nature

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Island. Blog – It Rains Down and Big Red

Well, obviously, although on the island it can shoot up your trouser legs, nae problem. I used to take it personally, on Tapselteerie days when it was my turn to quad myself out to the arse of beyond pulling a trailer of sheep food. The mud threw up shoulders of peaty mud just for me, ridging with a ‘let’s tip her’ thing. It was a heavy quad, right enough, a solid beast with attitude and held together by rust and bloody-mindedness. She lives on although the demands on her have changed. Now she. is just a Wahooo for kids and grandkids as they break the speed limit and probably challenge the sound barrier as they skideroo around the estate which, thankfully, is no longer ours. Now it is a beautiful place to wander through, old pines, beeches, bent-backed hazels, birches, all telling their stories of how damn tough it was to find the light, to survive. Some are so twisted, they’re feral, corcksrewing out and then up, seeing a chance. Such patience, such syncreticity. We can all learn from that, the willingness to enter a dynamic and to gently, softly and with intent, find our way into the light.

I went to UFOs today. UFO stands for Un Finished Objects, a crafting, artistic group, the chance to coffee up, cake up and to gather around a table in someone’s home. Around this table we talk, about our lives, our stuff, our worries, concerns and planned adventures. We reassure, kid on, tease, laugh and sympathise. In turning up we meet the unknown, even as we all, intentionally or otherwise, bring our own daily scrabbles into the light. We redimensionize. It doesn’t take away from our own angst, just re-jigs it, thinks us in a safe place. A shinglestropper. Think on this word. Not mine but that son of mine who is definitely related to Roald Dahl, Dr Zeuss and Terry Pratchett, not that I personally knew any of those men. Walking over Shingle……..can be tough if the Atlantic has anything to do with it. Stropper, strong, elevated, in control, as in the right shingle boots and with a good hold on the sky. So descriptive.

Back to the sheep. I head out in a circular rain with intent. Ridges, done that bit. I race through growly Galloway cows (don’t try it) who, or is it which, have all decided they were, in fact, sheep. After opening and closing endless gates, soaking like a ginner each time, and shouting them off, because, and you may not know this, a gather of Galloways is much like facing a brick wall with the thrust and speed and malevolence of a tsunami. Okay, so through the angry unfed cows, all chasing me to the next gate and through to the next, I do confess a doubt or six at my choice to become a farmer’s wife. Heading for the sheep, all baa-ing and sweet and completely manageable, I offload barley straw, cake (not our cake) and stand a minute as their heads dunk into the troughs. I look out. I can see the beyond of forever out there, the sea lashing the ancient rocks, the sky, wide with clouds and strata and greys and flips and shapes and big conversations and I am drenched. I have no idea how to turn Big Red around, not with a trailer and those humpy ridges. But as I head for home I just know. I don’t want to live anywhere else.

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Island Blog – The Fly, the Mouse, the Rat and School the Next Day

An eclectic combo, I’ll give you that. They all arrived today, slotting neatly into my log. I should, perhaps, give some background. It begins with the mouse. For decades I have dealt with mice indoors, scrabbling through the scuts of plaster behind the walls, making innapropriate homesteads in my halloween of a loft, helping themselves to lagging, which no respectful neighbour would ever consider, and diddling through and over my frypan cupboard. The last is unacceptable. However, I am no killer and that’s the tricky bit, but there is also in me a refusal against invasion. I have seen myself, in my wild pioneer dream, as a woman who would stand against invaders. They weren’t mice, of course, but big fighty men with bludgeons, no compassion and with a determination to take over the homestead, one fixed lightly down in a rickety space where wolves and bears, snakes and marauders were as regular as clockwork and the neighbours 20 miles away on horseback.

There was a housefly, no, two, on my window, and they aren’t the only ones to get stuck against glass, banging themselves into failure and refusing to be caught and freed. It’s late for them, so they are slow, but a slow fly is not slow at all. the gymnastics are impressive. I know they will die out there in the torrent of cold rain, the freeze of the night, but, if I can, I will ding about with a tea towel, catch them soft and let them go. Not so the mice. Oh, I have done, in the past, long past, humane traps and they are a laugh because unless you take the sweating and terrified mouse at least 3 miles away from your home, their home, they just return. Poison is not an option, although I tried it once when the mouse invasion was so alarming as to be overwhelming, and the way it takes them is slow and horrific. So, I set a trap in my frypan cupboard.

