Applecross

I have been entering some writing competitions recently. I'm finding it a really good way to practice writing under some imposed conditions. My latest piece not to win was about a holiday in Applecross last year for the Just Back travel writing competition in the Telegraph. I guess I was stretching the definition of "just back" a touch, but I came in on exactly 500 words thanks to some dodgy hyphens.

Its quite a sad piece, so if you're feeling a little wobbly about Ali today then maybe avoid it. Thanks

Applecross

 “They’ll be pinkies heading south” says Ali, looking up from her book as twenty or so pink-footed geese fly low across the grey sea that separates our cottage from Raasay. As I make another tea in the silent kitchen, Ali calls through “another fifteen just gone past, must be migrating, heading to Solway”

“sod the tea Al, I’ll get you a beer, lets watch the Pinkies awhile”

She could manage a couple of beers back then, it was the second week of her chemo cycle so each day was a small improvement as the toxins left her system. She’d slowly come back to life, start talking again, telling me about the geese or hedgehogs or something Grayson Perry said, or that maybe we’d see eagles this week. The geese kept on coming as the light faded on our first day in Applecross and we relaxed easily into our slow, quiet week together, both excited for another one of our Scottish adventures.

That was October, and somehow now it’s August. In between, Ali died. She talked about Applecross a lot during her final weeks, she told me that it’s all she could think about, that it had become an obsession. I got this panicked desire rise up in me to drive her up there again, like I had in October, with her fast asleep next to me as the sun slowly rose over the M6. I drove for nearly ten hours that day with barely a break. I could have done anything back then, bent down and pulled the mountains flat like bedsheets, sucked the clouds from the sky, because for once the drugs were working. Each month Ali improved a little more and she could breathe, walk, laugh without coughing.

So we didn’t pack her incurable diagnosis, we left it at home and spent a week amongst the bellowing red deer stags. We watched white-tailed and golden eagles float around like barn doors above Shieldaig harbour and most evenings a pine marten came to visit, helping the local mice eat  peanut butter that we’d smeared across the patio. 

As the week went on, the wind started to pick-up, battering our lonely cottage with rain that had come north from the distant Cullin mountains on Skye. We listened to the whistling window frames as we read our books and took long baths. Days rolled in and out with the weather off the sea, and through it all, pinkies continued to fly south into the wind, determined to leave those arctic breeding grounds before the real cold came.

It’s my turn to think of Applecross all the time now, it’s my obsession. This conflict of a place where I was the happiest I can remember being, but that I can barely say out loud. To help, I turn again and again to a quote Ali wrote for me towards the end, faced with a choice about where to die:

“Place is everything and nothing, for he is me and I am him”.

Brenda G Macrow

I didn’t go to the hills this weekend but I did drink too much which means I’m fumbling about at home on a Sunday evening looking for something tangible. The Crows outside are starting-up with their bedtime routines, cackling and posturing on their way down the field towards the woods. I’ve dug out my Brenda Macrow books, their torn jackets and brittle pages always sooth me. The smell of dust, or trapped damp, or whatever it is these old books smell of is taking me back to Barter Books in Alnwick where we bought them, I can hear the little train rattling around overhead and the pointless ticking of a clock.

Brenda wrote beautiful prose and melodic poems that scratch away furiously at the clichés and weary language we use when describing the hills. She was digging for that jewel in us for which she readily confessed, there are no words. Yet she tried, and I think what she achieved was to express just how compelled she did feel to dig, and it’s that journey which she takes us on. She wasn’t satisfied to have something in her that couldn’t be explained, almost at odds with this love for the mountains, so great and raw that it overwhelmed and confused her. She was out of control, and I haven’t read anything else about the hills that conveys this reckless love so purely.

“On days like this…” is a short piece of prose that I have found to be the most honest of her attempts at rationalising her feelings and it is as much about what it is to be alive as it is about the mountains.

The whole piece is here: http://www.electricscotland.com/travel/hills/chapter37.htm    

This passage seems to be shouting, begging, pulling at the ankles of the reader. I could imagine it shouted by a street preacher at indolent passers-by, it’s her rallying cry to us all, do you not hear??

“Do you not hear the faery violins of the grasses as they bend and bow to the breeze? They are playing for you. The trees are touching their harps for you -- the heather-bells are murmuring a song which reaches out to all the lost and lonely places of your soul. You are happy for the sun-kissed summer flowers -- and sad for the broken reed at the edge of the mourning stream. Whatever else you have known or failed to know about life, you feel that this day will live forever in your heart.”

She goes on to say that “while the senses cry “This is madness" the spirit cries “This is real!” which is a brilliant description of that conflict within us, when standing in the mountains, contemplating a view with your conscious thought, thinking how this or that look amazing, incredible, yet inside your spirit, which never grapples around for meaning or ideas, is finally connected and crying out way beyond your disintegrating thoughts, out beyond the senses, beyond reasoning, a spirit in you is crying out this is real! Do you not hear?

