nature

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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.

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Island Blog – Even When

There are times, I confess, when I am not proud of people. We islanders know it’s coming, the influx of visitors, and that those folk who arrive bringing all their issues with them do not represent the whole of island-hopping mankind, but the few can spoil it for the many. Since expected accommodation standards have elevated to 5 star, no matter what cottage nor house a visitor might pay for, at equally elevated prices, the reality of skinny single track roads, the paucity of supermarkets. the angst that arrives within each big-ass four-wheel drive, complete with bike racks, canoes atop, arrives too. I meet you on my drive to the harbour town, through the glen, through any glen, peppered with cattle and calves, with sheep and lambs, with cyclists, and I do shake my head. I’m thankful for Radio Two to calm me with tunes as you, the few, continue until we are both stuck in a hard place. No, not a hard place, a skinny, blobby, fall-off-the-edge,soggy place when your wide passing place is just a wee scoot behind that big black ass of yours. Oh, but you can’t reverse. I forgot. Let me shimmy and jimmy my way around two corners and let me wave with a smile. But do you return the wave?

We work here. We also need you, to fluff up our economy, to buy our builders, plumbers, sparkies, cleaners, servers, cafe and restaurant owners, hoteliers, guest houses, yes, we need you. Our winters are way longer than yours. When you are back in the hopeful warmth of your earning and your sweetly safe home, in a city, all without friendship and community, after you have complained of one dirty pot in the house you enjoyed big time for a week and left in a 6 hour mess, after you demanded space and questioned a slightly dodgy entrance, a slight wobble in a decking, spare a thought for the work we put in to make sure that you have a wonderful holiday next time winter goes. Because we do care, we absolutely do. We just ask respect for that about which you have no clue. We will always do our best. even when you are careless.

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Island Blog – A Squeeze between Cows

Driving the switchback to the harbour town, to where the Co-op’s shelves are diminished,thank you, hackers, I coast down the brae. The town is buzzing and there is nowhere to park. This island harbour creates a welcoming curve of safety for its people and the fisher boats which, once, filled the pier, canting together, double, and sometimes triple parked (sorry, moored) as they unloaded their catch. I remember, way back in the days of Tapselteerie, driving in to negotiate a box of prawns, crabs, lobsters, to feed my guests. Fresh today. No better selling point. A load of work for me indeed, but I felt engaged with a process. These fishers spent many hours out there, in all conditions, hauling, hoping, moving here, moving there, searching for their income, the cash to feed their families, their sense of self, of success. The winter months are long and lusty, no chance for a slide into a kindly Atlantic, not then, for she is in a frickin tantrum and all the way up to May. Respect.

I was going for a Covid booster. To be honest, I dithered like a fairy in the wings dying for a pee. for days before. I don’t know why, still don’t. I set off anyway, lacking any answer to my swither/dither, meeting the usual. Cows, lumber, chestnut bodies, slow, pink tongues, road block. I actually love that. These cows are beautiful creatures and their calves are just gorgeous, prinking and bouncing and all over the flipping place. The mamas can fill a single track road, sidey-on. And, they don’t budge. Oh, they might slink you a look, as they cud on, but that’s it on acknowledment. You can hoot, as someone did, as my eyes rolled, as I turned off my engine, but hooting is for owls, not for cows. Wrong language. Me no understand…….

In the Booster Lounge, aka, the scout hall, I went for a pee. No paper. Oh, to hec with that! I went on a hunt, pushing open doors, finding a kitchen, checking cupboards, grabbing loo roll, sorting the situation. Well, isn’t that what you do, when you think of the next person who might feel very upset about the no loo paper thing? Into the Booster lounge, a line of awaitees, no speak…..nurses ready, positioned around the hall. These are people, but everyone is awkward inside weirdness. I know this. I sat in a seat. The last time I was in this hall, I said to a complete stranger, was when I delivered my son, who now is the father of two, to Tai Jitsu. She laughed, but asked no questions. I must be scary, I thought, but no, not that. People just don’t ask questions.

When I got back to my Spinny Mini, she was completely stopped by a delivery van. That’s ok, I thought, I know he is on a schedule, wanting to get his deliveries done so he can get home across the sea to his family, his home, his rest. The sun was a beat, the soft warmth of a hug right around the harbour town. Smiles were everywhere, shorts, sunglasses, bare flesh abounded, folk dondering along the single track road, laughing, easy, happy. It is rare here, this longevity of sunshine warmth, but we’ll take it, we will definitely take it.

