nature

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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

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Island Blog – Lexicographer

We don’t ask to be born. How many times is that used as an accusation in the face of judgement? A lot, but it is true, and we didn’t, at least not necessarily into where we landed. We all want to be seen as who we are, and at every single stage of the who-we-are-ness which, I have to tell you is frickin tough for parents who are equally puzzled, and daily, at the transmogrification of what had at first, seemed like a wonderfully planned out life.

I came first, on the back of a howler. I’m sure, judging from photos in the album of me with hair tweaks and frilly frocks with matching bar shoes, all pristine and ironed to death, that I was the one, the perfect girl, top of the chart, a celebrity. That didn’t last. And why was that? Well, from what I remember, I was, well, different. I did conform, I did, and it was very wise to do so in order to avoid the slap, but what is it in a someone else, one who inhabits a ‘good girl’ even as she damn well knows she is on a slide to nowhere? I got brilliant. Please excuse the slanguage. I was best at performing, elocution (does anyone nowadays knows what that means?) English Language, Wordage, Dictionary expertise, the Study of Words, their history and their importance, once. And this was a gift? No, it was a loneliness. It felt like I was in some in-between space. I could see my ‘friends’ out there all happy with endless conversations about nails and clothes and fashions and horse riding and bejewelled parties around uplit infinity pools and I just wanted to sink into a bed of bluebells with a book and a like-minded friend. We would talk words, new ones, old ones, work out their meanings, laugh at our mistakes, be together on this lonely journey.

I knew one once. His name was Tom, and a bit older than me. We both worked at Lotus, watched the first run of the Elise around the track, which was right outside our big wide glass-filled office. He gave me lifts to and from work in his VW Beetle. It was the new age of seatbelts and we laughed a lot at working the whole thing out. We did spend time in the bluebells. We did talk words and their origins and it was a fire lit in me. I moved on, as did he. But I remember that glorious connection with words, with Lexography, with research, with the play on words, the way they change over time.

I’m glad I had that time. I can still see him in a stumble of trees, bluebells at his feet, laughing at some word I’d conjured from nowhere, the sundown at his back.

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Island Blog – The Truth of It

We don’t tell the truth. No, we don’t. We decide on a persona as we get out of bed. We do this because, well, in my case certainly, there is an abundance of moaners wherever we/I go and we/I don’t align with moaning. However, this makes it tricky for truth telling. I know this, have known this for decades. It’s as if the one we once were, the upbeat, smiler, joker, uplifter is somehow fixed, like a creature in a snow globe or a face in an old photo, the one who never changes. But we all do.

This storm frightens me. The gusts up here on the island are loud and fiery, up to 80mph. I know, I do know, that my gone man knew exactly what he was buying. He knew the gales, the wind shifts, the structure of home, the waiting for challenge that it faced, whilst catching the sun and backed by a woodland of 180 year old pines, not one of which would ever fall on the house because the prevailing wind would always push them backwards and even as I sit here listening to the huge punches of storm, I know that they won’t fall on me. Still the noise is still scary. It’s as if all the worst devils, or the most fiery dragons are initiating a full frontal attack on my home, and not just mine. However, it was my big frickin window and I met it, wondering, in the dark of the onslaught, the sudden rush of colding down my stairway. I danced up, I did, and heard the sound of anguish, the pull and push, heard the defeat, saw the big window fighting against it’s fines, confines, the plastic and glue and whatever which holds this big-ass glass in situ. This wind was winning. Gusts of up to 85mph and just me. For now. And there’s a thing. I rose, I did, I know this fear, I have been against this power before. I remember.

