A Rare Return

 to My Favourite Place.  Three ferries, hours on the road.  High Society and Oklahoma once we put the city behind us; and we are well on the way.

Sunshine, fresh breezes, and a few squalls.  Early morning walks, to old haunts.  And a welcome reunion with Sheelagh.  Old friends and new.  Prompts and tasks, deep into the night.

As always the island gleams under crystal light.  Colours change, rapidly; all greens and blues on the water.  Until the next shower looms.

Morning rainbows.  Corncrakes, throwing their voices, from deep in the long grass.  Then you see one, out in the open.  It ignores you; lets you watch.

For some there's the joy of puffins, boat trips to take, other isles to visit.

For those of us with timetables and chores, the play hours have to come at the start and end of the day.  But even they might be research, always with notebook and camera to hand.

A brief moment before evening drinks.  A few snaps to share.  Just from the phone, for now.

Two Harbours

 The long spell of cloudless skies and warm temperatures has run its course.  Cool clouds and a fresh breeze race into the cliffs.  The air carries a threat of rain.

A meadow pipit pipes my path down to the harbour, where a solitary eider paddles.  My old friend BCK33 brings her usual colour to the scene.  The still waters belie the sounds of crashing spray beyond the harbour wall.  I take the path back up, through the Green Castle.  Lumpy waters broil below.

Along at Bow Fiddle Rock the seabird colony seems worryingly quiet for the breeding season.  Two handfuls of shags deny the wind, standing in silhouette on the ridge of Shitten Craig.  The path through the whins is rich in the heady smells of coconut, but quiet.  I hear a lark ascending, but little else.  The tide is well up and I consider whether the outward or the return should be the one for the low road, by Jenny's Well.  Down the steps I go.  The tide has a bit further to rise yet.

There is no tinkle of water from the Well.  However the path of the burn is clearly marked by the rise, and the spread, of the Himalayan Balsam.  I reach the ninth green, where the balsam also thrives.  The beach is quiet, with only two walkers and one dog, plus a jogger, this side of the Three Kings.  I wander along the edge of the surf.  The distant viaducts are occluded, and as I recall the optician's words earlier in the week, about cataracts, I realise it's only the spray, swept from the surf.

As the bay curves so the roar rises in crescendo.  Above the sound of the tumbling surf is the roar of the wind.  Constant.  Driving.  The last tide has left smatterings of little jellyfish across the strand.  They should be back in the water shortly, if not pushed further up the beach.

From the Sauna at the Kings, three hardy souls emerge, striding to the surf, gloved against the cold, to rinse the pink and the dirt away.  This is wild, wild swimming; and a quick return to the steam of the coals.  The open doors of the Loons and the Quines provides a timely welcome.  Rare it is to find public loos still open these days, though a notice inside suggests that more volunteers are urgently needed if the seasonal facility is to remain available.  So, long since past the days of council funding, and now over to the community to dig deep.

The Blue Coast surf school prepares for an invigorating session.  They head along the sand, instructor in washed-out orange, pupils in bleached blue, quite possibly goose-pimpled blue in the parts the neoprene doesn't reach.  Each totes a blue board, which the wind would like to turn into a soaring sail.

The harbour is not busy.  Louise sits on the periphery of a clutch of eight mixed working and leisure craft.  There are only two others.  

Once again there are calm waters inside; maelstrom out.  Through the field glasses I watch the distant surfers, as they are powered up the sand, rising, tumbled.

For the return I head up through the town, and the path through the grounds of Cullen House, and on to Castle Hill, before joining the viaducts and the cycle path.  

Pinks and yellows on both sides, greenery above.   Rosebay willowherb is already reaching full height, soon to add to the palette.  The golf course below has all the evidence of the fine weather, though today's players adopt woolly hats and outer layers.  The fairways are browned, the greens watered and fresh.  

On the quieter stretches, as we rise, the sheltered cuttings of the old railway track are a haven for birdlife, in the whins and the trees rising on both sides.