Later on, perhaps describing herself:

“Down in the glen, the shaggy red cattle stand at peace under the tall trees and the woman at the bothy door forgets her weary task and looks away up into the mountains, with that in her eyes for which there are no words.”

Yes, there are no words Brenda, but there’s a cry and we hear it loud and clear. And you can hear it too, in the following poem which reads like a song, it forces you to sing it, it swings and heaves off the page. It’s possibly the most cheerful thing I’ve ever read. 

I WILL arise and go, and go to the mountain: Oh, I will arise out of my darkness, my sorrow, and go to the mountain. To the old ways and the wise ways: To the lost ways and the long ways. Where life is but a shadow that plays on the calm face of the mountain. 

I will cast off my shackles and flee to the mountain: Oh, I will cast off my shackles of care, of envy, and flee to the mountain: To the cool days and the still days: To the brave days and the blue days: Where Peace in blessing forever lays her hands on the brow of the mountain. 

And I shall find my soul again in the mountain. Oh, I shall find the soul that I lost in the City, there in the mountain. With the wild things and the shy things. The swift things and the sure things. And the night, a mysterious folding of wings on the broad breast of the mountain.

The shy things, what better term for wildlife? conjuring up swathes of fantasy and magic in us with the simplest of language. And what a beautiful way to spend a Sunday evening, bathing in passion for life. Here’s to Brenda and a life well lived.

Borrowdale Fell Race

Something’s catching moonlight and I can’t tell if its high trees, clouds or mountains. That’s the thing with the lakes, nestled in these deep valleys you get your perspective all out of sync, get yourself lost in the folds of the... shit, must be all the Sneck Lifter and Stella sloshing around in me but I think that’s just a security light shining out, not the moon. Actually, it is, it definitely is. I still don’t know what it’s catching on up there but one things for sure, it’s shining down on a complete and utter ponce, swooning about in the beer garden alone, me and the moths giving it Wordsworth at the wall lights. I’d come out when the musician stopped, thought I’d cool off before he returned, its getting on for midnight but he had promised to be back after his piss. Unfortunately the staff thought different and his kit was unplugged, people were dispersed from the dance floor, and lights were flicked on. All a bit unceremonious, he’s worked so hard all night screaming Nirvana and Prince down the mic with just about everything he had. Anyway, he seemed happy enough and drunk enough too, telling one woman he lives in Paris and telling me he lives in Liverpool. I don’t know which is true, but his thick liverpudlian accent explaining how there’s “a lot of water round here” and that “Tories can’t swim” suggests maybe its Liverpool. I guess we’ll never know for sure.

Earlier he’d stood aside from his mic, put Karaoke versions of Right said Fred and Dolly Parton centre-stage, he’d stood screaming Smells like Teen Spirit to the point of speaker distortion as one after another shirt was flung in the air by a group of runners hitting a big second wind. I resisted of course, in my usual deliberating, hesitant way, with fractured thoughts about toxic masculinity popping in and out my head as the dance floor swirled and stamped all around. Then someone behind relieved me of my top and I instantly got it, put the thinking to one side for a moment and joined in the abandon. I guess it’s all about being immersed, whether that’s dancing, running or anything, it’s about being totally immersed and present. Like descending Scafell Pike earlier in the day, sliding through the scree, out of control, completely at the mercy of that moment, the next step, that’s all. Thrown up to the wind like confetti, alive, smiling a smile that starts in your chest and rises, that’s what happens out there in the hills and I guess that’s how you end up stood romanticising at wall lights, half-drunk and hungry for beauty and experience, what else can you pour in whilst the lids off? Give me moonlight and narrow valleys, bring that musician back on I’m not ready for my tent.

Of course, I was more than ready for my tent, over ready. The race had been incredible, it lived up to all the build-up in my mind, five years of build-up in truth. It’s something I’ve thought about a long time, I’d escape into blogs about it in tougher times. Soaked it in, studied the route, learnt about old legends and battles that had played out over these hills. I’d follow the social media aftermath each year and wonder. Wonder how I’d fare on those last big climbs up Gable and Dale Head. It was hard work finding that out, and the best I can say is I didn’t stop! But the lovely run down the corridor route, the misty descent off gable and the surprise of finding I still had something in my legs to make places up through the quarry on the way back was fantastic. Parachuting down towards the finish field, excited, knowing I had finished one of the classics was fantastic. And although there was no Ali stood filming me at the line on her rabbit-eared phone, there were plenty of friendly faces, happy, welcoming faces keen to chat and share in the euphoria of being out there. I knocked about with Martin a while, got washed off in the river and ate Jam butties in the village hall, later as the sun dipped down behind Dale Head I sat easy amongst my new club mates. Barbecues smoked, kids raced about, stories flowed well like the beer and wine. Then to the pub, where I found out what Wharfedale Harriers are definitely the best at as they spilled onto the empty dancefloor like a bag of marbles and stayed there all night, seeing to to it that the day came to a fitting close.