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”.