Busy busy end of the year

Even though I had the month of December off it feels like I did more in it than ever before. It was probably due to the lack of routine, which makes every experience feel novel, firing off synapses at a more rapid rate than my dull-wired brain is used to.

Therefore, I have a newfound respect for my nomad comrade friends gallivanting out there in the world, meeting new people and speaking many languages. I raise my glass to you!

I travelled to Manchester to see my friend’s play A Christmas Carol, which was a total festive treat. I was fending off a cold at the time, so I think spending a day in the cavernous cold space of the Manchester City Library with its grand oculus finished me off. I had a fever for two days and lost about two-weeks in a fug.

The best thing about this time of year is that friends who live abroad or far away come back through town. I got to host many a Christmas meal; some more successful than others. All I can say is if you intend to cook a Korean feast but omit all the chillies (due to a spice intolerance in some of the guests) then what you get is a very very salty meal. Yet we popped open about five bottles of champagne to celebrate various things I can’t remember clearly anymore.

Me and the dog went on a day trip to West London: what a charming world! My writer friend Eloise took us to a pub with a roaring open fire. When we entered there was a man reading a real newspaper with a brown speckled Dalmatian sitting calmly at his heels. I ordered a mulled wine which came to £9.50! The Fox & Pheasant could never become my local, but we can all dream.

I tagged along to a friend’s family walking tour of London. It had been organised by Una who was visiting her UK family with her American husband. The tour guide, Terry, didn’t know how to pitch his material as the majority of the walkers were familiar with London and this country’s archaic/feudal system of property/land ownership. 

I learned a lot, like how Westminster Abbey is a called a Royal Peculiar because it doesn’t belong to any parish thanks to the way the old kingdoms were sliced up in Britain. My favourite factoid was why the Australians call the English poms. It’s an abbreviation of Prisoners of Millbank (POM) as many convicts were transported to Australia in the 19th Century from this Thames riverside prison, which no longer exists.

After seeing friends and recovering from flu, I set out on an epic journey to Orkney. My family up in the beautiful remote isles hosted Christmas, and me and the dog trundled up there by train to Edinburgh > train to Aberdeen > ferry to Kirkwall. An overall journey time of 18 hours, however, the strikes and the storms did not get in the way! A Christmas miracle. 

It was a quiet time spent with books and going for walks – weather permitting. On Boxing Day as the heavy clouds rumbled across our island, I took the dog for a walk, but when we reached the crest of a hill it started to hail. The hailstones were as big as salt crystals, so I ran to a stone house and sheltered against its wall. ROLO jumped head first into a bush. I peeked at her from under my pulled down hood as we got pelleted by ice. Her small gingery tail, shivering poking out from a hedge. 

A Christmas seal sighting

  

A Christmas Carol

It is December. I wake up to frost on the ground, crunchy underfoot. The sky is an icy blue and the low intensity sunlight is amber. It is beautiful out there; fresh, cold and bright, but unfortunately, I am ill and should really stay inside drinking multiple cups of tea. My soul wants to be out there though.

I went to see A Christmas Carol, probably the best story ever written. Dickens was a genius but the thing that strikes me as surprising each time I watch it (adapted for stage, film, etc.) is that it’s set in London. A big city. Where lots of folk intermingle and bustle about wearing shawls and striking matches. 

It surprises me because of the familial feel to the narrative. There is this old miserly man and his nephew’s house is over there and his clerk’s house is somewhere walkable with a giant turkey. When they enter a flashback with the help of the Ghost of Christmas Past, I’m pretty sure the Fezziwig’s ball dance is held in the city of London, which is also where Scrooge & Marley’s investment offices are. Everybody just lives on top of each other. Also, Scrooge has never left London, so he was born and will die there, wow.

I’ve heard that Victorian living conditions were pretty bad. People living in slums, raw sewage flowing in the streets, outbreaks of cholera, but then there were also the magical inventions of industry like gas lighting, which helped Scrooge see the illusion of Marley in his door knocker. Then there’s the climatic epoch that Charles Dickens lived through known as the Little Ice Age, which enchanted him and made us all believe in a snowy white Christmas. 

