think

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Island Blog – Alpha Zeta

I quote……’ What’s the greatest thing a woman should learn? That, since day one, she already had everything she needs within herself. It’s the world that convinced her she did not.’ Rupi Kaur

Trouble is, we, born with vaginas listen to worldspeke. We do, and it can confound and punish and confine us. I so wish I was 20 now and not 70, because I would have been a frickin menace. I had, I confess, hoped, that somewhat more of a freedom would have become a norm as my own daughter moved into the world of man control, and it has changed, but not enough. Perhaps, as our planet sucks her gasping breaths, the old structure might just collapse into a new alphabet. 

It oftentimes struggles me that the allowability to shout out truths only seems to come at the time when there is a load of ‘there,there’ in our ears. We can be ridiculous, inappropriate. How come it’s not ok when we are 15? The world says, ‘It was the Time’ as if that makes it alright. They turn away at that point, I have watched them do just that, as whoever ‘they’ are, or ‘is’ move or moves onto the next painting, choice of pudding. I have felt absent all my life, as if the norms within which I lived missed letters or numbers, as if the alphabet and the math would never find solution. I still do, but in the now of my now, because I have become an old frickin menace, with a vagina, I can say what I like. I have seen what I have seen over 70 years, and I am often pissed off with the whole alphabet. A is alpha. Z is Zeta. Are we saying that one is greater than the other? Are we even bothering with all the letters in between as if they have no significance? Think of the in-betweens in your life. Do it now. Those sitting on the pavement in the face of a night right there. Think of the waitress who is slow to serve you because she is on minimum wage, feeding kids and holding tight to her meagre home. Those, as you walk by on the way to a concert, theatre, a film, dinner, where you plan champagne, a proposal, those who unnerve you, swerve you. 

Shouting out is good, but that way of thinking can become a thing. What we need, and I hesitate to use that word (history), is inclusion, (too wordy), love. Might we forget the old alphabet and move, regardless of letters, word shapes and sentence approval? All good things are wild and free. (not my words) ‘The fire inside me can either warm or destroy. The choice is entirely my own.’ Thoreau. So much of life is about words, the way they are stroyed, the random way they stray, the weight of them as they land. Words. All constructed and constricted by the alphabet. 

I have learned this. I can go from A to Z without the rest of the alphabet knowing. Again, not my words. Writers, painters are nothing if they don’t pinch bigger ideas.

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Island Blog – Thinksmith. She

Been thinking about thinking. We all have a gazillion thinks every day, but it’s the sorting of them that fascinates me, draws me in to the frickin web of itself. I can get stuck. Did you know that a spider web is the strongest of all ‘materials”? It can hold a floating astronaut, once duly bigged up, or so I read. So, these thinks, these random trollops (can I still pen that word?) invade a brain, invited or not, and, mostly so NOT. Howeversoever, they come from the moment we wake. The What To Do List is immediately available, the flat surface visible, and, in theory, doable. Doable? Is that a word now?

Back to Thinks. I wake with all of them and I watch them fly about my mind, then, on lifting into the morning light, into a new day. It’s noisy, the think party, yes, but as my body moves from the dream world, where everything is transient, falling, scary, I grab my huge man-jumper, a gift from an old and gone friend for whom I cooked and cleaned. sling it on and take my legs to the floor. Oh, pause on that. There are those, many thoses who can not do this, and never will. I take the stairs down for coffee, knowing there is warmth and power for the kettle. I flick on the fairy lights because it is so not dawn, yet, but the moon is owning the sky and she smiles me. Salut, Lady Moon. May you live long and prosper.

But, and there is always one of those, or, if not, it’s a bloody However. Another think. How else can a writer break from one statement to another, without a but or a however, or a coach or counsellor, or a friend who cares? We don’t talk right these days. We fire statements like rockets. We don’t invite and accept, on the streets of our lives. Now, I know I am an old island woman, so am not in the hub or hug of today’s thinks, but it seems to me that there is almost more fight for survival in the world of greed and success over others, than ever there was. And that thinks me more, even though I have no inside information on how the hellikins this world works now. Just this very day, I heard a young man tell me he no longer seeks money as his goal. Yes, he wants money for his own lifestyle but not for its own sake. He wants wealth in order to share it, to help someone else, to be random, to be wild with it. It thinked me good.

