harbour

Today I drove the hill road into the harbour town to meet a friend. I was early and picked the sofa and the comfy armchair beside a warm open fire. The buzz was…..theatrical. I think I say this because the welcoming staff were all dressed in colours, with rings and tattoos and artistically coloured hair. Smiles wide, looking at me. I get it. An old woman in a big frock with bare legs and short boots and a home-fashioned jacket, seeded once in an old cardigan that freaked out when I washed it on ‘Too Warm’. I had thought at first, dog blanket, then I heard the story in it. My feisty impossible mother-in-law had knitted this thing, and for me. That had to have been days of knitting; days of love and commitment. No, I will lift this hunched and crunched woollen thing into my life, breathe my breath into it. Okay, great big respect. Now what? It thought me. I decide to wheech out the material drawer. I find velvet, or something that thinks it’s velvet and it is not for me to disappoint it as I finger the hold of it, the depth and then bring my own knowing into this I am Velvet thing. I am quiet on the subject, lifting out the deep colours, just knowing that this Not Velvet will be a right bugger to shape. It won’t shape. It yawls like sails in a slack-flack wind somewhere off Cherbourg. Hmmm.

I brought down my ridiculously pink tailors dummy on a white stick. I laid the compromised cardigan around her perfect pink shoulders, marvelling, with a snort, at her perfect pink breasts. I tell her this. I am amazed that anything I make for me, knowing my own body and using you as a caption of what I never was can ever fit, not with those pointy things almost taking my eye out each time I move around to pin or tuck, or wheech. But I, we, move on. She stands quiet whilst I pin and sew, pin and sew and then it is done, this bejewelled jacket that can only come out for air on dry winter days. Two, maybe three. Today was one so there won’t be many more.

We ordered soup. It’s always home made and so is the bread, so are the scones and the sweet baking. The fire was tended by a smiling young man. I hailed an artist I know well, one who has got his work into the online Saatchi gallery, and congratulated him as he passed by. There was a writing group just finishing up on a table nearby and I hailed the leader and signed myself up. So cosy in there, so easy, so fine-art. After lunch we visited the new exhibition, all local artists. I was enthralled at the work. I knew most of the artists just from their work. Many had sold and I was not surprised. I talked with my friend, an art therapist working with textiles, and we laughed and shared and quite forgot our old caring roles as we became two women in a space, with nothing but forward to go.

This day I drive the switchback to the harbour town. I only go there these days on a specific mission, never to wander nor to dawdle, as once I did. As I heft right down the steep brae and see the tongue of the Main Street sticking out like thirst, it is coloured up with tourists, the many who are here for a longing, an escape from lockdown. I am so not joining them. They wander, holding ice creams, takeaway coffees, bags of shopping, children, all loving the tidal sweep of the bay, the seagulls fly, the fisher boats, the chip van. I swing right into the harbour car park and meet a tailback. There are just so many places for the parking and I get it. You arrive and you want to park. That’s all, but it is not enough because all the spaces are taken so we tailback, hover, pause, exercise patience and not patience. I am here to meet up with my captain son as his boat is in the harbour for a couple of hours before turning seaward once more with his passengers. We bench sit for I cannot go aboard. He brings tea, a chef made biscuit wrapped in a paper napkin and delicious. We talk of our lives, his young family, my aloneness. We watch the in and out of boats, of visitors in yachts, of locals checking their own launches and sailors. We say hallo and I watch faces. Of the ones I know as friends, I see the toll Covid and isolation has taken on them. Some visitors come too near and my mask hand twitches. They laugh, cough, move on and here I sit scared as a mouse, even on a bench in the sea air.

What happens to us in such times? It thinks me, much, of those (including me in the past) who felt scared just being around people, never mind an invisible virus. We were labelled as those with mental health issues. Now, I am one who would fight to the death to blow all labels into the stratosphere, no matter the smug relax of those who choose it at some committee meeting and then tootle home delighted with the fact that they don’t fit the confines of any label. So, right now I am afraid. And then I am not. This fear is tidal. It rises, full moons itself and then subsides into seaweed and sand. It is real. Very real. But I would stand at the gates of Challenge and shout ‘ Don’t label us!’. I would. And I will tell you why. Any label fixes a person. It might be on medical notes. It might be a long term tenant in someone’s mind. Oh, he, or she, has mental health issues. How ridiculous and how wrong is that! Does this mean we who have gone down like a swan in a swamp, cannot find a way out? Of course not. We can fly again, lift from fear again, become wonderfully white and light and flighty once again.

It is a thixotropic place. In the language of honey spinning, that honey gift from the bees, this word means honey that refuses to spin. It is mostly heather honey which is why it is common to buy heather honey in comb squares, wax included. In life it symbolises the same thing. A refusal to spin, to melt and demur. What I find in these times is that I oftentimes need to remind myself to relax my shoulders, raise my neck, breathe and go forward, especially en route to what I consider the Big City, bubbling with way too much busy life, a life I felt so easy peasy in before. Suddenly it presents menace. My honey refuses to spin. It is still there but affixed in a wax hexagon that will not let it free. I am not saying I like it. I love to flow. I love people, connectivity, chance encounters, but now I am confounded, afraid and my body is telling me she is not happy.

I know that I am bereaved broken. I know that learning how to live alone after almost 50 years is not going to turn me into a confidently independent woman overnight. I know, because of this, that I have mental health issues. Fear, accentuated; sleepless nights; hypervigilance; squewed thinking. of course I flipping do. It thinks me of anyone who is so labelled and who feels less-than, diminished, isolated because of that awful label. (all labels are awful). When any one of us is in a dark place the last thing we need is labelling. We are not what ‘they’ tell us we are. We are just in a dark place, a dark well, looking up at the light and just a bit terrified of moving towards it because we have no idea of what that light might throw on who we really are now, in the aftermath.