Journeys

I take a weekend off to visit friends Rich and Gerry and help them celebrate Rich’s retirement from full-time work. Joining us is the other Richard whose retirement last year we tried to celebrate in a weekend of sailing on the sheltered waters of the River Swale in Kent, and when due to atrocious weather we were forced indoors.

This time around the weather looks far more favourably upon us and in the middle of a brief heat-wave, we all take to the water on board Waxywoo II and Courageous, respectively a yacht and a sailing dinghy. The silt-laden waters of the Swale and the River Medway are places where traditional sailing boats are plentiful so it is far from unusual to pass by some beautifully restored piece of floating wooden history like this ancient fishing smack. Our own craft are a little more modern but over two days on the water we manage to sail, swim, potter around a few creeks on the Isle of Sheppey and generally have a ‘Swallows & Amazons’ type adventure with plenty of scrapes and jolly fun. Just what I need to take my mind off the madness of house removals.

Rich and Gerry generously feed and water me at their Dungate home where we find that in our absence, Wendy, one of the badger-faced ewes who live in the orchard behind their house, has given us a real treat by producing two fine lambs. She manages the whole business entirely on her own, with no human help, so we are very proud of her, although she does look a little sheepish in this picture.
Hovering expectantly around the comfortable barn where Wendy had installed herself was our old friend Hot Horns, a ram who loves having his thick coat tickled just behind his head.

In fact he is tolerant of almost any human attention he can get and although he wasn’t saying much one has to wonder whether he was an active participant in Wendy’s big event.
My mother is now finally re-locating, making the long journey north, and will stay in our home until she can take up residence in the house next door which she is buying for herself. She has great plans, naturally, to add new features here and there, to decorate the place to her own taste throughout, to tame the wilderness that is the garden, and no doubt there will be a long list of other jobs in the months to come. Once again a member of our family plunges into a house renovation project. Mere age alone cannot stop this – it is in our genes, I fear. At least it will take Mum’s mind off of the fact that she has left behind the over-crowded warmth of south-eastern Britain with its tame hedgerows and tightly clipped lawns as she struggles to adjust her eyes to the rather less kempt surroundings of the scenic Highlands with its dramatic views and rugged mountains.

The final part of her journey is inside the fuselage of a twin-engine Otter aircraft piloted by a lady we all assume is the air hostess… until she takes her position in the driving seat. Flying in a plane this size is flying in the raw, intimate and noisy, unlike the insulated, flying-above-the-clouds Airbus 319 that brought us as far as Glasgow. Propellers whirling we pick up speed then spring into the air and level off just high enough to clear the chimney pots then head towards the Isle of Arran whose mountains loom at us on the horizon. This being a new experience for me my camera is shooting in every direction, sometimes capturing part of the plane in shot (oops, is that the wheel!) or sometimes a yacht sailing not far below us.

At times we are so close to the ground that it feels like we might just bounce off it and a power station chimney we pass over looks almost close enough to touch. But we do clear the peaks of Arran then soon we are starting our descent to Campbeltown Airport where we make a gentle landing then taxi towards the tiny terminal building just as a fire engine rushes towards us – normal procedure, apparently.
Kate has driven out to meet us to complete this lengthy journey, the finish for me but the start line of a brand new journey for my mother.

My leisure-time reading has just taken me to a book by Mike Carter, a man who cycled around Britain a few years ago, coincidentally going the same way around the country as we did on Cirrus Cat, anticlockwise. As it happens his journey took place during the same summer as well, which may account for the fact that the conclusions he draws on the state of the country, and the welcoming attitude of its people, were very similar to our own. But of all those he met and wrote about I was most struck by his account of Steve, the ferryman who takes passengers across Salcombe Harbour in Devon. Himself a well-travelled cyclist, the simple wisdom of this man almost took my breath away. His view of life and of how he feels we should view life’s many challenges, made me re-read this section of the book several times until I had committed to memory something I felt I should take away with me. “Finishing lines are good”, the author quotes, “but their most important role is to get you over the start line in the first place.” How true this rings today when too often we are focussed upon goals and achievements, so many of which are meaningless in their own right, when it is the journey itself that is important.

