weather

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Island Blog – Sun, Rain and I will Tomorrow

It may appear that, now I’m in Africa, I have less to say. Of course, it isn’t that, not at all, but more something to do with the sun, the beckoning, the light that opens up a day into a ‘let’s go’. It’s the same back home when the sun finds it in himself to show up at all, and we all respond, leaping into shorts despite the freezeback wind and the threaten of clouding somewhere over by. Kids want the beach, a picnic, play and more play, and thus everyone and anyone heads for the sea, or the river, or the pool if there is one in the vicinity. So, my musing will have it, sunshine and water are strongly linked. Very few will choose a cinema matinee or a visit to Great Aunt Granola in the nursing home. Not on a sunshine day. The film will show again, and she can wait a day or two as it is sure to rain tomorrow or the next, as it always does.

In Africa, rain is a blessing, and a challenge to drivers. I imagine it is also a challenge to those who live in townships, all those roofs fashioned from sheets of tin if you’re lucky, bits of tarp or bin bags if you’re not. But rain brings instant life to soil, fills water tanks, cools broiling bodies, eases tension. The drivers, as aforementioned, however, panic. Slippy roads stultify and confuse, it seems. Capetown, and other places, go slow, and I mean very slow, so that traffic convergence becomes traffic hesitation. Windscreen wipers swing like crazy and every other vehicle flashes emergency lights at any opportunity. It’s hilarious, unless you’re in a hurry, and a bizarre to me who knows rain in every state from slightly slippy road, through compromised vision to roadside puddles deep enough to sink my mini.

I walked again today down to the Indian Ocean. Sounds so majestic. She is warm and wild, her waves no hawking spit but rising above the horizon, backlit by sun, clutching kelp and shells in her grasp, to boom, and I mean BOOM onto the wide arc of white sand. She has a lot to say, and loudly. I felt it today as I read my book, the sonar wave shooting up the beach through me and knew I was connected, as we all are to all things, all the wild things we have, unfortunately forgotten in our rush for worldly gain. I watch dogs scuttle and dash in and out of the waves, their humans wandering besides. I see kite surfers fly above the crests, and canoeists paddle out to investigate rock formations. I hear children laughing as they tumble and shriek through the shallows.

My walk here takes me through an underpass, meaty with kelp-throw, a rush of freshwater strictured after big moon tides and very gloopy to navigate. Then I meet the ocean, flooding like she has a load of tongues, no two with the same sweep. One ankle deep, the next losing most of my legs to the swirl. I chuckle. My feet are safe, sand locked, my frock hem-soaked. I read a while, watch a train chortle by just above my head, wish I had brought my swimsuit. (is that what it’s called these days?)

I will tomorrow.

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Island Blog – A Fetouche

I’m watching the tide, Springs now, so big high, big low. Kind of reminds me of me. The tide, at this flood time, brings in the salmon and sea trout which (I’d rather write whom) just want a reasonably safe passage up to the fresh water that they seek for spawning. Interruptus lies in wait with lures and nets to catch them t’wirly. You might have to look that one up. Nonetheless, it intrigues me. The full moon, the swell and suck of it, of her, for surely, with her tempestuous nature, the sea is female? I cannot believe I wrote that, so ridonculous it reads in our, thankfully new, appreciation of how wrong we have been for a verrrrrrry long time. Eish.

Back to the tide. And to the weather, which, or is it whom, has confounded us this year, as it did last year, only in a kindlier way. I have frickin massive sunflowers, green for about 5 feet, blocking my view of any tidal flow, and yet producing no buds at all, till now, tiny nubs, and yellow as butter and I am so pleased I didn’t wheech the stalks out a while ago. There is always hope and that’s how I live and so, perhaps this seasona interrupta is teaching me, and you, how to listen and learn. I have blue things growing, pink ones too, stocky and holding to the earth, hesitational. I get that. And it wonders me.

I worked at Lunch Club today, just as a volunteer. In the village hall we lay out a welcome table, flower festive, for anyone who comes. One did. Then two, and then, as we in the kitchen decided it was a quiet day, up to 17 arrived, all smiles and ready for soup, sharing and laughter, and pudding, of course. I leaned against a kitchen unit, as my friends accommodated the rise of human tide. It told me that, even if each singular life appeared all green and no flowers, even if the tidal rise and fall of this year, this season, never lifted their spirits, that we could conjoin here, in this kitchen, we could make a stepping stone for each other into the next day. I am no fool. I know that most folk ‘pretend’ that everything is ok, that they are ‘fine’ and that they are not afraid, scared, cold, lonely.