The roar was deafening. Everything falling off everything else. Darkness outside, no-one there. Power out. The wind gusts terrifying. It’s dark now, scary. So, here am I, window was tight shut, and not open, at all, but even in that not open thing, a hinge broke. Split, freaked the whole frame out which, in my opinion was never an intelligent build. And then she bucked and pushed against gusts up to almost 90mph. I could do nothing, my strength a nothing. The window is big and heavy. In the dark and the slam of rain and wind, I ran to my neighbour who was alone with her kids. He’s at the pub, she said. I’ll drive down and get help. Men came but even they struggled with the power of the wind, managing, eventually, to drag in huge posts to wedge the window almost shut, the props against my bed, already drenched, then wedging my bed against the back wall. Mud and leaves and rain everywhere, but the window was re-instated at last and I am so very thankful to them. I slept in another room, well, sort of slept as the massive power circled my house, keening like a banshee, slamming huge unearthly fists against the face of my old stone home.

I heard no sounds beyond that during the night. Heard nothing of the devastation behind me, in the ancient pine woods. 20 massive old friends uprooted and lying on their backs, one of which flattened the Honey Shed whilst another fell right through the power line, leaving dangling wires. It took four days for any clearing, for the power to come back on, after everyone else got their light back the day before. And now, a hot shower after all those hours of cold and I’m okay and all the visits from neighbours, the delivery of soups and power chargers, all those hours of I’m okay when I wasn’t at all. I was scared, alone, small and without appetite. I was fearful that now I am responsible for the remaining pines in the woods, the ones which never bothered to grow a good spread of roots because the big guy in the face of all this wild shit is protecting the rest of us, or so they believed. These pines are now seriously wobbly because these huge gales will keep coming and they are not prepared for the onslaught.

It thinked me. Am I? All I have learned from himself must be in there somewhere, in my head, in my knowing. There is a huge amount over which I have no control, but there will be something, some things, over which I do. For now, however, I am thankful, yes, and completely wrung out. And my damage was nothing much in comparison to others.

I know that truth, but my truth is also the truth.

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Island Blog – A Speluncar Paradox

Blimey it’s hot. Even the stoics are wilting, including me, although I rarely confess to any such thing. And that thinks me, a lot. What is this inborn choice/need to always present upbeat no matter what the what or the whom? I spent this non work day with my thinks. We played think tennis together, the ball whacking over the net and back again. We both did a load of sweaty running about. The ball, the answer, said damn all, and no surprise there. Had I been that ball, that question, in this heat and being arse-whipped again and again, never mind the bouncing thing, I would probably have remained silent. Did we come to a conclusion? Well, no, although the match may have brought in a synergy because what I (we) realised is that I choose to be upbeat and also that I need my cave. There’s another also. I do not need to explain nor justify either, particularly the cave bit. I am human, chancing into weak, rising into brilliance. No, not weak. Bin that. If I always bring in the light, my choice, my need if you like, and my pleasure, then this cave choice is my safe hideout. Equally vital.

So, when I mourn for the lost children, for the wars which devastate ordinary lives, when corruption in high places decide the way the streets will or won’t move safely, when social media desecrates young trusting children, when lies are told in high places and those of us is ‘low’ places hear of them too late; when huge companies hide their truths, when weapons trade across oceans, hidden and politically permitted, when news comes too late, when everyone knows what’s coming, but if the sun shines and there’s a barbecue, a dance, a chance, a band playing, then everything’s ok. Isn’t it?

I am ready for my cave, my paradox, because tomorrow I will leap into the light I bring and spread it blooming everywhere.

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Island Blog – Celtic Sea and Me

We were born, before the wind, some of us. We are irrefutably connected to the mystic, although there’s nothing mystic about it, not for some of us. We’ve always known it. Trouble is, with all this concrete covering over earth, all that burying, that disguising, turns our land into, well, Pleasantville. Watch the movie. It has much to say about the falsehood of our lives. We, out here in the blast of the thrawn Atlantic, still bumping over tracks, still able to walk barefoot without (sort of) any fear of broken glass shards, used needles, cutting things, are still connected. It wonders me, as I think back to my time living in a flat in Glasgow after so many years in the wild, that pavementing damage to a human connection to what once was (and still is) so vital for a goodly life. Over years, over time, the strive for money success, the building over bones, over history has taken us up many miles by now. We are lifting ourselves beyond oxygen.

