jigsaw

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.

Underneath a humungous fallen pine, some years down, is a dazzling carpet of moss. There is Fingerley moss fronding through the cracked bark, delicate falls of emerald stems, each lifting softly in response to the heckling rain. It isn’t heavy, not soaking me or the little dog, just pinging wet drops at us all for the fun of it. The puddley dyke is drying up so anything damp is going to help revive the frogspawn I noticed a few days ago, although it’s too little too late, methinks. Old leaves mulch down, retreating back into the earth as food for the next thrust of life. It’s coming, at last.

Star moss grows down in the peaty bit, stunning bunches of delicate stalks with a star on top, facing up. Big rocks, upon which this giant landed, are coated in Afro moss, so tightly affixed they could fool you into seeing a soft landing. To throw myself onto one would end me up with broken ribs and embarrassment rising, so I don’t. Then there’s Moss moss that covers anything it fancies covering. They all look fabulous and green and very much alive. The otherness beneath the lonesome pine, which, in its dying grabbed a larch tree on the way, poor love, and has pinned her to the ground ever since, includes little yellow things that tell me they are dandelions but are obviously lying, Monbretia which doesn’t bloom till after lockdown and other coloured things I don’t have names for. None of them seem to mind that at all.

The sky is milk with a whisper through of grey. It is also shut if you don’t count the spits of rain. Sometimes if I look hard enough at a shut sky, I can find a smile of light, enough to believe in, but not today. Today it is just a flat white. Walking under the sky always marvels me. It stays up and I stay down. Such a synergistic friendship, and long may it remain that way or we’ll have Chicken Licken getting into another flapdoodle. A raven floats overhead, that sharp-eyed carnivore with a taste for lambs, parping like the horn on Noddy’s car. His mate follows. There is something both regal and scary about ravens. All that black and so much of it and so intelligent. Way back in the days of Tapselteerie we tried to get rid of a pair of ravens. It probably wasn’t legal but they took too many little woolly jumpers at lambing time. They nested on a cliff face which made it extremely difficult to get anywhere near them and they would have known our intention from the very moment we donned our balaclavas. Needless to say, we didn’t succeed and I imagine they live still as they have no predators save man.

Across the sea-loch I see a holiday cottage. Empty, of course, as they all are now. Elevated standards count for nothing in these times. You could have Moss moss on the inside of your windows as we always did or an immaculate palace of a moss-less place and still nobody would come. It’s all rather levelling. This virus is catalytic and no mistake. I look ahead a month or two, seeing the same road winding on into the distance, every walker keeping 2 metres away from any encounter, touching nothing, holding breath. Then I look around my home at the books, the things, the bibelots that gather dust now that my lovely cleaners are holed up in their own burrow. The news is just numbers where it once managed a few words in between the latest statistical revelation. Drink is bad, drink is good, children are important until they drive you bonkers whence that importance retreats into the latest Pixar movie with enough popcorn to rot the collective teeth of a whole country within 45 minutes. Meditation is calming unless you get they giggles as I do and exercise is an excellent plan as long as you do it alone and in the wilderness or at midnight.

And we knit on, we tough, inventive humanoids, or sew, or paint, cook and sort out drawers and cupboards, and we dust the bibelots. We are learning to move more slowly through each project, taking time, perhaps as a first, to consider the minutiae, maybe even to read the rules. And this will do us no harm at all. Watching moss, any moss, takes considerable self control. My legs are all a-jiggle. Stand still, I tell them and they huff. But it is good re-training. It is good to sit and read, even in the mornings, to call a friend, to FaceTime, to start a jigsaw (that’s as far as I ever got with a jigsaw), tend the garden, watch the moss.

Mother Nature has called a halt. She wants her finery back, her intelligent order and we, who have turned her world into a veritable tatterdemalion must listen and we must learn.