I can play with words, phrases, terminology, wordology, big thinks, random tiddleypom, the thinksmith, always, she.

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Island Blog – Happy Days

Well, now I can say that I have had an MRI scan, instead of just hearing about others being pushed into a tube, ear plugs and defenders attached, and with much encouragement to remain completely still for half an hour, at the very least. I don’t ever recall being completely still for that long, in my whole life. The knowledge that, to move at all will require a re-scan, is enough to have my toes twitching. My face was pressed into a face-size hole (not my face size, however) and my breasts too, although they didn’t share the face space but, instead, were ‘placed’ in other holes, also not my size. It seems that other women are way better endowed than I. Hey ho. The MRI Controller, a delightful smiling nurse in dark scrubs and with a beautiful face and smile, said things like, Don’t Worry, Think Happy Thoughts and DON’T MOVE. She also said that, when the silver stuff begins to pump up my arm and into my chest, I will feel it like a frozen worm slinking up my veins. Oh, yum!

Pre the scan, I had to answer a load of questions. Do I have any metal piercings? Am I wearing any make-up which, nowadays, has metal in its mix, or can do? Do I have tattoos, allergies, diabetes? have I ever had eye surgery? Do I have any metal crowns? What, like the Queen? No, she chuckled. Teeth. Do you weight over over 20 stone? Oh, ah, no. Tick No to all of the beforeness. And off we go, no, me go, in the delightfully attractive hospital gown/marquee, with the opening at the front. I remained still, ignored my toe twitch and took myself up, up and away into the sky where I met fairies and cherubs and angels and a lot of space. Radio Something blasted tunes into my ears whilst the scanner chugged and beeped and roared and then did a rather attractive staccato thing. The sounds kept on changing, kept me entertained until the frozen worm began its journey. I didn’t even twitch but kept up with the fairies and cherubs, flying high above all of it, the scanner, the cancer, the reality of where I lay, my arms down by my sides, breathing in and breathing out, my body calm and still. There was no flipping way I was going to threaten the success of this scan so I didn’t, something to do with my stoic parents, or something, someone. You don’t fail, that’s it, thats the thing, that is that. So, mostly, we didn’t. (not sure it helped, that attitude in life. Failing, as we all know, is just another step towards success. I digress)

Home now, home now, jiggetty jig (Pigling Bland, for those who never read Enid B) and in a very lowtothegroundnoisyfastwonderfulclassicsportscar. Lying down, I was, which was ok until I clocked that he, the driver, was also lying down. I watched the sky mostly, as the road swirled by, loops and curls and dips and rises and all the while hoping he wasn’t doing any of that sky watching stuff as huge lorries, massive SUVs and even the ordinary saloon, big with family and dog, passed us by from at least a 5 foot elevation. No matter. We zoomed like a focussed insect, overtaking (super fast) holding the road, taking corners as I would never take them, aka, no gear changes, and with an excellent driver, arrived back home in no cafuffle at all. He did ask me. Were you scared? And I could honestly answer No. I told him this. I am old. He says Elderly, arf. I want adventures, still, fun for sure. I may be scared about cancer and scans and lungs and breasts and oldness But, and that But is important, I do not want to turn back, fold, become less of that which my spirit still is. We have tunes on, me and my Lotus Elise driver son. He is cooking salmon, prepping a salad, I am writing this.

Happy Days.

