28 11 07

I seem to inhabit time backwards these quick days; a regression into memory. As a child, I heard of Eskimoes having hundreds of words for snow. Now I know that Franz Boas the anthropologist recorded just four: to mean lying snow, falling snow, drifting snow & snow drift. This, in just one language of the many of the people I now know as Inuit. Maybe there are many more Boas was not told. Here, there’s rain. It’s falling straight down & is constant. This morning’s Shipping Forecast gave six options for rain around the country: occasional rain, rain then showers, rain or showers, continuous moderate rain, slight drizzle & rain, & finally, occasional rain or drizzle. Before going out, I try to decide which I’m seeing through the kitchen window. It must be continuous moderate rain. Fliuch; wet then, in Gaelic. There’s no wind. Our words in English for rain – drizzle, showers, heavy rain, squalls, pour into my mind as the moderate rain falls on my green knitted hat.

One of this year’s piebald lambs – a cross of a blackface tup with a Hebridean ewe – with one and a half thin horns, nuzzles the hens where they disconsolately scratch the sogged turf. Up the hill water abandons its usual courses across & through thin soil, & being pragmatic, takes to the roads to follow its way to the bay. Which might be fresh rather than salt in all this rain. Fresh now, as though it’s the first time I’ve seen this (though in truth it’s an abiding memory from I don’t know when), on every hard rush blade, at the junction of each now-dead flowerhead & stem, drops of water catch my eye, rinse my sight.

At the point that looks out to the Atlantic, the morning’s heron voices her displeasure at my appearance & cracks long wings over to the island, to the looping, lingering call of her always companion, the curlew.

As the short day eases into dusk, the rain clears & a dilute sun sets a little west of the Tor of Beeches, its off-vermilion blush momentarily lending the hills a purple light among clinging clouds; as though the heather was again flowering as it did in summer. As the small stems of stork’s bill, Erodium cicutarium, flower unseen & unseasonal, by the sea’s edge right here, right now.

24 11 07

By Castle Tioram the fat handfed black pheasants are strident in their protest at the mere sight of the hound & myself. The dithering birds chak-chak at the hound, who, since they’re behind a wire fence, affects not to notice them.

A red squirrel climbs the Scots pine anti-clockwise, finding tiny things of interest there; its incurved tail meagre & rufous. It cares as little for all of us as the hound for the pheasants, as I do for the man who pays the breeder of the birds, reared only to be killed; food a long way from consideration.

The hound makes a hiccupping sally towards a rabbit on the island the castle sits on.

A herring gull mourns overhead.

23 11 07

At sunrise, together with a hind limned against a lightening sky, I watch as the bay becomes gold across its newborn sand. The news bulletin told me of Palestinians waking to the bulldozing of precious & ancient olive trees uprooted to make way for the concrete wall. The sun gilding sand is heart stopping, an organ played on by the blood of hind & human.

The hind moves on delicate black hooves over rock & heather, downhill, elegantly scratching her ear with her right rear leg; maybe, now in calf, she’s in as contemplative a mood as myself. I move up hill in a sky rapidly silvering then greying as the sun rises above the bay, above Ben Resipole’s hip & above rain clouds moving in from the Atlantic. The birches & the moss below are full of the flit & dart of chaffinches. The males echo the day, with their blue-grey crowns & rosy breasts, with the upcoming generation, or so I take it to be, slightly less coloured, but they’ll grow into it. The female is altogether olive brown. A grey crow, one of a pair in an alder, is wiping his beak on a branch, with a knife-sharpening motion, to take off traces of breakfast.

Under alder & birch & oak alike, the skeletal remains of bracken keel & reveal the green vividness of sphagnums & the herringbone pattern & green corduroy of shield ferns, (Polystichum aculeatum is my stab in the darkness of my own uncertainty). In the oaks grow polypody – Polypodium interjectum, their green multiple tongues dripping & refreshingly free of cant.