Homing…..I get behind a driver who slows, brakes, at every passing place. My eyes, not under my kind-gene control, roll. I pull back, but just for now. I won’t do this all the switchback way. Various diversions and limitations abound at this time and I get it. The Road Boys are doing Road Things, and the result, I just know it, will be a marvellous thing. But, I know this single track, every single wheech and slide, the places to peel off, the safe landings when anyone meets a terrified tourist who knows none of the above. We can be kind. I am kind. I have a sporty mini, I adore her. She can wheech like no other car and can park in a bird cage. Just saying.

Almost done, almost home. Sliding around the multiple bends, coming down from the lift of the high lochs, the sun hits my face and the view out to the Isle of Coll sharps me. I can touch it, this Long Island, this familiar, this Far Away. The village comes into shift and then……Cows. There’s no track (road), just cows. Lumber, golden red, beautiful, right across any chance of passing. Mothers holding the space. Youngsters bright, bouncy, all over the place. Camper vans rising from the below. A load of gear changing. A meet. Nothing can be be done. That’s what I’m getting from the nothing that comes from the cars before me and the camper vans aft of the rise. I sit a bit. It’s nice in the sunshine. No idea what’s going on in those cabs. Just as I huff enough to decide me to get out of my sporty mini and go gentle these coos away, one old mama moves, and the rest follow-ish. We squeeze between cows. I like that.

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Island Blog – Winding my Way up

Happy Easter to you all. A new beginning, the chance to change direction, to question old thinks, spouted from mouths a generation or two old, and definitely dead because times change, and situations alter facts and circumstances. Thing is to notice all this, and to adapt as best we can, no, better. Let’s be honest here. Nobody has an easy stroll through life, even if we imagine there are those who do. They don’t. It just looks like it.

It isn’t easy to make a change, not one that appears huge and as far away as another planet. However, it is possible to stop, notice, think, assess and then initiate a first brave step. I don’t like this place, person, dynamic, circumstance, let’s say. I can already hear the fall down all those steps of expectation. Clunk, ouch, clunk, big ouch, and so on. Ok, there might be a clunk or two, or three, maybe four, but if we refuse to accept whatever control is controlling, we will find strength. I promise that. It hurts for a while, but once the light comes in, it really comes in.

In the wild, nature has a dynamic shift and shrift. I see it every day I walk in the woods, along the basalt and granite coastline, I see the way those who have landed in a place which no longer suits them change things. Wild flowers that lined the track, which, in the interests of wide-vehicled vehicles, were dug out and discarded, now appear further back on the bank, or, even between the stones of a drystone wall. I actually laugh out loud on seeing them, my smile wide as a banana, and I crouch down to welcome them, their tenacity, their sneaky over-winter move beneath the cold ground. They refuse to be less than they were, than they are. You will not take us out, they say. It thinks me, a lot, as I walk on.

This afternoon after a lovely uplifting church service with people and singing and words, I decide to chop some wood. It isn’t all that dry, to be honest, and needs chopping into notquitesplinters. I’m game. I check the stack, notice the twists, the tricky bits, the very wet collars around the fallen trees, because these measured logs formed big trees once, hosting bird nests, sheltering humans in rainfall, protecting mosses and wildflowers from sunburn. Respect. I select a log, fix it on my block, so old, so scarred, such a friend. Anyway, moving on. I position, raise my axe, whack it down. Ah, I know that sound. This is not going anywhere, but my whack, even now, is dynamic, ferocious, driven, and, unfortunately stuck. My efforts to separate axe from wood is a right battle. I had to employ a metal wedge and a mell.

This is not the point, although I did free all of us from this tricksy mix. What I noticed after was the twist and lean, the reach and the change of direction in this tree. You had no light. You noticed that. You decided to change direction. You wound your way up, so slow, so long waiting, so hopeful for change, so trusting in it.

You marvel me.

