Where we went part two: in the pines, in the pines

 

 

 

The above is Tentsmuir Forest, which bristles along a hump of coast North of St Andrews, and which hitherto I had not known about.

 

 

Sadly, there is no overnight parking right in this spot, where the dunes and grassland roll out forever towards the retreating sea, so we drove up to the small town of Tayport and hiked a little way back, camping in a dune edging on heather, in view of the Firth of Tay (the Tay estuary) and the lights of Broughty Ferry on the far shore.

 

 

With the tents set up, a barbeque had in the brief but nearly torrential rain, and many friendly dogwalkers greeted, we went out for a walk.

 

 

 

 

Super-saturation effect – taken at the time, to show how bright the woods were. My camera was struggling to catch their glow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

That big estuary sky. We walked back to camp, then on back towards Tayport, where we had seen some World War Two defense huts still set up to watch the placid horizon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a bit of peering and scrambling and wondering, it was time for another barbeque and to watch the sun set (I should add that the first picture of the camp was taken at around 9pm, but we walked out and about earlier). The evening was in perfect light as the sun set and barred reddish gold through the trees.

 

As we started to get ready to turn in for the night, a fox came close to our tents. It circled twice, eyeing us and sniffing at where we had cooked. It was the only slightly unsettling part of our stay at Tentsmuir – how much difference can a sandy, dry heathland make to our sense of peacefulness. Even those odd remnants of war only seemed empty, catchments for dust and pine needles and graffiti. We slept well on the soft sand, though it was cold. We walked back to the car, lipping the wetlands and the huge sky overhead bore us no ill will.

 

Where we went part one: woods dark and deep(ish)

 

 

On Friday as we traveled North-West, the rains came and did not let up. Our plan to camp near Loch Fyne had to be abandoned, but we decided to have a day out anyway. We went into Cruchan, the hollow mountain – a hydroelectric scheme that was built inside Ben Cruchan in the nineteen fifties. Sadly, no photos from there as since 9/11, there has been some reluctance to let people take photographs inside working power plants. Suffice to say – the tour left lots unseen, and what was shown looked very much like a Bond villain’s lair.

 

 

 

 

But beyond that was Inveraray, a small touristy village that would be in good scenery if the mist had not closed in a little and the colours muted.Though the odd splatter of bloom provided colour against the whitewashed houses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, some places look better in the lashing rain. Textures stand out. There are fewer tourists, and the woods stand waiting.

 

 

 

 

We headed for a garden on the far shore of Loch Fyne that A had visited a year before, Ardkinglas. There was no one in the kiosk on the way in, nor anyone in the garden but us the entire time.

 

 

 

 

It was a beautiful place, managed but not manicured, full of rhododendron blossoms hanging like powder puffs, and moss and yellow- leaved skunk cabbage (which, D informed A and I, does indeed smell of skunk), a river, old stumps grown over with lichens – all hazed over, all damp and tentative in the late spring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this small respite from the rain, a hut full of poems and snippets about trees:

 

 

 

 

 

 

And further along the trail, the tallest tree in the UK, at about 64m in height:

 

 

 

 

and the widest tree in Europe:

 

 

both Firs of some sort, and just sort of there, standing stoic. Us the only witnesses.

 

I’ll leave you with one last picture of a fairy-like pool, with an odd looking tree in the middle of it. It sums up the mood of Ardkinglas quite well I think. A place to be read on a rainy day. A place hat can bear the weight of a thousand glances and still have something more to hint at below the surface.

 

 

 

 

 

We stayed on Friday night at A’s flat, in a lot more comfort than we would have been had we tried to set up camp in the downpour.  We spiked out all hopeful the next day to the East Coast. Tomorrow, I’ll post pictures here of our second adventure of the weekend – and a completely different landscape.

The art of destruction

 

These photos show two sides of the same street in Glasgow. I love the chaos of greys in the top image. The city being edited, the innards of girders and wires on display. Positioned opposite Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, I’m all the more tempted to think of it as art itself. On a grand and messy and impermanent scale. Take your pick of metaphors: Metaphor for creation and recreation. Metaphor describing the limitlessness of art. Snapshot of a day now sealed off (the people hurry on in the picture below, in the top image the wires are slowly carted away. In another hour everything is diminished, differently shadowed, more empty or something has begun).

