Interludes

Wednesday 4th November
Interludes
Image Left: Moon over the bay.

Sometimes when I close my eyes I find myself rerunning old business trips, I can almost feel the gravity of the car against the camber of the road. These are the interludes of my old life, as if somehow I am reliving the spaces between events, the boredom. I know the junctions, the by-passes and lay-bys but the rest is lost to me as dull ache. Memory is hardly a reliable witness, all that remains of my childhood Sundays at church is a feeling that religion is about passively restraining people in their seats. How may hours of preaching, communions given and taken , hymns sung and demons exorcised to be left only with the resonance of fidgety legs?

This evening I walked the island’s small street of cottages tapping on living room windows and inviting the occupants to watch the moon rise out of cliff faces and mountains of Mull. People hung in the warmth of doorways while the brave made it onto the street their camera flashes flickering in the dusk.
At the last house I collected my son and wrapping him in a sling walked down to Christine’s bay. The rising tide had reclaimed the estuary for the sea but the ocean swells had not been invited. On the edge of the sand I watched the moon in its mountain home and traced a pillar of light over stillness.

Later at dinner people thanked me for the moon and I wondered whether somehow I was responsible for its presence.

bible black

Image left: A flautist brings in the Dusk at the Sanctuary
Location: Isle of Erraid, Mull

Bible Black
Sunday 18th October
The sun, sea and wind have scorched my already over-sensitive eyes; I retreat under a hat pulling it down to seal my blindness. A reaction to a hand cream has brought me a temporary secession from the visible world, so I hang up my eyes and enjoy the painlessness of the dark while strolling arm in arm with my wife over the sand. We are walking back from the far end of the Narrows* and I am measuring steps out against my visual memory. Already the white noise of breaking waves has begun to fade to be replaced with the compression of sand under my footfall. Without clues to my position I loose faith and peek out from beneath the hat. Three hooded crows pick amongst the wind scattered debris of the beach; when I close my eyes again they are gone and I am back with crunch, crunch beneath my feet. Today the crows only exist is the visual world, their crawks and scratchings have been carried away on the breeze. I wonder if the crows could blank me out similarly; just as I have my world I suspect they too enjoy their own.

Slightly ahead of me and to my left I hear the clap of thousand tiny hands applauding the wind and remember the line, “willows whiten aspens quiver”** . My eyes confirm the words of the poet, the cliff faces like football terraces hold a swaying crowd of yellow gloved aspens. In the spring I greet even the smallest bunch of daffodils by reciting to myself the opening verse of Wordsworth’s most popular work. Just as Adam or Karl Linnaeus got to name everything so too the poets own my emotional responses. The call of a buzzard brings me back as it echoes between opposing rock faces. A visitor to the island who had worked in the film industry told me this was the standard sound used to accompany shots of wilderness. I imagine all that it is to be wilderness, all that it has meant to those who new of it, who lived within and without and then see the distillation of that intangible vastness to an image of mountain and the call of a hawk. I suppose no one has the whole bible as a bumper sticker, just the sign of a cross or a fish. So I have become a blind man wandering in the wilderness with half remembered poems and snatched conversation with which to build my world.

* a narrow stretch of sand that separates the tidal island of Erraid from Mull
** taken from The Lady Of Sharlott, Tennyson

Coming Up For Air

Saturday 8th August
Coming Up For Air
Image Left: Bottlenose Dolphin

The sky has already begun to darken. I watch an orange glow fill the spaces between the cloud on the horizon. The swell is hitting a small reef on the other side of a wide gully that runs through Erraid’s outer skerries. Pleasant domes of water draw themselves up into foaming monsters before petering out in the backwash of other islets. The sea is a mess, in the distance the mast of yacht swings like the arm of a metronome as it motors its way towards the shelter of Tinker’s Hole.

I cut the engine and put my faith in the ocean and Archimedes. My fishing line drops to the sea bed and I wind the reel up a little before jogging the lures up and down. The fish come thick and fast, mackerel and saithe of equal size. I toss them into a fish box while they are still flicking their tails against the air. And then the fins come and I forget the fish and watch as a pod of dolphins bounce out of the gully through the crests. In the turbulence they appear and disappear as if by magic sometimes within an arms reach of the boat then away as tail lost on the far side of a wave. This is too easy, fish on the line and dolphins for company.

I can’t be sure but this is probably the same pod we saw yesterday out in the Sound of Iona. At the time my oldest son temporarily forgot his sea sickness as they neared the boat. The weather had been better and sea more readily gave up its secrets. At a guess I would say there was between ten and fifteen dolphins in the group including a couple of juveniles. Close up their fins and skin give up detail in form of nicks, bite marks and blemishes; its a hard life being a dolphin despite the fixed grin. They moved through the sound gathering a flotilla of pleasure craft drawn from both shores; we left them to the crowd.