We know the moon rise and fall here. We see it loud, every time. We are so close, we could touch it. We can walk out into the blast of Spring tides. Sometimes, I wonder how you who live in cities and out there beyond the connection we have, manage emotional flow. It is hard enough to understand out here. A fetouche, for sure.

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Island Blog – Catastrophise, Dramatise, Realise

I am altogether not sure about the z and s in the spellings of these words. It was always s in my day, a zillion yonks ago, and there’s a thing. Zillions were Millions back then and that was beyond most everyone even then. So I play with the ‘zee’ and the ‘ess’ for godsake. Language changes after all, and I don’t know what that means, not neither. Moving on……..I have been full of thinks these past quiet times, and not just thinks, although the thinks-thing is of value, in that it, the think, thinks me. I had the eyeball check, all ok in that nothing will heal my left eyeball. My right is right as right. I was always right oriented, not that I need to be right, but my right side is my strength. Writing or any other thing, I do with my right. But I need my left, to educate me. So, my leftie is a tad compromised? We can deal with this, the two of us. And there’s the thing, again.

The clouds louer, growl, hover, push down, closing the sky. That sounds so like a sentence, but it is nothing of the sort. We know clouds out here, in the hawk spit of a volcanic finality, where it landed, where we live. It rains and loud, like a growing out of all sound, even the meen of a liquidiser, conversation stalled, loud, that loud. The Western isles clouds move like queens out on the raz. They come with punch and independence and consequence. I have known these trixy clouds for decades. We have had many conversations. They have guided me through lambing, sailing, hanging out the washing, choosing time to walk, to lead the horses, the bull, the milk cow to a field, or out of it. A keek at them clouds, and a wee question, sometimes a negotiation, and we have worked our way through the days.

I know that weather has changed, but for those of us who knew this was coming, it is no surprise. I know I have the benefit of longtime association with clouds, and intuition around weather patterns, but anyone can learn this. I am no scientist, no clever student. I just know that we can catastrophise and dramatise. We can hide, pretend it isn’t happening, but it is. And, happily we can realise and research and be aware as much as possible. And life is so beautiful. I hear at times, those who hold on to what was, the summers we knew, the way fungi should not be rising just now, what happened? That pointless question.

We can catastrophise, dramatise, or realise, and get going with how it is, how things are. It is a beautiful understanding, and an opening in the clouds, and more, an opportunity. Roses are fabulous this year, the sun blast sudden and as a real head turn, the random warmth like a mother, colours rise like fires in the grey, raindrops diamond, people laugh at the turn of it all. There is so much for the ones who notice, who engage.

Dont’ miss this. Realise.

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Island Blog – The Atticus and the Reflexion

I’ve been allowing a whole load of thinks over the past days. They swirl in like twimbly waves against the atticus that stands strong, stoney strong, against any natural flow, like a frickin blockade, salty confusion and a whole load of ineffective slapping at a finite. I got sick of this. To slam at a solid truth is to waste energy and intelligence. Although most of us, if we are honest, keep swirling twimbly waves at a solid something we don’t like one fricketty bit, by the way, until we eventually blow out of breath and energy. And we see the pointlessness of such a flagellation. As I have done, thank the holy crunch. I decide to employ reflexion, a different word to the one with a ‘c’ and a ‘t’ and with a shift in meaning, if not a complete one of those shift things.

I can see behind me, beyond me, I can see from whence I have come and this damn atticus is right in my path, if waves can ‘path’. And I have been slamming at it with full ocean saltforce, without intelligent thought. I suspect this is normal, whatever that means. It isn’t just me who confounds, surely? And then I find reflexion. It’s a flexi word, dynamic, inviting and entirely appropriate. It is ‘the phenomenon (I’m already in with that word) of a propagating (again) wave of light or sound, being thrown back from a surface’. Don’t you just love that! Opportunity, choice, intelligence, all so dynamic. However, I do know what it feels like to be on a boat in wild weather and facing an atticus, and it took a brilliant skipper to draw us all safely away from a slam dunk that would have so pissed me off down in Davy’s locker, as dinner was all prepped and the fires lit and the candles just squatting there all ready to fire up the evening. The undertow in an ocean is never to be ignored, not for one minute. Just saying, and maybe my just saying is saying something. Overboard, and you could end up in Venezuela for Christmas.

