life

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Island Blog – The Thread of Kindness

A new Monday at the Best Cafe Ever with a difference. In just a few days I discover I need help along my way. However asking for help when you are fiercely independent is tricky. I know this place and within the confines of it, I have learned much. People want to help. I want to help. It feels us needed and valued when we can proffer a something the other one doesn’t have, or has no access to. I have mellowed in my fierce independence because the only thing I was left with was empty space once my Go-Away hands were believed. I would watch the offer, gentled and meaningful from the mouth of a real friend, dissipate like breath in the air. Okay, I decided, this isn’t working because I do need help with various varieties of vagiaries and something else beginning with ‘v’.

Until I can drive again, once my eyeballs are relocated successfully, all-seeing again and quite marvelling me. I need help. Actually, I will remember this time, when someone with controlled eyeballs can see and watch one bird in the sky, I see two and both are blurry. They could be gulls, small geese, floaters. I enjoy the whole thing but can’t tell you what I’m looking at. Yet. At work I have to ask for help. Is there a table that needs clearing? I make much laughter about the whole thing because I know it is fixable and soon. Meantime I need a lift to work and back and my asking for help has brought me both. This kindness, this extra journey in the time of rising fuel prices, astounds me.

I was tired towards the ending of a day serving and washing and joking with lovely customers and my friend just turned up to bring me home. My boss also offered me a lift. Neither of these men were going my way. This kindness. I never expect it. I know I can get the bus both there and back, but that day is long and my work, (I love my work) is full on. Actually, no. I am full on. I need to work intuitively with the dishwasher, with the plates which need to go through quick, the teapots, the cups and mugs and I love the artistry of my role in the dynamic of cafe life, always, always, unexpectedly unexpected. We can welcome half a ton of human wonderfulness for coffee and cake, 25 ditto for lunch, more for tea, or we can welcome a third of that or a third more. No day is a given.

What thrills me to work each day is the knowing that we work as a team, that our motivation is service and kindness. The owners of this beach cafe lead us and need us. We who have the privelege to work in this place learn the ways quick and it is all about serving. Service in my ancient history was proffered to those of us who had failed all exams and had no idea what the heck to do with their lives. I see service so differently now. It is an honour to serve, to help, to reach beyond the menu, to step beyond the servery. To love a dog, to make another feel welcome, to settle, to allow, to warm another human being. Such an honour.

And that is how I will think and thank my beautiful friends who, in this pre-eyeball relocation, offer to drive out of their way to help me to work and back. I am so full of thankyous and yet I get it. We humans are a team, inside work, beyond it, in a community, everywhere. Kindness is the thread of life.

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Island Blog – The Perfect

See today? It was as if I had moved into another life. Yesterday I could drive my feisty Mini Cooper and today I cannot. I look at her, out there, well not that much ‘out there’ but just the other side of my window. She has a sassy attitude and I love to drive her. Today I have to get the bus, or a lift which I did get. Now hear this. I am no woman who will confound when confoundment steps in as if it owned the whole thing. However I also know that brushing away feelings about the about-ness of something that bursts open a heretofore locked door is foolish. The slam has reckoning and I can feel it.

I knew it was coming. In Africa my one good eye started showing me fantasy. You see one bird, I see two. You see one lorry coming at us, I see two and one of them is in our path. It isn’t a big thing, a cataract op, not now with the skills of surgeons, but the op is not the point. Even though I may no longer need specs (oh happy days) ever again, and will be back to work in the best cafe ever and able to drive again, this all thinks me on the Perfect.

I remember a perfect night when I was so fallen in love that I’m amazed I remained standing. I remember a sudden dance in a wild place, picnics random and crazy, hidden. I remember a friend sharing sweets with me in primary school. I remember that moment when I was lost around Queen St Station, unsure of next train times and the smile and welcome of someone. Hey, you ok? There is something so perfect about that.

When I caught a lift home after a very busy day at the Cafe, I felt so warm, so loved. We talked and laughed and I was delivered to my happy place. The perfect was, yes it was, but the Perfect doesn’t die. It still appears and at surprising moments, at random times. However we need to be open, curious, looking out. At my age it could be so easy to pull on the blanket and just sit. Don’t do it, don’t allow it. The Perfect dies if not fed with sass, determination and curiosity.

