mental health

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Island Blog – It’s All About The Hunny

I haven’t cried for decades, except that’s a lie. When Piglet almost got blown away in the Hundred Acre Wood, I did shed a few tears. It wonders me, as I watch everyone else leak a lot when shit hits. I sort of envy them that release. I know I am far from cold, feeling everything about everything and for everyone, but maybe I have some sort of cold in me, a woman in a life, one who wants no pity, no fixing, and one who has grown tendons and sinews like steel props. I just made that up. It’s probably ridiculous. But it does think me. Those of us who have pixillated themselves into another’s world out of choice, willingly at first and then through sheer stickability, find sinew and tendon strength. I don’t think it resolutes us, not all of us. Some grow bitter as old wine, vinegar, loose teeth and joy. Others choose the yellow brick road, the tricky walk towards a truth full of wonder and hope. Life is not a dream. Life is a dream. The Bothers, the Both-ers. We seek another and then that other just isn’t enough, nor are we for them. Two separates with too much of a gap for the mending, the amending. A sadling for sure, but a reality. We change, we learn differently, we choose what comes to us through a learning. And, we divide. And I know this, I see this, and I also see that the ‘stickability’ of the old pioneers has had its time, because in those times, nobody was their true self, not could ever, ever, admit to such. I lived there, so I know, albeit at the arse end of that limitation.

What we all long for is to be who we are, without fear, safe, recognised, welcomed. We may be years off that but I hope it is coming because for too long the world, often the religious world, has controlled and ruled through fear. The people believed and walked in blind deference, superiority and damning, like they had no independent thinking. Independent thinking got you hanged, subdued, dismissed. We don’t have that fear now and yet we still can’t be sure of who we are without labels. I am seriously hoping that for the next year, those with the courage to gently voice, with the courage to step out, to come out, to be who they really are, will find the strength to rise, to pioneer us into a truth which just might kill off the lies of centuries.

In all, in everything, in the daily grind, in the knocks and batters, in the sudden joys, the falls the resists, the hidings, the resists, the falters, there is choice. Always is, always, no matter the stricklies. New word. For me it is all yellow brick road and the hope and the courage and the determination and the honey. That choice is no nonsense. Try it.

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Island Blog – Wild Choice and I’m In

Family here, so flipping chaos and a lot of noisy fun, all twinkle girls and good champagne and hilarity. Such times give me a good peek into the lives of my children, although they aren’t. Children I mean. They’re parents, scrabbling for a way ahead, just as me and himself did a long time ago. Now that himself is up there sorting God out, no, not him but hie mummy, I have the peaceful mind they all long for. It will come, I tell them, although nothing will be gentle nor easy en route to that peaceful place. Stuff and regrets and inner failures and other ridonculous and fabricated memories will see to that. Memories, I have long learned, grow brambles. They do. Twisting and suffocating and blanking out the light, they persist like imagined dragons. They are not real, but they feel real. We all have them and especially those who say they don’t. I have gone to free a blaring sheep, entwined like a stairway in said thorns, getting too close with my bramble freeing gloves on, only to watch the wooly eejit pull away with nothing but a dump of shit left behind. It thinked me then and it thinks me now. Choice, the need for recognition, the power within an helplessness. I’ve been there, done that in my time. Not no more, not now I see the lack of efficacy in such, the damn weakness.

The thing is that nobody is going to, nor is able to, save anybody. Just me. I got that and by golly (can you say that anymore?) I learned this, that the world owes me nothing, life owes me nothing, my spouse owes me nothing, nor my kids, nor my work, nor my longings. It is up to only me. Everything is. This, plus that, equals power because I get to choose. It doesn’t matter when I finally understood this, no matter the crash and burn I had gone through, the shame, guilt, regret. Time is, so they say, an illusion. What I do now, how I live now is with choice in my always head. I can choose my morning waking, slept well or not, my progress through my day, because it is mine, my response to news, messages, invitations or lack of them. I can choose to be spiky, fun, naughty, mischievous or a grumpy shit with a gloom cloak about my skinny shoulders. I can rise or I can fall.

