what a difference a day makes

I feel as if I've been to the ends of the earth, or back at the beginning of time, depending on your point of view. If only I could upload photographs I could show you, but due to the limitations of dial-up, you'll have to paint the pictures yourself, people. You're going to need a palette of sky blues and  grassy greens, plus that particular shade of mediterranean turquoise more commonly associated with warm seas, but frequently found on the NW coast of Scotland. A clear, glassy turquoise, then. Cerulean blue and a hint of cadmium yellow ought to produce the colour in question. Last of all, an ashy volcanic black and a crisp foaming white like snow-in-the-sea.

A day of sun and shadows chasing across the widest skies. Walking on high clifftops on the oldest rocks in Shetland. Black rabbits scurrying away from our approach, sea birds turning below in an endless, effortless gyre. Conversation, laughter, some exceedingly bad jokes ( mine ) inelegant clambering ( also mine ) over a series of stiles and fences and assorted obstacles, all the better to gaze in awe at the dramatic coastline where the sea has shaped the landscape with almost unimaginable power. 

I love walking on old volcanic rock - it's so grippy underfoot, offering no possibility of slippage for walkers of a nervous disposition. The sun came in and out, the wind-scythed grass looked like old velvet, the sea pounded and crashed below, occasionally booming like the one o'clock gun off the ramparts of Edinburgh castle. 

Sorry. What the hell is that doing here, pray? Swiftly relocate head from Princes Street back to Eshaness.

Walking further inland we found a vast gash in the land, plunging down to a beach linked to the distant sea by a long subterranean passage. As the tide came rushing along the passage you could feel the boom rising up underfoot. The sea has found a way into the very heart of the land here, insistently pounding at its deep subterranean spaces until they surrender. I saw the sea at its most benign today, but later, over soup and bacon rolls ( a very Scottish Sunday lunch) I saw a photograph of a winter version of the same view we were currently enjoying under a September sun. The sea of winter is a very different beast. A feral, pitiless sea. A dark grey monster seemingly unrelated to the foaming, swirling turquoise beauty outside. 

Shetland is doing its seductive best to capture my heart, and I am enchanted. Under this autumn's mellow sun, it's almost possible to forget that only a short time ago my world had shrunk down to a landscape carved out of various shades of deepest, forbidding presbyterian grey.  At each turn and twist in the ribbon of road that winds from Northmavine to Sunburgh, every glimpse of the sea is a pool of light in the darkening landscape. The last of this perfect day turns to a pink dusted dusk on Meal beach and as the light fades we return homeward to the evening's slow collapse into night.

What a difference a day makes. Thankyou for sharing it with me. 

on the battlements

Definitely a night for wordless music and a deep whisky glass. Pass this one by if you haven't been divorced and have never had to do the merry dance of Sharing The Children. Really. Trust me. Scroll on down, this one's not for you.

For the remainder, all you battered and tattered little band of people who've had part of themselves torn away by an infernal engine called dee, eye, vee, oh, arse, well, heck,  gather round, throw another log on the fire and help yourselves to whisky. 

Finally tonight, after months of feeling that something was about to change, got a phone call from my ex-husband to confirm that he is leaving town and heading up North. In previous, hellish times, this would have been cause to crack open a bottle of champagne and toast his speedy departure, but now, with the our old battlefield grassed-over and the memory of the horrible wounds we inflicted, just that -  a memory - it's odd to think that I'm the one left behind, manning the Fort.

The Fort is a depleted thing. Once a busy, thriving concern when the babies were small, now it's a ghost-Fort, with just three of us, my partner, my eldest daughter ( the youngest is thankfully too young to remember the Bad Old Days) and I, left to remember the battles, the troop movements, the no-go areas and all the ghastly fall-out that used to litter our path through the wreckage of a family life. Wind blows down the corridors, and litter gathers under the wheels of a rusting tricycle. These days, the Fort is surrounded by a land in which I have absolutely no wish to remain. So part of me is deeply envious of my ex-husband's escape bid. Part of me wishes that I'd been the one to move first. I heard, with a sinking heart, the real pain in my daughter's voice when she said - well at least you're not going to move away, Mum. 

Oh, but I so want to. All of me yearns to leave, to find an island or a highland place, far from aspects of our world that more and more I fail to understand or feel a part of. All of me wanting to leave but knowing that I can't. At least not yet. Not until eldest daughter has grown up and gone, and youngest daughter is old enough for a move not to be The End Of The World, Mum, how could you do this to MEEEEEEEE? 