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Island Blog – New Light and a Fizzywiggle

Life is not a straight line I have discovered and keep on discovering even as I forget my initial discovery. I wake thinking that I have learned it all only to discover I have not. That’s a load of discovery for two short sentences. When I realise these things, I am usually in a situation wherein there is no proffer of conversation, even if it were ever possible. I could be the mouse, scurrying, or the reader translating or the shopper buying something to stop my eyeballs falling beyond their seams and thus causing immense and innapropriate dilemmas all around me. Or, I could be buying a cabbage. I even have conversation around that. I have so many words in my head, so much desire for conversation beyond the ordinary. I want to learn about constellations and the majesty of the sky, about the way flowers grow and why they die; about the way trees work to support each other, about the way they grieve and they surely must grieve.

Last night I was in bed by 7pm. I did think a bit about those just heading out to the pub, for dinner somewhere, for dancing, for fun. I did. In fact I heard the cars drive past. As I climbed the stairs, as I noticed my climb, my tiredness, I did smile. I do remember nights out, dressing up, quite the fizzywiggle, the music, voices, nonsense and unpromises of a summer’s evening. And I smile at the memory. I loved them all.

I remember what it was like to be young and fluid. I loathed myself, hated my awful body and felt like a lump of concrete and in the way of everyone. I throw light on this. I see her, oh she was pretty, young, freckled, lumpy, badly behaved, with too much imagination, and an imagineer, a liar, a girl we just don’t want here. She meant nothing to me. I remember my yellow rose wallpapered bedroom, well lit, mine-ish, and all the hours spent there. Half a teenagedom. Not because my parents didn’t love me. There’s no because.

As I move dynamically through my olding years, missing most of the cut of conversations in the Cafe, I see new light. The dance and the flimflam of chat in the kitchen and the servery are so uplifting and inspiring that I find conversations about stars and wild things and new understandings, about AI and subterranean influences and about all that is hidden from us above ground. And I feel a sense of landing.

However I am still a Fizzywiggle. Just saying.

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Island Blog – The Influence of the Pause

Not my brilliant words but those of my wordsmith son in Africa, who can just say these things. The brilliance just falls out of his mouth, it seems, without thinking at all and with no sign of a ‘like’ nor an ‘erm’ nor a clearing of his throat as if in a bid to buy time. I had to write it down, and have looked at that phrase on my to-do pad for a few days, letting it influence deeper thought. In fact, I have employed it in my daily round, halting myself in my usual hurtle to nowhere as if somebody just might snip. out an hour or two, thus leaving me believing it is 4pm when, in fact, it’s bedtime. Pausing is indeed influential. For example I am washing my few dishes as quickly as I can, not noticing the plates or the old silver, or the ancient wooden spoon, my favourite and granny’s favourite before me because it has been so favouritised as to have warped and twisted into the perfect of all wooden spoons. I don’t notice the pattern on the plates, bought from the island charity shop when I decided to move on all the stuff I had washed and sparkled for 40 years, and was utterly sick of looking at. I don’t see the old cutlery, solid silver and generations old as I swish it through the suds, not wondering at all of the many hands which did just this in many kitchens when suds did not come in easy-squirt plastic bottles.

The air is warm today even as the sky is shut. Sometimes the sun gets pissed off at being in the wings and blares through the smoke and mirrors, a spread of white light, a dazzle, a blinding. But, mostly, the sky is shut. I did a lot of pausing today, stopping mid whatever and noticing myself within that pause. I could feel myself inhabiting the space this pause created as if I had only just caught up with myself. It was almost a surprise. I don’t know why we hurtle, except, perhaps, it is old training. If I hadn’t hurtled in the days of Tapselteerie, nothing would have come to fruition. What bizarres me is when we are advised to leave the past in the past when our body memory just isn’t listening. Don’t these wise ones know that?