Tonight I have the ocean and the dolphins to myself, so I drift under a darkening sky. A grey seal joins the fun stretching his head out of the water to view the contents of my boat as it tilts on a wave. The dolphins eventually move off out into the larger swells beyond the island. I start the engine and turn tail for home leaving a phosphorescent wake in the darkness of the sound.

Image Below: Coming up for Air (Bottlenose Dolphin)

Space

Image Left: Sitting with the stones

Space , Friday 26th June

My wife walks on ahead to the spiral and her sitting stone. I scramble through the bracken lifting patches of roofing felt, hoping to catch a lizard taking in the last of the days warmth. I have no luck and follow my wife to the spiral. The sun is making its evening descent towards Iona and has already begun to shoot out colour into the horizon. As my wife sits, I bounce round the rocks of the spoil heap photographing orchids, ferns, thyme and tight bunches of stonecrop.

The island is one mile by one mile, but what surface and what intricacy. Living here is like unfolding a lung. I have to ask myself what scale should I use to measure? Do I run a tape over points of the boulders or down into the crevices where hard ferns and stonecrop shelter? Maybe the surface of a leaf counts or the delicate inlayed scales that surround a lizards eye. If I look closely these details too give up their own structure and inversely the space that marks out their components. I once tried to grasp the size of mountain; in the dark of a winter evening I drove over its shoulder and understood the blackness against the streetlights of the villages and towns that clung to its foothills. Here there are few lights to give contrast and daily tidal surges make the ocean a less reliable yardstick.

Some days I go a little deeper viewing the world under a microscope and finding red splashes of blood in the body of a tick, blood that was once mine. Is everything just membrane, there are only boundaries and separation. When I draw caricatures two circles with dots at their centre become breasts or eyeballs dependant on viewer; a simple act of defining space. Am I only interested in defining space?

Image below: Common Lizard

A Rare Thing

Image left: Common Sandpiper
Sunday 7th June
A Rare Thing

I turn into the Narrows under a sky filled with the siren like calls of oystercatchers. I quickly find the empty cup of their nest seated in a heather topped boulder: It had originally held three eggs, but two of these had been lost early on leaving only a single chick to face the rigors of life on the beach. I move off and their calls subside.

The recent run of neap tides have failed to dampen the expanse of sand leaving it littered with sea borne debris. Even the small tidal stream that skirts island’s side of the sand has disappeared leaving only the fossilised indents of running water. On the opposite bank the oaks of John’s Wood have filled out their canopy still holding to the glass ceiling created by the prevailing winds. Below on the edge of the sand a patch of Irises are just beginning to flower, the distance lending them the feel of impressionist’s sketch with hastily thrown yellow dashes amongst the green fuse.

For the island’s rocky margin life has also moved on apace, the low cliffs hold wooded tufts, with oak, birch, aspen and hazel all in leaf while the rowans had started to blossom. Even the shear faces of rock are dotted with tight bunches of thrift like unfurled anemones. Where ledges and fissures afford some shelter ferns, penny royal and heather bring their own colour to the patina of lichens. I drew myself into this world with deep breaths , someone had painted over the surfaces with life.

From a low stand of birch the call of a bird brought my attention in from the beach. The tone was melodious enough to be a songbird but it had a distinct resonance that marked it out from the thrushes and warblers. Its calls pulled me from bush to bush while my quarry gave up only tantalising glimpses. I was been played for a fool and when the bird had taken me far enough from its nest it made a long arc back to were the game had began. I too returned to the start but instead of replaying the chase, I waited. A small wading bird emerged from the thicket calling to its mate who answered from the top of rock on the edge of the beach. It flitted off the ground and threw its legs forward to grapple with a low branch on which it intended to perch, it took a couple of second to find its balance. I waited with them as they moved from branch to rock through the small valley dipping their tails and calling all the time. What I took to be the female made occasional sorties to the base of a hazel, where I assumed her nest lay. The species of the bird was only something I could guess at and these guesses ranged from rare passage migrants to species I had seldom found the need to look up in my field guide. I suppose life is a rare thing in itself and intimacy with it, rarer still.

On The Street Where I Live

Image Left: The Island

Monday 1st June

On The Street Where I Live

I woke early to full sunshine and the thinnest of breezes. In the summer here, daylight begins about the time nightclubs are sending patrons home, darkness becomes a brief interlude in an endless summer day. My neighbour remarked yesterday that she could live another whole day after dinner, and I remembered I had a whole day to live before breakfast.

