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Island Blog – After a Squinny

A sticky nob, on a cupboard (just for clarification) and suddenly I see. Actually, no, none of it was there before, it just appeared like measles do on a body. There was one, maybe two, and all you have to do is turn away for a moment and that body looks like a field of poppies in full bloom. This is what happened to, not just all the other nobs, but the whole cupboard, all the cupboards, 10 of them plus 6 drawers. After a bespectacled squinny, I gasped. I did. I had heretofore imagined a quick wipe over the damn nob and then had planned to move onto considerably more interesting pastimes, such as a dab or two of oils on my painting, around that shoreline, I thought, or to just wander out, barefoot to fill up the bird feeders which seem to empty within minutes, but no. Suddenly I could see that my entire kitchen unitry would cause apoplexy should an Health and Safety inspector appear on a spot check. Unlikely, yes, what with the ferries in confusive disarray and it’s after 4 pm anyway which, as we all know, is when any officials employed by any government or council drop everything. Well, not everything, but you know what I mean.

Back to the knobs. They were all sticky, brownish and scuddy. Disgusting, I snorted, looking at my fingers. Then I saw the runs of coffee, the splashes of bolognaise, the sunshine drip of egg yolk, the blobs of god knows what. How could I not have seen this before? The answer I have worked out. We see A) what we want to see; B) what we expect to see and C) what we absolutely know, because we are clean and tidy and mindful in our homes, isn’t there at all. What a collision! Needless to say I had to squirt a lot and rub a lot and gasp a lot as my smart eco bright turqouise cloth greyed up and my squirty stuff lowered its meniscus by quite a few centimetres. My white cupboards and white drawers and white nobs are now sparkling like newly fallen snow. But, oh, there’s a cobweb, up there, look at it. It? There is a halloween party going on above my head in this kitchen. I determinedly refuse, despite the massive temptation, to check other rooms. After all, I did well today. I changed and washed bedding; went to Library and came back with not one book; sorted out the roofers, walked, chatted with various others in all of those situations and shovelled up a huge dump of sheet poo from right in front of the church gate. I even prepped supper.

Thing is, as all this thinks me, is the importance of laughter, even alone among sticky nobs, cobwebs, etc. Also, if the so called negative of a situation can be shifted into an ok thing, ok with me that is, then I won’t cart about any uneccesary shame nor blame. And then, as the thinks think on, what about how we judge someone else for their ‘cover’? I know people who won’t ask friends to their place because they are embarrassed about their ‘cover’, their ‘lack’. How sad. When I visit someone’s home, I couldn’t care less about the surroundings, the spills, the stains, the anything. I visit to look into the eyes of a friend, a human with a heart, doing their best.

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Island Blog – So Who Am I?

Answering for myself, and honestly, I am reckless, spontaneous, loving, able to say sorry, aware, intuitive. I make endless mistakes, move too quick into situations, pull back too quick as well. I am naughty, looking always and everywhere for the chance of harmless mischief, wherein, I have noticed, only I ever get sent to the corner. How is it, I ask myself, that this still defines me at almost 72? I have no answer for that one. I think that, finally, I have come to terms with what seems to run like blood through my veins. I just can’t not be who I am.

Controlled, or so it seems, by these qualities, and as a youngster, I found myself often having to apologise for my, well, self, because in those days I heard, until it almost took me out, the rules by which it was acceptable to present oneself, and they just did not fit. Music began, my feet tapped into jig; someone said something and I was unable not to respond. I moved away from encounters, situations, circumstances feeling like a blue alien all the way up to when the rulebook annulled me. I remember that time, the compliance strangling me like a corset, and it was the same as a young wife. Oh, a lot of me was ‘acceptable’, until it wasn’t and the ‘wasn’t’ came from someone else. It was like living in a constant storm. Funny, is it not, that our past continues to trigger things in our present? However, and notwithstanding all that learning and behaving and feeling corseted on the way to strangulation, I now believe I have held on to me.

The wind is high tonight, red in the weather app, but that app isn’t promising 70mph gusts, as of last weekend, scary as hell. These gusts are coming in from the other direction, and at the most, 40mph. Piddling, really, in a land and history of a great deal of gusting. It thinks me. Sideswipes come at all of us throughout our lives, gusts which could, if we let them, take us down. I don’t like being down. So, what do we do to prepare for that which might come, and often does? Now that is a good question, a very good one. My belief is that we all have the power to stand, as a self, against any constrictive or blasting force outside of who we know we are. We cannot control the weather without, but we most definitely can control the weather within. No matter the corsetry constraints of youth and beyond, we know who we are. The hard part is stepping out in those boots. It’s worth it, I promise you, no matter the battle.

