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Island Blog – Lexicographer

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

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

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

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

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Island Blog – 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 – Fiddle Work

I was thinking about fiddling today. I was. We do fiddle about, do we not, with fingers, with ideas, with olding, with blockades, with the constant push against the barriers we meet on a daily basis. Should there be a question mark here? Honestly, the whole ‘how you do grammar’ thing was once my absolut. Don’t mess with me on that word. It doesn’t need an ‘e’. There are kids this day bothering about results on where the eff they place their ees, never mind their hyphens and dashes and please don’t bring up exclamation marks, which, btw, were just fine a few years ago, and which have now become a yawn. Turmoil at worst. Fiddling at best.

Let’s fiddle. Fiddling requires finger movement, dynamic finger movement, in the fingers, that is. Limited, yes, unless you have learned how to. In the mind, different. There’s a wildscape in that head which (not ‘that’,….never ‘that’.. #grammarqueen) can spiral the brightest mind. You might go low one day and all the old stuff rushes in as if a tide has suddenly turned on you. It stutters, physical momentum, there are stumbles, hesitations, pauses, a want for hiding. Other days, and for no particular reason, the fiddle mind plays a wonderfully dynamic tune, and your heart is light, your clothes feel right, your make-up worked, the path ahead clears like a walk into bright opportunities and surprising serendipities. What you expect, you will attract. I know this. It is a fact and proven. So what is the thing about days when your fingers tangle-damage your scarf, when, in irritation at said tangle-damage, you wheech off a precious gold chain, breaking it; when you forget your keys, can’t decide what to wear for an important something or someone or when your ego is way below knicker level, in fact it’s ankle deep and asleep? There’ll be days like these. Mama said.

I had one today. I know these days of old. They’re trying to be the seventh wave, and maybe they are. They do piss me off, nonetheless, because I never gave them permission to diffuse me into a spread I feel incapable of. I wanted focus, a strong light ahead, a clear path, and now you straggle me into a general illuminator. I don’t care who else can see. I just want light for myself. Ah! there it is, the conundrum. So I don’t appear to be the master of my own days. Instead there is a force I cannot see which confabulates my story, my plan, me.

When I arrived at work, I felt as if my outside, all uniformed up, didn’t belong to me. At the door, I pulled up, said some stern words to myself, got to it. But it didn’t shift. I listened to the laughter from my delicious co-workers, chatted, heard their news, cleared tables, engaged with customers, laughed with them, loved their dogs, filled water jugs, cleaned endless kitchen equipment (inventively), but I still felt I was limpish . I thought ‘tired.’ I thought ‘old.’ I watch my fingers type this out and I laugh. Tired, yes. Old yes.

Ach, wheesht! Fiddle on. Always fiddle on.

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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 – Ordered Chaos, Fire and Fun

I shove another full tray of pots, cups, teapots, plates, cutlery into the maw of the crazy fast wishdosher, lift up the done one to dry the constituents whilst they’re still hot. Glasses, cutlery, everything does better with a quick dry. I turn to see the wotwot of the dynamic in the kitchen. Is there space for me to bring clean thingies in, or not? It is definitely a dance out there. I get to the butter pots shelf. I can see there’s a shove-in. I hesitate. I can’t see the back of this shelf. In theory, all the butter, jam, chutney pots, etc are cautioned into regularity. In theory. Actually, to be honest, in a busy fast-moving cafe, there is always a shove-in going on. We work with balance, all of the time, every minute. Someone out there in the thick of orders needs more mugs, cups, espresso minis, than are available in their parking places. I have them, I have them, they are super boiling hot from this crazy fast washing unit, but I have tea towels and I’ll be right there. Same with cake plates, glasses for anything Frappe, soft drinks, just island water. Orders come like bullets. Me, i enjoy the slow, not sure I should, but I do. That’s me hiding in the Washeroo, noisy with pots and busyness. And then comes that lull, the fizz and scoot of the coffee machine making latte, mocha, small, large, americano with hot milk, with oat milk, with nothing, and I do peek out. I do. I am armpit high with suds and soup pans and soap suds, but the immediate is incoming, and right there, just the other side of our flimsy protective walls. I wipe off suds, find my way through steamed up glasses and my unsurety around the paying equipment and smile a welcome. Not just me. I’m just talking about the Sudster in this dynamic. We all smile a welcome. Hi folks, how can I help?

