FOXGLOVES

Some of the things I love

I love foxgloves, the spikes of flowers, each with its fine pathway of dots into the petal; these splashes of colour on the walks I have taken in the summer for most of my life. I like seeing the bees struggling into them for their nectar, though I now realise it is only long tongued bees that do this. I like seeing them swaying in the breeze. Though now I hear that when they bend their stems it is to acknowledge the passing fairy folk.

But most of all when I was little, I loved to tell people that they were deadly poisonous and yet the digitalin that was extracted from them was now used as a heart medicine.

I wonder if I can be tender at the image of little me; so anxious to please and to be praised. I think when I was young, I sometimes treated the natural world as an extension of my stamp books; keen to know the names of the birds and animals and flowers but not so keen I ever knew much about them. The number of times I spotted eagles and declared with conviction they were not buzzards even though we were in places where eagles do not live! I wanted to grow up to be some sort of naturalist, maybe to have a zoo like Gerald Durrel or to dive in the seas like Jaques Cousteau.

I remember that every Christmas my great Aunt who I had never met, would send me ‘The adventures of Pip;’ a book I loved the first time I got it but, a bit anxiously; as the young Pip got an education in the life of the hedgerows and fields from her Romany friend that I would never achieve; slightly annoying; the times I got the same book three years in a row for Christmas.

Looking back from such a distance, I recall that childhood was composed of so many walks in the natural world but I also remember, as children, when we lived in places where we had friends; we roamed the fields, climbed the trees, poked at wasps nests, tried to get immune to nettle stings by walking in nettle fields and maybe that was a closer connection to nature. I also remember, in Norfolk, wandering the bramble patches; picking Blackberries and getting purple fingers and somehow itchy all over or, on rare occasions, dragging nets through the shallows of the sea to catch shrimps and prawns, the odd flounder and crab and far too many weaver fish which we stamped on, in the callous way some young people do.

I remember being high in the mountains with ravens appearing in the mist below us and grown up climbers, astonished to come across ten year olds like us, hundreds of feet up a cliff, with rain drops dripping from our chins.

And I remember the hurl of the yacht in the Irish sea with water spouts and ferries passing; covered in spray, while the crew tried to recover from too much whisky from the night which I had served them while they listened to the music of the crooners of the fifties when eating and drinking below. And I remember my dad saying how proud he was of me for being able to stand a watch alone in the gale. I still need to remember such things.

I also remember, away at school, hundreds of miles from home, walking the meadows beside the river, stalking a silent dignified heron who was almost but not quite irritated by my presence. Or listening to bird song and looking at the summer flowers in a break from school lessons, while I wondered why I was not with family anymore and wondered whether any of the new children in my life would ever talk to me or acknowledge me and I remember the calm, the bliss of those moments; the reprieve from the loneliness.

But I also remember later when I did have some friends, battering a ‘myxie’ rabbit to death when we encountered it, screaming in pain with its bulging eyes in a field below the woods we were walking in and I remember how I trembled at killing and knew I had done something terrible but good.

Now, now that I am old, I remember, up in Lochinver, walking up and over a hill with Mandy and other writers. Mandy knows the land in way I never will. We walked slowly in the heat, amidst clegs and midges. Every so often she would stop and point out a plant and tell us its name and it’s folklore and what it was ‘good’ for. She would also point out houses form the clearances and old Neolithic sites and I was entranced. Her partner was one of the key figures in the Assynt land buy out (The very start of local Scottish communities taking back their land.) Even on the walk, I knew I would never understand the names and the myths or connect at all with the land; in fact, I got hot and sweaty but as we dipped to a river with its rapids and the cool shade from trees along its banks, I loved it. I decided I wanted, like her, to run a croft and have a boat and write; perhaps luckily, I never had the means or the energy to follow up on that.

I love to be in the natural world and tend to hate cities and big towns but I still know little about it and know little about the culture modern wilderness writers have almost certainly developed among themselves. I imagine our place and role in nature occupies a smaller and smaller portion and that our anthropomorphism or assumptions about what we feel we are due from the natural world is deeply resisted now. Sounds ok to me but, though I want to do my bit about pollution and about global warming, and indeed, went to University, over forty years ago, to try to be an eco-warrior, I tend to only skirt the very distant edges of such debates.