So. I can't have freedom, yet. I'm stuck here in the Fort, holding the damn thing. Why am I holding this Fort? It's not as if it's in any danger of imminent invasion. The sentries have all gone to get different jobs, and there's not so much as a single pitchfork left with which to defend the battlements. But instead I find myself like a hamster in its wheel doing an endless repeat cycle ; a seemingly endless patrol round the sodding battlements, noting bloodstains here and there, observing how the buckets of pitch we drizzled over the heads of the incoming hordes of Visigoths ( or perhaps just tides of luvvies, thugs and assorted wags ) have left their indelible stain on the stonework. Patrolling the battlements of the ghost-Fort, vowing that nothing will drag me up to the airy attic room where the children's clothes are stored, interleaved with tissue and lavender, stored as if by preserving wool and cotton I can somehow, preserve and save them, my children.  The battlements are, in truth, a bloody chilly place to be on a dark autumn night. I'd far rather be downstairs with all of you, watching sparks rise up against the night sky ( the roof could use some repairs, I fear, but hey - it's a Fort and who among us can afford to repair a Fort-roof?) and sipping at a glass of whisky. 

So why am I out here? Because inside the Fort it's suffocating. Because out here, I can't see much beyond the yellow sodium lights of the cage I feel I'm in, but out here, at least I can feel the wind on my face and taste the rain. And besides, in truth, I'm not really back at the Fort yet. I'm here, in Shetland, removed from all this Drama going on back home. But...

But I have to go home soon. Back to the cage I built. Or Fort. Or whatever you want to call it. The life that hasn't fit for years. The absolute aching loneliness of years and years and years of waving, and smiling and trying to communicate. Of sending out a little signal into the darkness and waiting for an answering one in return. Thing is, here, in Shetland, there's a distinct possibility that I've picked up some answers to my signal. Faint ones, sure, but answers just the same. Given more time, I could explore each and every signal and who knows, maybe the darkness might recede a little. There is life, Captain, but perhaps not as we know it.

But I have to go home soon. And the signals will grow fainter and I'll tell myself that they weren't really answers after all, and the howling loneliness of the Fort will descend again, and night after night, I'll be up there on the battlements, peering out at the distant sodium lights and remembering what it felt like to live, albeit briefly, at sixty degrees North.

So. Yeah. Tonight's cheery little threnody has been brought to you courtesy of Dee-Eye-Vee-Oh, arse with orchestral accompaniment from the nice Mr Bowmore of Islay.

generate to irritate

For the past three nights in a row, my little shed on the shore has
woken in the wee small hours to the thrumming and rumbling of heavy
machinery. In the absolute silence of a Shetland night, such sounds
are magnified tenfold. Noisy nights could be expected if this place
was a vast urban conurbation, but it's not, it's a small island where
the sheep probably outnumber the humans. At the first sound outside,
I woke in darkness, wondering what on earth was going on. Voices,
splashes, sounds of metal ringing on stone and under it all, a
generator rumbling and coughing into life. In the pitch black of a
Scalloway night, my neighbour had turned on floodlights and could be
seen hurling concrete into a mixer with gay abandon prior to doing a
spot of recreational wall building and pickaxe wielding. He was doing
this a scant thirty feet away from where I clung to the edge of my
futon and profoundly dammed his eyes.

Monday night, the show began at 2 a.m and finished at dawn. Tuesday
night was a later performance, beginning at 2.40 a.m and finishing at
dawn. Last night it began at 3.15 a.m. and by then I was so sleep-
deprived and desperate, I climbed downstairs and phoned the police.
Curtain came down twenty minutes later. There were no encores.

Yeah, I know. You think I should have gone out and spoken to the
insanely insomniac concrete-mixer and pick-wielder myself. You think
it was a bit...cowardly and mean of me to sic the law on him? You can
see it, hmmm? You would've done that, eh? Got your clothes on,
grabbed a torch ( it's pitch dark out there - no streetlights - the
floodlights are for his benefit, not for community illumination) and
gone next door to remonstrate with a neighbour you've never met. A
very strong neighbour ( you should have seen the vast stones he was
hefting around - phhhwoarrrrrr) with a pickaxe. Yeah, right. Sure you
would.

So. Silence blankets the shore tonight. I'm flailing around in a
sleep-deprived fog, trying to stay awake long enough to draw a
cartoon promoting, announcing and introducing the first meeting of a
Stitch and Bitch group in Lerwick. I hope I have cojones enough to go
back to the shop where I was initially rebuffed for enquiring as to
the possibility of there being such a group already in existence in
Shetland. Go back to the shop and ask if they'll be good enough to
put up the poster that I ought to be Getting On With instead of
blogging...

The idea behind the S & B being that if you build it, they will come.