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Island Blog – Tatterlife

Yesterday the air was warm and still and the sun shone like a circle of fire in a right blue sky. T’is rare here and so very welcome. We, who live as islanders in the now of Now, know this and our shorts and suncream come out just like that. There is no Winter/Summer collection of clothing. We find the beach, the forest, the shore, just as the birds do. We do not presume another such day. This day the wind rises, not cold but coming from a source that will turn to South Westerly but not yet. This afternoon the wind is slanty-eyed, mean and punching and the poppies will not last the night for the accompanying rain that batters resolute. These are the days of our life up here and I remember it well, travelling back overtime when being ‘out there’ for the animals and the visitors brought a damp into the evening kitchen. Oh dear, tomorrow there will be people at our door, damp guests in need of warming food instead of the fresh salmon salad with minted new potatoes I had planned. Dawn found me making soup, a contradiction of what was yesterday as they chuckled in frocks and sunlight. But I know what you don’t know yet. I didn’t say.

And it thinks me. I wonder how those who expect Summer to be Summer or any season to be as it was, either in childhood, or just before we finally (good lord) got the hang of climate change. Resistance is futile. We know this. And we still resist. I think about that. Out here inside the sharp-toothed mouth of a volatile Atlantic Ocean, we might be wiser than we thought. After all, we have lived with a dynamic not many could ever live with and for years, no, generations. I get that island roots help and they do, a lot. My own understanding of this came once I discovered that my great grandfather was a lighthouse keeper on Skerryvore, one of the wildest and most isolated of lights and I mean so wild, even when the Atlantic was in a good mood. Ferocious waves and zilch accessibility. My great grandmother, on Tiree must have wrung her hands at every storm approaching. Or maybe not. Maybe she just got the hang of this sunshine calm/ ferocious storm dingbat thing like every other day. A boat will bring mail/people/family/food supplies. Or not. And the Not might be months.

I think we island folk, for all the moaning that goes on about ferries and poppy stripping, are pretty well equipped mentally for the way times are a’changing. I think that everyone should experience life in a wild place. Not not and not again as a holiday home but as an experience. The island, all islands are beautiful in the sunshine days. But there are zillions of poppy stripping days, of roofs lifted in sudden changes, of the slam dunk and crash of nature blasting in, of freak storms, of ferocious and terrifying gales with hours of lashing hailstones that can kill a cow, a deer, a sheep.

But I am glad to know this, to be in the mix of this. Not happy about the scary times but somehow in tune with what I have known for decades. However, this time, this climate change time does alert me like a rabbit to danger. And it is ok. If I am resistant to the change that is a glare in my headlights, then I am a fool and I am no fool. The poppies will be stripped in this sudden wind. And then I will walk out in the calm of the next day, thank them, and let them go. This is a Tatterlife. We are all living it no matter where we are, what we earn, whom we know. It isn’t that life is dying, no. Life is finally asking us to live it.

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Island Blog – To Self

I used to think I was myself. I thought ‘self’ rhymed with elf and that worked for me because I felt easy around elfish thought and elfish being. But I was wrong. Whom I thought I was didn’t fit with city life around a mum who wanted to fit in and I did not. Oh, I am not saying I didn’t enjoy the cityness of city, I did at times but there was always a longing for what, for something I did not yet know, nor understand. I watched my friends happy (it seemed) in their environs, around the lifestyle their parents had forged and fought for and I turned green at their easy joy. Like an elf.

Moving on, because this is not about me at all. My baby sister is famous for her internal bubble and fizz. She is still just herself as she always was, but I do admit my watching her was through binoculars as she turned from girl to woman. Nonetheless, she was herself. You might, had you been there as we grew and flew, observed that, as the youngest of five and as a very feisty pint sized girl, she retained her identity, when others of us higher up the line might have bent and bowed in order to avoid parental judgements, admonitions and flying hands. I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t there. I was firmly married and dealing with all the upsydowns of such conjugality. She was not afraid to speak her self out, stand her ground but always gently, not like me. I doubt she ever slammed a door or tantrummed out or performed any other such taradiddle. Maybe she did but it isn’t in her eyes, not when I look. And those eyes are still brightly focussed and merry, ready for a twitch or a lift or a dance or a spontaneous hug.