 

A juxtaposition is trigger for all sorts of thoughts. The child in me just wants to hop the fence and roam around in the rubble.

 

Where have you found art this week?

 

[All this inspired by Hilary Smith's post on mushroom hunting, here]

 

Love letter 7 – stone collisions

 

Because Edinburgh is built over hilly terrain and up against and on the crest of volcanic cliffs, it is often hard to navigate for those who do not know it well. Points of visual reference, such as the castle, prove useless when suddenly you find yourself at a lower level than the street you wanted to be on. Now you’re under a high spanning stone bridge. Now you’re curving round, looping back on yourself. You just saw that infernal castle a moment ago, but now the compass is spinning and wherever you are, it’s oddly dark for a Spring afternoon.

 

 

Pro tip- that’s not actually the castle. It’s the governor’s house of the old Calton Jail, on Calton Hill.

 

At other points, the landscape of the city provides an chaotic but visually appealing collision of stone and texture. Over the years a sequence of building and rebuilding and adjuncts and buttressing has lead to brick and stone insets in the natural cliffsides (ruins of old churches, or stopgaps to prevent rockfall) and to the picture at the top of the page, where an alley smashes into itself as two buildings come to a head.

 

 

It confounds the eye – one building heaving into another. Lights rim the floor so that in the dark there are some simpler definitions for the foot passenger to use as guide. But not all of Edinburgh is like this, of course. There are the grand parades among the frenzy of knots and neuks.

 

 

And then there’s the final image I will leave you with here. One of my favourite parts of the city, where the vistas open  and the cliffs rise in their changing colours over the rough and short cropped grass. Holyrood Park, by the Scottish Parliament:

 

Objects+spaces, mute

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edinburgh, in permanent pre-spring. Hard stoned and blue.  The glasshouse, The Scott Monument in a whirl of snow, an alley in the University district. Only a model of the town, showing it in 17th century layout, looks warm, Mediterranean. Let’s go and live there in the tiny houses, rake the wee gardens, sun ourselves.

Nothing to do but wait and blow on our fingers.

Imaginary art

I sometimes in idle moments think up art projects I’d like to do. Usually on a grand scale, with near impossible elements. Something way beyond my reach, but that compels me, anyway, to ponder their logistics.

 

My latest imaginary art project is one that I think might be feasible, though I’ve no money to do it, no connections to anyone who might sponsor me. Here it is though:

 

I conceived of an epic journey across North America by Greyhound, going to every stop on the line and taking pictures of what I found. Thinking up a song for each picture, appropriate to mood, or perhaps suggested -or even sung – by folk I meet along the way. I’d gather pieces of wood, leaves, plastics, found images, letters. Mailing those findings home in a box marked with the name of the town. I’d get back on the bus to the next place and do it all over again. Maybe sometimes I’d stop in a motel for the night and for a shower. Any photos I took there at dusk, looking in or out, could be added to a ‘night supplement’. I know my talents as a photographer are limited, but it’s for the record, not for the beauty of the thing. Record of a moment, of place and fleeting things witnessed.

 

But for the main show – in the gallery they’d hang the blown-up pictures. Headphones underneath to play the song. A small shelf with the relics laid out. A note beside, with the name of the town, the date I visited, the people I met. This exhibit could travel too. Return to the places I’d been. I understand that this kind of art is an imposition on place, so there would be feedback slots where people from those places could slip in their own photos, the songs they’d want. We could make up a book of these images and mine, with credit to everyone and no one privileged over the other – just the town name, a series of pictures, a song list. A map at the back of my journey.

 

I thought I’d do this for America only, but perhaps America doesn’t need my help making art out of its own sense of place. And I know quite a few places. Somewhere new for me then? Canada would be immense. Every small town, every wrong-side-of-the-tracks and brilliant vista and tiny house on a grey field and lake shore crowded with pines, across that huge country.

 

I’d need a good coat and hat, I think.