But if you build it in the middle of the bloody night, your neighbour
will grass you up bigtime.

rainy Monday evening

It's dark, the day has been put away, the work all done - the
children tucked up with a long-distance word from their mama and I'm
wrapping myself around Martin Taylor's sleepy, smoky jazzy riffs for
late-night grown-ups and wondering if I'll ever get to be good enough
to improvise a few of my own. Today the fiddle part of Fiddle and
Pins was hauled out blinking into the grey daylight of a wet and
misty afternoon, actually a wet morning too and probably, after I
finish here, an unbelievably wet evening as well. Last night's concert
reminded me that music can be the best company ever, even if you're a
crap musician like me. One of the joys of electric violins is that
while I'm going through this hideously discordant re-acquaintance
with my fiddle, I'm near as dammit inaudible.

Trust me, this is a blessing. On an acoustic violin I'd sound ten
times more ferkin' awful than I do now. But now, I can saw away and
feel like I'm really sounding not too bad, mainly because all I can
hear is whatever genius I'm jamming ( I use this word loosely) along
with.

It does give me a completely illusory feeling of playing well, and at
this stage in the game, that can only be a good thing, because if I
could really hear what I sounded like, I'd consign my little black
bendy fiddle to its case and never let it see daylight again. So
today I've played along with Afro Celt Sound System, Charlie Haden &
Pat Metheny, Martin Taylor, Martyn Bennet and Jesse Cook. In my
imagination I'm up there in front of a wall of Marshall amps, speaker
towers, decks and...oh do shut UP, you at the back, I know I'm a sad
git.

Today the World of Real Work As Opposed To residency work sent an
email wondering if I'd had any thoughts regarding a cover for The
Trouble with Dragons. I hear the sound of distant whips, I fear. It's
odd, having crossed the tipping point of the residency and cantering
towards the home run enables me to hear what has largely been
inaudible until now. And what do I hear, pray?

Money talks
I can't deny
I heard it once
It said 'Goodbye'.

Amazing how I've managed to tune out the normal background hum of
money-related anxieties. I really feel about a million miles away
from all that nonsense. But, alas, we have to eat, shoe the children
and keep the roofs from blowing off, so perforce, I have to nail my
nose back to the grindstone. I mean I haven't exactly been taking it
easy, but I have taken time out to do stuff that feeds the soul
rather than the maw of Mammon. I don't want to give the false
impression that the residency has been one long sojourn in the Big
Easy, but I am all too aware that pretty soon I'll have to re-engage
with The Moderately-Sized Difficult.

Cue the Cajun music. Ma jolie blonde va gris maintenant. Zydeco
filles go wahhhhhh. Iko, iko stay here.

ms. mouse heads for the hills

 You know, I could get used to this solitude stuff. I rolled out of bed extra early this morning even though it was Sunday, trying to squeeze in a hillwalk before heading back into Lerwick to see two concerts, one of which kicked off at two thirty. Therefore,  I had to lope up the hill at a rather accelerated pace and down again in order to get back in time to do a quick change from woman of the mountains into woman who listens to jazz in her lunchtime. Actually, not too much change there, except I never wear lippy on a hill...

So. Victorious, I am being. I climbed Ronas Hill ( Shetland's highest) in the teeth of a small hurricane. God, it was windy. And not from the carpark halfway up Collafirth Hill, but from sea level. The honourable ascent. And yes, it's only half a Munro, but hey - I was completely on my own, and even half a hill can kill you if the weather turns foul and you trip and break something. So. Me, myself and I plus an unfeasably heavy rucksack ( in which were an A&E unit, three Sherpas, a portable generator, a twin oven Tranga, three pounds of egg tagliatelle and 250ml of Perigord truffle sauce, a Siberian goosedown bivvy bag, a month's supply of 70% cocoa solids Valrhona, a Blackberry, three i-pods, one pair of circular needles and four balls of kidsilk haze yarn and a Nice Young Man) climbed the hill. 

At the top I could see the skies rushing towards me were that shade of grey that promised  serious precipitation possibly accompanied by a blanket of thick cloud obscuring all obvious landmarks. But I have a lush's tradition of having a celebratory swig of whisky on finally wheezing my way to the trig point, so, nervously and very, very quickly, I necked my malt and headed off, back down to safety. And not a moment too soon. Literally, once I was safely on the road down from Collafirth Hill and turning to say thankyou to all four points of the compass ( Oh, do stop sniggering at the back. I know. Ancient hippies r' us.) the heavens opened. Rain, wind, in quantities to be seriously alarming higher up the hill, but from where I was, just noisy, wet and forcing me into a kind of jog-trot ( tricky in hillwalking boots) to deliver me soggy but very happy back at my car twenty minutes later.