The first morning, I can barely look. It takes hours before I can brace my pioneer self, she who has seen dead everything, including humans in this wild place, and check. Clean, gone. I am no killer but and but again. This is my space, not yours. The next check was a little easier, the one after, ok and now it is normal. I am not immune to it, to finding a life gone, but I am easier in my skin. It will go on because they are hungry and it is winter beginnings. And I know this place. I know that creatures will come in to the warmth. I remember it when we lived wilder, on Tapselteerie, when it was normal for me, for my kids, to welcome in the coldings. We couldn’t save them, but we gave food and warmth for a while. We didn’t have rats in the house, and. I am thankful, but they were in the byre and the barns. I have only met one once and its confidence terrified me.

I was staying overnight with a schoolfriend on her parents farm. I was under 12 and not a good guest in that I had no experience of country life at that point and had yet to connect with the wild in me. In short, I was scared of it all, the confidence of my friend, the way she swung from ropes in the barn, danced among the pigs, marched confidently into a map of cows, pushing at their flanks when they growled at her, shouting words and laughter. I was put to bed in a cold room with damp sheets and the dark was immediate when the light was turned off, although I had my wee torch. I lay there, tried to sleep and it took ages. I felt something heavy move over my feet, jerked up awake, flicked on my torch and the movement stopped. Two bright eyes clocked mine. A big rat looked at me from the end of my bed, I felt it’s weight on my feet. A second, and it was gone. I yelled. People say they scream, but they don’t. They yell. Someone adult came. I wan’t to go home, I sobbed. Insisted, despite reassurances that the rat had gone. My dad came. We drove the miles home. It was almost morning. I was never asked about my trauma, only told, in a kindly way, that I was over reacting.

School on Monday was interesting.

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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 – Shambles

Rhymes with brambles. They’re all gone now, obviously, blackbirds, robins, mice, people, sharp still. You don’t mess with brambles, not here. Sheep can die in the twist-hold of brambles, thorn sharp and clutching. However this is not about brambles. The rhyming thing just a rhyming thing, even as it thinks me about life, about lives, because a bramble sharp and clutch can hesitate, at best, a life. Or, it could lead to shambles, chaos, confusion, as if a dense wood just marched around a person, those huge darkening trees, stealing all the light, predatory.

I know this place well, although the darkening trees change. It’s still dark and the consistent thing is me, alone, cold, lost in the forest. Been there, seen the nowhere, got caught in the brambles but I am no sheep, and that’s the change in this, the invitation to freedom. Me. You. In the dark, it is compelling, stay here, stay here. You can’t see anything. It’s so very capsulate, almost safe. We need light, even unlight, any light. And what we need is recognition from someone we respect. that may sound frivolous, as it did in my young days when no man would/could ever say more than Well Done with a shoulder slap, moving on quickquick in case he was questioned. They needed it, and we thought we needed it. However, in the we, the we of the long ago, when men took liberties most of us will never talk about, it felt like we had to be ok with the falsehood. But now, in this open age, when what I accepted through fear is no longer acceptable, I, who allowed am still looking for a someone who just gets me, who recognises what I have done, who I am with no skimming, no polite flapping of hands, but someone who says something that makes me stop dead. Someone saw me today. Someone recognised my talent. Someone who really knows, beyond my mum, my sister, my friend, not that I dismiss them, not at all, but this is a Someone in my climb out of the brambles, who smiles at my courage and bravery, who recognises my talent, my gift, my light, and that stops me. Not stuck in the thorns now, not confined but fired up, strong, actually believing in myself.

Just a few words of recognition that really land. Now, there’s a power.

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Island Blog – A Winter and the Unlight

It wasn’t at first, this morning, raining I mean. In fact it was light and brightish, although not the bright of summer. the sky an upload of smurr and cloud blobs looking depressed, buildings braced somehow on hilltops already a slipstick, for me anyway, the grass an already skid. The track potholes, recently filled with nasty grey sharps set the labradors a-shimmie as they navigated safe passage around them to avoid cut pads. We crunch on in protective boots, talking, checking the labs, looking out, looking up. This dimlight of winter, when skies proffer less, we humans miss the light of light. Although many talk of hibernation, we are not hedgehogs. Light is precious, not just a bit of it, but all of it and the intensity matters. It thinks me.