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Island Blog – Macaroni and a Hag Stone

I hear calls, here, inside my ordinary life. Birds in trouble, a catch of a mew from a feral kitten, lost and hungry. I hear the rumble of boats way out at sea, the whirr of a coastguard helicopter, the call of a lamb being an eejit, even the high-pitched squeak of a mouse in my drystane wall. I hear it all, even, and above the noisy interior of a home on Radio Two. I don’t think my ears do the hearing. Can’t be. I think I hear because I care so much about them out there, fighting for their lives, every single minute of the day. I remember, in that short spell of living on the Glasgow streets…..well, not ON the streets, I was super aware of the timbre of passing conversations, recognising trouble. It caused problems, as you may guess, as I launched myself towards a young woman lying on the pavement and crying out. I heard her pain and that was enough for me. I just held her hand for a moment, and she looked up at me and I don’t regret that one bit, as her eyes said many things. Thank you for caring, no hope here, please move on. And I did.

My kids liked to eat three dishes. Macaroni Cheese, Shepherds Pie, Sausages and Mash. The End. Now, I may have bored myself to death preparing the same old in a weird triage, but it happied them and all plates were cleared in seconds. Life was ordinary then, as it is now, but I know something, something I had no idea I was teaching them….the ability to listen beyond the noise of Def Leppard, of Super Mario, of the shite and spite of secondary school, because, even if they don’t all admit to it, they do listen, they are aware, they do hear. So many times I can walk with someone who just talks all the time, listens to nothing, hears nothing, unless I arrest progress and say, Stop. Listen.

I can hear mice in the undergrowth, the chatter of baby tits inside a drystane wall. I know the call of a young buzzard, the way a mother woodcock reassures her chicks, hidden inside a stone uprise inside the woods. I can hear when a huge beech limb is about to give up and fall due to water ingress. It isn’t magic, just practise and an open mind. There is a wonderful place in-between the sensible worldly science and the Otherness and I can embrace both, and I like that very much. I think being stuck is a choice. Not mine.

Still, in my days of the now of me, I can be cooking something, dancing to something, listening to something, and the ‘else’ calls from outside, lifting me there, taking me out, barefoot, with a cheese-coated spoon in my hand, to hear more. Living between two worlds, if that is what it is, is for me. And, I have a hag stone. Oh, I don’t believe I can see faeries, or even through them. I don’t believe looking through the hole will give me illumination. I am no fool. My feets are firmly grounded. But I am open.

Always.

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Island Blog – Fire, Full Stops, Fun and a Pirate

I . just lit the fire. Please excuse the full stops in anything I write. It seems there is a grammar pixie which, or is it who, which, or is it that, has infiltrated my laptop. Nothing to do with my dextrous fingers. I have typed for many, and fast, and the only damn full stops which, or is it that, ever appeared were because my non-ring finger punched the relevant key. Glad I got that out of the way.

There is a chill in the air. I won’t say ‘unprecedented’, the most overused word since Covid, in my opinion. The raindrops are beautiful as they cling to wilding creepers, all a-bluster in the thing of the wind, so, to be honest, I have no complaint, not with that beauty all there for the looking. In the mainland town today, pre. boating home, (another damn full stop) I saw people blind beneath umbrellas, all waterproofed up, crackling like fires beginning, and I thought, this would not be me. I would be out there, walking, laughing into the rain, drops stopping my eyes, soaking my jeans, sogging my skinny sand shoes, or whatever you call such footwear these days. Have I escaped a full stop…..?

I was on the crazy, busy, push and pull of people contained, and, hopefully, continued, mainland for an eye test, long overdue, but not because I was doing the overduing thing. It seems I need eye surgery and soon. So, I’m off again to see an eye dude on a higher pay grade, and then to surgery. To be honest, the whole surgery thing doesn’t phase me, as the travel logistics do. And then, my beautiful family appear from the wings. It all becomes simple. I know, as they do, that eye surgery is not something anyone would put on their bucket list, but what this brings to me, as did the cellulitis, the breast cancer, is an open sentence, no full stop.

And, right now, I am researching a pirate eye patch and an inflatable parrot. Well, come on, there’s always the opportunity for fun. Always and always.

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Island Blog Clouds and Colour In

I watch Clouds. They’re like television for me, so much big ass sky out there. Below, a sealoch, reflecting. Clouds in the saltwater flatwater, trees and homes too, otters, fish, sometimes kayaks, canoes, people spinning over they know not what. The clouds bump each other, argue, lift above and change shape, give in and dissolve, or are pushed into nothingness, wind-altered, dismissed. Like us down here. There is music in the sky, melody, dissonance, discordance, and dance. Same below, changing moment by moment. It thinks me.