Today my whacko son came for a coffee. I can hear many of you asking, genuinely, ‘Which whacko son?’ and I get that and feel so very lucky. I have four of them and all whacko, and a daughter who is the only whacko with girly bits. I have no idea where they learned this spontaneity, this ‘lets go’ thing but they have and I’m still up for lets go, so we did. We drove up a bit on Tapselteerie and parked. Then we headed to the shoreline which is definitely more tumble-stumble, wrinkly and sodden than in my memory. We laughed, slipped, negotiated through obviously very high and recent tides, the sprawls of bladderwrack, and other whitey, browny greeny and yellowy seaweeds proffering a wonderful opportunity for an arse crack all along the volcanic shoreline. He held onto me, helped me over and around and through the sink bogs, over the tumps and tumbles as we embraced the freesing blast of stories from the north. The spume and wave flight was white as snow, rising with the gulls, the clouds dark but moving fast with the wind, passing like thoughts which don’t deserve to last. The sea was so alive, the hail blasting at our grinning faces. And then the sun, a momentary lapse of reason, proud fire, until the clouds regained control. We loved it all, laughed through memories of his childhood and my motherhood with five whackos and their dad who thrived in the wild, the lunatic weather, broaching the thin places of an ancient island, spouting stories every time someone who is open comes along, someone who chooses to be tough, to find a way through, to let go, to find the mischief.

Always a choice. May 2026 fire a rocket through old thoughts, old ways. May the grey clouds get bored of hovering over the wildfire of someone who has grown tough through all the whatever shit, and who has chosen to be who they are, no matter the what, the who, the which, the when, the why. I’m in.

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Island Blog – A Gallus Vocabularian

I remember those who tried to scumper me with smart wordage. Not the individuals, just the slimy snake thing about them, as if they had swallowed the dictionary and spent hours, if not days, trying to sort that confusive vomit. I despised that tactic as it was only used to put me down enough pegs as to sag my personal washing line. I was a girl and a woman of my time, I know this, and the snakes were often men in those days, but not always. It is true, or was, that the biggest judges of females are usually other females. I am not sure that’s a ‘then’ thing. It allows itself yet, this upperhandedness, as if we still haven’t exhausted the desperate need to be better than another still feels old.

I didn’t know I would be a vocabularian. All I knew was that words and their usage fascinated me, drew me in, the way they can tip and bend a sentence into an entirely new meaning, with skill and a musicality. Words change their meaning all the time, becoming elastic, fluid, non PC, redundant, just worn out. And new ones come, across continents, through engagement with new languages, cultures, and colloquialisms, and I welcome them all. New ways of saying old things, old tired things, oft repeated around parental tables, invite new landings, new lands, new opportunities for the brave Worder.

When one of the last above does speak out new words, perhaps faltering and definitely feeling like Gulliver in Lilliput, there’s a big element of risk. But, and here’s my challenge, because if we don’t speak out just because we believe we sound ridonculous, what does anybody learn? I say my word. I am immediately corrected. What now? A sink back in my chair in defeat? Or, do I rise up and correct the Corrector. No, not that word but the one I already said. See, the thing about rebellion is about numbers. My Thesaurus is a tatterley old man, the wordage good enough, has been for decades but as I dive into the pages of it these days I find a lack, flack. I may be, as I indeed am, a Gallus vocabularian, t’is blood in my veins, but I am still wide open, wider, to listen to and to learn from new wordage, new words, new meanings to old words and to be okay watching the beginnings and endings of the longest words falling off the edge of the world. They need to go.

When I meet the arrogance of word ‘control’ the uppernance of entitled supremacy, I do two things. One is the overnaturally dissolution of self, that’s me in this, sinking back, folding, giving in, and then I remember who I am. I am not aggressive, no antagonist. But, if you’re asking, I’m holding my place right here, and peacefully. I won’t try to climb the ladder to your command of language. No. I am down here in the welcomes of new lands, new people, not having a clue what they’re saying, just knowing they hurt, they’re here, fearful and have lost everything and are bringing me a light into a new language. By goodness, we need it.

As a gallus vocabularian, I can almost feel my rebellion red beret.

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Island Blog – All About Light and Laughter

There’s a thing about the old year heading into our past, what with Christmas excess and access just a week or so away. It dillies us. Many are considering big things, big changes, altered thinking, all of those tiddleypoms. I don’t mean to minimise the intent behind them, not at all, but it does wonder me because in my long experience of a gazillion changes in a long marriage, long life and an absolute whammy of inventive children, nothing big happens overnight. Not sustainably so. It thinks me. Do we imagine we can transform as happens in lovely but completely unbelievable films? I think we might. Because we have this deep longing to be who we aren’t, with all our mistakes, even as we may happily allow them in others, proffering encouragement and even support to bring them up and out of those clutching chains. So what holds us in brackets, a definite halt in a sentence, one which might have developed on and on with the odd comma? It wonders me, even though I flipping know every graphic on this hoodlum nonsense. It’s not grammar that holds us in chains, but people, awkward relations, expectations, fixations, and not one of those bring light, nor laughter.