I bet a frozen Victorian city was so much nicer for its well-heeled inhabitants because all the waste in the streets would freeze and the noxious smells would lessen. That probably added to the magical Christmas feel Dickens was talking about. But how about how cold it got? I’m chilly in a centrally heated house wearing several layers under a Berghaus fleece. I bet a lot of people froze to death or lost a limb during the Little Ice Age in London too. 

Xmas Decor

We’ve put up the Christmas decorations. It makes me happy. 

The Horror Nativity is out again in the fireplace, it’s like a menagerie of eerie and monstrous figurines made from lurid plasticine that we moulded one sad Christmas. There are two red and green balls hanging from a nail in the kitchen. One lonely Santa hat sits on a shelf looking like a leftover prop from an office Xmas party. I think the look is almost complete. 

Let’s shine the light on Groot for a moment. The pot plant who has had many manifestations over the years he has been in our lives. Abandoned and picked up off the street somewhere in Victoria. Re-homed in the flat Groot grew taller and was re-potted one Spring in Vauxhall. 

During Covid Groot decided to grow even bigger, probably because we were indoors all the time pottering about and watering him maniacally. His roots got all entangled and made a bird’s nest around the bottom of the pot. That was the summer when everything was closed. I remember going to a nursery garden to ask if they had any discarded plant pots I could forage. We picked one that looked more like a bucket with holes in and carried it back to the flat. Voilà Groot got an even bigger pot.

When we moved house and got a dog, I found out that Groot’s species was poisonous to pets*, but we couldn’t give him up. So, we moved Groot upstairs into the bedroom where dogs are not allowed.

But when Yuletide comes around it’s Groot’s time to shine! 

He is hauled back downstairs in his upgraded edgy stylish pot (which looks a bit like a burnt bird cage) and given pride of place. We wrap a wiry set of fairy lights around his tropical-looking foliage and hang a single ornament from his branch of a dachshund wearing a Santa Claus outfit. Groot marvellously plays the role of our Christmas Tree.

*ROLO is wholly uninterested in Groot even when he’s looking so great as a Christmas tree.

Christmas in quarantine

Almost finished the first half of my quarantine in my hotel room with a view overlooking Yokohama Bay. Each morning I open the curtains to see a different dawn and through the day new cruise liners and ships sail into the harbour across dark blue waters. There are factory chimneys in the near distance emitting elongated plumes of smoke that look static, like a collage cut-out stuck on the sky. At night, city lights glow and glimmer over vast unfamiliar terrain looking like an alien city.

‘Please report your daily health condition’ my app says. ‘Do you or a family member living with you currently have a temperature of 37.5°C (99.5°F) of higher? Please take the temperature if you do not know it.’

‘No.’

‘Thank you for responding.’

The hotel gave us a thermometer when we arrived and each day you have to enter your temperature into an app, otherwise a person calls you and waits for you take your temperature, awkwardly hanging on the line for the bleep bleep bleep of my reading. 

Every day I get two calls through my government covid monitoring app, either from a bot or a real person. The bot simply asks you to blink and records your face for 30 seconds. Initially, I stood still for these mug shots, but now I wink and blow kisses at the bot. It doesn’t seem to mind or interfere with its work. When I got a real person, I was gazing out across Yokohama Bay at night and the caller screen was blank even though there was a woman on the other end checking on my condition. She was probably trained to study whether I “looked ill” from our one-way video call. We had a nice chat and I showed her the view outside my window and she said it was キレイですねー　(very beautiful indeed, I mean, then I was probably hindering her work). 

She asked how I was feeling, and I said I felt really sad because I was having to quarantine for the whole 14-day period because someone on my flight had omicron. I just wanted to go home and see my Obaachan whom I hadn’t seen in over two years. My blank screen caller really did sound sorry for me and made exasperated noises of concern.

‘I actually meant how do you feel physically; do you have a fever or a new cough?’

‘No.’

‘Thank you for giving me your time.’

The next real person called me on Christmas Day and when she hung up, she said a cheery ‘Merry Christmas!’ and that was quite cute.