Over time and troubles we have learned each other as grown women. Although we shared parents, her memories are not mine. I remember one evening when the three ‘Little Ones’ remembered something. I knew nothing of what or whom they spoke, their happy voices and smiles lifting like birds or butterflies into the room. I had gone by then, moved away from self and it thought me, thinks me now on my peregrination to self and it is as wavering and wandering as the word because if you have bent and bowed for most of your life, how can you easily find your own self? It also laughs me and fill me with chuckles because I know Self is out there somewhere and she will find me too, one day.

I digress. Sorry Birthday Girl. Thank you for being there for me. Thank you for being so beautifully wild and strong. You little pipsqueak, you tiny powerful woman, you know your self. And I think I always loved that in you.

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Island Blog – Needs, Things and Each Other

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what I need, what I think I need and what I don’t actually need at all. What I need is one thing and what I think I need quite another. What I need is what we all need, love, community, friendship, social encounters, a roof over our heads, food for our bellies, heat to warm us on cold days and nights. We need a bed to sleep in, a pan to cook with, a plate to eat off. And so on.

The second need is the one ‘I think’ I need and thoughts, as we all know, can be fickle friends. As I dash to re-purchase this thing online, or jot that one down on a shopping list, I pause to question myself. Could I manage without this thing? Do I really need to Subscribe and Save on mascara for instance or Evening Primrose oil or Dog chews? Could I find, perhaps, an alternative once the one I have turns solid or runs out or better, learn to live without it at all? The answers are all in the affirmative (although stepping out without mascara is a scary thought) so I make myself wait a while in order to stop my knee jerking. The absolute necessity of most ‘things’ fade into mist eventually. It is astonishing how very much I can easily do without and, I notice, these apparent needs that caused me momentary panic not so long ago, are always just things. After all I never need to write down, Call this child of mine, remember a birthday, send a card or letter or email of encouragement. I never forget the not things in my life. But in the realm of things lie all the troubles. Things need us too much, and not the other way around. They matter disproportionately, our material needs, the number of ‘Likes’ we get on Facebook, for example or the followers on Instagram and so on.

But it is people who matter, not things, never things. Rich or poor, surrounded by ‘things’ or without them we have a choice when it comes to sharing ourselves, our light, our conversation and our interest in each other. All the not things worth everything cost absolutely nothing, not a penny, not a sou. So next time you are assailed by a sudden need for a thing, even to the point of complete panic, breathe out that breath, blow it away and with it all the nonsense thought-chatter because inside that huge brain of yours lie a million neural pathways, each one leading somewhere you may never have travelled before. And, given enough quiet breathing in and out, enough space created between the apparent need and that sweet but infuriating voice of inner intelligence, you may well discover, as have I, that whatever promised to make life perfect is a liar.

The issue of what I actually don’t need at all lies entirely inside my own head. Now that I have learned to stop and to question the knee jerk, the have-to-have thing, I am laughed at how faithfully I have responded to date. I was a sheep, in truth, following the flock even if each one ahead of me fell off the cliff. How ridiculous! But once aware, always aware and I am busy awareing, particularly so since the hacking when access to any purchase slammed a door in my face, when this hacker infiltrated my social media, broke down the very walls within which I had felt completely safe. It is freeing. I can feel myself rising from sheep into intelligent woman and it’s not a new feeling. Each time I have noticed my fall into mindlessness, in whatever area of my life, the thoughtless following behind the others, it has laughed me. Good lord, what the heck am I doing, or, more likely, not doing? I think we can all be mindless at certain times in our lives when we find our ship foundering on the rocks of trouble, when the walls fall down and we stand naked in the wind and rain. In desperation we try to grab hold of all we held so dear, all that, we thought, kept our walls firmly around us. And although we might blame the ‘hacker’ initially, we can be honest with ourselves. We needed this rock-founder in order to think as an intelligent being, to reconsider the way we are living our life. But we are normal, we are human and all of us want our life to continue just as it did before. However, Life never goes back, only forwards and if we can accept this, embrace Change in her attending discomfiture, then we are the ones who are truly alive. We are adventurers, we are brave, we are mindful beings in a mindless world.