At work today in the cafe kitchen, working with the team, filling the quick-steam dishwasher over and over and over again (and more), we fried, all of us, but we knew we would, and we kept each other cool just by asking “you okay” a lot. It’s a very uplifting question. My thoughts as I sank my old fingers into the deepsinksink scrubbing pots and pans and kitchen whizzy things went to the oceans, the seas of the world. I don’t question my thoughts anymore, nor did I much as a young woman. I know I am connected and it is a warm bond, like a cord, like a chord. I saw and see what those caught on pavements may well, and do, dismiss, although not so much these days.

My thoughts today as I batted away a persistent wasp sailed on the Celtic Sea. I love that name, feels me at home, my sea, although it isn’t. However I came home and studied a bit. This Sea, which immediately tells me it is confined somehow, like the `North Sea’ and thus, a possible grump. However, this sea, a big tradeline traverse, has the blood of the massive Atlantic in her veins and that smiles me. She will be feisty for sure. I check more. Celtic Sea, Basin Countries (the ones she bangs up against) Ireland, Wales, Breton France, Cornwall. She follows a tricky coastline and, knowing skippers (sons) who have launched into the Bay of Biscay in slight trepidation, she has a temper. She is also the minder of part of the Continental Shelf, where land falls away into scary depths. She curls around landfall, so she needs company.

I love her already. She sounds like me.

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Island Blog – Peppers Ghost

Last family gone now on a very long drive south complete with two girls, one sausage dog, one cat, one hamster, two bicycles, a ton of kit in back. Ten days of bonkers, of opportunity grabs, of endless and fun-filled action packed crazy. In other words, normal for my family. I have watched them fly huge kites, slice the sea-loch into tiny particles, wheeling and squealing and all the way up to sunfall, catch fish on the flow tide, barbecue, dig a fire pit, build dens, bond with a friendly deer, watch stars, straggle over rocks at low tide to gather big mussels for supper, and so much more. I have those memories. It wonders me that I have them at all, that they all still come. This island roots them all, even though they spin away into very different worlds. This is home and, as always, I am the one to wave them off. I’ve been doing this wave-off thing for decades, for ever, because I was always the one to stay home. It was as it was. And still is, certainly now in the autumn of my own life.

The silence is deafening at first. Any car passing by isn’t a goodness me here they come. I don’t hear the quad, heavy laden with way too many kids, careening down the Tapselteerie track. The sea-loch is calm and in one piece. The evening is gentle, soft, empty, and yet full of echoes, laughter, children, questions, invitations, halloes and goodbyes. My home is at rest. And, although my head quick-turns at an approaching car or at a tumble of high voices sneaking through an open window, or at a sudden flash of someone small. running, laughing, shouting something, I know t’is peppers ghost, an illusion, a memory, a wonderful memory, just one of a million and they’re all mine.

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Island Blog – Do You Remember?

I walk today in the Tapselteerie woods. After a refresh of rain, after yesterday moving through a thick of tourists and shoppers, there are no Excuse Me’s here, no need. I am alone amongst the hidden faeries, the ground-dwellers, the dripping leaves, alone in the glorious, yet musical silence, even though it isn’t silent at all, not with all this dripping and faerie chatter. There’s a thrum from the soft ground, I can feel its rhythm through my soft shoes, my toes connecting with the gentle buzz of conversation, nature speke. I stand awhile to listen, just stand, to take in the peaty smell, think ‘whisky’, laugh at myself, the sound caught up in the air, held in the massive branches overhead, then released back into silence. I see a broken limb, a huge one, and put my hand on the beech bark, murmer something, a thank you. You are old, you are fallen, I see you. My fingers, gnarled and bent look like my mum’s now. I never saw that coming, but nor did the beech limb, thrust out wide, fighting for light, tangled in it, too far, too high, too ‘out there’ to survive.

I move on and out of the woods, the only sound my rainproof jacket (awful noisy things) and begin my walk home. There’s a mist across the sea-loch, a smokey rub-out, a loss of definition. Everything is lush, green, ebullient, a disguise. In winter everything is clearly defined, the start and the stop, the contours of rocks and hills recognisable like a something laid bare, naked, a woman without make-up, just woken. I slow my pace. The rushing in me is like a burn in spate, a river, even, a tidal flow and this is not always a wonderful thing. I know that my life required a great deal of rushing, but not now, yet still I rush. To slow, to sit, to wander, to ponder, all can feel like anathema even as I see others who can and to wonder why I cannot.