Merlin joins me.  In the space of a mile or so he tells me I have been listening to 17 different species.  Not only do I hear the willow warbler, but I stand and watch as he trills in the treetop.  I know now what I watch, and might recognise that song next time.  Of the less familiar, I have been walking with a sedge warbler, and a spotted flycatcher too.  It's a wizard wheeze; don't leave home without Merlin.  Though I don't need him to tell me of the stonechats I chase along the fence posts as we go back into the deep and coconut scented gorse, or to hear the yellowhammer singing for his cheese.

As I head back towards the harbour, wondering if the eider might still be there, so I feel the first smattering of rain for some weeks.  It won't be just the golf course that needs it.  Selfishly I'll be glad to see it break this week.  So long as the warmth returns next week.  My Favourite Place awaits.  Meantime here's that Invasive Species that's about to spread even more.

Dangerous

 It must have been a little north of 15 years ago that I dipped my toe into the very murky waters of the Byron legend.  I had been putting together some notes to mark the 200th anniversary of the not-so-good Lord's swim across the Hellespont, in the wake of Leander.

Other than that, and a hint of the lurid tales that followed him, I knew little; had never then read, and still haven't Childe Harold; more a fan of Robert Byron.  That said my researches then resulted in my becoming a huge fan of Richard Halliburton.  He too had crossed that dangerous stretch of water, just like Paddy Leigh Fermor.

I digress.  Byron, Lord, that was the subject matter.  And indeed a subject known in much greater detail to Essie Fox, for she it is who penned Dangerous.  She takes us to Venice, to Byron's haunts and all his many lurid pleasures.

 

She crafts her tale around his writings, his contemporaries, and before you know it we are deep in historical crime writing.  Deep in the sights, and sounds, the smells too, of Venice two centuries ago.  The hedonistic lifestyle of the anti-hero.  And his hangers-on.

I'm at risk of too many spoilers, so engrossing is this tale.  The crime team appear on the scene, though they have but a bit-part in this tale.  Wallowing in a cell; then another cell, from which he considers another swim, across The Lido.

Unveiled and unmasked, in what follows, this tale has Byron and his entourage in all their glory, seeking to right the wrongs that have besmirched his 'good name'.  Crafted around the people and places, with just a little invention here and there, Dangerous is a cracking read, a ripping yarn.  Essie Fox has delved deep, and sucks us in to Venice two centuries ago, the waters dappled with fragments of Byron's life and style, from cradle to grave.  

Much as I delved deeply into Halliburton 15 years ago, a new writer to me then, so I think I may still be reading Essie Fox, a new writer to me today, 15 years hence.  Dangerous is masterful. 

It may be time that I read again The Flying Carpet, sampled once more that sheer joy that Halliburton and Moye Stephens had as their aim as they took their little bi-plane round the world.  Perhaps too I should be reading again Elly Beinhorn's Flying Girl, and not just for the section where their wing-tips met in those heady days.

But for now I think I'll away and see what else young Essie Fox may have in store for me.  I may be some time...

Merryn on Nan

 I mentioned podcasts a little while back.  One of those I had listened to was from Paperboats; and in particular Merryn Glover.  Anything that starts with, born in Kathmandu, and ends up walking in the Cairngorms, has to be worth listening to.  And it was, deliciously so.

The Hidden Fires, is Merryn's most recent publication, and what a read that is.  She set out in the footsteps of that other quine from the hills, Nan Shepherd, and her unique writings in The Living Mountain.  I might just go back and read that one again soon.

 

Decades later, finally accustomed to the unfamiliar climate of Scotland's mountains, learning how to work with crampons and ice axe, how to survive, Merryn takes us to haunts and the high tops, the hidden corries and the lochans, of Nan Shepherd's earlier work.