 

Of Hargate Hall

-Rather than of the wedding D and I attended, which was full of light and bustle and food and good cheer, this post is about the venue itself. About the feeling it carried, subtle, overwhelmed by the good mood of our party (70 odd souls and three dogs).

 

Hargate Hall, Friday, early evening. That white tent is a marquee.

 

You could say it was the perfect setting for hush, for suspense. For reading at the windows, looking out across the stumbling, black-tree garden. Hargate Hall was built (so a photograph in the entrance-way told us) in 1899, so not very old by the standards of English Country Houses. In little over 15 years after its construction, the facade of the aristocracy would begin to crack with the onset of World War One.

 

Nowadays it’s a collection of self-catering apartments adjoining a fantastic central hall replete with stained glass windows with pseudo-heraldry, and a spiked candelabra hanging from the ceiling. We stayed in a low mezzanine, located up a steep wooden ladder and overhanging a small central room. It was like staying in a cosier treehouse.

 

On that first evening, D and I walked the grounds through the soft wet mist as it grew darker.

 

the flash reflecting off the white mist, just outside our kitchen.

 

The garden path curves both up and down. We followed the downward path first, by the marquee and into the thin woodland.

 

 

we found this little…house? It is used for wedding ceremonies in warmer weather. Here it stared at us mournful, open mouthed

 

 

This ghostly gate marked the edge of Hargate Hall’s lands. Beyond was a farm reeking of the cows.

 

The light was beginning to go, and my poor wee camera struggled to keep up. It’s hard to capture the atmosphere under such conditions. It wasn’t eerie – I have been in eerie places – but was instead still. Stoic.

 

The farm, the drystane walls shelving the fields off into the close horizon

 

 

We wandered round along the main road and towards the gates of the hall. I’d like to say I had time then to read The Secret History (it would I think have been a perfect choice – second only to The Little Stranger) but there was far too much to do and far too many people to meet. The same of course was true of Saturday, the day of the wedding itself. But the evening of the second day brought snow, and our last morning saw Hargate Hall and the farmlands covered white.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One last shot of the hall itself. We had to take a taxi and then a five hour train ride back north. It’s funny though, on the ride to Buxton train station, the driver referred to us coming ‘up’ to the Peak District, though he had already asked where we were from. Perhaps he misspoke, or perhaps it was something to do with where he felt situated – Northern, already. It always strikes me strangely, to hear of ‘the North’ on the BBC weather forecasts, when there’s so much more north. It reinforces the idea that Scotland is, to those who live below it, a different country, though they might in other respects (and irksomely to those who believe otherwise) refer to Scotland as a region. A region North of Thule, I suppose.

 

From the train we watched the snow storm follow us into the North, skittering the higher lands and leaving the valleys green and then, further, the tufty brown of semi-moorland, then green once again. I began The Secret History, but still have much to go. It seems so far like a slip of caramel over a big white plate – flavourful, but. More coherence (possibly) later. Thanks to all who wished us a good trip. It was.

Working and blurring

 

This statue is of the Ancient Greek Goddess Iris. Iris was the messenger of the gods, and linked the heavens and the earth – she was also the goddess of the rainbow. I love how the sculptor carved her dress as if rippling in the winds. And how this creation, even after hundreds of years and lacking a head, limbs or wings (she is often depicted as a winged figure), is still elegant and powerful, suggestive of great speeds -

 

And so I’m using the image as motivator. January has been a slow, creeping month in terms of writing. I have been tackling a long essay – which I will talk about more later if and when it is accepted where I hope it will be – and also on Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts. Editing is a painstaking business sometimes. A few hundred words here or there. A handful of pages. Keep going! Keep chipping at it until the text ripples with motion but still has weight. My reading has slowed as I attempt Beckett’s Molloy, which itself requires a patience, as if reading occurs with my head underwater, and I must resurface, catch my breath. Even thinking of its flash-fiction like intensity makes me take big gulps of air.

 

I put great spaces in everything. I take my time, picking over the surface. But I’m happy doing so. Focused, even if frustrated.

 

What are you tackling? What keeps you on a steady keel?