Our son Mike’s journey is now complete and whilst Kate is supervising his introduction to Carradale life, something he seems to be taking to rather well, I am wrestling with the estate agents dealing with the sale of my mother’s house down south here in England. I feel as though I am having to push through treacle to get anyone, solicitors included, to even attempt to speed things up. It is as if the whole English sale and purchase system is geared towards sloth and even to suggest that things could be done quicker is met with surprise and alarm, horror even. Small wonder the housing market is in recession at the moment. The contrast with the more efficient Scottish house buying and selling process, where much of the work is done up front by the seller, is self evident and I know which I prefer. Estate agents, however, are of the same mettle all over the universe.
Grumbling over.

Family on the move

Our eldest son, Tony, has paid us a visit for the first time.

With a bit of reasonable weather, with all our first time visitors we like to show off a few of the treasures of Kintyre and seem to end up at Skipness Castle, a place with a fascinating story to tell despite barely having experienced combat. Far from being a ruin today, this place was inhabited until the seventeenth century, lived in by the favoured few with their servants no doubt, but the place is now said to be haunted by a Green Lady, although we did not see her on this occasion. Within the castle walls today the light seeps through small window openings casting shadows on the quiet world within.

But the stones used to build this castle glow with colour. A pink sandstone etches the corners of the structure, surrounds the windows and the fireplaces and picks out other details in a way that would not be out of place in a modern dwelling. Built by ‘Sven the Red’ when the Western Isles were part of Norway, he clearly had an eye for colour and wanted to create an impression on anyone approaching its walls. The roof balcony, created for the more liberated to wave from, was however a later addition.
Of all the new sights around him on his visit, Tony seems to be most impressed by the green lushness of the undergrowth that surrounds us, this being such a contrast with what he is used to seeing deep in the south of England. Frequent and persistent rain over recent weeks has promoted accelerated growth of everything with roots to suck it up and leaves to wave about. Bracken has been shooting up out of the ground, uncurling its long fronds, roadside verges have grown hairy, encroaching on the space available for cars, and trees now full of sap are bowing under the weight of their leaves. Everything is rushing, it seems, to get from flowers to seeds in the shortest possible time before the summer is over.

It is this point in the year, when the land and the sea are finally beginning to warm up, that Kate and I might have expected to find ourselves exploring the Highlands and Islands under sail aboard Cirrus Cat. Instead of castles, this blog would have been dotted with pictures of island wildlife, perhaps of tidal shores, of windblown spray and seaweed strewn beaches. Instead, I must report that these plans have yet to come to fruition, and may yet stay on hold until next year the way things are going for us. And the explanation for this starts with a journey south that will end when we have radically changed the lives of two members of our immediate family, and our own too.
Our first port of call is Yeovil in Somerset where we arrive to help our middle son, Mike, move from a place that has been his home for many years. He is coming to stay with us in Carradale. Moving to the Highlands of Scotland can be a life-changing experience, but living back with Mum and Dad can be even more of a culture shock - Mike thought he had left home for good over fifteen years ago - and his presence in our home promises to turn our own lives around as much as his own. In the intervening years we have each changed a lot so we are eagerly looking forward to having this older person around us and getting to know him better.

Closely following him on the journey north, as soon as the sale of her house in Sussex allows, will be my mother, her arrival establishing a three generation family set here in Carradale village. Neither of these moves are part of a long established plan; this is not how our family does things, it seems. For example our own decision to move to Scotland, although based upon solid reasoning, was implemented ruthlessly quickly as soon as we had reached our decision. House hunting via the Internet got under way then, almost before we had told anyone else, we found ourselves moving in. The whole process from deciding where we wanted to set up our home to re-locating lasted no more than three or four months, a remarkably short period of time in which to be turning your life around. Surely other people don’t do things this way. But yes! I had not previously appreciated that this was a family trait, something I should find comforting. But in some strange way I find it rather disconcerting that all of us move around so readily, following the advice of Albert Einstein who once said ‘Life is like a bicycle. In order to keep your balance you must keep moving’.