She read's the book and reads the land, the range of mountains, adding her own eyes and words, to all that Nan Shepherd set out.  We dip in and out of Shepherd's essays and poems, as well as her seminal volume on the hills.  And it works.  It works so well. 

Merryn Glover looks again at the wildlife, the trees and the undergrowth.  She finds the eagles soaring, the black-cock lekking.  And she swims in the chilled waters, where Nan bathed.  Inching in, adjusting to the cold gradually, wise enough to dispense with youthful frivolities of the reckless dive and the shock to the brain.  Common sense used just as much as the others, as she listened and scented and felt her away among the mountains.

We find again those loggers, sending timber down mountain torrents to the shipyards at Kingston.  We walk in the path of wartime regiments, from Glover's well kent territories on the Sub-Continent, to tragedy in the Cairngorms.

Such a good read ; so much so that half way through I stopped and listened to the podcast again, to hear Merryn chat about it all; then returned to read on.  It is a gem of a book, and goes straight on to those lists I keep.

This is a volume that deserves to be in first edition hardback on the shelf, rather than a download to an e-reader.  If only there were a first edition of The Living Mountain for it to rest beside. I'll have to settle, at least for now, in digging out the old paperback.  For I will be reading that again, with fresh eyes, before too long.

Up With The

 Yes, of course it's the lark.  As I opened the door, still dark, barely a rumour of the dawn, he sang and he sang and he sang some more.  Out of sight, as usual, though this time due to the morning darkness.  Somewhere above the field, on the far side of the garden.

Auspicious it was, for I was setting off specifically to hear birdsong.  International Dawn Chorus Day.  Not many years ago we used to be able to listen to the dawn chorus rising across the globe.  On the radio, through the night.  Euan McIlwraith hosted the Scottish end, and by the time his birds were singing, the headphones had been twittering me in and out of sleep for hours, chatting to his colleagues in far flung parts, revelling in their own dawns, their own songs.

This time I was heading out for a guided walk.  Baron's Haugh was the location, that splendid reserve on the east bank of the Clyde, accessed from Motherwell.  Our host was Sam, RSPB Community Engagement Officer, assisted by John who had ears to pick up and identify calls way beyond my range.

Brilliantly they had arranged for a few bats to fly round as a dozen and a half, sleep deprived but curious, gathered in the car park.

To the woods we went, still deep in the gloaming, but the air bursting with birdsong.  Stopping occasionally to tune in, Sam giving clues to allow us to know what unseen birds  were entertaining us.  The wren.  The loudest of them all, such power from such tiny lungs.  As Simon Barnes says it's the trill at the end of the verse.  And having Sam point it out live might well be what it takes to sink in, to never leave you.  

By then of the walk the wren and the blackbird, and the robin too, were sounding different to the slightly less untrained ear; and it was more than educated guess that could tell one from t'other.

The song thrush was out and proud too, he repeats and repeats in your ear, a bit like Ella's nightingale in that sense.  It's the repeat, probably not the same phrase, as he chooses  different ones, but tune in to the repetition, and you have your thrush.

 On we wandered, Marsh Hide for the wetlands, along the river bank - sadly no otter out to play - with Sam and John holding the attention of the group; raptured when the whitethroat made an appearance.  It was the flight, then the song.  And once we had him so we found him again and again, dancing round the hawthorn, that unmistakeable scent rising in the morning air.  A hint of Rod Stewart suggests Barnes, though he and Sam both have it as scratchy.  The flight is more fun than the song.

And on we went, a few deer to enthrall the children.  Blackbirds and blackcaps, we might be able to tell them apart.  And the willow warbler, wood pigeon on the percussion.

In all of this Merlin proved a good chum to have with you.

Such a fine way to start the day, then home for a hot shower and hot drink, refreshed before the daily grind begins.  There had been drinks and morning snacks with Sam and John too, a little hideaway in the woods, but those intolerances meant I had to pass.  And they do a bat walk later in the year, which might be fun, and won't disrupt the sleep.