//

I’ve had to stop my newly reset iPhone from creating “memories” with my photos because the albums were very sad. It kept cycling through limited snaps of the plane, meal boxes and the view from my window. It was like a dystopia where I'd spent my entire life in quarantine.

The meals are very good. Can’t complain about the three meals a day the hotel staff deliver and hang from my doorknob. The boxes get progressively nicer as the day goes on which is better than the reverse. I look forward to the yoghurt pot at breakfast (blueberry is the best), though not a fan of the vacuum-packed bread rolls like the ones you get on aeroplanes. Lunch and dinner you get an assortment of things, always including rice and some meat, fish and veg. The presentation is like a bento box with different compartments for different dishes, so that the flavours stay separate and clean. 

The most tragic thing about this quarantine is that there is no booze. No alcohol on the premises! Agh. Why had I brought tins of biscuits to give as gifts to the neighbours when I should have packed tinnies? You can’t have Christmas without a drink. I felt like I’d been checked into rehab. 

Hark! There was a Christmas miracle. My aunt Mariko (angel) sent me a festive selection of Asahi beers which arrived on Christmas Eve! Just in time for dinner and before a surprise display of fireworks that went off outside my window. Praise be. I had a PCR test and the results came back negative. Hallelujah. 

On Christmas Day my lunch box contained a piece of roast chicken and dinner included a slice of chocolate roulade affixed with a figurine of Santa Claus playing the trombone. The TV was showing Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence – with a storyline I couldn't fathom – but seeing David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto playing side by side as massive pop stars of their era felt like a blessing. Also, that hauntingly elegant score. I had calls with family in Orkney and Aidan’s lot in Northumberland, who were all preparing feasts to be had later in the day. Bang whizz pop! Gorgeous fireworks were set off again outside my window and I had a special Christmastime indeed.

I Slept

I slept. 

Woke up to a colourful dawn of pink grapefruit hues across Yokohama Bay. There is a rainbow coloured ferris wheel and a theme park outside my hotel window. The spiral rollercoaster with tiny people on it – probably shrieking in excitement – is the antithesis of what I’m like in my compartment.

I did 45 minutes of Yoga with Adriene. I said 'hello' to Benji the dog and on-screen yoga companion – the first time I’d heard my voice all day, which was quite a surprise. 

Played my Gameboy in bed (dusted off for this trip). I could only find one cartridge that was already inserted. In my other life, I am a novice Pokémon trainer named Yellow with a Pikachu nicknamed ROLOCHU on the way to Veridian City.

I slept more.

To be pulled out of sleep aggressively by the ringing telephone. It was hotel reception, they were connecting me to the ward officials of the town where my Obaachan lives.

‘A fellow passenger on your plane has tested positive for omicron. You will now have to do the full 14-day quarantine at a government designated hotel.’

Oh no! I knew this was likely to happen coming from virus riddled London, but still I was aghast. I asked her whether the whole plane was being put under extended quarantine? The ward official said no, only passengers who came in close contact with the infected person. (I must’ve been sat close to them! What bad luck.) They told me I would be moved to a new hotel at the end of my 6 days here, and that because this was going to be a longer stay than expected I could order items such as pants online.

Then I began to cry because I’d come all this way to spend お正月(New Years) with my grandmother and now I was going to have to miss that too! Was there no way if I tested negative to complete my isolation in her house instead? She sounded sorry for me, but said I had to remain in a government hotel for the full 14 days, ‘What if you were to pass the virus on to your Obaachan?’

I let the news sink in for the rest of the day. I don’t remember what I did. All I know is I talked to my loving friends who all sympathetically suffered alongside me. 

//

The next day I woke up thinking it was Christmas Eve, but I was a day ahead of myself. 

I started to unpack my suitcase and took out my portable fairy lights – thank god I brought decorations to brighten the place up a bit – and a cardboard cut-out of a wintry tree house with woodland creatures, which I could assemble as a Christmas activity. I placed all my belongings on the racks and shelves, hiding the hotel toiletries and instruction manuals in the bin liner they gave me for my used linens, shoving it all under the bed.

Jumped around to a hip hop work-out video on my travel yoga mat then danced to Charli XCX.

Still getting used to the small kettle the hotel has provided, as it’s more like a hot water pot. The water remains warm a long time after it’s been boiled and there’s a button you press down to release the steam to humidify the room.

