nature

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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.

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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.