‘There are a surprisingly large number of people who go around dreaming of an island.’
By Hilary..
Summer 2022 - keeping a travel diary with a picture of two lurchers on has turned into this short diary I feel compelled to write as we return to London.
Hilary writing her diary..
It already feels light years away – our escape from the heat of London, North bound via the vast coasts of Northumberland to the Isles of Coll and Tiree – new islands on our continued Hebridean adventures.
Trying to keep the big skies and seas within me and the combined stories of seaweed collecting along these liminal spaces, of ship wrecks and land grabs, exploitation and resilience. The swallows playfully circle our van/home like the Dolphins around the aging and fully booked Caledonian MacBrayne ferries. We see otters and rare corncrakes, sprinting hares, the machair – the unique ecosystem of shell sand bound by vibrant carpets of flowers. You can watch the weather as it passes through and over you – one minute sunshine, the next gales and rain - volatile and unpredictable.
For islands said to be the sunniest places in the British Isles all islanders comment on how bad the summer has been – it seems the heat dome causing fires across Europe has pushed these colder, wetter fronts northwards. Nowhere is isolated, everything, everywhere is connected – our way through reliant on our collective ability to imagine elsewhere and other.
In the 1920s wooden shack we shelter in on the Isle of Coll stretching out of the confines of our van I don’t sleep well. Walls and curtains make a barrier between the night I had previously felt comforting. My obsessive reading uncovers more local history - of the imposing castle on the shore, of Boswell and Johnson’s visit to the Isles and the fact that the deep stream that edges our shack is known as the ‘stream of heads’ because so many were slain here. The whole bay is strewn with goose excrement and death. Bird flu warning signs have followed us up the British coast and carcasses of gannets lie decaying on the tide line. We spot a lone bird. Standing on one leg, it looks headless. We circle cautiously and it moves but gannets are not meant to be on this beach. It is dying. The last ones we saw dived and reeled in the stormy crossing from Eriskay to Barra last year – plummeting into surging seas. 86 million birds have died and it is barely noticed. These constant signs that all is not well in the world. Knowledge that the tipping point is already here and of the levels of deep denial and deliberate destruction are profoundly …what? Heart breaking? Distressing?.... not sure of an ample word that can describe this consciousness.
Browsing bookshelves in shades of blue featuring fishing, PADI manuals, wildlife guidebooks, Jack Russells and Jacques Cousteau, I pick up ‘The Book of Clouds’ and revisit the classifications I’ve always loved - cumulus, stratus, cirrus…. looking for signs – forecasts and forewarnings. Evaporation. Condensation. Precipitation. The water cycle learnt by rote and taken for granted in diagrams of sea, land and sky is now teetering. Cloud watching becomes more urgent as we live with this breakdown and what it already means. Next to these portentous atmospheric formations is ‘Rain Later. Good: Illustrating the Shipping Forecast (Peter Collyer) and I set myself the task of learning it off by heart for fun - drawing out and memorising the map from Dogger to SE Iceland, Hebrides to Fitzroy. The sea is subdivided by lines passing through sand banks, skerries, deep sea oil rigs, histories and politics. As I am neither sailor nor insomniac, it seems less of a poem or lullaby of information than a cryptic meteorological puzzle.
Days later, on a circuitous journey home through lands of parched grass and oppressive heat we practice morse code breaking with an enthusiastic amateur radio ham at the National Radio Centre. The only one I and many people know is … --- … Save Our Souls. If these staccato messages reach out into past and future distance who will listen? Will we save ourselves? The Shipping Forecast. Morse code. Things alien to everyday modern life, superseded by radar and satnav. As we leave the self-declared ‘Intelligence Factory’ the battle with ‘Siri’ begins – I argue for map reading skills, invoking the proven diminishing of the hippocampus and human navigation system and the urgent need – the necessity - to be able to find our way.
On immense, deserted beaches flanked by giant dunes, the children gather stones and clamber rocks. After my forays into the community centre Library I can share that this Lewisian Gneiss is 3 billion years old – some of the oldest rock in the world. There are no fossils because they were formed before life on earth. The words leave my mouth but still I have vertigo. Thinking of deep time, our place in the universe - precious, precarious life.