Down here, we have to walk in boots. We are grounded and sometimes stilled and stopped. We don’t have cloud privilege. I know that clouds are moisture and not there and all that weatherly wotwot, but from down here they have substance. And, when the landing you inhabit feels like a place you would rather not be, the chance of a lift into the sky is not so weird. Thankful am I for my imagination, for my belief in the extraordinary, in the impossibility of possible, in the chance, the random, the wild connection with all that not one single one of us can ever explain, nor define. However, and nonetheless, I, like everyone else, am damn well stuck here, and in boots. And when the knocks knock, it hurts.

We are taught, and I am thankful for that taughting, that there is a way beyond loneliness, rejection and self-recrimination. More, a swipelift on and up into the wild and the fun and the adventure. I believe it. I also know that, without such guidance, I could have fallen off my perch.

I walk under clouds, as you do. We know that things ethereal are changing. It will affect us, the grey, the wet, the cold. I bought red boots today. Colour in. Colour in.

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Island Blog – Who Will Stand?

Opinions are easy to form. They rise like birds, or bile, and the moment they are heard, they create an emotive reaction. The one who hears, the one to whom the compliment or invective is aimed, is immediately affected. A positive or uplifting opinion is voiced from a place of love, a negative one from fear and a lack of knowledge. ‘You shouldn’t do that, or say that’ is gifted, invariably, by another who has never done that, nor would ever do nor say that, because doing or saying ‘that’ carries a degree of personal risk, particularly if delivered in public. I would be judged, for sure, marginalised, criticised and rejected, and who wants to risk finding themselves in any of those uncomfortable states? Safer to stay quietly in crowd thinking.

It is very different if a judgement is proffered. Then the forum is mine, because everyone is fed up of delays, costs, the weather, tourists, noisy children, the limitations and demands of work, of family life, of rules, rules and restrictions. Now I have the crowd behind me, the mutterers, the ‘angries ‘. I can lift my voice in this scenario, I can go flipping wild with my fists and my body and my learned beliefs around caste, colour, sexuality, the government, Calmac and the state of the NHS. I have wings now. I can fly with this, lording over all of you mutterers down there, muttering. Danger alert.

Just saying.

Have you noticed that any negative judgement or criticism is invariably delivered in a whisper, or anonymously? This is Fear in action. Sometimes a name is named, but the personal risk is slight because taking the negative stance is our natural leaning as humans, and there are many ready to agree. And why is that, I wonder? How long have you got? To distil……..poor housing, no, disrespectful housing, overcrowding, lack of staff, old trains, planes, ferries, Covid, Brexit, wars abroad and encroaching, flimsy governments, corruption, domination, lack of respect, lack of respect for every single one of us. I get it. I really do, from my comfortable home on a beautiful island. But someone has to ‘voice up’, and there are many such someones out there, the brave, the courageous, the risk takers, the ones who understand that the only way forward is not through fear, but love.

I attended a women’s business conference once, many years back, in Glasgow. There were a lot of women there, and many good speakers. The attendees came from diverse backgrounds and varying levels of success (so called). High heels, perfume, smart suits abounded. We settled. Success, so called, shouted from the stage, women who commanded businesses, entrepreneurs, food chain giants, those who had noticed a gap in a market and who had dived right in. It was exciting, dynamic and, for me just a show. I was never going to be any of those hard-nosed focussed female leaders, even as I loved their stories. The last speaker talked of giving love out, or walking it out. A very different presentation, and, ahead of it’s time. She was ahead of her time. Because it was just after the first Afghan war, there were mothers, sisters, even grandmothers in the audience, and giving unconditional love caught like a knife in many throats. The crowd grumble rose into something scary, so I left, but I still got it. What I got, was that I, in my safe place, had no idea what these angry women were going through.

Hard to find love in such a place. I will not ever experience what another has experienced. I know that. It doesn’t stop me, however, because we need to stand, to speak out for renewal, for hope and for the true meaning of love. It isn’t only sexual, or even familial. Love is just allowing, accepting, non-judgemental, all inclusive, no matter colour, sexuality, choices, directions,space issues. None of those, none.

Perhaps it is a gentle allowance, even as that word sounds patronising. Eish (African word) I don’t know, but we must do something to bring Love back. In any form. Who will stand?