I know atticus is always a sudden. I also know how reflexion can tumble me over and onwards to fret another shoreline, to tingle more little toes, to whisper over other sands. But, without an atticus, there’d be no limits, no new startings, no haltings that help us to consider our choice of direction. We are in control of our own boat. I just got that. Once again.

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Island Blog – Thanks to a Horsefly

I’m here, back home and in the wealth of warmth. Well, warm, eventually, as the mornings can be sharp and bitey, requiring jumpers and leg coverings and a very good attitude to the shivers that challenge a mug of hot coffee. The afternoons sprawl wealthy on the bed of confidence, no leg coverings required, in fact, bring on the fans please. T’is weird and the way it is. By noon, I am overly clad and fighting my morning garb for the sudden, and somewhat desperate freedom from all that morning hoo-ha, which I abandon on the stairs. Jumper, leg cladding, even wrist warmers for the day is in pieces up here. Where once, we knew how the day would be, might be, the wise cautionaries telling us to keep our semets (vests with buttons and much restriction) on for months to come, now there is disarray and not only in the vest, leg cladding, jumper department. Weather steers moods. Cold rain, warm rain, just rain. Promise of sun, hope of sun, arrival of sun. It all guides us from pissed off to delighted, from a confirmed ‘there’s no hope’ to the one who is alert and watching the cloud shift, is accepting climate change, is actually the one in the game. And the game is more than weather. The game is one we play together and alone. Many of us have been assaulted by massive loss, like a sudden death. I almost cannot follow that sentence. It is too catastrophic. Too alone.

I find this next bit quite hard to say, as if I feel that what is going on with me palls by comparison to the catastrophic and sudden loss, one I have been close to this last week, and a timeline I can never be a part of, beyond the paltry can give.

But I am saying it. My time in hospital, whilst I fought to be not dead, has thrown up something important. With Cellulitis, there is a lot of swelling and one lymph gland remaind high despite the massive doses of antibiotics that saved my life, and after which, my consultant, Isobel, God bless her, sent me for a mammogram and biopsy and ultra sound. She was right. I have breast cancer, an unusual one, called Invasive Lobular Cancer. She, the cancer, is quiet, not necessarily presenting in lumps, although they did, eventually find one, the half size of a frozen pea. She appears in the right breast for the first time, as I have had at least five no problem lumps in the left.

What I feel is scared, unsure, and thankful for a horsefly bite. Beyond all those intitial feelings I am unsure about being in the garden. Thankyou friend Winnie for guiding me to big ass protection. Thank you to my ex breast cancer sisters who guide me to probiotics and dark green veg. I will leave island in a week for consultation and biopsy and mammogram and MRI and a whole load of questions and decisions. I don’t know whether it will be a lumpectomy or a complete wheech off of breasts. But what I do know is the strength of my family, my siblings.

I am suddenly cautious coming downstairs, cautious about walking out without a kick ass protection slathered over me. I am aware of my age, and that seemed to come overnight. Slower to move, all of that shit. But, for now I am watching eider duck on the sealoch, divers, geese, and the sun is creating diamonds on the salty surface.

And I am eternally grateful to a horsefly.

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Island Blog – A Story for the Bridge

The birds wake me, for there is no other disturbance here. I know, I know, many hear the bin lorry, early traffic, noisy neighbours, those heading for work or those heading home from work, but not here, here where the biggest sounds are from Nature. And I am glad I live here. However, it is not always a treat. The sun doesn’t always shine big, bright and warm and oftentimes the birds are punched backwards by the gales that can rise in Spring, Autumn, and definitely in Winter, and Winter stays way too long. Always has. But we who have lived here longtime, have learned to love the whole of island life. We might turn blue in the endless months of rain and chill, but we know that our weather, an unique weather pattern, will, in time, turn on the sun to warm us. And we have learned how to bring a smile into any day, even if it takes a lot of physical strength to remain upright when moving from car to shop.

The garden is dry, the island is dry. A rare thing, and not so rare, historically. There is talk of a water ban. I remember one, way back in Tapselteerie days, when bowsers came over on the ferry, their big rotund bellies full of someone else’s water. Not for us, though, with our independent flow of spring water, but for others on the mains. Holiday cottages, bed and breakfasts, hotels, all flapdoodled without water. Water. The {almost} only thing we need to survive.