Dusk comes a little earlier each night, bringing greater safety, but greater hunger to the deer. The Glen Tarbert stags are down from the tops; three of them that I see have almost identical broken left antlers. They’re young & their rivalries are over, leaving only those cracked anti-trophies of male hormone flow, subsided as tide in the inlets. At Camas a’ Choirce, a solitary fossicking badger trots & snuffles between pounding rain squalls, light on her feet, her belly low-slung & her body-mass-index enough to frighten humans. Mostly nocturnal, she (I have no way of telling the sex of this animal) will spend more time sleeping in the longer colder nights, but have no food shortages just yet; the woods an autumn larder of roots, worms, carrion & mushrooms. At Kentra, young hind calves trot ahead of me, bemused by my torchlight in the pre-moon dark.

Clarity arrives with the full moon. Although there are clouds, the light is brilliant, lighting the white of sheep up on Gobsheallach hillside with a shining matched only by the luminescence of lichen rings on the rocks I finger as personal touchstones as I pass. Scale is confused in such clarity where I find it hard to ascribe anything but equal value to what is in front of my eyes wherever my glance falls – a lunar illumination scaled to fit human perception.

20 11 07

There is a second flush of growth in oak & other trees, known as lammas growth. It happens in the summer & is a response to temperature & other factors favourable to a fresh surge of growth. The tree is most prone to this when it’s young; it doesn’t happen in old trees. Nicolas Battey, writing in the Journal of Experimental Botany: “This decline could be conceived as learning from experience . . . A youthful tree shows lammas growth. It seems an enthusiasm, an impetuous response to summer warmth and light. With age, it declines, and the tree settles down to more sedate growth.” It’s a kind of freedom of expressive growth; it’s not the expansion of spring laid down the previous year. I don’t doubt that trees also learn from experience; to see any tree in Sunart oakwoods reacting, however slowly, to prevailing wind & the falling of old limbs from gales & lightning is to see trees balancing on rocky slopes in a decades long dance.

Lammas Day (“so call’d from the Mass said for preservation of Lambs”) is perhaps a Christian pilfering of Lughnasadh, the festival to celebrate the start of the harvest season, the growth that has given the first fruit.

It may be there is a correlative to trees’ lammas growth in the ragged robin & the spear thistle; a learning & an urge to make a fresh spurt, an utterance of life. An impetuous response. A song.

Also with a new burst of expansion are the jet planes, which have not yet made their eastward migration, but were only waiting on fine weather to make their high-sky vapour hieroglyphs, which fade to parentheses & the symbol for eternity; a figure eight on its side. These offensive jets (I’m using the MoD term) are Harriers & Tornadoes. Somewhere between the swept back wings of Tornadoes are Storm Shadow & Brimstone missiles, as well as General Purpose Bombs & Cluster Bombs which sow their submunitions over a couple of acres to flower at will. In other fields. Some of these aircraft rip to Ardnamurchan from Lossiemouth, about 150 miles as the crow flies. The vapour symbols are probably scrawled by a defensive Typhoon; the Eurofighter.

Among the boats returning to land fish today are: New Dawn, Celestial Dawn, Fruitful Vine, Fruitful Harvest, Harvest Hope & Ocean Harvest.

19 11 07

I can feel the frost coming. The air is cold & still. Chimney smoke over by Kentra, not moved by any wind, drops to the bracken & rolls, spreading like liquid. The sky has cleared itself of sulky grey & the moon has already risen high. There are two sunsets this evening. One, the colour of an angry boil against a few delicate stratus clouds slips behind Torr Beithe, the tor of beeches, now conifers. The other, the colour of salmon flesh is hard against me in the sea by Eilean Dubh. A curlew’s thin thread of a call as she rises stitches the two.

******************************

With the moon nearly full, the shadow of the two rowans just by here & my own shadow as I pass by them are as distinct as any negative formed by the sun. There are no Leonids, comets or shooting stars; the moon is enough, picking out the shine of rock. This moon is the Blood Moon, it’s written on my almanac, with vague neopagan overtones.