And later...a concert to celebrate the life of 'Peerie' Willie Johnson ( Shetland's beloved guitar player, who was known and loved the world over) with, oh bliss, Martin Taylor playing guitar with his band. If this is the solitary life, bring it on...

podless

Okay. That's it. I'll have to come home.

Today, at the gym, my precioussssss noisypod died on me, and no
amount of rescucitation and restoring and restarting and reloading
can bring it back from the dead. I am, as I speak, digging it a very
small grave and will consign it to the great Apple in the sky just as
soon as I come up with an apposite piece of music to hum at its funeral.

All suggestions welcome.

A pod-less planet looks pretty bleak to me. Not to mention the sheer
impossibility of doing any exercise whatsoever without the noisypod
to fire me up and set me going. What? No music? Phwoarrrr. Fergeddit.
In that case, I may as well sit back on my couch in the potato
position and commence The Consumption of Chocolate. Tried to log on
to Apple and buy a pale, shuffling substitute, but couldn't even
manage to do that. Dial-up is crap for online shopping, a fact which
has saved me a fortune, but which, as of now, is a royal pain in the
ass. I want a pod, and I want it, if not now, then next week, weather
permitting.

I'm trying to make light of this but...inside I'm looking down the
long Black Tunnel To The Time of Complan and Zimmers. Is this the
beginning of The End? First the i-pod goes, then the i-sight, closely
followed by the i-deas and on and on, until the floor is littered
with teeth, hair, prostheses and the only thing left to look forward
to is when Nurse swings by to turn the l i-ghts out.

Opened a little red box posted from home and discovered two posies of
sweetpeas, only slightly crumpled after their long journey to
Shetland. This tender gift reduced me to a state of hiccuppy sobs,
which I'm sure was not their sender's intention. Sweetpeas now
gracing my table in a teapot, their petals unfolding in soft shades
of pink and lilac. A little reminder of a garden that is still
blossoming a long way south from here.

deafening hush

Sunday afternoon, growing a tad bored with the utter silence of my own company, I set off again, ever intrepid, up a hill, across a trackless peat bog/ heath, compass in hand, in search of a high ridge walk marked on my map with a clearly drawn dotted line. This dotted line, or its equivalent, an obvious track, was guarded by not one but five mangy sheepdogs who came running to surround me in a faintly menacing huddle. One of the collies had a single glaring blue eye, which did not reassure me of its owner's good intentions. Another of the collies was the same size as a bear. One of the collies turned out to be a vast black labrador. Hey. There were five of them and one of me, so being a wuss, I took the road less travelled. I did the nonchalant very fast powerwalk away from the dogs and took an alternative uphill path. This meant forging my own route, compass in hand just like yesterday, eyes peeled for signs of BULLS. After a morning of rain, today's wet landscape was dotted with variations on the malevolent tussock*. As I leapt and splashed my way across this moonscape, I wondered , not for the first time, what the hell I was doing spending a lazy Sunday afternoon engaged in such strenuous pursuits. Then the sun slid out from behind a cloud, the beautiful wide seaview opened up and I remembered why I love walking the high airy places. 

The silence, the solitude and the wide open spaces are breathtaking. The alone-ness is okay too - not what I'd choose, given my 'druthers, but a similiar solitude to the one that I've lived with for most of my working life. Just because I recognize it, doesn't mean I like it, though. Alone-ness can so easily shade over into loneliness. Yeah. It was bloody lonely. Across a narrow channel of water lay Burra, the last place my colleague Harry Horse looked out on before he killed first his terminally ill wife and then himself. That kind of enormity and terrible finality made my view of his beloved landscape all the more meaningful , and also all the more lonely not having anyone to turn to for a simple human touch - a hand on my hand, an arm around my shoulders. Something to pretend that we are not alone. Even if, in truth, we are. 

Sat on a rock and drank Lapsang, ate oatcakes, blew nose and pulled myself together. I looked out over the top of the ridge to the fragmented landscape of many little islands, stacks and nameless rocks, each standing alone, all of them linked by the waters of the pale blue sea. I'm guessing that Harry was beyond any form of connection, beyond being able to reach out and say - help me, I'm drowning. I'm guessing that his wife was his lodestar and that he simply could not bear to find his own way through his life without her. 

The sun on my face and the wind in my hair remind me of the promises, the miles and the life I still have to live. Travelling hopefully. That's what I intend to aim for - not the arrival, but the journey itself.

*These are clumps of grass which protrude from the swamp, seem to offer firm footholds but the moment an unwary walker commits to one of these babies, it tilts sideways forcing you to overbalance and slide into the swamp.