So let the stop stop you. Let time go by and ask yourself, as I asked my own self, What is really lacking here? Is it the thing I feel I cannot live without or am I just lonely, unfulfilled, frustrated, angry, sad? When a person has the courage to ask those questions, the patience to wait for an answer and the trust to address the real issue, a way will show itself. Not the old way but a strange new way on a road heretofore untravelled, at least by us. On this road, this path there is laughter. On this path everyone makes mistakes, founders and falls down but all around are those to lift, to encourage, to make you laugh, to hold you up until you once more find your footing because all around you are others who know, have learned themselves, that what we all really need is each other.

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Island Blog – An Old Lady and This Day

Today I watched, on a Zoom meet, a woman of almost 90 and obviously quite the thing around the interworld. She, elegant and with the bright eyes of a bird, was clearly confident. She uses WhatsApp, Facebook and other apps with strange names, although she didn’t announce it in search of a Goodlordwelldonehowamazingyouare response. In fact I suspect she might have looked astonished had any of us shown our resistance or lack of interest in being thus in touch with cyber space. I thought on her life, about which I know absolutely nothing. She knew war and deprivation, loss and fear, possibly hunger and cold. She knew flappers and bombs, new jazz and silent movies. What things she has seen in her long lifetime, what things! And she is not confused, not at all, nor has she lost her beauty, that soft-lined old face with more laugh lines than wrinkles and not a whine in sight. I suspect she was fierce, could be fierce and might yet be fierce and that thinks me. In her days of simple but harsh life, she had to keep her humour and her resilience, her softness and her fight. She needed both heart and claws. I imagine she was decisive and direct, unfearful as we are now fearful to confront rudeness, untruth, injustice and wrongdoings. She looks pint sized but never let a pint sized woman kid you into thinking you are stronger, because you are not. It isn’t about size nor physical strength but about courage, passion and backbone. I wanted to sit at her feet to hear her stories. I just hope her young ask her for I do regret not asking enough for stories from my own old ones.

So an ordinary morning was flipped on its aspidistra. Just like that. An invite to a zoom, to meet women I don’t know turned into a whole day of thinks and mind flips, memories and chuckles. Ah, when we greet the day with open hearts, what delights and sights await our looking eyes! If we are looking, that is. I am always looking so that every incoming thing catches my eyes. Was I born with this? Perhaps, but that perhaps can get subsumed by lifely demands, lists, children, workloads and drudge until it becomes something you can’t really taste in a tired sandwich. I’ve been lost there too. But there is this thing in me that refuses not to live, to really live, even on shambolic tricksy days. I can feel low and full of self-pity and there’s a word or two on that. Self pity is everywhere inside us. It is an easy go-to when life happens, when life throws the shit our way and laughs in our faces. I tried resisting, I tried reasoning, I tried logic and denial and not one of them ever worked. Ok, I said. This is not working. Let us meet, my unwelcome visitor, across the table, my table, and discuss. I soon saw it, Self Pity, for what it is and, after a few direct questions, its voice became skinny against my inner core strength, my own self. It surprised me at first, and then as confidence grew, I took my power back. I am taking my power back, I had said in my best strong voice and it bent and cracked and crumbled until there was nobody but me at that table. It was a gasp for me because I never felt any inner core strength, nor power, but just ran into the fight with heart and claws and with no idea of the outcome. I bluffed, basically.

I wonder how many times that long-living woman did just that right out on the street of her life, within her home, along her neighbourhood. These days we fight with ourselves. In her day there was no such thinking. The tough survived, the weak did not, although I bet she helped a few. Back then, thinking was for the thinkers and not for we ordinary folks. We just pulled on our stockings and got on with it, with all of the ‘its’ day after day after day. Not a bad way to live. Although I do bow to the thinkers, they have, unintentionally, opened up a can of worms because many of us stay with the worms and forget to live, to dance, to fight for injustice, to laugh at disaster because we know what we can do in the face of it. Like her, like that old lady who changed my day and not just this one.