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Island Blog – Indigo and Goose Shit

I’ve been blue for a few days, I admit, and blue is my favourite colour, but not my favourite way to feel. Although I don’t show it outerly, this feeling, I still feel it. It’s like a trudge in my heart, filtering down to my legs and up to my thinking. And I did trudge, all of me did this trudging thing. Each task felt like a frickin bore and a half, more. I kept going, automaton switch on, but felt almost absent from proceedings, even if I did proceed. Sleep was bumpy and ebullient with odd images and chilly moments. But, now I have moved on to green. I also love green, the growth colour, the one that heralds change and the promise of astonishing colour. I went to church today in astonishing colours, my boots and one of my layered frocks, the colour of goose shit after a korma, and my underfrock green with white flowers and yellow interiors, the teeshirt below a washed out blue, a concession and a wink to the blue of late. My socks were wildly striped, my coat blue/grey with red hearts. Nothing matched but I read the lesson quite the thing, acting it all out in my voice. A definite improvement.

It thinks me. Sometimes, actually many times, when I remember the gazillions of counsellor guides who have gifted wisdom, revelations and inspiration over most of my adult life, there has oftentimes been the invitation to colour a feeling, or a state of being. As I am me, with my instantly curious mind, I wanted to know ‘which shade of this colour would you like me to name?’ There was a silence after that until, I’m guessing, strength was gathered along with an eye roll, pre responding. If asked, I might explain the difference between shade and hue, between the wisdom of naming a colour as a single thing instead of the many, many hues and shades of that particular colour, depending, naturally, on what other colour/solution/medium was added, and in what proportion. Have I lost you?

I walked today in the wild place. It is right outside my gate, a few steps, slew right, and I am on the right track. Always the right track. The air was a gasp of what might have been a snow warning, had the clouds told me so, but no. Damp held in fists as I breathed in the smell of Autumn’s stand against the Winter King. He’s a bugger, so he is, arrogant and confident and blowing early shards of ice at people when they’ve only just got the hang of those awful wooly stockings, only just thought about packing away all their summer kit. The trees wave at me, spindly now, ghost trees, sap sinking into roots. The snipe are in, the hedgehogs snuffling about for a place to hibernate, the stags are silent, dead, or triumphant, but wary. Grass is held in stasis and will soon be dead, but the moss and the fungi still stand tall, an arrogance in their standup. Thats an island word.

So, if asked the question today, What colour are you? I would grin, avoid doing the shade, hue thing, and answer, still blue, but with green. Blue but with a touch of rose madder = indigo. Green with a touch of cadmium yellow = goose shit.

Sounds like confusion. That’ll do.

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Island Blog – Machines and People

So there I was, and still am, tiddling about with a replacement washing machine thingy. It has been in my head and at the end of my dialling digits and a rumble in my tumbly for two weeks. The whole online deal appears clear and simple but it is anything but. The baseline is this. My washing machine crossed her arms across her barrel chest and shut down like a judgmental matron and I have known a few of them in my time. She would receive water but would not slosh, nor allow her belly to rotate, nor would she spit out the water taken in. A couple of floor floods later plus a heap of sodden towels, I gave in and hunkered back on my heels. Right! I said. Damn You! I said. And then I mellowed, not least because hunkering on my hunkers was fun once but not so much these days. I could feel my big toes shrinking. Okay, I get it, you are gone. RIP my faithful friend of years. She loosened her arms and I could feel a mellow fill the little room. I rose into action.

My washing machine is insured with full and complete and absolute promise that, if an engineer cannot be found, or one is but he decides my machine a write-off, I will receive a free replacement. When I took this insurance out, I did inform the company that, a) I live on an island, b) there is no such engineer here and c) no washing machine company will deliver to the island, never mind recycle the old one. They, the company, assured me (from Bedford or Manchester, Dubai or India) that all of that isn’t true. I find it is. I order a free replacement and am promised installation and recycling of the old one, but I am canny so I call often to find out wotwot. Twice, my order was not acknowledged even thought I had confirmation delivery emails both times. Third time I asked deeper questions and discovered astonishment. I could hear in their helpful voices they had never encountered island shenanigans before. Quite an excitement for them I thought. I was not angry, nor challenging. All voices came from the throats of genuine warm people who just wanted to help.

Today, I hope, and after some time, I believe my replacement machine is on its way, due for delivery tomorrow. Ah, I thought, I doubt that, so I called and spoke to yet another delightful and puzzled person. She clocked (finally) that island delivery will never be straight from the original courier. So, my machine will not arrive tomorrow. I laughed with her, said I know this place and did she know the name of the courier? She did. Two in fact. I had never heard of either but she said one was Glasgow, one Inverness. I laughed out loud. Days away, I said. Oh, she said, really? hell yeah lady. She gave the number of one and that’s my work tomorrow. It, my machine, will be taken to another courier in Oban (I know them all) and then eventually, come to me. T’wont be here before I leave for Africa but I have neighbours with machines. All is well in this island world and in this exhausting process of calls and holds and so on and so fourth and fifth and sixth, and even though I absolutely know I won’t get installation nor recycling, I have met some lovely warm helpful people.