Things I’m glad I brought with me for hotel quarantine:

1. Tin mug. The ‘return to Japan support group’ on Facebook were correct, the cups provided are too small and you can’t have a proper brew in them.

2. Tea bags. They provide small sachets of instant coffee but that’s no fun, nor does it help pass the long stretches of time.

Basically, the elements that make a good cup of tea.

Yokohama Bay (quarantine hotel)

At APA Hotel & Resort Yokohama Bay Tower, not slept in the bed yet. A totally tiny room with a beautiful view of the glittering lights of Yokohama. 

My destination for the next six days of quarantine, before, hopefully (pray for me because if someone on my flight tests positive for covid then we all get locked up for the entire fourteen-day quarantine duration) I get to move to Obaachan’s house to finish off my time there. At least then I’ll be able to spend New Year’s with the family. 

Obaachan welled up with tired tears of joy when I called her from my hotel room; her shoulders dropped with a sense of relief. She didn’t think I’d be let in and fair enough, I’ve come from omicron infested London. 

I tested three hours before boarding with a Fit2Fly PCR to get the certificate – Japanese authorities love certificates. 

I was standing in line with other Brits who wanted to go abroad, one wrinkly man in a polo shirt and a blue-eyed stare kept banging on about how he had paid £119 for the privilege.

‘They told me come back here for 12:45 – it’s 12:40 now – and when it’s 12:45, on the dot,’ he pulled down his mask every time he addressed us for emphasis ‘I’m marching back in there. It’s bloody chaos, Terminal 2 is.’

A kid whose flight was boarding soon, politely asked us if he could jump the queue and this old man said, ‘Where you off to son?’

‘Zimbabwe,’ replied the clipped accent. 

‘Bloody hell.’

I received my negative test result (yes!) as check-in opened, where I also handed over various other documents. Tellingly, everyone in the JAL queue whipped out plastic sheets containing their physical pieces of paper to get into the country. One of which is a Written Pledge, which waives your rights to privacy if you bring covid into the country. For Japanese nationals (that’s me) their family members can be named and shamed i.e. publicised to the media, if their relative unknowingly brings in the virus in. For a foreign national your visa status can be revoked, also you could be put into detention. So much for herd immunity.

Nevertheless, I was allowed on the flight. The cabin attendants asked us all politely to keep our masks on and refrain from talking. I thought, damn right. Mask up and shut up. Stop the virus. I ate my meal and covered my head with a blanket and slept most of the way. Super tired from the stress of it all. The past weeks had been filled with waiting for a single line to appear on LFTs, cancelling plans, booking scarce PCRs, feeling groggy and foggy from the booster and watching friends drop like flies. 

We arrived in Japan; the red sun was setting. Shadows were stark and long. Uniformed people drove boxy vehicles around the plane for inspection. I couldn’t believe while looking out through my small porthole window that I could see Mt. Fuji in the distance, emblematic, behind the Tokyo skyline. I had landed!

I got tested at Haneda airport again. Currently Japan’s borders are closed to foreign nationals, so everyone there had to be on a Japanese passport or an exceptional visa. There were lines and lines of us being corralled from one part of the airport to another. I downloaded apps via QR code, printed and signed documents. Ticked checkboxes, removed my mask for facial recognition, scanned my passport. Filled out a medical assessment questionnaire. Got given a green tag to attach around my wrist, so I didn’t stray from the flock. Spat into a vial for the covid test. Staff checked my phone had the government apps installed and explained how to use them. 

I stood and queued and sat in front of bureaucrats behind plastic safety screens, who scribbled on my paperwork and directed me to go stand somewhere else. I waited about six hours from disembarkation to receiving my negative test results, phew. Those of us who had travelled on the same aeroplane got sat on socially distanced seats to wait for a bus to take us to our designated government-paid hotel. Destination unknown until we got there. A woman with two children sat behind me said to the bus inspector, ‘Why can’t you tell us where we’re going? I’m honestly scared.’ The tubby man apologised profusely and said he didn’t know why, but rules were rules.

