Procrastination

Amongst a morass of admin and odd jobs, there have been some real highlights this week in a more creative sense.

Finally, I stopped dodging my own art room and started painting. Concentrating on this idea I have that this is my gift, was a primary motivation for moving. Two months in and I was still organising this light, large and entirely suitable space but not actually producing anything other than bins of rubbish and an obsession with finding a lost pen.

The local art gorups have been very welcoming and I have joined ESAS. The recent East Sutherland Art Society exhibition was of a very high standard and what was particularly impressive, was the respect the paintings were shown with good framing. I enjoyed Jennifer Mackenzie’s open studio very much and am looking forward to Studio Smith’s. It is a region of creative folk producing beautiful work in an inspirational landscape.

So, having also dodged oils for years, now is the time to rise to their challenge. Generally, oils are taken more seriously than other media. Perhaps this is because they are expensive, smelly and bloody difficult to wash off anything they sodding touch. They take forever to dry and can be buggered about with until they do, eventually, condescend to cooperate. Thus spaketh the artistically bewildered on turps dabbling with acrylic.

PS don’t expect your cat to be friendly when you have wondered what the banging was all night only to find that you had shut her out in the rain

PPS Gulls have disappeared – many incoming migrant birds are arriving already and there is much bird flu on this coast sadly – but I am sure Graculus will be back

#HelenintheHighlands

Independence Day

I met a couple from West Virginia at the wrestling – lovely people who stay the summer long here, year after year. He plays golf and she is an internationally renowned photographer known for her bold and quirky portraits.

Yesterday, I was invited to join them for the evening to visit some friends they had made in Embo. I had absolutely no idea what was afoot.

We were welcomed by this lovely family into their home and out come a couple of huge photo albums and a DVD.

Well, bless my bootingtons, what a night! Chocolate eclairs and the funniest , most brilliant journey of reminiscence from a day in the summer of 1988 when an old fishing village of 300 residents gained independence for that one day.

These remarkable people were part of the team who decided that to raise money for their community hall they would need to do something extraordinary and they most certainly did.

With state independence granted by the Queen and the PM, Margaret Thatcher, they patrolled the borders and had their own currency, the cuddie (fish; the older ladies had been herring packers) and issued their own visas.

They also annexed Dornoch by driving tanks through the Sutherlnd Show and kidnapping the President. They held their own Olympic Games with their flag flying (yellow for the sun and sand, blue for the sea nd sky, red for the Viking forces). and their Dictator, looking very raffish in a series of increasingly extravagant outfits, giving out the medals. A rousing chorus of the Embo National Anthem rounded off the activities.

It was an absolute joy to read some of the many newspaper clippings, handle the photographs and laugh and laugh at the film footage – and not a mobile phone in sight.

I hope I shall never forget watching the the tanks leave the parade floats and their contents disembark SAS style, guns and coastguard flares blazing as they effected their coup. Bird scarer atop the tank going off at intervals, the driver with his broken arm so his codriver was changing the gears.. not surprisngly, they were stopped by the police on the main road but they had just wanted a photo. Those were the days.

As to manning the borders – the single track road in and out of Embo – with military, uniformed officials, the PM and full on stamping of passports was a serious business. One chap came up from Cornwall especially. Delegates from Hawaii arrived because, of course, Embo is twinned with Hawaii.

I hope I shall never forget watching the High Jump with the competitors wearing flippers; and the pantomime horse steeplechase; Radio 2 trying to interview a blind man’s buff game at night – a sport which in the daytime, also included an extra tricky dimension of popping your competitors’ balloons .. and so it went on. Glorious and reminded me very miuch of party games from a gentle childhood. Are you there, Moriarty?

I left with a recording of the Embo National Anthem, a visa and a cuddie. I believe the exchange rate is still 2 cuddies to the pound.

Roast Beef and M*A*S*H

Whilst the moggies have settled into life with endless sources of warmth in the kitchen and airing cupboard, the dog has struggled and is showing some signs of stress. However, thanks to the endeavours of the local dog trainer, we have discovered that Cwtch will do almost anything for roast beef – his sit n stay is remarkable as his focus on the treat is lazerlike in its intensity. Think I might be Golspie’s answer to Lady Gaga as I replace my clothes with slices of beef – a most unfortunate notion on many levels.