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Island Blog – The Trees Speak me Friendship

Yesterday lifted into today about five hours earlier than I might have chosen. Sleeping is obviously not my strongpoint. I should know this by now, accept the truth of it but I am a natural believer in a good ending, not because the aforesaid happens to me, but that I happen to it. If my attitude is positive, my diet good, my daily walks beneath the giant trees accomplished, mindfully, then I will sleep and sometimes I do, but on those ‘do’ days I wake in astonishment and rarely expect a replay. Perhaps that’s my mistake.

I dress, pull on my attitude, go through my decisions for the day, squirt perfume, turn to the dark window and look out. I know it is fully dark here by comparison. No streetlights, no headlights, no light pollution at all. I keep looking. There is no such thing as full dark. My eyes adjust. T’is a survival thingy. I can see a bit more, a bit star, a bit moonslice tipping out from behind a cloud for a moment, just a moment. Ah, I say. I remember a time, no, times, walking home from a ceilidh in the village into the pitch black of night in all the wrong kit. I remember the first frill of fear, the fingers of it touching me, shivering me. I remember stopping still on the Tapselteerie track. A mile of this to go, more and a lot of winding and pothole avoiding. Stop. Look. Listen. The trees know where you are. Find them and listen. Alone out there and with the fear sliding off my back, I felt myself come back to me. Bringing all senses into an intelligent one, we moved forward in a new light. I could hear the wind coming from the west, or the east or the south or the north just by the lick of it against my skin and the trees bent accordingly. It thinked me, this bending with a powerful element. I chuckled as I move forward. Of course they, the trees, must learn to move with the wind changes, with whatever each one brings. Otherwise, well, think firewood. Could I, this small and only ‘I’ learn from the trees? Could I be as majestic and strong as they are in spite of wind changes?

I did and I still do. This day after the clouds dumped about 27 rivers on our heads, the sky cleared a bit and that lovely blue appeared, swirled with clouds. Actually, I can feel a bit sorry for clouds. They are at the mercy of all four winds, all four temperamental powers, shredded, clumped together, fluffed up until they get complacent and then pulled apart like rotten cotton and thrown into space. So, the blue came and I walked through the Tapselteerie woods, every single step a memory and yet each step completely new. I stop to watch the beech trees, all sung out and bare, silver trunked and light rooted. Hold tight, I say as I move beneath 100 year old limbs like gifting arms. I hear the squeak of birch branches, the tic tic of brush Hazel, the groan of the giant pines and the song of their needles. Looking up is fine but don’t step forward when you are doing the looking up thing. There are potholes and puddles and things that bring you right back down to earth just when you thought you were Alice or Dorothy.

I think of land ownership. Not that I believe in it. We are just tenants for a while and thus responsible for the land we think we own. I know now that trees care for each other, that a beech tree roots light, that pines go deep, as do oaks, but, as they do their roots find weakness in another species, say a birch or an alder and that root will lift like a strong finger until it holds the weakness, securing it to the ground. Now that is friendship.

And the trees are friends to me.

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Island Blog – The Nothing

It rained today. A lot. The track is more like a little stream despite the culverts, now all clogged with copper leaves, hesitating the flowaway. I stop to watch the trickle that should be a steady flow. This rock, this island, is good at sloughing off water and it needs to be for we would all drown otherwise. There is enough height, enough of the waters need to return to Mother Sea, to ensure we just require wellies and macs and a good attitude. Our skin is good up here, less drying wrinkles, more flow and adjust, much like the land upon which we live. I skim the puddles where the land lifts like a shrug, just enough to allow a sort of dry footfall. My old boots, my beloved boots, are more than happy to share the wet with the wet and I can often squelch homewards. No matter. Things can always dry unlike sad hearts, hearts that just recently have filled with salt tears with nowhere to go. Not my heart. Mine is dry as a desert and there may be a problem there, but this is not about me. This is about them, the ones who cannot see beyond the rain, cannot see the bright light in between clouds, the geese flying black against the darkling sky, the swing and waggle of some shrub grown way beyond its boots and needing a cutting reminder of its place in the garden.