It thinks me, about life.

Today wasn’t a day in the best beach cafe ever. I slowed my feet. I watched the birds on my feeders, felt the heat the humidity in the air, saw the cloud cover, the hunker down of grey and white, the pressure, humid, a standing still. I noticed the effect in the someones I met in the shop, the touristic faces denying access to anyone, a lot of looking anywhere but at another, the sweat beading. It was, ‘a bugger’, as we say up here, not being mincy with wordage. Hot, loomy, a holding, as if in the arms of a big woman you really didn’t want to be held by. And so rare. It’s cleared now, I can feel it, hear it in the music of the dove wings as they ping like regentlessists, up and away and over and back again around the bird seed.

We live, all of us, within our attempts to order chaos. We do. Chaos comes in like a wind from nowhere. A teenager turns fury. A mother or father departs. A sibling comes out. A storm barrels in. We lose credit, funding. A dream dies. Taking it way down into the ordinary….. A bus party comes in for cake, no, quiche, no, cold drinks, no, actually, 4 lattes, two with oatmilk, and, oh, look at that raspberry bakeweIl or that strawberry sponge…..or soup, shall we have soup? Eventually, resolution, an order to Initial Chaos and the chance to learn to work with it. Eventually, to have the wisdom to prepare for the next blast. An eloquence of freedom. It’s every day, after all. For all of us.

I know it is easy, my analogy in the butter pot shelf of the cafe, but it still speaks. We can’t make everything perfect, nobody can. All units, all shelves, all plans, all dreams will fall into chaos. But, and this I have found, in the multiple chaos of my life, that it is possible to find new storage for the ‘butter pots’. The bigger stuff, the beyond of any sky, the way forward in a fireball dynamic? No answer. We just have to live it and to bring hope and fire and. fun to the dance.

Just believe it. And, keep going. Chaos gets tired too, in the face of someone who recognises an incoming unfriendly.

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Island Blog – Proud I am

Back from work, a busy day in the best cafe ever, above white sands, above history, the place from where many families were cleared, uplifted, circa 1870’s, homes burned, and then wheeched across oceans , without a change of knickers and with no sanwiches, because, and get this, the landownders thought sheep would be more profitable (and less of a pain in the baxxy). than humans. Folk are drawn here. Yes, there are excellent coffees, soups, bakes, welcomes, but there is a ‘more than’ thing going on here. I can see it in their eyes. They have clocked something, but have no clue what it is. Bus tours arrive, all a-flutter, all unsure about whether to go for banana loaf or lemon polenta cake, or maybe a cheese scone with extra Mull cheese and Mull Seaweed Chutney, or soft sponge with strawberry jam or carrot cake with philly icing, or flapjacks, brownies, focaccia bread…… and there is so much more to invite you in and to make happy you as our guests.