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Island Blog – Passerine Birds

They’re here now, the passerines, lifting and lighting up bird feeders, trees, shrubs and gardens. Each morning begins a new bud, a slight of colour, pink, yellow, green, buds bursting like pregnant women into new life. A bird lands, the stem bounces, a confluence of energy, just for a moment, but it is enough. Connection is an imprint made, the duplicity fixed in time. Up there, in the wild sky, whether cloud brown with incoming rain, or cloud white as puffballs against a still slightly icy blue, whooper swans seek rest on their way south, or is it north; various geese honk by, all hoot and panic and in perfect formation; thrushes sing from the tippy top of any tall tree, talking a load of shite, all sqeaks and burps and farts as if one bird makes a whole orchestra.

We wake earlier. Afternoons are actually afternoons, instead of a snippet which goes rudely dark over a cup of tea and a biscuit. It is, as everything is, just a passerine thing, for changes come, unbidden, unbound, just as life should be, if we understand change in that way, in the only way to be honest. I’ve lived long enough to know that this is how it is, no matter how much we may attempt a singular annihilation of such a limitation. Acceptance is all. And that means what? Living every day, yes, as if it is your last. Yes, indeed. But that may be too much. I remember laughing my head off at such crap, once, when I was 30/40 and sinking under the weight of business demands, of children’s needs, of a husband who tried to be what I needed, but didn’t really get it, of collies needing feeding, of muddy feet, of guests, of phone calls asking me to be sure of the best day to see whales in the wild and in good weather. Of so very much more.

I’m thinking of Lizzie. Her funeral soon. How can this be? She, already 72, but only just before me. I am alive for mine, and it feels wrong somehow. I don’t make sense of that, nor try to. I am all about living life each day. You know that. There’s a however and a but in that, neither of which I can explain. She has been in my dreams, her naughty smile. Although I was the one who took the fall as a teen, the instigator, the trouble maker, I must tell you that Lizzie was right beside me. Yes, I was mouthy, a leader, but no leader is worth anything without a Second. Lizzie was calm to my lunacy. She was so gentle beside my absolute fury at absolutely everything and everyone. I wonder at her commitment to me. Most friends ran away and judged. Ditto their parents. My poor mother. I do, now, recognise that.

Now she is gone, sharp and sudden, sort of. A shock indeed. A Passerine Bird of multi colours incorporating musical brilliance, people skills which gathered in choirs and friends and moments and times. We didn’t connect a lot once I left Englandshire for the Island, but she is still in my dreams. How extraordinary to have that impact on someone. Like the passerine bird on the branch of a budding shrub. She bends me, we bounce a bit together, and, then, she is gone.

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Island Blog – Susurration, Perhaps

Outland, Outsea, this unpredictable giant of salt water, gluttoning on random rivers, streams and a million other acolyte trickles of water, bursting from deep, deep within the belly of earth, all desperate to conjoin with the Outsea, the glorious escape from endless confinement. They cannot resist the ancient call, no matter how Man levels and compromises, poisons and redirects them for new housing, for a wrong forestation. No matter the poles thrust deep, no matter the planting of invasive species just because nobody educated us in time. These bodies of water will find a way, however patient they might need to be.

I watch it all through a reach of glass. Gannets slipside a wind I cannot feel, sitting here behind a double shot cappuccino with chocolate sprinkles. I cannot sense the slant and shift as they rise and float so close to an unforgiving granite cliff. Below I notice seaweed flopped over the stony rocktops like mermaid hair. When the tide rolls back in a great big yawn, the patient weed will lift again and float away, always on the move, a survivor in a deeply awkward life. And then cometh another storm, or the oceanic and angry response to the way we humans are making life very difficult for the flow of water, and that weed will look like a victim as it is blattered onto rocks by the fist of gravity and into new places. But don’t be deceived.

Ice white spume froths around the rocks, falling away, back into the green. Under-sea blow sends shadow pulses then takes them away. Catspaws echo each puff of wind, a feisty wind, footsteps. Gulls crowd on a spit of rock, a jagged tooth. They look like jewels from here. A shag stands sentinel right on the end, sea-facing, wings out like a black angel. None of these know I am here, high up on the cliff. watching the wind taunt the water willow, the scraggy grasses, watching the long reach of every wave push across the sand; watching each one retreat, return, repeat. Across the poppling water, the Outlands are clear, striations on their rocky faces. I can count them and see a peppering of cottages, a mast or two, a ship hugging the far shore. The gulls weave a sky web, the gannets dive, the shag stands dark sentry, and up here, behind the double shot cappuccino and that reach of glass, I can hear nothing. Susurration. perhaps.