I see the old pines out back, quiet now that the stripping wind has exhausted itself. Larch and pine needles thicken the steps up to the compost bin as I walk them today. The burn is loud and wild with peatwater, brown and luscious and thinks me of whisky. So fast it falls, crashing down into pools and slowing like a slug as it builds and bubbles golden froth in the waiting time. I hear it at night as I try to sleep, listen to its song. I love to hear living water, I love the tidal crash. I love the argument between land and sea and I love the way they work it all out. But it does think me of where something stops and another something begins, such as a life, a death.

As I diddle about with should I, shouldn’t I in the confines of Covid fear I think of those who are in the place I was over a year ago. They are there right now and I can do nothing to ease their pain. They will be feeling everything and nothing at the same time. They will be numb and practical, baking, cooking, serving, anything to fill in their moments, anything to keep their feet moving, their smiles bright. I know this place but I know nothing about their place. It confounds me, thinks me of the crash of the burn as it falls into a pool, almost a relief, about the slug in the waiting time. It is, in a word, tapselteerie and yet they will be fighting to hold on to normal because for decades normal was normal. Effortless. She knew who she was and he knew who he was. Now that he is gone, who the heck is she? What is normal?

And Nothing is waiting at the door. Nothing is but a bit player on this stage. But, for some time she will give him the limelight. As I did. As I still do at slug-froth times. My respect to her, to any of you who know what the heck I am talking about.

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Island Blog – Eighth Wonder

I am 68. My eldest boy is 48. His daughter is 8. I like 8 and it thinked me this day as I counted everything to get to 8. My footsteps to the washing line, the stairs on the stairs, the times I changed frocks although that is the fault of a haar that barrelled in just as we all thought the sun was in charge. It has come and gone this day, 8 times. We are currently enjoying a non-haar moment or eight. I hung 8 things on the washline. One duvet cover, one fitted sheet, two pillow cases, 3 pinnies and a dishcloth. I did so not plan that 8. Promise. I am not anal.

When something comes into a mind, something that has resonance with whatever past or present complexicus or delusion, it can fix like a road block. You just can’t go forward, backwards or sideways without encountering this fix thingy. Usually, it lasts a day, dissolving into the dark of the night and foofing into the forgotten but occasionally it lasts. I have had a few of them in my time. However, I am confident that this 8 thing came from yesterday and will be gone the morra, as we say up here. As that rather lovely digit, art, to be honest, an endless line in a double scoop and with a great deal to say about itself, my mind wandered towards the 7 wonders of the world.

I know them , of course I do. The first is my Granny’s house in Edinburgh. The 2nd is the Eiffel Tower. Third is the day I knew I was expecting my firstborn. Fourth are the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and fifth is the view from my little island home. The 6th is/are, without doubt, my five children and 10 grandchildren, 7th is The lighthouse at Alexandria and the 8th is clear to me. It should be up there for all to see for it is indeed a world wonder.

I believe that had the world been emotionally intelligent at the time an importance of revered men got together to decide for the rest of us, this 7 wonders thing, or had there been allowed a woman in the selection committee (eye-roll) then this 8th wonder would have have listed high, before the Hanging Gardens, even before the Giza Pyramid, because although those wonders bring in sightseers, money, wows and gasps and tons of photos, the 8th wonder can change the world for the better, unlike any of them. The 7 can be blown out of the ground, destroyed, looted and reduced to rubble. The 8th cannot, not if it is handed down the generations.

Ok, I’m about to tell you. It came from a yesterday moment, one that stopped me in my tracks like a roadblock. I wanted to stop. I wanted to take it in, the think I thinked, to fully absorb how incredibly powerful this 8th wonder really is. It may sound simple. It may seem impossible. It may be an eye-roller, but I think the 8th wonder of the world is a man who can happily listen to a woman, hear what she has to say and then empathise without fixing.

I know 2 outside of my family.

We have a long way to go girls.