells, and it works, the boredom treatment, never mind the bright lights, the secret garden or any of the stuff he drones on about.  I just want out, so I fall asleep.

Now, I love the dark.  I know that, inside it, there is calm and peace.  I also know that night creatures move at such times, but they don’t want me, they want mice or wandering birds, and, although I may, indeed be a wandering bird, I am way too big for their taste.  I sincerely believe that television, for all its great dramas has bigged up the darkness with fear and we believe it.  Although I do acknowledge that, living on an island, my dark is just dark with not much inside it to worry any of us, I still think fear as food is something we don’t need.  We spend too much time, me included, looking at how things might go wrong.  Why should that out-balance them going right?  Perhaps more looking at the light in our lives would gentle the dark in us.

Dark is dark.  Light is light.  It is enough.