I think back to the fallen limb, to all the fallen limbs I have encountered throughout my years among the Tapselteerie woods, as an islander. I remind myself of all the moments I have calmed and gentled others in turmoil; how many times I have heard said that my bright spirit has uplifted a falling soul, how many I have welcomed in with warmth and light and music and ideas. And then I remember how easy it is to forget the legacy of what I have given, of the who I am, of the how I eased life, of the when I showed up, stood tall, made laughter a bridge of opportunity for another. I did that, and I forget that.

I’m home now, and writing this, but my mind scoots back to the old beech. She gave and gave, proffering her strength for a ‘great place for a kiddies swing’ as she pushed and fought for light within the canopy. She struck out, braved herself, gradually over a long time, silently, determinedly, proudly, independently. I did too.

And so did you. Do your remember?

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Island Blog – Go Mahousive

Ok, a new word, yes, but my family are right there on inventiveness. We always were. I do remember the odd altercational exchange with t.t.t.tteachers who stood resolute against any such inventive nonsense, stuck as they stood, like plastic, and holding out the Oxford Dictionary, which, even then was definitely well beyond its shelf life. So we, in that crazy Tapselteerie kitchen did invent. We did. Stories, chances, lifts and lufts, beyonds and togethers, all made a right frickin mess among pots and pans and plans and dance dynamics, not enough bread, squashed strawberries, an important delivery that didn’t arrive. And I am proud of that, The fact that in the face of endless structural collapses, we made our guests believe that everything was mahousive. And it was. To be honest, should I notice an unavoidable slimjink, I would move into the guest mist, performing, always performing, my eyes alight, bright with a tomorrow promise and an absolutely firm delivery of an amazeball pudding, with cream and liqueur and more wood on the fire.

It worked. It does now, I watch the do it now thing in the Best Cafe Ever. What might be a lack turns into an opportunity. In order to make everyone welcome, we, on the business side of the counter, behind the cakes, the swivel and twist, the real mahousive, the inner workings of a brilliant cafe are bright like the sun. Welcome, we say. How can I help? And there are so many incomings, I watch them. from behind my Washeroo. Hallo you, I think. Each customer is served alert and kindly, orders change, others in the group, the family, shift and change choosing this, no, that, no maybe two, no, one.

And on it goes. I did spend a while today standing and thinking. There are only two words in the Oxford Dictionary beginning with mah. One is mahogany, brown and well, brown. The second is mahout. Elephant friend, those who, back in the day, cared for those poor creatures who were forced to carry queens and other eejits with delusions of grandeur through streets, into wars, way way out of their natural and familial environments.

So I officially add Mahousive. It means bigger than anything. I’ve done this adding thing before, by the way. I wrote a piece for BBC Wildlife, a gazillion years ago, about a whale, so called stranded in a sea-loch, Isle of Lewis. It was a nonsense. The whale was fine. It was February, so damn cold even that word wasn’t enough. I, and Janine timed the breathing of the whale as it took on the loch and the captive fish, I watched the surface lift in response to the hailstones. The loch ‘poppled’ . It did. However that word did not exist, I challenged that. I find it now in the dictionary.

Go Mahousive.

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Island Blog – Sense ability

We forget, don’t we, to notice what our natural senses tell us, unless someone. shoves a fragrant bloom under our noses? So busy is life these days, so disconnected from the beauty of the wild. Where once fields scattered in glorious disarray, there are housing estates. And it’s all very well to shout about the loss of ‘green’ but where would all our people live? In caravans, wicker shelters? It’s definitely not an easy conversation piece, nor a simple decision for the big cheeses in our world, our cities, our villages. I remember a time living in Glasgow, in a flat. So not my thing, but there we landed, short term. There was a ‘washing green’ for all 6 flats. A stumbly plastic spidery thing stood in the small patch of grass, a few pegs attached. One sunny morning, after washing a load of boy stuff and with nowhere in the wee flat to effectively dry anything bigger than a couple of boxers, I lugged the basket down to the back door. I had already bought pegs and hoped the thing that looked like a big umbrella with plastic connectivity and the ability (apparently) to move with the breeze, not that there was one, would never be one, not in this square of overgrown grass, fenced in like a punishment, would dry the load.