I am watching weeds thrive in this mini drought. It thinks me. If I had to come back as a plant I would come as a weed, a pretty one, mind, but a weed, nonetheless. These creatures are tough, survivors, invasive, yes, but they survive. What does that say about me, I wonder? I believe I am hot-wired for survival, and not just a wimpy sort of almost there sort of survival, but a pushy, strong and flowering one. I meet many of my age and on into their 70’s, and see myself as fortunate, indeed. Others have not been so lucky, as weedy me, I see, walking with sticks and supports, with hair that hasn’t seen a hairdresser for some time, who are out of breath and melting in this heat. I put up a big thank you, and pull down a blessing for each one of them. These folk are my folk. We danced in village halls together, not so very long ago, but there will be no more dancing for them.

There is a bridge over our lives, one we all must traverse, at some point. It’s a swing bridge, one we don’t really trust. Half-way across, exactly, is the keystone. It lies in the middle ride, and without this keystone, we would all end up in the water. I am on it, we all are, once we hit our three score years and ten, and, because I can still dance, i can help, encourage and support others around me. Together we can laugh at the inevitable, remember our younger days and lift our long memories into play, batting them back and forth between us like shuttlecocks, because we have shared a history on this island, through all the difficult days and through all the happy ones. Only our circumstances are different. Our sense of fun is the same.

I just went to the shop to buy compost for the dry earth, readying it for a sluice of goodness. Prior to this, I had walked the hotdog to the shore for some coolth and a tiddle about on the rocks. I found a tiny shell, a twizzley one, like a minute snail. I also picked up wire, plastics, rope and twine, which would, had I left it, have rejoined the ocean at high tide. Having only two hands, I pushed the tiny sea-snail shell down my front. I would find it again, eventually. Forgetting it completely, I drove to the shop, smiled everyone up and lugged my compost into the boot. Once home, something caught my attention and I burst out laughing. This snail shell had migrated into just the wrong place, so that it looked like one nipple stood out and proud. I thought the shopkeeper had looked at me, a tad abashed.

I wish I’d had that story for the bridge.

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Island Blog – True Communication

The weather here in Africa changes every day. Yesterday was too hot for toffees and bare feet on the deck, burning, broiling sun, the need for shade essential. Inside the weather stays much the same until load shedding when no air-conditioning cools the skin, when it becomes a sweat-fest, when moving around at all must be performed slowly in order to avoid a meltdown. Unusual, they tell me, those who live here. I can walk out in bright sunshine beneath a perfectly blue sky and return after one cup of excellent coffee in a deluge of warm rain, as if the clouds all agreed to dump their load and all at once. Just as quickly, it changes again. I am forever dinging back and forth with anti-mosquito spray only to have it showered off, reapply, shower, reapply. But this is a small problem in the face of the continuing elevation of power offs. For those who need power in order to run a business, it is a big deal, unless you have a noisy generator to fire up at such times and even that harrumphing beast won’t run everything. It wonders me. Is this a worsening thing or just for now? I believe the former and not just for Africa. It will come to all of us eventually. The key is in preparation, alternatives and attitude, much like everything else in life over which none of us has control. The only control we all have is over ourselves, our choices, our attitudes.

The Ha-di-das awaken me early each morning with their cawing. I am certain that they line up outside my window like a choir with tonsillitis, one, two, three, now! and I am blasted from sleep like a rocket from a bottle. They are big birds and everywhere and it is impossible to hear what another person is saying when they ha-di-da overhead. I decide they’re the crows of Africa but without crow intelligence, all that fleeing’ aboot and yelling the same stuff around the houses, following or chasing each other from tree to tree as if that’s all they need to do to justify their existence. In between their cawing chaotics, a sweeter song, the bulbul, smaller, softer of voice and considerably prettier of hue, lift and flutter between the branches preparing the second nest of the year. One bulbul calls, another answers, so politely. There’s no everyone-shouting-at-once thing with bulbuls. Other beautiful rainbow birds with floaty tails that arrive on a branch a few seconds after the body lands, petrol on water, aurora borealis, blood red, butter yellow, sky blue and emerald, the birds delight. None of them shout at each other. It thinks me of communication and the different ways we use it in our own lives.