Thankful for the bad days

 

Slog is one of those words that fills the mouth like a caramel, like you’re trying to eat a caramel as you say it, pushing it off the back of your teeth. It’s a nice word. Does that bring comfort? Can you really be thankful for a bad writing day. For a week of slowness. thickness. I don’t know, I don’t think so. But I’m saying it anyway. Performative utterance to make something happen. To keep my fingers on the keys.

 

Writing at the moment is so much like a millstone churning round. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a millstone in action, but we can all imagine it. The grooves in the stone catch and crush the wheat. Rasp the casings from them very slowly, spreading their insides out until all that’s left is a fine powder. Is this a healthy process? I’m tapping with blank eyes, with dry lips. I’m cutting the flour with white dirt, that’s what it feels like. Nothing is pure as I want for it. And it’s my own doing.

 

But let’s say that the upside of the imagination currently stalling is that moment to, if not pause, at least look around as you crank the handle, as the internet fizzes about you. Rub your aching hands. Waves hit the sea on a distant beach. The sun lingers a bit in the sky, never quite enough. A cold front moves in West from the Atlantic. Someone sits very quietly in a room, hating their hopefulness and ill at ease with all they have written, and alone with this. And then you find two pieces, one after the other, that help:

 

I am tired. I am tired of speech

and of action. In the heart of me

you will find a tiny handful of

dust. Take it and blow it out

upon the wind. Let the wind have

it and it will find its way home.

 

And then,

 

There are beautiful wild forces within us.

Let them turn the mills inside
and fill
sacks

that feed even
heaven.

 

The first is Tennessee Williams, from ‘Blue Song’, and the second, St Francis of Assisi. The internet gives us the illusion of symmetry which is the truth of sympathetic thoughts, across time, across language, across veracity – who knows if St Francis really wrote those words, I am trusting a random quoter on the internet – whatever form, whatever instability is present in both sentiments shared in the one space, it feels good to have faith in the complicated something they give. In the current that passes through them when you bring them together like this, and let them blow out again.

The Coalmine

 

The dizzy lights of fireworks on Hogmanay are fading, the New Year is stretching its shoulders and cracking its fingers, reading to really begin.

 

It’s probably bad news to commit myself to a deadline (the deadline as institution, as a concrete space that squeezes down on you as the days go on) BUT in the spirit of a fresh start, I will. This is going to be the year I finish my final draft of Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts. I’m within grabbing distance of a good draft of the first 100 pages. They’ve a polish and a spikiness to them. The character, frail, violently-minded, grieving, livid, now walks around breathing on her own, so I just have to get her to walk towards the end line. I have to keep typing her steps.

 

What about the last 250 pages?

 

Outlined

Sketched

Scratched

Cellular

 

I think it’s important to mark the turning point of a book, where you as a writer feel it IS at last, however partial, a book that will be done. Enthusiasm gets you through the early planning and first draft. It might be so good! It’s all stem cells, all raw potential. Despair sets in for the next few more edits, when you realise you haven’t quite written that work of compelling business you were hoping for (although, if you have enough ego perhaps you do? You know which writers I mean.) Then the slog begins. The point at which you might turn back, stop chipping away in the dark. But in the dark, you throw up little sparks of light. Maybe it’s the coal seam gases (the cabin fever, the marathon runner’s blood deoxygenising) but you keep hopeful. You think, someone will read this, one day.

 

I’m writing it for that pit-ghost, someone.

 

When it’s good. When D has checked I stuck to my outline. When Drea thinks it’s ready. Then someone will read it. A ghost at a computer. A busy ghost, with a dozen other mss to read. Beyond that, the ghost of someone who finds the book years later on a shelf in the library and thinks, hmm, what’s this?

 

I think most literary writing is the writing to ghosts. So we have to have some kind of belief in possibles. In hypotheticals. We can drive ourselves to distraction with hypotheticals. What if, when, who will read this.

 

But all we need to be doing is typing, chipping. All I need to be doing, for the next month, the month after that. In between reading and work and gulps of outdoor air and music in my ears and chatter.

 

Resolution. Resolve. Steady hands. Writing out loud about it, so you can see.

 

You’re my pit ghosts. You’re my someone.

 

In the dimness, the little white sparks off some of my words keep coming.