I stood on heights today, affixing twinkly winkly lights as the afternoon took hold of a bright morning and brought in a shroud of cloud, a darkling rain. I growled. I did. It’s as if the old year hasn’t peed for months. I look up as I go fo fill my bird feeders, the goldfinches, blackbirds, dunnocks, sparrow, tits all cheeping and swinging like gymnasts on wires and through skinny branches, and I say, quite loudly, Well Damn You! There is, as you might imagine, no immediate response. The birds still fly, even as the wind buffets them awkward. It lights me and I laugh. I know that they can live without getting their knickers in a knot, because they work with what meets them each morning. I want to live that way. I do live that way. I didn’t always, not with all the youngstress of kids and work and business and what-the-hell- is-happening thing.

But what I did know was that I was always going to be about light and laughter. It was a choice. I had seen too many others go into the dark. I knew about the dark, of course I did but when I met it or it met me, I pulled back eventually, recoiled. You are not for me. You have no power over me. My favourite people? Those who have found the light, through endless searches, looking for help, guiding lights, those who were broken and who decided to rebuild from, sometimes, nothing. I look at them and it definitely thinks me because I have everything, I have enough, I have it all, and there’s a new year coming after the gorgeous Christmas hooha, a new chance to be who I am with light and laughter, for anyone to be who they are with confidence and the right to write their own name across 2026 with a big fucking pen.

With light and laughter, of course.

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Island Blog – A Fellow Human Being

I profess to being absolutely disinterested in any written rants, particularly on social media, although in my day I would have said by letter. I am almost as disinterested when standing a few feet away from a verbal rant. Now why is this? I have many thinks, but the one that sticks up like a pole in the desert is that this ranty person wasn’t listened to in childhood and the subsequent frustrational decades have taken root, like a tumour. Only one person can heal that deep wound.

A rant is a speech, really, and it goes on until the end. The ranter is fixed in his or her opinion, no matter any reasoning voice traversing the few feet. There is no solution, no turning, but only escalation if rebutted or at the suggestion of any level of understanding. It’s basically Don’t Bother. However, being completely in love with all people, I cannot just redact nor dismiss what someone is obviously in a right stooshie about. Conversational tactics are learned, usually as a result of noticing, observing through a singular and silent thought process. As I wander around the world, sorry, Island, reading books, hearing real life stories and really hearing them, eventually returning to the gentle tick tick of my wood burner munching old trees and the bashing crash of yet another night of an angry wind, I carry the arias of questions like a swirl of songbirds in my mind. (Way too long a sentence). I do wonder about my mind because it never rests, not even at night. It never did, so chances are we are stuck with each other at this late stage. I can wake amidships of the darkness, tossed and turned in some bajonkers seacrowd of sky-wipeout waves with a thought, an Aha, as if something wonderful happened whilst I sort of slept and I must needs grab my goonie and spiral down the stairs into the glorious pitch dark only wild places enjoy, and write it down. When dawn finally manages to push up the night, the heavyweight that she is, I read what I wrote and laugh out loud. It makes no sense at all and here’s why. This mind of mine, this extraordinary muscle, if that is what it is, has already moved on to another sphere and that means I got left behind. I remember this feeling as a young girl. A very high IQ is not necessarily helpful in life because unless it is gentled and respected and very carefully cared for, some ambitious parent will start pushing. Moving on……

I did digress there, I know. Back to where I began. Understanding people with different views to my own, with opinions and agonies and childhood wounds when in the shape of an adult is never easy. We like, we don’t like. We love, we hate. We want to be with this one but would run miles to avoid that one. Division. Exclusion. Judgement. Don’t like any of those. Saying Hallo and being open without bias, without sussing someone out from the way they present, isn’t easy. Our culture nowadays is so invasively critical, so knowledgeable on body language, on verbal dynamics, on fear and suspicion, thus not honest with ourselves, that we come to any new meet dressed in Kevlar.