17 11 07

sleet or snow?
feels good it soaks into.
my body wet.
mistily moistened.
snow or cold rain?
acanthus rooting above me gone bad for the cold?
or those withered leaves suffering heavy snow?
what’s that faint sound coming on?
a jet?

I find it hard to observe frogs closely without being distracted by fragments of Kusano Shimpei’s poems. That one is from monologue of a hibernating frog (translated from the Japanese by Cid Corman with Susumu Kamaike) & it’s what frogs should be doing round about now, not leppin across roads in front of cars & pickups & heavy boots. But there they are. Making sure they don’t dry out; though in Sunart oakwoods, it’s just about impossible to dry out. There’s no doubt though that the year is somewhat warmer for longer than is usual. Over on the north shore of Loch Sunart, close by the wrecks of two small boats, ragged robin, Lychnis flos-cuculi, is still in flower. Here at Gobsheallach, right outside the door are the tall purple flowers & foliage of spear thistle, Cirsium vulgare; up the hill, as elsewhere around, male catkins of hazel share a branchlet with as yet unshed & now lime green autumn leaves. I mention this in the bliss of ignorance. The thistle & ragged robin are summer flowering, yet here we are in mid November. How easy to use phrases like global warming; the truth is, there are complex factors at work here, which such easiness undermines. It’s certainly the case that plants have a wider period of flowering than memory or text books generally allow. Frogs make up their own minds, according to temperature. & Kusano. & here we are in a temperate zone (& therefore basically not too extreme), in what amounts to a rainforest, made so partly by the north Atlantic drift. Frogs may come & go as they please, to a certain extent, using the glucose in their blood as a kind of anti-freeze; though I grant, not of their own volition. When they do hibernate, it’s in a hibernaculum. What a grand word for sleeping in mud.
But neither the frogs nor myself are sleeping the winter away yet. There’s a half-moon, lying on its back among broken clouds, the way I feel to be, looking up at the few visible stars, but no sign of the Leonid meteors, which are only for three days from the 16th to the 18th of this month; nor of the shooting stars that my star chart predicts. Peter tells me also that I might be able to see the comet Holmes, in Perseus, not too far (though that has to be relative) from Andromeda.
I see only the frogs tonight

proceeding quietly single file.
long silent single file.
file of frogs proceeding.

from Lululu’s funeral (accompanied by Chopin’s funeral march) Kusano Shimpei.

15 11 07

swords into ploughshares

a gunmetal sea

& when I write grey skies I think of Gertrude Stein. These are not grey skies but curling greyladen clouds, formless in whisps & solids, changing their formlessness as wind drives them. Light & dark according to density, the load of moisture they hold, that they are. Nothing recognisable, as different from yesterday’s grey sky as the shapes clouds don’t become. No trees, faces, monsters. They’re all down here, where here is. All morning behind that grey a reverberance above cloud tops; another unseen jet rolling over the sky, rumbling the hills here. I’d thought the manoeuvres & ravening aerobatic displays over, that air force jets had ended, another seasonal event, going into underground hangars like the woodants, to sleep & dream of becoming. But this is probably a last summer visitor who can’t wait to catch his fellows in their fall migration to the middle east, the mountains of Afghanistan & plains of Iraq

13 11 07

Is a stag an event? There’s no wind, droplets of water on every aspen, birch & oak, as well as at the tip of each stalk of hard rush. Ambling across the bay west from Kentra, two hours ahead of low tide, pausing only to scratch, the dark necked stag owns it all. I move up the hill to cut him off & sit quietly where he’ll come ashore. To see things, it’s easier to be still than to lumber behind. I sit for maybe twenty minutes until the damp seeps in. Experience says he’s scented me & moved off below or above. There’s no further sight of him.