I scattered some poppy seeds, all random and sent hope from own mouth. Are you talking to yourself? laughed a passing walker. No, I said, I’m talking to the poppy seeds. Oh, he said. I love poppies, he said. We have plenty in our garden. Do you talk to them? I asked. Erm, no. Pity, I smiled. They would probably benefit from a well-wish or two. He walked on.

I walked this afternoon, wearing walking sandals for the first time, the warm air encircling me. On the final leg I paused beneath the sycamores and listened to the Bombus, the bumble bees, filling the still air with their wing beats as they bumbled from flower to flower. As I was doing this pausing thing, I heard voices and saw a young couple coming towards me down the hill, full of chatter and love. Do you hear the bees? I asked and they paused. Oh YES! they said and we paused together and they asked me things as I did them. Then I saw her, the young hind walking softly up the track we sort of filled with ourselves. She stopped, looking at us. We are in her path, I told them. She wants to come this way, so let’s move into the trees. Immediately we had stepped aside, the beautiful creature walked confidently on and we watched her, saw her soft body, her straight back, her beautiful dark eyes, her long legs for the running.

And we marvelled at the influence of the pause.

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Island Blog – The Eyes Have It

In the best cafe ever, wherein we all watch each other’s back, notice a falter, the need for a break, the wild of a new story in bright eyes all focussed on cutting new sourdough, tomatoes and red onions for a salad or on finding the right knife for this, the best ladle for that, we work with the story. And there is always one. We come in from different places, different lives, different lifetimes, and as a dynamic, we help each other in the Servery. We decide we can lift the customers, be gentle with their dithers, their extra loud voices in a life wherein they probably wonder if anyone will hear them ever again. We work together with the young, who falter and apologise even before they order. Then there are those with entitlement and with children who just might fight the expected roles laid out for them, encouraged as they are to shout for ice cream or half a something and without that bit, or that bit. We oblige. Obviously. But the Servery has options, and even as we don’t ever want to judge another human being, I think it is survival in the world of service. Behind the scenes in a busy cafe, we might eye roll at rudeness, not that it ever shows because we know that everyone everywhere has stuff in their lives and it is often hard to leave it outside when they come in. It seems to me that when folk move into an environmental enclosure, that stuff can bubble up, uninvited. People are people and all very human. It thinks me.

Things don’t matter much, although the bright welcome of a cafe definitely does. If the layout is spacious and obliging when it comes to Can we push four tables together because there are 12 of us, mostly kids? and we say Of course, and help them scrabble-bunch tables for two into a crocodile of wood, shifting flower vases and finding more chairs, then we see smiles and thankyous all around us like butterflies, because people matter and things don’t. Priveleged, entitled, arrogant, humble, apologetic, cautious, all human behaviour. And we know this and know ourselves in each situation because we have all been there in at least one of those. I, for one, remember well the fear of going into a cafe or restaurant with five kids hungry as wolves with a flock of sheep just there. I just knew there would be mayhem even though I was strict on behaviour and respect. But a lot is down to the staff in the cafe or restaurant because they have eyes. They also have choice. Everyone, let’s be honest, is fed to the back teeth with judgement and admonishment, and most kids can read body language from birth.

So we use our eyes. We can see when someone comes in and isn’t confident, and warmth.rises in us. because people matter and things don’t. We read the silent language and slide in, bright eyed, no matter how many orders are waiting, no matter any wee issues with machinery, problems, with deliveries. We just make it work because this cafe is all about people and not just how many come through the door, even as this is important. It’s more about a lovely welcoming place to come to, about the smiles, the way we adapt to a customer’s request, the simplicity of the work of service.

People matter, things don’t. The eyes have it.

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Island Blog – Make your own kind of Music

I look for the harmonies in everything. I say ‘everything’ because that is exactly what I mean. In music, I can hear all levels, and way below the melody. I can hear above too, but could never reach those notes without a long ladder. I was never a descanter, unlike my sister whoes vocal chords are wired to the moon. In any music situation I find myself following the supporting chords, finding them, latching on and, eventually, finding my way. Even hymns in church offer me opportunities, even as I feel for my pew fellows as I duck down into the melle of the many lower levels of any good music. I remember, as a child, knowing exactly when any piece of music was about to find resolution. I knew, still do, when a modern song will end, and you might laugh at that because if you are in the know, pretty much everything is 8 to the bar, 8 counts, unless you challenge that, and writers do. I laugh when I meet it, in music, in prose, even on the street or in the bar. With confidence, someone just stops and goes, having said something profound and without a single cap-tap to propriety, leaving the rest of us with vacant faces and puzzlement. Composers and good writers have done this many times and I see it in musical score, in good books and there is something fizzy about them, like the best champagne. Intriguing. I love rebels.