We all have our colours, our voices, and we all want, no, long, to be heard, to be listened to. Sitting with another I want to hear what they say and then respond, probably with a question, thus making it clear that I have heard what you say and want to know more. If I am being a ha-di-da at that point, I may fall into the trap of counterpoint by bringing up an experience of my own. This, I have learned, is not what you want from me, not at all, because what I am doing is to dilute your story, thus indicating that I know how you feel, which is, of course, a nonsense. How can I know how you feel when I am not you? I can’t. So I ask a question based solely on what you have told me, a question that encourages you to continue. It is odd that we seem to need to compare stories as if that brings us both into a shared place, but we all do it. When himself died, so many people told me they knew how I felt and it was like they had taken out a great big eraser and rubbed my experiential feelings off the page. I stood my ground, said nothing, but felt myself disappearing because all of a sudden, the moment was lost to me and claimed by them as their own. I smiled but wanted to leave both them and the so called conversation which had suddenly become a competition.

I feel the same when someone keeps their mobile face up on the table between us, their eyes darting to look, their eyes off me. I just go quiet because I feel I am now unimportant and definitely unheard. But don’t we both have agendas and busy lives? yes, we do. However this moment we share is the moment to share, to listen to each other, eyes on each other, body language relaxed back and welcoming. You are here with me now and we are not ha-di-das but bulbuls or any other bird that has learned how to communicate softly, listening for a change in tone, in colour, feeling the story and learning from it. You tell me, beneath your words and if I am really engaged, that you are troubled about something, something that is of import and concern. You honour me by sharing, whether it be beneath your words, in your body language or clearly readable on your face. I want not to fix you because what you want from me is validation and a listening ear. Often my mouth doesn’t open at all at such times, because the urge to ‘suggest’ my solution to your problem is full in my mouth and I must needs keep my teeth firmly clenched against the spray which, if freed, will only serve to soak your story, to dissolve it.

Learning learning learning! It bizarres me oftentimes that I still have to, want to, learn a better way to communicate. When I was young and full of my own ha-di-da shrieks and rants, I never considered the rights and wrongs of conversation, my own agenda loud in my mind. I knew the way to solve this problem for you and I rolled it out like a wonderful bright carpet for you to walk on. Ridiculous, I know now, although I was mum of five and that brought a whole gamut of problems requiring immediate solution, but not now, I don’t ‘solve’ now because by not solving, not interrupting you with my marvellously mind-blowing idea, I allow you to find your own way through. And isn’t that all we want as we spread our problem out like a faded map across the table? I believe so, nay, have found it to be so as I listen, question gently and without challenge, without my agenda or my marvellously mind-blowing fix, I watch you light up with an idea, one that just might work for you, and all because I listened and paid attention, sitting firmly on my ego, my need to be the one who sorted you out.

You called. I responded. You spoke. I heard you. Mobile off, eyes on. Rain, sun, power off, power on, none of these are important when someone is vulnerable and trusting enough to tell me of their troubles. I am here. I hear you. I don’t solve you. You do. I know it. Keep talking for I am listening as the faded map between us begins to colour up.

This is true communication.

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Island Blog – A Swan’s Dilemma

I walk down a track of orange, gold, yellow and blood red. The leaves left to rest beneath the trees to left of me and right remain un-crunched by dogged boots. They lift a little in the breeze as if to acknowledge my passing, landing back down again without a single sound, not even a whisper. On the track I recognise, through the mud and squelch and slidden bootprints, oak, ash, sycamore, beech, chestnut, lime, alder and hornbeam, but only just. The weight of all these walkers have pushed the embrowned leaf fall down, down, down towards the earth’s core or chewed them up as I might chew spinach leaves into a pulp. Standwater is everywhere. I see the still standing grasses and woodland plants I cannot name showing only their heads as they fight to rise above the massive rainfalls of late. This, I tell them, is how it will be from now on, so next year, grow taller. They waggle at me as a light puff of what was a full blown gale yesterday ripples the water. Peering down I see the almost astonishment of what lies at the bottom, rocks, stones, grass still green, for now, waving, and drowning.