In the afternoon I walk round the headlands on the bay’s sands & there’s his slotted hoofprints leading in to an inlet east of where I was sitting in the morning. It’s among the poised & ponderous heron prints, each foot just about the span of my hand. The ridges & wrinkles of the bay are crisscrossed by worm casts & the meanderings of small whelk trails & the musings of other shellfish creeping. Just as the outlines of heron, stag & fish prints are softening in the moisture retained in the sand’s striations, so are the lower slopes of watercut hills of rock around the bay blurring into cloud; the peak of Ben Resipole rising into sun. The stag’s away.

11 11 07

-- through metaphor to reconcile

the people and the stones.

Thinking about William Carlos Williams’ short poem A sort of a song. That reconciliation is difficult, even when I know there’s no real separation, no such thing as independent existence. It’s what Dogen meant when he wrote of mountains constantly walking. The bedrock does not protrude from the mosses, it wears them. The trees don’t displace air & water, but contain them.

The night of the new moon & the rain has not let up any, coming in hard twisting ribbons curling across the woodland. In a search for shelter, or maybe just restless, frogs leap high across the road. A sullen elk-wet stag, shaggy & hunched, steps out from my torchlight & behind the dripping oak at Camas a choirce.
The following day in Morvern, by Laudale, the wind persists, buffeting until the shelter of the trees at Aird Beitheach, the high birches, is reached. Leaves swoop back into these trees with the wind, dipping from tree to tree, up at the last moment to land on the topmost twigs, to resolve themselves into a flock of tits & treecreepers, momentarily leafing the bare birch & oak in their own fashion. At night small mammals are constantly running across the road, perhaps mice or voles, tawny brown & rushing from one side to the other before revealing their nature as dried leaves scuttering in wind.
Then, last night, pulled from the trees, the last downtwisting small birch leaves, despite the intense cold, become what they maybe were all along: flimsy breezy moths. There’s a brown owl sitting on the fence, fully awake, & I guess tired of moths.

(No ideas
but in things)

Williams wrote in the same poem. Things have their own ideas, they’re themselves, sometimes idea-less, happening, an event, walking their own way.

09 11 07

SHIPPING NEWS

A maritime seasonal gauge at Ardtoe Jetty is the number of boats at moorings. In the summer there's a dozen or more small boats, a couple of which are working boats, bringing home in an infrequent way, lobsters & crabs. These boats, mostly pleasure craft, are brought ashore, one at a time, as the oak & aspen leaves fall around them. Today, there’s only three boats & two RIBs. The RIBs act as tenders to the two small fishing boats, OB 108 being one, & will ride the winter here. The only boat I've seen there with a name, Tarbaby, has gone.

Caledonian MacBrayne ferries from Mallaig to Eigg, Rum, Muck & Canna did not operate yesterday in the storms & squally winds.

Among the boats from Fraserburgh & Peterhead that put out: Valhalla, Tranquility, Ocean Pioneer, Contest, Courage, Accord, Achieve, Celestial Dawn, Arcane, Fear Not, Opportunus, Harvest Hope, Challenge, Fruitful Bough. One boat put out from Scrabster: Seagull.

Monks & witches landed everywhere.

08 11 07

A gale here & stronger wet squalls coming with northwesterlies. Rain’s dashed down against the slates but the strength of wind curling round Gobsheallach hill contrariwise pushes it upwards again to sing over the roof ridges. Rain takes turns with bouncing hail. The hound is unnerved by the squalls; facing them the air is forced into her long nose & sets her sneezing, behind & she’s forever looking over her shoulder to see what the noise back there is bringing. In a sheltery dip she puts up a sudden snipe from the bracken where neither of us saw it until it flew a few feet. It slid sideways in the wind & curved up slightly, in that deceptive way of snipe, before, blown, clipping a small birch trunk & then running into the heather & over the rock; more pheasant than snipe. She may be sheltering or may have been pushed down by the gale & injured a wing. If that’s the case, it’s the fox who’ll benefit tonight.
It won’t be the same fox, but the story is told of the fox trotting down the hillside here & along the road past the house over by. The man of the house sees the fox, bold as brass, & fearing for the hens, runs inside for maybe a gun, but comes out with only a hearth brush, which he lobs anyway at the fox. The fox, nonchalant, turns, throws a look, grabs the brush in his smirking teeth & trots on his way. When the farm is having a new shed built, two-three years later, a fallen trunk needs to be moved; in a den underneath, dry & in good condition is the red hearth brush. I think it’s in use to this day.