I pegged and swivelled the thing. It squeaked and creaked and tipped and I just knew that nobody, from any of the flats which, all of which proffered a scummy window view of me out there being a loon, used it. I stood back to check my affixings. All seemed pegged up. A window opened. A woman poked her head out. I looked up. Hallo, I smiled. Just pegging out my washing. Aye, she said, and chuckled. You won’t do it twice, she said. Everyone takes their dog out there and never clears up. She was right on that. I remember that moment, as I moved back into the confines of a flat, having known the fly-freedom of a west coast home, all space and nature, most of the latter moving in with confidence, and felt an overwhelming sense of loss. I won’t live this way anymore, I said to myself, even though it seemed there was no way out.

Life is different now, and it thinks me. I would have diminished there, starved, lost myself. I am a wild woman, a creative, a solo. Returning to the island gifted me, eventually, a reconnection with all that was familiar. Instead of traffic noise, I came back to the birds, remembered their songs. Instead of grey pavements, I returned to peat-foot, to a ground that bounces with me as I walk. Instead of incessant chatter, I returned to conversation. Instead of a thrum of people, an assault, I met individuals.

Today, just today, my five senses lived, really lived. I watched a young otter dash to hide under my car, a fleet, yes, but I saw it. I watched sea eagles cut the sky in a spirograph. I heard the loons way down there on a lifting tide. On a walk I saw wild honeysuckle, blousy and determined, create a bouquet of delight from the roots of a huge fallen pine. I stopped to touch the delicate but feisty blooms and breathed in the fragrance. Home again and I sat to taste a home-made hummus, salad, a wild garlic Tapselteerie pesto, toasted seeds. I heard the loons again. They’re down there somewhere.

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Island Blog – Herstory

I have two new geraniums. I have lived with, and looked after, for decades, the salmon pink geraniums beloved and nurtured by my mother-in-law, for almost fifty years. Who knew a plant could survive that long! Anyway, I inherited them, loads of them in pots, and all healthy as fitballs. My word. I didn’t, I promise, try, not never, to let them die, even though their presence overwhelmed me at times, many times. They just grew strong and green, producing flowers the whole damn summer and beyond. Even after her death, my mother-in-law I mean, in 2002, I still had five, no six, no seven, in her conservatory. Back then this conservatory (such a clumsy word) had no warmth in the winter months, so she brought them in and cared for them somewhere in this little stone-built home, still caring, still checking they would survive. I admire that. Her story with her geraniums, her green fingers. She knew everything about plants and gardens. This, btw, is not about her, even if it might look that way. I just went off on the geranium/mother-in-law thing. Moving on.

The two new ones. They are not salmon pink. To be honest, I am very tired of salmon pink. I want red. The ladies arrived, a bit discombobulated with all that dark travel, the shucking of delivery people who don’t know what’s in there. I let them sit in my open-mouthed garage for a day or two before replanting. From the width and strength of the stalks I clocked no newbie, no flop. These girls know themselves. I may have got them wrong. I put them in bigger pots, brought them in because out there on this island of bonkers weather, ‘in’ is safe. They rebelled. Their older leaves grew spots and stayed spotty, talking to other newer leaves, so that they spotted up too. I watch them.

Today they asked me for more space. Ah! I get it. I had placed one beside a well-established orange tree, and the other perhaps too close to an equally established ficus tree. Domination. I missed that. I moved them, as they asked me to. No plants want to be close to another. I see it often on my walks through Tapselteerie. The fight for light, for space, the ultimate diminish of one. And I say, I do, out loud, I see you. Do what you can, do your very best. You are beautiful even where you are.