I switched on my Google live location and sent it to my aunt Mariko, so she could track where I was going. Luckily, it was only a half hour drive from the airport and we pulled into Yokohama, a scenic coastal city. We were let off the bus in small cohorts. We sanitized our hands, got more QR codes and a thermometer to verify our daily temperature. I was given a non-smoking room and handed a very much desired bag of food and sent up in a lift to my room. 

I have a king-sized bed that’s more than half the room’s width and a TV that’s almost as large. I have a small writing desk and an excess of mirrors. Even though the TV and bed dominate, when I open the curtains what do I see? A most elegant view of Yokohama Bay, with a lit up cruise ship docked in its placid waters. Not bad at all to hunker down in over Christmas. 

November surprises

November is one of the hardest months to deal with. Shadows get longer, the commute becomes steamier, the night dominates. Trees are lovely and orange, but then slowly their foliage disintegrates, and the roads are covered in moisture, so you can’t wear Converse anymore. You need hoods and umbrellas; waterproof coverings that help you have more extraneous belongings to leave behind at bars and on train carriages. One frosty faff after another, with the added runny nose.

A colleague of mine suggested I try a store on Rivington Street, which sells bits of fashionable wood to find a going-away gift for my flatmate. He is basically a zine, so I trust his recommendations and it took the pressure off me having to find the “right” shop. I walked in wearing my raspberry beret and mohair coat. The doorman gazed past me through the glass pane at the street tinted blue.

In the store were mobiles hanging from the ceiling that looked like Alexander Calder, and I thought, ‘When I own an apartment, I’d like to fill the void with abstract art that twirls around on a wire.’ I sat in a smooth wooden chair made for Eames enthusiasts, beneath bare low-wattage bulbs that flared above my head. There were books and binders, aprons made from bark, terrarium, cacti, succulents. Small vest for a dog.

The run-up to Christmas is tiring with Santa schemes and end of year drinks, industrial-sized fairy lights flashing on all over town. It’s easy to go along with when it’s happening, but in November when you know that mountain of merry is looming, I get tired. I get that premature feeling I’ve frittered away another year when really, I haven’t, this is called life; where like walking, every day follows another, like your left foot follows right.

Over there on a shelf I spot something.

In a flimsy, square, see-through casing – no it can’t be?

Few objects are seared into your memory like they are from childhood. The avid collectors and hobbyists we are at age ten. You remember your favourite yoyo that lit up when you performed “walk the dog”, or your special eraser that smelt of something sickly-sweet kept in your smudgy pencil case. There it was. My plastic, carrot-scissors. (Tiny with a magnet on the underside – the blades hidden in an orange sheath that looks like a carrot stick – the handles lurid green - moulded into the shape of leaves - like a cavolo nero.) I loved this pair of carrot scissors and I stuck them to my table-leg in Year Four. I can’t remember why I liked them, they may have been the perfect size for a ten year old’s hands, or the cuteness of them was fun to contemplate, who knows.

One day after sports, I came back to find that they were gone. I checked all the other tables, disbelieving how they were gone. I looked on the whiteboard, which was also magnetic in blind hope. I began to panic and asked the form teacher what had happened to them? Did she know about my important scissors, or did teachers try not to pry into the lives of little children, with all their hideous collections of soft toys and stickers?

‘Don’t worry.’ She said. I couldn’t convey to her the gravitas of the situation. Quietly, I hoped. And she was a good teacher, so she wrote up on the board, ‘Has anyone seen a pair of carrot-shaped scissors? If you borrowed them, please return them by the end of the day.’ Weeks went passed and I got used to it. Someone stole my carrot scissors and they were going to get away with it: what a world!

Now I turn its flimsy packaging over in my hands. I can’t believe it. To be re-united with these feelings after twenty years. What I would give, to be able to go back in time, to present this to myself. And I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at whoever gave me the scissors (a la Back to the Future) because they mattered so much to my formative sense of justice.

Thank god the shop didn’t have any reindeer food or eco-friendly candy canes, otherwise I might have been put off the whole idea. With Christmas coming around the corner, why not? It’s the price of a pint and I could forget about the whole thing, making the surprise even sweeter on Christmas Day. (I felt silly, but I shouldn’t have because I owed it to myself.) The man in the fisherman’s jumper behind the counter, folded down the edges of a brown paper bag over my plastic purchase. I plopped it into my tote to forget about it, then browsed the shelves for gifts. There was nothing here for her.