I met the small party on the street about half past six and we found coffee and a clear blue sky framed in the small panes of the kitchen window; we made our way down to the pier. I hauled on the mooring ropes breaking the inertia of the boat and the day in general. The engine sprang to life primed by the warmth of the sun and we idled out into the breeze of the sound. Ahead, Iona’s cliff faces hung like a wall in the distance and behind us Ben More crested out of a blue mountain haze. I felt a little uneasy about breaking through the quiet presence of the island and ocean with the rattle of hum of the engine at full throttle. We eventually turned towards Tinker’s Hole and found a small flotilla of yachts moored across the narrow gap, their masts glinting scimitar like against the horizon.

Overhead terns called as they flitted between the islets occasionally diving almost butterfly like to meet the water. Where the falling tide had exposed a long stretch of white sand on Easter Island, the striking patterns of male eider ducks jarred at my vision as they sat with their drab mates in the sun. We glided into seal bay finding a single grey seal hauled out on the rocks, he quickly dismounted and slipped back into the sea. I cut the engine and we drifted a little downwind of Seal island, the smell of seal’s breath still tainting the morning air. After a few minutes the seal reconsidered and returned to its perch lumbering out of water and the grace afforded by that medium. We sat hushed by the presence of the seal as if waiting on a guru for some words of wisdom, none were forth coming.

Our little boat trip was to give a couple long term guests a last look around the island and so far all the actors had willing taken to the stage. Leaving the seal, we cut back into the sound and visited Jimmy’s lagoon, a large sea trout bolted over the sand as we navigated through the monoliths. The tide was too low to afford the boat access to main lagoon. I took us out and hugging the opposite shore from the island made my way down to our jetty on Mull. I tied up and we stepped out to look back to the island, the summer sun was still lighting the face of the street, picking out the brightly coloured doors with a frame of shadow.


The distance hid any of the morning’s activities giving the place the look of a model village. My eye moved from the pier and sheds past the tractors and up the hill towards pier cottage and the byre. Above, the sanctuary topped the small wood and higher still the quarry and observatory. My eye took me back to the street and gardens, a perfectly formed miniature world that rested motionless in the morning sun.

When we finally returned to the island we found the world had woken, I handed the boat over to Phil and the children for the school run. The cows were already making their way back along the track their udders a little lighter after milking while their calves called from the front garden of number two. On the street two empty chairs, a laptop and a guitar looked to have been hastily abandoned by a unlicensed busker , while doorways held guests and residents that had come to look out over the bay at the wider world beyond.

Image above right: Street Life

A Shallow Scrape In The Sand

Image Left: Oystercatcher chicks

A Shallow Scrape In The Sand
Wednesday 27th May

After dinner we walked onto the low grassy headland above the arc of the beach, the Oystercatchers where already up swinging around us with alarm calls while keeping some distance. I had found the nest earlier today on a walk across the bay to collect some guests who had been visiting Iona for the day. At three o’clock the shallow scrape in the sand was occupied by to two fluffy chicks and a single undamaged egg. At five, on the way back from a visit to the croft a small beak could be seen as it broke through the shell.

I guessed by now the chick would be out but wasn’t entirely sure if the little brood would be mobile enough to have scarpered. Once on the move finding highly camouflaged wader chicks becomes almost impossible especially when their parents’ warning calls seem to encourage them to remain as motionless as any of the other three million pebbles on the beach. A couple of years ago I nearly flattened a lapwing chick that had decided to patrol a stretch of road next to a Pennine moorland. What had been conspicuous while running on flat surface of the loose road completely disappeared when seated.

After walking backwards and forwards over the same ten feet of road for five minutes and finding nothing I glanced down at my feet and saw what I thought was frog that had been unlucky enough to encounter a car. Realising it was the chick I took a deep breath before bending down, luckily the flat appearance was partially an optical illusion created by the mottled pattern of its down. I lifted the chick and its legs dropped down like the oversized landing gear of an aeroplane. When I placed it back in contact with the ground it new its cover was completely blown and made a break for it in style of Road Runner.

I took the precaution of checking and setting my camera before we neared the nest so as not to spend anymore time than necessary disturbing the chicks and their parents. We dropped onto the beach cautiously studying the ground before every step. We found three chicks safe and well with half an egg shell in a small cup of sand. The latest hatchling was still sporting the wet look and nestling into the down of its slightly older siblings. All in all we stayed at the nest for a little over a minute before walking the short distance back to the street and out of danger zone for the worried parents.

Image Above Right: Nest Amongst The Pebbles
Image below: The Conception