07 11 07

The wind’s blowing up from the west again & from the point above the ants that looks out over Eilean Dubh I can see ocean spume. Although the ants are in full hibernation, beside their small dwelling I find a pair of Scarlet Hoods. These mushrooms are blood red with a waxy feel & shine among dead bracken & deepsea green moss. They’re also edible, so into my hat they go for safe passage home. Then, with the easy optimism of an early find, the hound & I set off mushrooming in the woods.
The woods, like me, are not sure if autumn is coming or going. The oaks are browning & crisping their leaves, one tree at a time. It’s not age, nor yet exposure that causes this patchwork undressing, but perhaps an expression of health or of individuality, with here a mature tree in green leaf, there a partially clad elder & here a stripped fifty year old youngster. The taller hollies are vibrant with berries, a signifier of a bad winter, it’s said. Other hollies here seem close cropped, perhaps by deer; certainly they’re very low & appear to be layering into small groves, but no taller than mid calf. They have no berries, so maybe they are too young , or simply all male trees. The willows are still leaved. The Scots pines are direct from a Chinese mountains & waters landscape scroll, with their backdrop of soft-toothed hills. A signature is the final spindly foxglove, with its single purple bell.
It’s a joy to walk in these damp, duff-smelling moss clad woods; I think of Sweeny, exiled, mad, & his naked wanderings in the woods of Ireland & Britain: “Dense wood is my security, / the ivy has no edge.” in Trevor Joyce’s perfect translation. & “I occupy in alien woods / an old retreat; / in my familiar square of trees / shrewd centre of such intimate quincunx am I”. Quincunx, where he counts himself a tree. Indeed, it’s so silent here, that the slight sibilance of our exhalation is equal to the fall of sap in these oaks.
Of mushrooms, though, not a smell; save for a single psilocybe. I stravaig north & west; past the trunk where once was frosted chicken-of-the-woods, a dim memory in the skillet now, past the small stand of beech & deeper into the oaks, where, still serving my stomach, I take the consolation of a bite of wood sorrel (Sweeny: “Though you relish salted hams / and the fresh meat of ale-houses, / I would rather taste a spray of cress / in some zone exempt from grief.”) But the truth is, the sorrel’s tough & at the uttermost end of its season.
Once, I would have been pleased by the psilocybe, but with deep woods & scarlet hoods singing bloodred in my brain, now they stay unplucked. Hinds & stags have no such scruples, browsing through the woods. Nor the slugs. What does a slug experience, nibbling on Russula emetica: the Sickener? Hard to imagine a slug with vertigo, or seeing flashing lights, or even vomiting. These are the toxic effects on humans of this little cherry coloured mushroom. Fly agaric seems to be eaten with impunity by deer. It has, of course been taken for its psychotropic qualities over the ages in northern woods. I’ve eaten it raw and any psychotropic experience – the flashing lights, organic curlicues of Green-Mannishness & an overwhelming certitude (of what, is never asked) - is second only to uncontrollable shivering & prodigious, endless vomiting. Americans also assert, helpfully, “it fries the liver”. It has also been taken when passed through another’s liver. Some stories have it the liver of a deer, others the livers of the rich, (poor people being unable to afford the mushroom: but this doesn’t stand scrutiny, much; poor people need only go to the woods. But again, parenthetically, we might ask what else have the rich ever done for the piss-poor). Mrs Beeton might say: first catch your deer. & what would the rooted & branched stags experience in the way of apparition & delusion from psychotropic agarics? Safely through a liver, then, the urine may be drunk: result – intoxication without toxicity. I’ve met men who’ve drunk turps & even brasso & achieved a kind of Sweeny-state; they’d maybe drink urine too, if they were half the believers that our current ranks of neo-shamans & Latter Day Druids are. Sweeny was never half so deluded.
The hound looks at me – I’ve sat still long enough. All day, we’ve seen nothing moving but a wren; heard nothing but the running water of burns among boulders thick with moss, & now the lowing of cattle over the hill towards Polloch. It’s just two Scarlet Hoods then, with my supper eggs & potato. At the kitchen table, I’m eating & leafing through Dogen’s “Instructions to the Cook”: (“When you prepare food, never view the ingredients from some commonly held perspective, nor think about them only with your emotions.”) & out flutters a small clipping. It’s dated by me in pencil 12 11 05, almost precisely two years old. It’s from the Guardian, & in entirety reads: “Swedish papers reported the tale of the rampaging, drunken elks that threatened to attack an old people’s home. The old people were saved, but the elks were following well-documented behaviour that included attacks on joggers and cyclists after feasting on fermented apples.”