And, for that I am very thankful. You can have such fun on the phone if you decide to get to know, a little, the warm human on the other end of the line just doing their job.

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Island Blog – Rememberus

This day is Remembrance Day. I know it is customary to remember on Sunday but I hook my line to the actual day. Today. I reel in those who were dead before their time, all of them. Although it is never an ok time to die, not if you are loved and still want to live just a bit more, this sharp snap of the line came anyway. So much I wanted to say, to ask, to laugh with you about, even, as in many cases, just the time to get to know you better. You could be my mother, my father, my sister, my brother, my best friend, my child. The rippling out of such grief is like a whole new wasteland beneath your feet. You wonder why the whole world hasn’t stopped, well, dead. You idle through the days feeling pointless. You were something, somebody to someone, a one you took for granted would always be there for you, a someone who made you feel that your little life really meant something, was important, powerfully influential. It’s as if that sudden death wiped out a whole carefully built beauty of experiences and secrets shared, moments that lit flames you never knew could be lit at all.

Although I write this, I have no experience of such a sudden loss. I feel the pain vicariously. To have received that telegram, that policeman at the door, that phone call, shudders me. It could have happened to me, but it didn’t. I have spoken with those who know, firsthand, this shattering agony and then watched them sink and diminish, lose their strength, their spirit, falter at what we on the outside of the inside of this awful shit might consider nothing much. Going out to buy milk: taking the dog for a walk: answering the phone: washing, eating, changing the bed, little things that overnight turn into impossible mountains stuck smack in a once familiar path. Their shoes are wrong for this terrain. They don’t recognise the face in the mirror. There is no forward.

And then, overtime, they rise, these brave, lost, scared and angry people. I’ve watched them do it. They walk now, as those women did during wartime and long after when brain shattered men and women returned damaged, in need of help and receiving none, or little. They force themselves up and out. They remind themselves that all those infuriating platitudes are meant well. Bit by bit they re-engage with small talk, very small talk, peacetime talk. The weather, local gossip, criticisms based on absolutely no information. Their eyes glaze but, politely, their shoes remain affixed to the pavement. What they know, what they have been through, is beyond our ken and forever thus.

To the ones who are destined to remain. I salute you. A lost child, a friend, a family member, a partner. You are The Brave, just because of your strong spirit, your determination to survive even when you really didn’t want to.

To the ones who were snatched away, who kept going through all the fear, who loved life enough to leap into the flames, who were caught in an accident, an incident, a tragedy, a twist of fate. You are The Brave.

Rememberus?

I do.

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Island Blog – Happy Birthday Little One

Today is my sister’s birthday, my little sister and I have 3. Of course they are not ‘little’ anymore but to me they are still little. I remember being ordered, and often, to keep an eye on the little ones and I would roll my eyes and grunt like Kevin because I was that much older with a brother in between and where they still giggled about rude words, I was wanting to kit myself up in mock leather hipsters or culottes (oh dear) or a mini skirt and jackboots in order to attract wolf whistles from builders. As the years rolled on and they all became women, our ages differed little and our lives diverted down different paths, we found common ground. Womanhood.

I have no idea how old she is today but I know she loves birthdays and not just her own. She is a woman who celebrates all dates important to those she loves and she does love actively. As we all dive into our separate lives, we can lose the connection we had in childhood, to a great degree, or it can become misty, hard to see in the harsh light of reality. Unless we are in touch with each other we won’t know what or how each other feel about things. About fish, or holidays, or cold winds or street entertainers. Or anything else for that matter. But it doesn’t matter, not if the connection forged in childhood has rooted. When we would meet as adults at first we were cautious around each other for how can we be sure of all we might say, that it might not upset or offend? We don’t. But now, as we move through our 60’s, we are less easily shunted off our rails. Ah, if we could know this gentle acceptance in our 30s what a world this one would be!

Back to the birthday girl. I know what she means to me and she knows what I mean to her. We have history. We have gone through pain together. We have fumbled, got it a bit wrong, come back and made it right. We are sisters and that bond is the tap root. She is a marvellous strong kind and loving woman. She is funny, naughty, mischievous and intuitive. She can laugh a grumpy room. She is a changer of moods, a shifter of darkness, a bright light and she can cook a symphony.

Happy Birthday Little One.