Long tail tits piccolo around me although I can rarely see them, so tiny are they, but I know their voices so still whisper a greeting. A robin follows me, or does it lead me? I ask this because at the point when I might well take the short route, it bobs on a branch or two beyond the cut-down and eyes me, black, pitch, a challenge. Ok, I say, I know, I say, I should, I say, and I will. Sunlight dapples the track lifting colour to my eyes, a shine on the rocks like a rainbow, as on the surface of stand water, oily and still as something that isn’t alive at all. Any stillness here is a surprise and a thrill because the weather is a………a what? A bully? Sometimes. A mover and shaker? For sure it is aye that. A music maker? Yes, that’s it. The sound of island weather, the way it alters colour faster than I ever could on a canvas, melding, blending, fracturing, defining, the sound of a lead violin in a wild space, the orchestra in full battle mode. You need a conductor I shout above the storm, yanking open the door and holding tight so I don’t head off, like Dorothy, to Oz. Not that I would mind that much. It sounds like an awfully big adventure.

At the funny bone of the elbow shaped track I no longer have to duck in order to see the skerry. White water, even on a calm day, lifts like white curls around the rock, the surface of which is almost invisible to boats but don’t be fooled as one fishing boat was all those years ago, for it is wide as a mountain and just as high, or is it low? Grounded at the earth’s core, or so I imagine, solid, silent, no flag-flying attention-seeking Halloooo! No. Only the white baby curls and a good navigation system will avoid you disaster and just offshore. So why no ducking? Because the flipping hooligan we ‘enjoyed’ recently, that discordant orchestral mayhem that sucked in and blew out windows, split ancient pines and stripped my roses, also turned even the most determined leaves into tiny flying saucers. Wrenched from the mother ship and without independent flight control, they probably lie now beneath my slidey boots, muddied and rendered mulch well before they were ready. And that is life up here, out here, here on the sticking out end of a big rock combination, granite and basalt, unlikely mates, a marriage of opposites, apposite, no escape and for centuries. The thought rolls my eyes and huffs my breath. Well Done, I mutter. Rather you than me on that one.

A pair of hooper swans are still here. When around 80 of them floated in with a gentle piping honk (or 80 gentle piping honks) a while ago and then left I had thought them gone. I wished them well on. their way, congratulated them on their journey from Iceland and yet this pair remain yet. Weather, again. Where we once knew the bite of a cornet, dis-cornet, at this time of year, encouraging all of those with any sense, those untethered to this land such as cows, horses, sheep and humans, to elevate in search of warmer climes, we have introduced confusion. It is mild here, wet, yes, windy, yes, but mild.

I understand a swan’s dilemma.

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Island Blog – Touch only Rain

Rain, at 0400 is a sigh, a shake of my head, a slump in my gut, yet I know the flowers need it so and it makes a pretty mist picture-coat on my window pane. The sky is heavy with it, with rain, fat pregnant greys all lined up like women at an anti natal clinic, emitting rain. The morning seems just fine with it. There’s no sense of disapproval, no cross words flitting across the in between where humans like me are earthly bound and at the whim of weathers. The birds don’t mind enough not to fly, to swoop down for soggish seed and to rise up again quickquick into shelter, although it is not from the rain they hide. I sit on the other side of the window, watching rain. My phone app tells me in an inappropriately luminous yellow that there is an 100% chance of rain the live long day and I slump again. What is all this slumping? Well, I don’t know. Perhaps I am bemoaning the loss of those recent balmy summer days, the ones we recently enjoyed on our rain-sodden island. Our summer could already be over. We all know that. We are well known for being sodden, have been rain sodden for about 600 years give or take and we are also well known for going completely bonkers on sunny days, completing gargantuan tasks in record time like re-roofing a hotel, landscaping a 20 acre garden or building Gran a bungalow by tea-time, foundations and all. Or perhaps this slump is that I am thinking of another’s tears.

The wood pile is rained wet but the wood pile has no care of such a minor incursion. This wood grew from sapling right here on the island after all and has rain in its DNA. It burns regardless, wet or dry, no smoking. No bees though. Bees don’t like to fly in rain. I imagine them all peeping out through that tiny hole watching the clouds and needing a sugar rush. Buzz buzz, not yet ladies. How’s Her Majesty? She’s fine the old bat and who wouldn’t be with all that royal jelly plus, if you don’t mind, 1000 nurse bees at her every whim whenever she fancies whimming?