The thing about a lack of light, the rightlight over time, is that we don’t notice the happening of it. One morning, let’s say, we suddenly notice wrinkles, or sunken cheeks, and we astound. What on earth is this me looking back at me, she who for many months looked just fine? Winter is a baring. Winter isn’t the whole truth so don’t believe that. I, without makeup am a lizard right now, a cave dweller. It will pass. Ok, so that given, what do we do with the now of now? As the cold or the rain or both attempt to pound us into sludge creatures, we have a choice. We always do. And, by the way, anyone who says they don’t care about how they look in winter is lying.

I went out today to a Community Orchard Advent Thing. It was marvellous, everyone dressed, not for the Arctic, but for the Wet. Stalls proffering ideas and help on how to make natural decorations, pans frying bacon and sausage for rolls, hot punch provided, so many inventive ideas. I stayed a while, as many more arrived. Community brings a light to the unlight, and it matters. I forget how I look. Turning up, showing up is what matters and, as I left, passing others walking or driving in, umbrellas, waterproofs, it thought me this. Who gives a shit how I look? Answer? Nobody, because I came, and so did all the others living in the Unlight. That’s the way to navigate Winter.

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Island Blog. – That’s my guess

There’s a time and it comes as the night pushes down the day and takes over. Before, when they argue with each other, the clouds tangle and squish, bumping against each other like school kids in a lunch queue. Inevitably the dark wins. How could it not, pushing down like that, an easy pressure, whereas, just saying, the light has far harder work? Dawn has to push up, after all. I think of Dawn with strong shoulders, her determination strong. She’s been doing this for millennia. Let’s hope she doesn’t get tired of the whole pushing night away thing.

Once night has squashed all of the light, I move me towards music and candles. It isn’t a stoop of my shoulders, more an invite to a new dance. The fire is fiery, licky flames thankful for the island timber, those old trees felled, usually by some storm with a dinky name. Eish the nonsense in that! A storm is a storm is all. I will never understand why there are pet names for such as storms, those massive and upwrenching take-out blasts of gargantuan force. We are, in my opinion, both foolish and blind to the truth of what is true. Nature will always win. We are almost irrelevant in that truth, but not quite, not those of us who learn, who are as prepared as anyone can be. It’s those who pretend it isn’t happening who concern me.

I went off on one there. I am not a worrier, not a fearty. I turn on the tunes, light the candles, begin to write. In this simple island life where roads may be passable in icy conditions, when a ferry may run, where rain falls a lot, when there are parking spaces in the harbour town, when everyone sees everyone else as an islander even if most of us are blow-ins, white settlers, whatever, even as we did choose to actually live here, to work here, to join the community and there is a strength in that. I think on that, as tunes play through my speaker, as my twinkly winkly lights twinkle and winkle. So simple. Enough, yes, enough. I walked today, twice, once with. a friend who laughed me a lot. We met muddy dogs, squelched through mud and the sharp stones of puddle refills. We talked of life and hope and christmas trees and future plans as we listened to the plop of raindrops on rhodie leaves, or from the ridonculous highs of Cyprus, Caledonian Pines, the Oldies in this place. The music of it, the beat, the laughter it brings, the musicality of Nature. Who hears it anymore with headphones on?

Community life is simple, bloody hard, difficult, awkward, challenging, slow moving, and wonderful. What else is real life but this? A confusion, an out of self. That’s my guess.

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Island Blog – Everything a Touchstone

Another damn gale. We have many damn gales up here in the pointy end of two countries joined together at Gretna Green. It’s all thanks to the fact that there is nothing but Altantic swell for a gazillion nautical miles, which, let’s be honest, makes for the best playground. However, I took notice of something. It wonders me. Wind, at any level is actually silent. It just blows. But, when it hits something, a building, a person, a mountain, a ship, anything held by gravity, it can shriek, whine, even sing. Think of the rustle of leaves, the melody that comes through cracks, the siren scream around the corners of buildings, the blatter of bamboo wind chimes, and so on. The thwump of a wheelie bin toppled: the sigh and crash of a falling tree.