Still, as the sweep fancies himself as Hotlips I feel I will be in good company. Although as he couldn’t get his helicopter in his van, the eccentricity bar hereabouts is already pretty high and no-one might notice a frizzy haired woman of certain years wearing the butcher’s finest and trailing the local doggo population like some canine pied piper. I love this place.

The schools have gone back and builders various have suddenly turned up. The guttering is now repaired, the house is being pointed in a multitude of colours to match the sandstone, granite and other rubble of which it is built and with any luck the bidets will be gone soon. As the plumber said, We don’t do them here, leave them to the French. Good to know but a bit of a stretch to post.

Poetry Club last night was sold to me as a non intellectual sharing of thoughts and feelings about our favourite poems. I could feel the school girl panic rising as rhyming couplets and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner were discussed but when I was asked for my favourite poem, Frances the librarian was able to recite it ad lib:

In Winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle light.
In Summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

RL Stevenson

Suddenly, in the land of the long days through summer and the long nights soon to come, this rhyme takes on another meaning. Note to self – plant wisteria.

#HelenintheHighlands

Good, good, good, good cetateans

I would be lying if I said that I didn’t miss the fields at Swanbridge – I miss the birdsong in the daytime and the silence at night and the warning grunt of a piggo wandering up behind me at any time. I struggle with the traffic noise here very much. I was warned.

But there are compensations – there may not be much of a range of dicky birds in the garden here but there are sparrows and collar doves, thrushes and jackdaws, hooded crows and gulls. Lots of gulls and quite a few oyster catchers. I especially like the oyster catchers perching on the gravestones and shouting overhead at night. I have seen curlew and terns, shetland duck and waders various. Soon, there will be flocks of migrating birds descending on the arable fields here and the estuaries.

I can drive 2 miles and see seals lolling about on the sandbanks of the firth. I saw a young dolphin washed up on the beach outside the house the other week and I saw a group of volunteers rescue her. And this week, I watched dolphins from the garden. I saw wild goats on a mountainside. Wonder if they’re all called Gerald?

Some of the wildlife is less aesthetic and views human flesh as a delicacy to be served with Deet and antihisthamine rather than a nice chianti. Bastard midges got me in the end. I was warned about them too.

I leave you with the massed pipe band marching up the street and the thought of Graculus the Herring Gull who has given up rapping on the kitchen windows and has started shouting down the chimney instead. Tony lives on.

Seagulls don’t eat Swede

This week is Gala Week.

In a programme of many events, I have so far attended the wrestling, banger racing, darts tournament, 70s Boogie Night, lunchtime cabaret, main parade and fully intend on joining the looney dook later this morning.

Lets start with the wrestling. I am one of a very few adults in a school hall full of children and a full size wrestling ring. It is one of the best £5s I have ever spent – solid entertainment from start to finish with an extraordinary mixture of dummy fights and wince-making, full on slam me down and count me out action. Playing to the kids, these guys were absolutely brilliant fun but I concluded from the baying for blood from the youngsters that we are only a wrestler’s dap away from full on Lord of the Flies at any given moment. Take it from me, front seat at a match obliges some level of interaction and whilst I was prepared to join in and kiss some of their baddies, some bruises were best left to the professionals..

Banger racing – held on fields below the Pictish fort and alongside the Dunrobin beaches, was great gas guzzling fun in a thin place. Got sunburned and had to go home early but what a hoot!

The Darts tournament in the Stag’s Head was more than a little confusing to someone who hasn’t watched any darts since Eric Bristow but it turned out asking a player what was going on was only ever going to elicit the response, ‘it’s a darts tournament’. You live n learn.

It is not an easy thing to walk into a pub, say, on your own but I have been greeted at every event – from art exhibitions to the disco – with the warmest welcomes. People come up and say hello – some I have met only once before, some I knew through FB and some were comepletely new to me and I to them. Top prize goes to Heidi, teenager, who greeted me at the doors of the pub with the words, ‘Helen, I know you are new here so come and join us ‘ unprompted by her family.

Aside from the bonkers Gala activities, on a domestic front the Aga and I have drawn a truce – it has agreed to stop destroying food and I have agreed to actually read and follow recipes. Gary the butcher told me to buy an air fryer instead but I feel with this new more amicable arranegement, Aga and I will get along just fine.

As to seagulls, they really don’t eat swede.

#HelenintheHighlands