Still Winter / Contemplating Displacement / Thinking of Growing Up

After Christmas you forget how long winter lasts; but it is a long, laborious, languorous time. No more falling leaves just frost then wetness that is harsh and a misery to deal with. I keep getting minor chilblains in my toes because my shoes are too thin and the heating inside buildings is too high and outside we all know it is cold. Outside. It’s out there. Where we all want to avoid, for now, until the light lasts longer and we start to stretch not huddle, shout not cusp.

People I work with are ill. I got ill but then kept on getting better to a point of getting worse again. Old age must feel the worst in the cold. I don’t know how they do it when I, in my late-twenties, feel lethargy upon waking up. Get up. I have to coax myself up and then I fall back asleep again like a flimsy blade of grass. Four alarms I have to set for myself, on Fridays I set seven because the time I have to technically be up by is 6:30 but I could push it back to 6:50. Any time past 7 is a disaster. But then again, I don’t have an active life style.

I work on a computer interacting with a cursor that floats around the screen all day. It’s all virtual anyway. Facebook’s started greeting me with ‘Good Morning’ and I can’t tell it to go away. I tap some buttons and wait for things to load or happen or both and then it becomes darker and the shadows become masses and it’s night. I go home the same way I came. I actually don’t consider this drudgery, which might sound surprising to an alien, but it's true. I want to be doing this. I picked it and worked hard to get it. But the actions really don’t imply the feeling. I don’t have to scrape my knuckles on hard surfaces to get a wage, I don’t even have to move off my squashy bum bar the times I get up to make some instant coffee. There are cats in the office and I produce comedy. What’s the big fuss in all that? Nothing. Nada. Nout.

I don’t want life to disappear though and for me to fade away. But I do want to be worn out and characterful like a familiar leather case - a doctor’s bag, a kid’s favourite satchel. The essential pair of shoes. I want to be one of those all-purpose all-weather handy things that granny couldn’t live without. Best thing since sliced bread etc. etc. I want to be creased and smudged by love, and sometimes dropped but I’m washable and sturdy, I’ll survive. There’s been talk of displacement theory around me.

Paul told me on a hangover that I was feeling this way because ‘You're paying back for all the fun that you borrowed last night.’ Borrowed, I guess, from the alcohol (fairy). It could be true. It could be true I pondered because I tend to do the same in the limited space I inhabit. I started to use a new glass recently for the water by my bed. It is a special grey glass made by Iittala. By making this change I had to move the coaster that used to lie beneath the old glass because the old glass left marks, my Iittala does not. The coaster now takes up the same space as my necklace and the two together on one surface is too crowded and so the necklace had to go. I’ve folded it in tissue paper and I will take it all the way to Richmond on a train. That particular necklace has had its time on my bedside table, I have more in other places, and I’m sure it’ll resurface some other time. And it's not forgotten just displaced by the movement of other things. A reshuffle.

Friends are the same. Ones I used to see all the time have become ones I see occasionally. Ones whom I never had the chance to see are steadily creeping their way back to me. But most notably, the ones I didn’t even know existed I see quite often now. More often than not. I check my online bank account more than I watch YouTube videos. I boil the kettle more than I open a can of beer. I sit around thinking a lot more than I do running around. All a steady shift and displacement of things. Not noticeable enough to be genuinely perturbed by, but you have an inkling later, retrospectively: a rupture.

Ash Dome by David Nash

Inbetween Time

The only time you ever have ‘enough time’ is in between things. Such as now - while I lie flatly between duvet and throw - when I am supposed to be packing. An in between state (I am in) because I left work an hour ago to go home to pack for the very long journey tomorrow where we cross continents. Another man I know crosses oceans (going the other way round the globe).

Everyone is on the move again after the roast turkey and stuffing and gravy sandwiches. I lie flatly and think of the beauty of the way - how family will fly up to taunt and tear one down and then shoot up like a distress signal which ends in a glittering shower-burst of light - the winds picked up at night and in the day it was still. 