I made myself walk today, along Tapselteerie tracks. I haven’t walked since my daily sunshine ones in Africa. Every morning we set off, about 8 or earlier, to avoid the sun heat. Sometimes we left it too late and it wasn’t only the golden retriever who found it too much. That sun is careless of his power, blazing down, no breaks, relentless. I loved it. As we found rivers, water holes, ditches, anything water-logged for the hotdog to find relief, I stood on the bank, watching him courie down through scrub and boulders to the water flow, the cool base note. It thought me. I stand here, like the top note and in between you and me there are so many levels, tricky to contour. The base note is the river flow. So much opportunity between us. If I could cant the in-between, make it fit, sing it out, give it instruments, the flute perhaps, then violin, maybe two, then viola, then cello, then, if really brave, double bass. Such depth.

When I was there, in Africa, we went to a candlelit concert. Vivaldi, Four Seasons. It was wonderful. The (unusually) quartet sat among 200 candles on stage. It was a beautiful show. However we came away a little questioning. I had seen this performed before but with the Basso Continuo as fifth instrument and it was definitely missing, the base, the low voice, the resolution. Stu felt the same but without my musical training and having never seen such before. It was a feeling of lack. But this is not about music.

In a life, in any life, however ‘small’ or ‘big’ the whole dynamic is essential, and when the melody is lost or the baseline, then there is a void. In my experience, over years of providing harmonies to visiting bands, I knew about the middle bit. Nobody wants it because why? Well, nobody honours the viola, the chorus, the second violin, the timpani, nobody. They are just support, but woe betide them if they fail to perfectly perform. I honour the middle instruments.

The wives who keep onkeeping on, finding food, walking miles, working from below dawn to above sunset.

I honour the men who work hard in jobs they hate just to provide for their families.

I honour the ones who lost their place because nobody showed them how to find it.

I honour those who believe that they will only ever live in the middle of musical score, or in the worlds of prose.

In those who believe they will never make an impact.

Tell you this, all of you. Believe in yourself and take that self forward. You are so much more than you think.

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Island Blog – Breakthrough

I love my days of. rest. I also love my work. The rest days see me different, hear me different, slow me into a wander. I use them well. I was crap at rest days back in Tapselteerie and that thinks me. I watch other youngsters dash against rocks, refusing rest, thinking what…….oh, if I stop will everything else? If I admit to ‘rest’ does that make me weak/pathetic/a failure? Do I hear my mother’s voice, my father’s? I remember all that. My mother was very strong, had gone through shit I have never experienced and taken control and courage and carried others along into a better place. The resulting mother expected the same in her girls, the four of us. Her boy avoided that but got what we never did from our father. Voices from the past have extraordinary continuance. I’m changing paragraph now.

I watch the sun dapples on the flowing tide, higher now and rising to the incoming full moon. The gulls are wheedling, sorry wheeling over the ebb, strickling for sprat, for silly fish that fly too close to the ceiling of the tidal inflow. Pickings. I see everything here, feel it all, hear it, smell it. I know when a tide changes, when the wide sky is grumpy and threatening. I feel the change and that’s the thing of living wild, connected with all that is important. Things mean little out here beyond the need for a ferry, for basic supplies, for help when needed, for music and ceilidhs, for the craic of island life. We can dress up, and we do at times, but we can turn up at a wedding in dungarees with earth under our nails and nobody would bother at all.