06 11 07

Smoke’s curling out from the top of the chimney; the day is grey, a shade somewhere between the meditating heron’s back & the negative-blackness of the cormorants barely skimming the salt water. The light begins to fail at four o’ clock on November days like this & a prolonged dusk adds to the sombreness of the day. Sea in the bay reflects nothing. There’s no break in cloud cover, only layerings of darker & dark. I’m taken by surprise, then, by the vivid yellow of the furze bushes to the west of the bay. As I warm my eyes with their glow, I’m distracted by the dartings of a wren, brown in her cave of spikes. Sheep graze furze in hard winters; I’m thinking it would need to be hard indeed to get past those inch long spines, which are in fact its leaves. It was once ground as cattle fodder & is still fed to horses who apparently delight in it. I’m lost in the quick jinking of the wren & the hardiness of this plant, when the rich almond smell of the flowers reaches my nose; it’s zesty & sends me straight back to childhood kitchens & marzipan. Warmed by memory, scent & sight, I stroll on, nonchalant in the cold wind.

05 11 07

In Scandinavia, the burning of birch has led to whole technologies of the wood-burning stove. Although it gives off a good heat, it’s no sooner lit than burned through. There’s plenty of it here, as in Scandinavia, but here also we have oak, the quintessential firewood, lasting long & burning hot. Firewood has been taken from these woods as long as people & woods have co-existed here, with folk still taking logs & brushwood, though nowadays most wood, if felled & if removed (rather than left for the slow energy burn of beetles, wasps & spiders & their kin) goes for other purposes. In other times, holly was said to burn like wax; plenty of ash was laid to a fire, burning as it does green or seasoned. I still start fires when I can with knuckles of ash, from faggots collected under the trees when storms crack off limbs & shower down twigs. Likewise the whitethorn, which burns hot & is said to bake the best bread. Rowan also burns hot, but though I’ve saved the trunk & arms of a storm-felled rowan for three seasons, I’m too superstitious to burn it; rowans guard a house, & although I sometimes believe this & sometimes don’t, it’s just not polite to burn your guardians.
The bonfire to celebrate Guy Fawkes (though there was no effigy of himself or the Pope) was a huge wigwam of scrap wood on the foreshore at Salen. I’ve no idea what types of wood it was made up of; though it’s a fair bet that most of it came from elsewhere. As far as I could tell, it was salvaged from demolitions & renovations of local houses; though there appeared to be the sides of an old shed, entire. It felt mean at a fine public festivity, of which there are too few left, to be thinking of the use all that wood could be put to. When the man from Salen said, almost in a whisper, that it was a shame to see all that heat wasted, I couldn’t but agree. But; & but, the anarchist, the peasant at the tumbrel, the child in me, was overjoyed to see the fire catch & take in the offshore wind, flames neither dancing nor licking, but drinking the wood. It was the sparks that danced in that elemental dance, retaining the shape of the hot updraughts, pushed this way & that like stars at the beginnings of time; that same dance of purest elation, driven by the same force, to be seen in shoaling fish & swarming bees & the swoop of starlings at dusk as they prepare to roost & pour into a tree or ivied wall.
It all made a fitting spree for the passing into winter, although it was past All Saints & All Souls Days. The flames, if you believe such things may have helped souls of the faithful attain their places elsewhere. Saints needed no such help, having probably already been roasted to ensure their sojourn in the clouds. With harps. (or is that angels?) Myths are fun. & the month is called samhain in Gaelic anyway, meaning harvest & surely a time to remember the dead & that we’re alive & with a fine crop.
The commemoration of a man who didn’t succeed in blowing a parliament to hell & which led to excesses of anti-Catholicism (why do I think of the Revd. Paisley & his refined sense of smell: “No pot-pourri here!”); the celebration of Halloween, itself a kind of Christian theft of the harvest hullabaloo of Samhain, at which cattle bones were thrown in fires to ensure prosperity for the coming year (indeed the word bonfire or bonefire is said by some to be a direct translation of the Gaelic tine cnamh), all makes for a mix where, like at the edges of the fire, at this fringe of the Sunart oakwoods, distinctions become blurred. Perhaps the more so because it’s damned cold & we’re outside the pub clutching our whisky glasses, but within sight of the still crackling blaze on the shore & its sense of redemption for those damned in the myths. Though I note that over the road the big house was once a Temperance Hotel, so maybe the whisky will lead us all to perdition. Or to laughter: the same place for an unbeliever.
The children, tumbling in the wet, leaping from the walls, clattering into shins & yelling, are there already.