Orcadian landscapes have a haze they wear; the locals call it the Har. When there is no wind and the sun is lower than you could possibly paint it on the horizon the Har dissipates the sunlight and generously spreads the particles across seas and mounds making everything glow, faintly. When the wind picks up the droplets are blown clear and you’re left with hewn edges. Fragments of rock that were sleepy giants turn in to tablets. There are bird calls everywhere and the sun rises only to set - you’re right there sir - there is a certain timelessness about it all.

When I travel my body puffs up. That is when I travel internationally across time zones; that is when I am not in any time zone. Maybe it’s because the mental state of waiting (for the flight to be over) versus the physical sensation of it being day when it should be night (thus having gained a few hours out of nowhere) creates a physiological contradiction in me that makes me swell. I have no idea but time is tricksy.

And so why is it that I only feel like I have enough time in between things. Like for example, you have a meeting at 3pm but you got out early from the dentist's at 12pm so you have 3 hours to kill - you literally have it in such abundance that you need to get rid of it via murder - poor time. You think we don’t want you when you know all people want is more time, you must get such mixed messages all the time time. It must be the want for something to arrive quicker or last longer that marks the passage of time. Or gives it any meaning at all, otherwise we’d all be here in between states neither waiting nor wanting nor waning. And a warning to all layabouts like me who try to hide from time in between inner and outer layers of bedsheets fully clothed lying really pebble still - we won’t go unnoticed - time will creep up and devour us whole like a crocodile.

First Winter Morning

Blink blink sunlight passed over the horizon and the playing fields of clouds rolled out over the misty blue. A letter with two fish sealed upon the envelope had arrived awaiting my thumbing. The days at work seem long and dreary because of the on-off central heating the lack of cats and the dead lightbulb turned upside down on the adjacent table, ‘I’ll buy a new one at lunch’ I say feebly and never do. Screw-in tops, I’m cautious of buying the wrong size. The boss suggests I embrace what the Danes do ‘hygge’ and I wish I could so I try and do it but the only glitch is it’s difficult to do alone.

I think of my friend in America where the weather must be getting “pretty baltic” as he described it over an e-mail from long ago. New York in Winter. I wonder if it’s prettier of more wintry than here? Two sprawling mega-cities with cosmopolitan folk and rundown neighbourhoods. Do they have council Christmas lights? I notice that on my street to work the lights on the lampposts aren’t lights but green shrubs made of plastic and shiny spindles. This street mustn’t have the budget for lights. 

The envelope contained a pale blue letter with a black and white photograph glued to the reverse. The small things really count, I guess. This little messenger guided by two swimming fish on the creased white paper tossed and turned over mailbags and conveyer belts. Guarded by perfectly formed handwriting. ‘What’s you landscape?’ she asks. 

That self-induced dawn, the first Winter’s morning was brimming with light but shy. Her streaks of pearl pink brushed against the sides of flat clouds but if you looked closely she could have been the aurora in disguise. I think of Orkney and the crashing waves on to a placid shore that’s seen it all. The cliffs are grand but unassuming. The few weathered goats that eat seaweed are as much part of the landscape as the jutting out rocks from beneath the sea. Sometime seals bask blubbery and gleaming with snouts like dogs and big wide eyes. I delight at the sea. So to answer your question, that’s my landscape Annina, but this will do for now.

Dead Seal Scrolls

‘Merry Christmas!’ says my Grancha, ‘who wants some sherry?’

‘It’s Christmas Eve not Christmas yet’ interjects Granny, ‘you always want to be early for things.’

‘Oh. I see darling. B’won’t stop us from having sherry though will you?’ He asks sweetly but already up and meandering over to the drinks counter. Grandparents in Orkney are the sort of people who have a drinks counter; two bottles of Castelgy Gin, bitter lemon Scheweppes - almost certainly flat, aged sherry sweet and dry, a vintage Taylor’s port, and some red wine that I drank the whole lot of last night. 