When I move out from the hidey-hole, it is, it is my hidey-hole. I confess, I admit. It is where the non-stop washing up-ness goes on, and my safe place. However I hear voices. There’s a nudge in me. I clock two other servers, but I can tell I need to let go of my comfortable scrubber persona. We are a team, we are few but we are each important, and of value. My listening tells me that a whole tribe has arrived. I pull out from the hiding of this work, and I see a big few, a big queue. I hear ‘Can I help you?’ and a backdrop chatter from those not first in the queue. There is a lifting ahead, a wild scamper, a dynamic. The wee team rises into, not a clearing of humans, but, yes, a clearing of humans. Quick fire, one order, two, three, four, five. We have run out of hooks for the paper choices. No matter. We talk, murmur. This, needs this, that needs that, is there extra cheese, cream, jam? I watch us flow through the small space, moving like dancers, pulling back, moving forward, asking for help, two trays for table 8, is the quiche ready, is there more salad….all of that. Two soups with focaccia, two different soups; two quiches; one warmed cheese scone with extra cheese, two fruit scones with local jam and cream, one elderberry tea, two flat whites, one with oatmeal milk, one salted hot chocolate with marshmallows and cream, one with none of those. We work to make sure that they are served on loads of trays, everything hot, everything timed to work with the dynamic of their group. We fill the water bowl for their dogs. We ask about their little ones, engage with Granny, make sure we make sure that every guest feels like the One.

I am proud to work with the young and intuitive owners, and with the funny, beautiful, crazy, sometimes weary, girls with whom I work. I am granny to them. They lift me, remind me of the feisty woman I am, was, am.

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Island Blog – Two Sparrows

I love my work. I’ve said this before, I know, I know, but I am happy to say it again. The energy required, the energy generated, both are like two sides of a something that has two sides, which, pretty much defines all of us. Our bright talents can go dark, but that is all about personal management, a noticing, the ability to uprise road blocks should one be careening, and our inherent goodness, because we all have that. It is slightly off-pissing that we need to keep a hold on the wonky planks of our personal attics, to ensure that the ‘cobwebs’ don’t become thixotropic, dense. cauterising. Oh, we who are honest, know that place, and there’s a choice thing there. Actually, it’s mostly an ‘oh bugger’ because what we inherently know, regardless of parental influence, is that we don’t want to harm, that we are listening, noticing, learning.

No idea why I went there. Perhaps it is because on my journey to work I meet eejits who are, very possibly wonderful people but who don’t feel the need to wave a thank you as I skid off into the briars and sludge in order that they, in pristine big-ass vehicles with one wife and possibly one dog, slide by. I’m happy with the slide, and I always wave first, but when another living, breathing, vulnerable human makes no eye contact, proffers no acknowledgement of my skid into the briars, I confess I do ‘miff’. Momentarily. It wonders me. Is this how life is for them in wherever they come from? What I do know is that it isn’t a warm community, like a remote island, wherein we all recognise the need for each other. And that is sad.

Today, as the cafe filled with soup orders, dogs, children, bikers, walkers, holiday folk with a hunger for delicious scones and fantabulous cakes, coffees, herbal teas and a welcome that seems to bring everyone together, there was just me, behind pots and bowls and a sort of lull. I heard a sparrow cheep, insistent, and recognised it immediately (the benefit of a mostly silent island life) as a young one shouting at dad. It’s usually dad. Mum has had enough. She is not there for the endless ‘feed-me’ demandings. I emerged from the pots, nobody else there and followed the sound. As I passed by the tables, conversation flowed, nobody else caught this, to discover two sparrows inside the door, on the stairs, baby shouting, dad (I imagined, exhausted, with a ‘what now?’ in his voice}. I slowly rose the stairs, the door behind them, the birds, thankfully open. I gentled ‘ off you go, you guys’ as if they could understand me. Eventually they did.

Inside the busy, the curriculum of any work, the random, the sparrow, will fly in and will think you. Some will notice and respond. Many will not. I want to notice everything, everyone, all of this life, the random, the awkward, whilst learning the ability to accommodate, even to whisper a freedom. For me, there is nothing else.

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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 – Adventurers

When an adventurer decides she, or he, is fed up of unadventuring, there’s a thing, a stop, a catch a fear, a big kick-ass scary one. Can I do this? Who am I to think I can? What if I fail. let down, feel stupid, fail, fail, fail? The ‘thing’ brings restless nights and all clothing feels too tight, too awkward in all places where shift and motion was, heretofore, simple. It is as if a new dynamic has infiltrated my boring, and bored self, a sort of dancer, a fluidity promised but without a manual for the new moves. I sort of rush in, awkward, over keen, in the wrong shoes, my body still on its way to here, the here which is now my absolute here. I want to be altogether with myself, to be completely present, even though I know that not just my body but my mind are still both on their way along that winding strip of single-track.