**********************************************************

My prevailing sense of anarchy, the child in me at this bonfire, has echoes in an unpublished chronicle I’m privileged to read - A Highland Boyhood in Ardnamurchan, written by Angus Cameron, who grew up here & like most of his generation in the peninsula, had no English before he went to school. It was loaned to me by my neighbour, a cousin of his, but even though she & one of her sisters & another relative try to unravel the knot of kinship, it remains tied & unresolved as to what degree of cousin.He writes of Kentra in the years of the First World War: “As the year rolled round, Hallowe’en was looked forward to with great fervour, as a crowd of us would dress up to go out “guising” and get involved in a host of pranks and tricks. Boats and carts would be removed and replaced in somebody else’s croft or patch. The shoemaker (Allan) guarded his boat carefully, but as soon as he left for a cup of tea, we would have it shifted. One year we put it beside John George’s potato pit, exchanging it with John George’s cart, which we left on the shore.”

03 11 07

It’s the old way, still the way of most of the world, but it’s become remote & we try to banish it: to walk unaided by light in darkness. How apart & rare. Now ten days after full moon, four until a new moon. No houselights east or west. A little dim starlight as the west wind frays the lumbering mass of greyed cloud. To slowly feel the way with cautious feet. To feel alone in silence. To feel cold in dim mountain bulk, the absence of complication, world reduced to the slow & slowing unseen but present; like the presence of the liver & spleen in the body – unfelt but known of. Stags in the dark. Birds roosted. One step. & another

31 10 07

Five days after full moon & still there’s light through torn clouds greater than the starlight, looming Ben Resipole at the end of the road I’m walking. No lights but for these. All the steading lights are out across the bay; the stags are no longer moaning in Moidart or Laga. Late curlews waver their calls across the leaden sea at Eilean Dubh. The cold bites the bridge of my nose & I’m suddenly & unassailably happy & singing: the sign painted on the road bend is SLOW & oh I don’t hurry; I step slowly into the night’s mysteries & out across the turf under which a million infinitesimally small creatures lead their lives in the forever dark, through which owls & bats swoop thick & noiselessly & the slugs slowly curve their way. Fresh rain drops on my hatless head; my neighbours the mountains dream on.