Returning to my desk listening to podcasts whilst packing the many orders coming in for the Green Backs whose sale are fuelling the building of the POWER STATION I hear Brian Cox talk of this sublime wonder and his speech to COP26 global leaders ‘If through deliberate action or inaction - or a combination of both – you eliminate this civilisation, then you probably, in my view, eliminate meaning in a galaxy of 400 billion suns, potentially forever, so have a think about that responsibility.” When we are part of something so miraculous why so carelessly squander it all?
Tove Jansen of Moomins fame lived her life wintering in Helsinki and summering in a remote island of the Finnish archipelago. She wrote ‘There are a surprisingly large number of people who go around dreaming of an island.’ I was born on one in the Irish Sea and perhaps the coastal mountain journey from hospital to home embedded itself in me - all of my stories from a land locked childhood were of islands and the sea before, as a teenager, I was trapped on another one this time yearning for escape - walking Atlantic beaches gazing out towards an imagined America, the first landfall for about 3500 miles.
Together with another small island born deliberate exile (Dan) we leave these islands on the very edge of Europe and journey South. Reaching Johnstonebridge service stations at dusk a lone white goose waddles across the BP forecourt. I feel an incredible urge to run and never return to this corrupt little England of enclosures, sleep walking suburbs and home counties harbouring deluded Tories. George Orwell had much to say about this England Your England. He too dreamt of an island and moved to the remote Hebridean Isle of Jura where he wrote his opus -1984. In between navigating treacherous waters and gardening in a harsh landscape he wrote of groupthink, memory holes, Big Brother and newspeak and most of all of truth - of the freedom and responsibility to face the now and future with bold clarity.
On our homeward journey, doublethink emerged at a fateful family gathering. Tink was attacked by bad philosophy. A husky stalked and launched a gruesome strike on our dog taking the chance of the moment I reluctantly felt I should join in and allay my watchful eye. The brief talk, interrupted by agonised wailing, was a concurrent offense of aggressive climate denial – their dog a daemon mauling our own. As we raced towards the distant emergency vet Dan reminded me of Victor Frankl - “Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.” Frankl recommended that the East coast Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast believing that freedom without responsibility is an oxymoron – a retreat into stupidity and denial – an inability to respond to wounds inflicted. An inability to be responsible or responsive to anything.
Tink after her attack
Unable to get back into our house because we’ve rented it out to cover our trip away we ‘are forced to camp.’ The cult film ‘Withnail and I’ has become the reference for our ‘delightful weekend in the country’ with a dog that is now a patient. We thank the trees of Westonbirt for sheltering us from the heatwave we’d wanted to avoid as we brush flies away from open wounds. We meander the B roads of middle England flirting with the edges of motorways and metropolis passing evocations of past and present war and protest - Greenham common, Newbury bypass, Blenheim Palace, Bletchley Park….
And against all my instincts here we are back in London. I google ‘islands for sale.’ One pops up. A bleak tear dropped shape island on a tidal race with a lone automated Lighthouse powered by solar and sheltering nesting sea birds. I try to imagine working the abandoned light house keepers walled kitchen garden, getting to know the patterns of migrating visitors. But I am here now. Tink is healing.
Dreams of an island are receding…….for a while. We drink tea and plot in the sun-bleached garden. Esmé describes the checked tablecloth as ‘fading like so many species’ and I want to cry.
Dan has returned with a new mug. In free- flowing watercolour it states ‘a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.’ He’s only just noticed the quote is attributed to Roosevelt , co architect of the US New Deal of the 1930s – inspiration for current calls for the Green New Deal that we try to work on here and now.
A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor - Roosevelt
So - it is back to it with new urgency, one minute excited, the other overwhelmed. A head full of practical plans for solar installations, of archives of infrastructure - of hopeful vision only interrupted to bail out the front of our house from flash flooding. Underground rivers resurge into submerged DLR stations – the Pudding Mill River that the London Olympic stadium was built over erupts.
My thoughts return to storm cast seaweed, to the islanders of Tiree fighting proposals for the industrial harvesting of the kelp forests sheltering their low shores from storm surges - to the hubris and carelessness of humanity pumping sewage into seas. I send snapshots to print – making a physical album of images to sit alongside those stored in my mind - moments of care and wonder, truth and horror from a summer of fire and flood, cream teas and dancing swallows.
Returning Malin to Thames. Pressure rising. Thunderstorms. More rain needed. Visibility - Becoming good. Later.
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