Talking about ‘bother’ I had one. Apparently we are Superfast here now, whatever that means, and I was in gracious receipt of a new router and plugs and wires. and instructions, all free. I looked at the box for 3 days as if it might release, when opened, yet another demon. Then, exasperated with myself, I rose from the floor of denial and split the seams. I understood not one word. This is not for me, I said, and closed the box. Another 3 days and I get an email. from Marc at Tech Support telling me I haven’t connected my new router. I could see myself, back of the class and with no ink in her well. I dismissed and went to sleep but my dreams were all about. falling off cliffs. So, today, I shucked off my cardigan and hunkered down beneath my very old desk, a courie-in with the cobwebs so black they must be years old. I swiped and cleared. Thinks and fears. Thinks are pull everything out, everything. Fears are ‘what if I lose wifi? I did it anyway.

In that space and place I found autonomy and courage. I have no clue about technology wires. I don’t understand the WAN from the IP, and there were many more. I just sat under that desk and tried to be powerful. I plugged in this and that, found they didn’t work, but rested there because the new router sprang to life. I did send up a thankyou, but we are not done yet. However I knew my skills were done here and then I caught some young friends walking by with their wee one and dog. They came in and got me online. I must confess, after my cliff falls and my fears of being stupid and old that I never countenanced this happiness.

A breakthrough. I have had many of them. I hope you do too.

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Island Blog – Scales,Compass.Middle Thing a Finger

Scales weigh things, make a balance. On the one side, the weights. On the other the thing being weighed. At least, that is how I remember it, way back when I was young and weighing things. I even recall weighing a baby in the brass cradle when the nurse couldn’t get through the storm. Problem was that the ounce weights kept disappearing. I found one, once, in the bucket of a toy digger. I just guessed the baby weight, zoomed it up a bit and my guess was accepted. It was winter, after all, days thick with noise and storm and floods and falling trees. This was, and is, island life. I should report that said baby is now father of two and strong as an ox, but with a big brain. I also recall, during that and many other winters, the water clogging or freezing, the oil too expensive and the range very much off. Water came from mountain springs, travelling many blue-pipe miles to our home, a home stuck out in the beyond of beyond. I boiled kettles to wash my children, filling Belfast sinks in the old dairy or in the farmhouse kitchen and it worked like a genius because, with a few rubber ducks, some wooden spoons and loads of washing up liquid, they sat together, splashing and shrieking whilst I concocted a wholesome stew and tatties for an evening meal, whence I wheecked them out and into towels to eat. They liked being around me and I get that. Any of the five bathrooms were miles away and freezing. I would navigate around the abandoned calf within her straw bale warmth, bottle feed her from an old lemonade bottle (not with lemonade), check her eyes, ears, mouth, and then feed my family whilst she snuffled herself to sleep and whilst I wondered what the hec we were going to do with her.

In my life the scales unbalanced, and often, but here’s the thing. I like balance within myself. There may be none outside of me but within I will make it so. In the confusion of life, any life, the balance is in our hands. I believe it. At times the big bowl is too heavy, or too light against the weights and this demands a more weighty response. I know, I know, that scales are now the size of iPads and pocket friendly, but they weren’t once, so go with me on this because it represents balance more effectively. If there is a confrontation or a challenge, there is always that middle thing and it takes courage and determination to level. I cannot work out how to connect my new router. An example for you. The instructions presume I know new language. I don’t. So, my middle thing is to ask for help, after a long time spent beneath my old desk and among the cobwebs. I scrambled out, and up off my knees, and thought this. I have many talents but this is not one of them.

Himself always had a compass. It was within him. He knew where True North was, anywhere and any place in the world. He didn’t even have to look out, nor up. Whereas I might have been sailing across yet another sea and wondering where the hec we were, knowing he knew. However, he was not so good at compass bearing within a home space. Perhaps I clocked this, even though I was so young and so clueless about Farmer’s Wifedom, Motherhood and more. Perhaps I understood balance and wanted it for myself, my home, my marriage. I was never just the middle thing. I could land like a truck in the brass cradle, challenging him to find the weights. It didn’t always work. Men are shite at communicating feelings.