Gulls cut the sky looking white as newborn snowflakes against the greys, lazy, leisurely, nae rush at all, whilst other colours sharpen and shout new defiant music into the sleepy air. Rain turns ferns apple green. Moss and lichen lift into shades of Ochre, Sienna, Olive and prick tears to my eyes, Granite rocks divide into maps of the world, the cracks darkling with wet. There, the Mason Dixon Line, here, the continent of Africa minus Angola and over there, Iceland, more or less. Rhododendron leaves are polished to a sheen. My face drips as I walk and the little dog grows ever mud coloured. Puddles big enough to bathe in squat along the track, rain plash hiding tree reflections beneath its surface. Come another day reflections, for this day has no time for such gob-smacking indulgence. Mirror another day, bring out the cameras, click, post, marvel, compete, Like. We raindrops are legion and extremely busy watering the flowers and pissing people off. In short, we are having fun rumpling puddles and filling the wellies of anyone who stands still too long. We are chewing up the mud for the spreading, clarting the roads with it and sinking the baleful cows up to their knees as they wait to grab mouthfuls of hay before it becomes insulation for wall cavities.

Diamonds shiver at the tips of weeping larch, hundreds of them, thousands, perfect pear drops of heavenly water held in stasis, catching the light, on hold until it is their turn to fall into the mud. Still, it is surely a wondrous thing to be a light catching water diamond even once in a lifetime. Rain popples the sea-loch, lifting, luffing, tickling the surface until it giggles. A single heron stands as if on water, still and patient. Beneath a spread of hardwoods, beech, chestnut, elm, birch and ash, their branches lowed with rain weight, the ground glows liquid green, a molten gold carpet of Creeping Buttercup and Lady Elizabeth poppies. Even the wheelie bins gleam bright.

I remember rain, as slump and lift, as promise and disappointment, as joy and sadness. Rain, tears; Rain diamonds; Rain liquid life; Rain skid death; wash clean, wash away, wash out; I remember the joy of rain and the unjoy of it. Walking in the rain helps to shift a slump even if I cannot stop thinking of the family who will reach arms out to a beloved pet this day and touch only rain.

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Island Blog – Daynight

The clouds are pink. So are the hills, the trunks of the hazels, the rocks and the sea-loch. It is 4.45 am and everything is pink. I am also pink, according to the mirror reflection and my face needs ironing. This is due to the crumpulation of pillow, duvet and face, conjoined in a less than harmonious trio. We obviously fell out at some point during the night, fought each other until we ran out of oomph, and then collapsed, like all menage a trois do in the end.

The house creaks. The floorboards creak. My knees creak. We are all coming to life, beginning to breathe in a new morning, taking in the pink, leaving the night behind, letting it go. Sometimes I am delighted to let go, sometimes I wonder if being awake most of the night makes it day and not night. Perhaps there is an in-between, like a no mans land, a wild place that has no name, as yet unlabelled. I can give it plenty names, however and not all of them polite, but in deference to social rectitude I shall name it Daynight.

Although it may sound terribly awful spending a deal of the dark hours awake, I am well used to it and find myself able to recover quick quick during the hours of light. Just a 30 minute catchup snooze can lift me right back into a Tigger bounce. It thinks me. Have I devised a splendid plan of action, a modus operandi, one that will always lead me into what may sound like a child’s story, or am I a natural bouncer? Did I learn myself this attitude or was I born with it? Ho, I say and Hum. I don’t have an answer but, for the record, I am very happy with my bounce, even if my knees do creak nowadays. And, even if I did come up with an answer, what would it matter and who would care?

I watch the pink clouds. There is Robin Hood with a huge snake in his grip. Here is the Rockbiter and over there, oh look, it’s Noddy’s car, complete with horn. If I called you over, it would be too late to see what I see. Clouds are like that. Shape shifters, game players, always moving on like night, like day, like everything. Even if I grabbed my camera, it would be over, the cloud show and they would just look like pink clouds. It seemed important, back then, back when I didn’t understand that the whole point of anything is that it changes every minute; people, time, clouds, weather, happenings, all change. The key is to just look, to watch, to stand quite still and let the eyes have it. And with every look, watch, stand still thingy we change because we have experienced something new, something that will never come again, not in this way. A kindness given, a word of support, a smile, a wave; the way rain falls on a window, the swing of a feather falling, a catch of rainbow light, the scoot of a rabbit, distant laughter. A pink sunrise may come every morning, but it will never be the same twice, like zebra stripes and snow flakes, every one unique.

Like you and like me.