I know we are fortunate here, despite the endless gales, because life is real. Rural places all over the two countries know what I mean. We learn to live with each other, even though, yes, we may tattle and maybe rant a bit, but so does any living creature who resides in a collective. Sparrows are a great example. If we want the end of war, we need to live that way. We know it even as we expect not to have to pay it forward ourselves. It takes one, two, consistently refusing to unfriend, to be open, welcoming in the spite of rejection, over and over and over again, listening to the angry, the ranters, those who are pinned to the wall of pain, just sharing time, gifting it, not as a fixer but as a fellow faltering human.

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Island Blog – To Disturb Gravity

There’s still a hooligan outside which is a damn sight better than one inside. At Tapselteerie one was the other but making different sounds. Outside it was all crashes and bangs and thumps, whumps and with a refusal to own up to any of them, whereas inside the whistles and toots, the rattles and shakes seemed quite happy to locate themselves. Many newspapers gave their lives for a gap filling, holes in the walls, gaps in the window panes, cavernous splits in outer doors, the underneath of which had never touched ground for decades. Rain found its way in, under, through and over. Even my children were damp of a morning, wondering, as they did, if they had wet the bed. Even I wondered that.

Nowadays, as the hooligan refuses to let go of it’s fury, my home is better protected, even though it is as old as Tapselteerie. Yes, there is the odd leak, and it isn’t wise to open a wind facing door to greet the exhausted postie unless I close it smartly behind me. The ferry didn’t run so. he had to wait for the possible next one, which wasn’t possible, thus demanding another two hour wait. Hey ho, island life. The disturbing of gravity is quite the thing up here. Lord knows what it must be like further north. Today I returned 8 wheelies to their upstandment, wheeched over and obviously nauseous judging from the mouthal eruptions littering the track. Interesting, nonetheless to see the food choices and waste of others. A load of plastic wrapped somethings, dog poo bags and a ton of wine bottles. Moving on.

Disturbing gravity, according to my ancient Thesaurus, refers to ‘being ridiculous’. I immediately jumped on that one as a brilliant interpretation. It thinks me, as I was talking just this lovely morning with a very dear friend about the importance of fun, of being, I suppose, ridiculous. We take too much seriously, especially ourselves when all we really want is to have fun. And it is entirely possible. In me it is natural. I can be in the most ‘serious’ situation, with everyone being ‘serious’ all I want to do is to play the fool because I can see the ridiculous. Not to hurt anyone, of course, but just to remind these wonderful doing-their-best humans that it is so much easier to let go of pretence and to be honest and thus, individual. I remember this in my younger days, but, like most, keen to be accepted as one-of-the Ones, I spent hours dressing myself up as someone who would fit. In short, it was not good enough to be who I was.

Now, over 70 I will be who I am and give diddly squat about trying to be someone else. However, I do acknowledge the young now, the ones still stiffing themselves into the wrong clothing, employing an almost alien language, a new shape, just to fit in. I. look, hopefully, towards the wise parents who probably suffered those restrictive chains themselves and who will now look carefully at the young of our future and get to understand them, to listen and to learn and to ask them the questions most of us have never been asked.

Who do you want to be?

What would you like your life to look like?

And then, and then, to sit and listen.

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Island Blog – Bend or Break

I’m watching my candles, the flames going sideways, even in a triple-glazed home, for which I am so very thankful. At Tapselteerie there was more winter and wind inside that huge house than was absolutely necessary. We felt that wind shooting up our pyjama bottoms, even under six duvets, and outside, well, the outside would try to strip the skin of us, as it did the tiles, roofs, guttering, even uplifting trees, flagstones, sheds and more. I am thankful I don’t live there any more, even as I love it, the estate, with my heart in agreement because of all the memories. My time there was. then, and I was the right woman to live with those situations. I was bendy, like a candle flame, still burning, like a tree dancing in a gale and still able to survive the demands of that dance floor, no falling.

It thinks me. How bendy we are, or aren’t. If life is easy, there is no learning, no chance to discover what we can survive. Actually I don’t like that word. It is over-used and it still isn’t enough in the celebration of those who actually made use of the thing they moved through in a proactive decision to make a change, to live better. If someone has met a horror and who has got through it, yes, as best they could, battling through the explosion of it, and who has then, once the shock reaction has been made into a new road ahead, has stepped out, stronger and wiser. It might be ‘I’m not going through this again.’ It might be ‘I will have to go through this again, but next time I will respond as a different person because you can’t stand in the same river twice.’ The waters move on, the days, weeks, months move on. I have moved on.