But what about now, about the chaos of life, the threats, the unsettling, the imbalance. Here’s what I think. We cannot change what is out there, but we can weigh the this and that of it, find the ounces, find singular balance. I tbelieve that the middle thing is personal choice. It was when I weighed my 4th baby in that storm, when I used my finger to level something that wasn’t quite scale-agreed. I think we are the middle thing.

Make the scales balance, with a finger, with choice, with attitude. And point true north with that finger.

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Island Blog – Reasons to Celebrate

There are, approximately 9450 words beginning with ‘C’. Well, damnit, I can never find any of them when playing scrabble, or, maybe, I don’t have the insiders like the flipping vowels, or, maybe, the other player has stuck the damn ‘C’ at the top of an Eiffel Tower from which there is no escape. It’s a pinnacle, and if, if, there is a Z or another impossible consonant affixed way too close to said ‘C’ then, basically, I am f**ked. However, that C challenges me, makes me both furious and determined to like it at all. I don’t mind it in ‘nice’ or spice’ or priced, or all those other words which seem to employ the C as a follow on. I like it in Niece, for example, although the I before E except after C thing in English Language lessons almost grew me wings. The rules of grammar are absolute and infuriating. I know that all that I have learned is not important now, and I accept that, whilst feeling a tingle of sadness for the beauty of what is lost.

I look for the C beginnings. Caring I know that one, the way of it. How about champagne? Ah, now that gives me tingle. Even though chairlift, coercion, confinement and control rise into my head, I know how it is to celebrate. No matter the years of awful, for anyone, if celebration is a sparkler within, then celebration will out. However and however, I wonder if folk darken, lose their hold on the fun of life, deny themselves the grabbing of moments when the sun.suddenly shines after months of darkness and rain? Noteveryone. Not me.

As a family we celebrated everything, every achievement, every brave move, every birthday, everything. Through tough times, through loneliness and exclusion, through self-doubt and sibling rivalry, through all of it, there snuckles a smidge of hope and if grasped, barely breathing, this snuckle can bring the C back three paces.

Celebration. Such a wonderful word and, just to say, I am proud of C getting to the front of a very big word. Celebrate everything, every moment, everyone. I know life is damn tough right now, but bring the damn C to the front.

Celebrate, Celandine, Collective, Creedence, Cherish, Community, Charisma, Co-ordination, Collusion, Co-piloting.

Let’s go with this, plus Champagne of course!

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Island Blog – Mud Heft and Stone Humping

It annoyed me, the scourge of mud below my wee pull-in. It used to be gravel but I am letting it return to itself, to that grassy green naturality. To be honest, I am displeased with those who seal the ground shut. We have little enough of it left, after all, and all that healthy breath is paved and suffocated. I know that gravel isn’t so clever at closing the land, but it dims the light. Folk moan about moss in their lawns and yet moss is essential in so many ways, and, by the way, moss is way more beautiful than sticky-up grass, mown into controlled order, like Dickensian pupils.

The sun was freed up, all of a sudden, and the wind grew warm. I pulled off two big jumpers and felt quite menopausal for a few minutes. The weather is bajonkers, but this smells of warm stories and hope. It inspired me to do something. about my grump. See, when lorries or big vans deliver they just scoop onto my not-gravel, digging nothing less than. a whole ditch. Those wheels sink so down, I feel like I am looking at the topsoil of hell, not that I. believe in that. I selected my least rusty shovel from my fishbox of chaotic garden things with handles and marched forth. It took me ages. I stabbed and jabbed, scooped and dumped and all beneath a warm(ish) sun. It wasn’t a big scoop, just a deep one and I felt a butterfly of excitement once I hit the tarmac.

Now, stones, I thought. I have some big ones, old as Eve in my garden, fallen from drystane walls of old. I grabbed my wheelbarrow and bent to hump three big ones onboard. Heavy. they were and still are, but they are beautiful. Ancient basalt, naturally formed and willing to help. I placed them in situ. Now, if a van or lorry thinks it might cut my corner off, it will regret it.

I wondered if I should paint them white and then dismissed that nonsense as so urban. The moss growing over them is so beautiful. No white paint here. After all, drivers on islands might consider the fact that we are island folk and also that they should be looking for rock trouble, as we all do.

I hope you have sunshine too.