Power on, power off, power on again. It is island life, life in the land of the Scots, and across other countries in the northern spheres. When I talk with others who don’t live here, they are amazed at our resourcefulness and we have that in spades. We have known saving cows in blizzards. We have known endless winters and even smile at those who are filling flowerbeds in April. Our winter has a greater hold on these beautiful, exposed and rocky lands. Was Englandshire formed by ice age or volcanic eruptive chaos? I don’t know, but we were. Collisions, cosmic fury, undersea upthrusts, the moon in a right stooshie. That’s us, and do you know what? We are tough as nails, but more, so much more. Nails are rigid. We are not. We learn to bend with the winds, we laugh at the rain. It’s just rain, after all. So, when ‘Disaster’ happens, let’s say on social media (and god, those disasters are endless) such as when something isn’t delivered, or the nail surgeon has ruined nails, or the dress isn’t really silk, or Deliveroo didn’t, or the whatever didn’t whatever, I do wonder if a winter on a remote island might be a grand idea. Not in an expensive rental with all accoutrements and a live-in maid, but in one of those wee bothys with the best view you will ever see in your life, the seabirds overhead and the selkie singing you ancient stories: where the ferry may well not run: where the mail arrives when it can: where the skinny roads may not be gritted; where outlying farms and homesteads are way more than a bycyle ride away even on a good day: where the path is not perfectly gravelled, the door sticks a bit and the fire takes a bit to get going and the kindling is damp.

Where, after dark there are a million stars and all of them silent, and where you can hear all those words the wind never got to say.

Everything is a touchstone, or it is lost as nothing.

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Island Blog – Palimpsest, Ingress and Egress

I watched ospreys today, fishing in the sea-loch on a slack tide. To be honest, I didn’t see them actually fishing, too many bent-back hazels in the way, but I did hear the shrieks, warning shrieks, a rasping ‘bugger off’ I hadn’t heard before. The gulls were wheeling, all high-pitched and taking up all the air, filling it with the squeals of schoolgirls on a home bus. My alert alerted. Damn hazels, always in the way of seeing clear, even when naked. Now that’s a talent, I thought. The chaos continued as I moved on up the track, my eyeballs almost falling out with all the futile looking. I knew there was trouble down there, somewhere. then I saw the lift of huge wings, the power of that 8/9 foot flapation, three of them with gulls like midges pursuing them. Gulls don’t even fish, I said out loud as I almost fell off a rock, my eyes, still fixed, now rolling. Creatures just don’t get it, do they, although they do. These huge birds, birds of prey are floating about like cruise ships in the skinny waters of a tidal flow and the little boats just don’t want them here. They win in the end. Amidst a great diatribe of birdswear words, the ospreys lift and slide away, cutting through the sky, hardly flapping.

I would like to hardly flap. I walked on, could feel my heart rise into a rap sort of beat as I re-met the ordinary. It thinks me. We get these bajonkers lifts, insights into otherness, and in the during of it, we shock solid. Then, when the gasp is done and the spin is over, there we are on the same track, in the same place, as if we never just visited Narnia. It’s a gift. Unwrapped it goes on forever like Pass the Parcel, when the size of the thing makes all eyes sparkle with anticipation until, at the very last a very small dinosaur, or car, or lip salve appears. Is it a disappointment? Yes, sometimes. It’s life and a learning. Tough but real. What is learned then is vital.

Our own tidelines are written over many, many tides, some when we were just learning and later when we are most vulnerable because of that learning. Thinks. Do gulls just harry, parry with and infuriate other birds just because they have beaks enough and don’t quite remember why they have them all, or are they just bullies? I stop myself there because I can’t believe anything or anyone is just just. I know the palimpsest of old, and I also know the truth of such a laid out truth, that it is constantly rubbed out and amended. And that’s a good thing. The ingress of old thinking, the restrictions, particularly for women but in no way exclusively, seeps like damp over a gazillion decades. But, and there is definitely a but here, we all have the power to egress, to say NO and then to take action.

Those big birds chose to lift, knew their power, held their voice, just lifted. I recommend it, no matter the gulls, the bullies, the ingress, the old rules.