When storms come, without or within, they are mostly a shock, a gasp, but we learn, those of us who want to, the whos of us who refuse to be defined, declined; the ones who just know they can difference a situation next time, whether through attitude, if no structural nor physical change is possible, or through the invitation of change. It doesn’t matter which. Either is power. I live with this as a strength, a personal strength. Everyone has angst, problems, issues, troubles, border flops in certain conditions and with certain others, in lifestyles gone into big question marks, in work choices, in bloody everything. Either we bend, or we break. That’s it, pretty much.

I know about this. Perhaps it’s an olding thing, a curveball thrown at the break, the angst, the La La of the whatever of whatever. It comes back to me, and it could, if it would, fix me in chains I will not accept. I will bend, not break. There is no ageing in living beyond the year count. There is only the choice to frick it all and to learn, and to choose again.

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Island Blog – Don’t Stop the Dance

So what, after death? Nobody can answer that because a whole load of shit blocks all doorways for the closest, the ones who, from now on will face down anger, regret, emptiness and a big dark. On the outside of them there’s another so what. No question there, just thinks. What we outsiders feel is the obvious, the wonderfully human impulse to make things better, which we cannot; the beautiful desire to bring something like a plant, or soup, or words which can be swords, trust me. The formers are well meant, lovely, kind and do very little because the dark is all invading. So what can we do? There are two answers to that question.

Bring light. Not the light we want to see but the light worked out through a lot of thinking. Too many times we have all given gifts that weren’t well received. The reason for that is simply because we didn’t bother to really find out what makes another tick. I’ve done it myself, we all have, until that is we decide to learn, and that learning guides only one way, in human contact, in calling, in asking, in gentle conversations over coffee. See, the problem we have, as we had pre the invasion of Covid when we were ‘forced’ into neighbourliness is that we have forgotten each other, all over again. It seems, from my friends who live in cities and environs where nobody really has a scooby doo about any of their neighbours, even when all 10 flats or more share an entrance, that nobody knows anybody. It saddens me but of course it does. Out here in the thwack of gales and skinny switchback roads, we have a strong community spirit, but don’t let that think you that it’s a breeze (scuse that) living an island life because it is tough and controlled firstly by weather and secondly by the ferry company, by product being landslides. We are volcanic and eruptible, although ages late on that one.

My point is this. Communication with others is our key to surviving. It is also our key to a happier life because no award, no amount of money, no rise over someone else, in work, in words, ever lasts beyond the initial feeling of superiority. We all still have to put out the bins, deal with bills, sort childcare, park our dreams, work hard, bring in food. All of us. However and but……each one of us have to find the fun, the dance in our lives. From the time the dance left our feet, when we got a baby, a mortgage, a demanding job, we stopped believing that we had a choice. And the years go on and when something takes over as acceptable, we let go of it, the dance. Until when? Every life is tough. But, and this is me talking about me as I face olding and don’t want it, as I have a few aches and hesitations and lacks of confidence, and as I, every day, tell myself Don’t stop the Dance, don’t, because all around you are falling into a grimace as if their legs have forgotten the steps, Don’t Give up. Someone has to keep bringing in the light and the tunes even as cancer takes hold, even as a beloved dies, even as a child is traumatised, even as those my age slip and dip into an acceptance I won’t accept.

This is my so what after death. I can’t beat it down, but I can still dance, still reach out to others, ask them about their lives, actually see them, and learn. And I can bring light, not a candle, nor an enlightened fixing, but just by sitting there, making eye contact, no mobile, no other agenda beyond that other broken human across the table talking with me.

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Island Blog – I Rest There

It rained all day today, heavy stuff, non stop. Actually, no, it wasn’t always heavy. Just looked like it through my windows. And there’s a coolth in rainy days, even as it isn’t as cold as yesterday which was all slippy ice and still as a still thing. It just feels that way, all that wet and slam against windows and the wind pushing against the glass like a bully. It thinks me. Perception. Always a good thinkster. Let’s dance with this……