I like to tell myself this is because I am fed up with powerful people and activists and everyone really; pronouncing on what is right and what is wrong and what we should or shouldn’t do with our world, when, to my mind it is these attempts to alter, whether they be ones I approve or those I despise, that ultimately lead to some of the trauma our earth continues to experience.

Despite that, I love being in the natural world. I think the happiest I have ever been has been on watch in mid Atlantic with a maze of bright stars above and bright plankton below with the occasional huff of a dolphin and the long streaks in the phosphorescence as they played around our stationary boat, or maybe it has been when I have been on the last watch of the night and felt that sense of relief as the dawn lightens the world and the long dark of the night, because we had no light or electricity, vanishes for another day. Or maybe it was, one incredible day of wind and bright sky; cross country skiing on my own; way beyond Ryvoan Bothy in the Cairngorms, with crystals of snow whipped away by the wind.

But maybe my most apprehensive times have also been in mid Atlantic, becalmed, when we decided to go swimming from our engineless yacht with just a rope streaming from the stern for safety. That feeling of utter vulnerability; no land for hundreds and hundreds of miles and no knowing how many thousands of feet of water there were below our puny bodies or again sitting alone on another voyage with the grey metal like sea stretching away for ever. Sometimes that was wonderful and I felt part of something so much bigger and more incomprehensible and sometimes it became bizarre when I found myself tempted to step off the board and try to walk to the horizon. The same with the snow. The weirdest of times, which I have also experienced in squalls at sea, is the utter disorientation of skiing in a blizzard, not knowing if I was going uphill or downhill, unable to judge anything as all around me was wind and whiteness.

Nowadays one of the nicest parts of my life are my almost daily walks round Ardmore with Dash the dog. It can get annoyingly routine, I know where the snowdrops arrive in late winter and what the roses will smell like in June and the gorse in the spring. I know the place where I like to photograph the crocus and know the rocks where the seals sun themselves at mid tide. I know where the cormorants stand with outstretched wings to dry out and where the cherry blossom will be and where the apple and pear blossom is likely to be and when it will arrive to be replaced by something else.

I remember the time the tree crashed to the path in a storm, a bare two minutes before I reached it and recognise the small pile of branches left in the field from where it was tidied away. I remember gales when I have got soaked and so has Dash and frosts where the sea partially freezes and evenings watching the bats flickering along the hedgerows at dusk in the gloaming or that time I had an osprey pointed out to me or the other time Dash the dog was terrified of a big bag of winkles a man was walking to shore with or the man who said there were so many sea trout off the point but they were not biting.

I walk here and I get lost in my thoughts here and sometimes those thoughts are harsh and sometimes they are kinder. I often talk to Dash the dog. I often wish Dash had better recall skills so I could let him off the lead, even better would be if he could reply to my conversation.

And I will stop now. Without a conclusion or a moral. I like Ardmore far more than any building or construction in nearby Glasgow. I like it that, nowadays, a fair few people know me and I know which ones will stop to talk with me and Dash and which ones have dogs that hate Dash and which of these dogs will be restrained by their owner’s and which are left to their own devices. And I know that each time Dash sees another dog he goes tense because once he was badly beaten up here by a huge dog but that most often, after a while, he relaxes and they set to sniffing each other and wagging their tails.

And yes! The foxgloves, sometimes said to be the gloves fairy folk wrapped round their feet, sometimes the shoes foxes used to muffle their approach on unwitting prey.

There are so many stories about so many things. I could fill a lifetime with the lore of just the plants and creatures of Ardmore and maybe knowing there is such richness and that I will never know much of it at all, is my conclusion of contentment.

My walk with the wreck of the sugar boat, old fish traps, the cairn and cave and tower in the woods that I have never seen, familiar and unknown but only because I am content for it to remain that way.

You can read more about my life in the natural world in with my family and with mental illness in my memoirs START and Blackbird Singing. Do get them from Amazon or message me direct for one at a discount.