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Island Blog – Left of Right in the Dance

There’s a silence at this time of day, when the sun has set behind the hills and the dark, greedy and heavy is bloody determined to win the game. I think about that game. It’s gone on for a gazillion years and yet these two keep on keeping on. We adapt. However, I notice that at certain times of the year those two fighting for space, early themselves. On a cloud-sworn cover up day, the dark finds an invenue and grabs it full force so that, say from about 2/3pm it is effectively dark. The school run is all headlights and avoiding those horrid blue-lit-light cars which confuse and diffuse clarity of vision. Or, they do for me. I’m pulling over thinking Ambulance.

This morning I knew I was going to collect my beloved mini who has been in the operating theatre for almost a week. I was up twirly, Dark still holding like a control freak but obligingly (or maybe because Moon is stronger than Dark), hoisting a crescent moon into its sky, and that light showed me big frost. Oh shoot. I de-pyjamad myself after a couple of strong coffees, black. I did falter. The sun will be low, the courtesy car frozen up, the switchback road possibly an icescape. Then I calmed, ate something and set off. I got as far as my neighbour (8 yards) and could see nothing but black, even with switch-eye shades, the visor down, nothing, no road, no concept of a landscape I have known and trusted for decades. It was gone. I did falter. I could go back home, explain, they’ll understand, I’m old and a fearty. I could. But I didn’t. I stopped, parked, thought ‘what is the left of right, and what is right? It jinked my thinks. I love movement, the physical, the mental, the way we can shift in a dance.

And I remember the dance, the way I went to the left of right with a partner who was making a collision mess of such a simple swing, couldn’t count, legs flying, hands barely gripping. My feet knew better than I ever did, and I saw what might happen if I didn’t guide this galoot back into formation. It’s the same inside my own mind, the crazy galoot, the dark and the light and the whats are there for me to hold onto when the dark oppresses, the light is quiet and hesitant and the galoot is a wild tom on the hunt?

In the silence, now that this island comes bome to itself, there are bare roads, plenty parking, no holidayers, some of whom expect more than they might if they just got the whole island thing, the way we have to go left of right, a lot. I’ve met plenty who’ve come here, and they love it. I do, I confess, have a squidge of an issue with the expectations, as if here is the same as the ‘there’ they have come from, with everything perfect. Island life is far from that. Instead we learn to go to the left of right a whole lot. Here it is all about acceptance, understanding, a gentle acceptance of the way that every single one of us do our best. And, all of us can keep up in the dance.

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Island Blog – A Pining

I have them, now and again, in spite of, or because of (don’t like the ‘spite’ word) my olding hooha and the general strimble of downstairs sans a trip, and the forgetting of what I said last week about an important something. Seriously? You remember that? Well, go you and your mind. Mine is all heading off on wings of hope and the next moment, proffering itself as a wild opportunity for me to be wild and opportunistic. Just saying.

However, tomorrow a very big 200 year old Pine tree is being felled. It has to come down, split as it is from navel to tit and with the two sides dancing to different rhythms on windy days. We are talking many tons of crash, was this big beauty allowed to fall au naturel. It’s too near the road, too close to wires and sheep and fences, never mind all the dog walkers, the workers who come by daily. The tree surgeons who will make this whole thing happen, have a tricky task. I wonder if we who don’t have a clue about such skills, have, well, a clue. I don’t. They will have to clamp, climb, position, focus, watch the wind, catch the moment, pick their time to cut. My respect to them.

t thinks me, about loss, half loss, about those with skills who come in to make a situation okay, about the times We did, about the times I did. And I remember bits of it all. The awful times, the fears, the losses, the pain of them, the gradual lift back into the light of ‘Oh Fk’ another season. A tree falling was just an irritation. How immediate and how young was that thinking! What it meant was no delivery serv ice (not that it happened much), no school run access (yippee), no guests in all the wrong clothes leaving nor arriving. Lawny it was a fracking nightmare, and often.

At the Best Cafe Ever today, as we cleared and scrubbed and sorted all the flotsam and jetsam of a very busy season, I was aware that this tree is coming down tomorrow. I know it needs to happen, and I will wander up to watch the skills of tree surgeons. It’s 200 years old. I’ll still pine.

Not just for her