Well dammit!. I had a strong conversation with them on departing the mother ship. Ready? I asked. Steady? Shall we? It doesn’t seem to work that way and not just because this old adventurer is arriving in the right tee-shirt and on time. None of us here really know how we will work together. We have never been squished into a cannon of lunch blast, folk arriving hungry, asking for vegan, asking about allergies, about takeaways. Asking for 6 soups with sourdough, for quiche with bits, for two cheese scones with extra cheese, for fruit scones with jam and cream and for many more combinations. I watch the new owners work with kindness and can-do. I watch my co-workers welcome old and young, dogs and babies, serving with smiles and spectacular baking. I am proud to be one of the team. Very proud.

Back to the adventurer. She, me, has been very spiralled, very tired. This is not my point. Of course she is. She is old and has sat on her skinny butt for, what, almost four years since the only himself she will ever want, decided to die. I talked to his photo today. I do often. He believed in me. You can do anything, he said, and more than once, and I could and I did, I did, I did. Still am, mate.

Right now I have strawberry jam a-boiling for the Calgary Cafe – so worth a visit, and a mushroom risotto. I’m also prepping a Pasta Puttanesca. I love the story in that dish. All those women, the adventurers, who chose to work on the streets, had to, to feed the ones they loved, and then, in the rejection and cold of the night streets, the kindness and respect they found.

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Island Blog – To Pace Myself

Not writing a blog feels like not breathing right. I’m all staccato and pixillation. It’s been busy – I’ve been busy with work, people, emotive tiddlypoms, opportunistic dynamics and sunshine. I complain about none of those but they do demand a new attention, one to which I had, heretofore, not thought about at all. Truth is, I forgot that I am now over the 70 hurdle and that does make an infuriating difference. I don’t ‘look’ my age, or so I am told, and when I see others bent over big midriffs, stick in both hands and with a list of ailments so long that, were I to ask about them, Wednesday would turn into Thursday.

It doesn’t seem to matter how actively I make my brain work, with scrabble, wordle, writing, reading, good conversations on interesting subjects, nor how much I walk, row, bend, strengthen core muscles, a body will demise. It’s a right p in the a, and no mistake, but that’s how it is. Three days work in a busy cafe takes me four days to recover from, even though I love it. The whole getting old thing, in my opinion, is of faulty design. Surely the whole person should age concommitantly, brain and body agreeing on a strategy and just getting the hec on with it. But, no. There are those whose body continues about a million miles beyond their brain, and vice versa. Who ever thought that was a fun idea?

So I doze a lot, catching snatch-sleeps randomly, but not on work days, obviously. I tell myself this is newish, that I will get used to it, and I hope I will because I don’t remember a time when I had this much fun. Buzzing as a team member, laughing, serving, joking, teasing, washing up, chatting, moving, helping……all so uplifting. I have more energy than ever raised within the past 4/5 years. I laugh more, and easily. I see the fun in pretty much everything. I matter. I am seen, valued, important, and what I think is this……..

There should be a shop (do I have to write ‘store’?) for oldies who find a new purpose and who are on the hunt for a new body, one that isn’t carrying all the sharps and damages of decades. I could flip through the items for sale, check out the general strength, the state of internal organs, the power in the arms, hands and fingers, the vertebrae, the hips, knees and more, the versatility of well-toned muscles and the ability to bend from a strong core. A bit like buying a wedding dress, but more long lasting. I would keep my face, heart, mind and beliefs, however, because it was all of those attributes that got me this far in my crazy bonkers life and I love my life.

Perhaps I need to learn to pace myself, whatever the hell that means.