I see a rain day as an internal rain day as a VERY BIG RAIN DAY. Others not so. You, jolly old you who don’t give a rip snort about weather, skipping out on your skateboard, or heading off for a sea swim, or just happy in your life, or a kid who never sees anything as a stopping of fun and opportunities. See? Hence my thinks. If I awaken as I usually do thinking a couple of things, such as I am so thankful I have woken up at all, and in this beautiful cozy island home, or Oh dammit, I can hear the mice in the loft and it’s only 4 am and dark as hell out there, I have to decide how I feel about how I feel before I set foot on the bedroom carpet. If I don’t, the negative overtakes me, the fear, the alone, the self pity. I am crap at self pity and also very good at it. I read that two contradictory thoughts can be held in the brain, but nowhere have I discovered how to deal with that. No amount of googling. So, with lofty mice and gratitude diddling with my brain, I downstairs myself and into the day. It’s still dark and the rain drowns out my audio book and my thinks, until I settle. That’s when I stop to listen to what is actually going on right now around me, and I re-jig myself. I am Alice, I know it. Curious, adventurous, a bit wild, a lot wild, trusting, too trusting, saying Goodness! a lot, eyes bright and without fear, even if the Red Queen is just around the corner.

In this real life, I can see how damn tough it all is. We have made our families islands and there’s an understanding and a loss in that. We want control. We also want to make the change we want to see. I get it. Waaaay back we were the same. There’s no way there will be the restrictions on our kids, not yet even conceived, no way this patriarchal control will come into our plans, no way this, no way that. I’m smiling now, writing this. I’ve no idea if our plans worked, probably not, but I do know that, no matter the child, no matter the chaos he or she brings in, we just loved, floundered, got lost, spent nights without sleep, hoped, prayed, loved again, barely noticed if the broccoli was yellow, cooked something with gravy, baked bread, answered calls, washed clothes, hoped that school was ok and dreaded pick-up, barely noticed the day of the week, tidied bedrooms, thought thought thought of the best treat with the money and time available: on days of non stop rain, on days when the wind threatened to take out windows, days when I was late for pickup because the sheep got out and it was just me trying to negotiate with a dog who did not understand a thing of me, when the landrover broke down and I could do nothing about the damn thing with it’s huge tyres all fixed with a spanner thing that would defy a god strength. Or, when I am feeling so broken and don’t know why, and that’s why I just look blank at you as if I don’t know you at all, and there’s no treat and I’m sorry.

Basically we have no idea what we are doing, most of the time. The problem is we think we do, because admitting we don’t feels like a personal failure. It isn’t.

I rest there.

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Island Blog – Moody and Beautiful

I love to watch the headlights moving around the backside of the sea-loch. Where have they been and where are they going to? I love the bitey catch of coriander when I open the pack to snip it over a green salad. I love the fall of the dark, when my twinkly winkly lights show themselves, a string of golden positivity. I love the disappearance of my whole garden, the emptiness of birds at the feeders, the slink-silhouette of a cat on the track and the way it suddenly looks up at me, the movement of me, the momentary connection.

I love my shower, the way it changes me from one day and into a solace. I love to sort and prepare something interesting to eat. I love the window dark of my rooms, the blindness of looking out. I love the pop of a cork and the glass of red wine, the way my speaker bigs up my playlist. I love that I got through today, that I walked into the wild, noticed, stomped, trudged, faltered, filled in time, did some admin, all of that. I love that I assembled a tapestry frame, after many attempts, that I changed my bed, laundered bedding, cared enough to respect the linen.

I look around my warm and comfortable sitting room, see the fire licking flame, feel the pushed out warmth, hear the tunes, and it thinks me of the other side of this I love thing. It isn’t an ‘I hate’ no, because I don’t believe in black and white as parentheses. I believe there are many greys in between. So, (don’t ever begin a sentence with that word) Sorry, dad, but I am doing just that beginning…….If there is, and there is, an whole nother to an I love beginning, how does it begin?

Perhaps it is honesty and doubled; perhaps we find it hard, if not impossible, to allow the truth to spill. Because why? Judgement, tick. Failure,tick. You are young, made mistakes. You are menopausal and angry most of the time. You are a young man who was told at a vulnerable age to pull yourself together, to stop snivelling, to man-up. You are a young woman who doesn’t want to do what her parents think is ‘best’ for her. You are sure you don’t identify with the sex you were born with. You are olding and furious about the tiny and daily losses of sight, of movement, of where you put that important receipt, or of who will help you stack a ton of wood, your fingers gnarled and weakened. The Lonely in all of these can be black as an island night.

Perhaps it’s because I am old and doing this looking for receipts, or trying to work out a way to see better in winter craft work, that I can see the love in the lack. Living so long gives a person a ‘so long’ on the angst of things whilst holding tight to a tryst with life. I am still trying to rein in the Lonely, a really feisty and bloody-minded colt, all spurs and twists and moody and beautiful.