The fire is grinning and burning up, toasting the backs of old socks and yesterday, I, as the Youngest of the Lot was on my hands and knees digging ash out of the lead bucket that’s been stuck in the fireplace for over a decade. The grill has snapped in two due to the continuous fires overhead but it still works and can’t be replaced anymore. Scraping ash in the morning - and seven piles of it - when touched feels cold and smooth, like the pebbles on the beach outside. When I was six I threw a tantrum and ran down to Watersound and had a go at the sea, I was angry about something with a burning desire to kick everything to bits and to quell my rage I shoved my hand in to the cold wet sand and dug down until about my whole arm was lost in the depths of the shore that clenched it. When I pulled it up it popped out from the suction and a small yellow-green crab had it’s pincers around my middle finger! I shrieked for the tiny life of me and waved my arm about frantically yelping and jumping about until the crustacean plopped off and scuttled back in to the sea. I ran back home no longer angry or crying but at peace with whatever had just gone on. The ash in the grate was cold as silt and smelt distinctly of nothing.

*

‘Hello. Big fat gross dead Mr. Turkey’ it sat there as a lump in shallow pools of watery-blood, ‘We’ll eat you tomorrow. Sleep well.’

*

When the door bell rings twice succinctly in two onerous rhymes that means Colin’s at the door, he is my hero and 90 years old and wears a fluorescent jacket that has Duck Patrol printed on the front breast pocket and Game Warden emblazoned on the back. It was a joke present from his longstanding friend but he wears it with pride and jauntily. Recently Colin took in Lily, an abused rescue-dog who hangs by his side enduringly and always looks so nervous of being hit again, what brutality can sear in to even animals’ brains I thought, and my hero’s bushy crown of white hair and weathered toothy-smile is what brings life to our laughter. 

‘Someone to come and see you’ Colin says nodding at Lily on the end of the leash, she turns her side to me and only dares to look up with twitchy eyes when she thinks I’m not looking (I am). ‘And to drop off this.’

‘An Orcadian dictionary, perfect. Thanks.’ I bend down to touch Lily but her leg wobbles and I just put my hand out for her to sniff.

‘Merry Christmas then!’ Says Colin as he saunters off with Lily tight by his side, and Granny tuts and murmurs to herself about it only being Christmas Eve. 

Don’t say ‘noo’, say ‘now’,  

Don’t say ‘ku’, say ‘cow’. 

(C. M. Costie, Speech)

The language of Orkney seems to have passed from the Norn to the Scots and then to the “correct way” of English, taught throughout the schools during 20th Century to standardise their spelling and speech. That’s fine I see it happening that way everywhere, I think, but it’s a shame. Now the dialect is known as Orcadian and to be honest when I speak with some I still miss half the conversation or the whole meaning. ‘Back of four’ means anytime after four o’clock and I find the logic sort of odd, just as I find it sort of odd how the sun rises and settles in one low position above the horizon for half an hour in the day before it starts to set again. Darkness is here by four.

*

‘Maybe after lunch you’d like to go beach combing together?’ asks Dad hopefully.

‘Only if we find treasure.’ I say non-plussed, stirring my tea with a hot spoon.

Wrapped up in layers of wax coats and fleece wearing a hat with a flap on both respective heads, the two stride up the drive, atop a cliff edge and down to the Playgroup Beach. Here, if you were to walk in to the sea and carry on straight you’d arrive in Norway, tells me my father, god know’s why we talk in as-the-bird-flies hyperbole. Totally unrealistic. I wanted to look for treasure, odd bits that fell off boats or deep-sea-shells that got thrown up by the swells but all I could see were thick mats of seaweed; layering sinews dripping wet and ripped up from the ocean bed, strewn across the sandy beach and now covered in little skippers (sand midges) eating away at the decaying water-fauna. Then lying there on the shore - I was drawn to it - a body like form. Corpulent; whale-ish in demeanour not size and not yet bloated, actually very calm and still like a sleeping policeman. 

One dead seal.

A big grey body and two little paw pads where the tail should be. I asked in that swallowed-shrill-cough I save for times of shock and persistent calm - 

‘Where’s the head?!’ It was severed clean off.

‘Probably cut off by a propeller of a boat. Nice and clean.’ There’s me looking at the dead thing in disbelief and he sees that and walks away.

‘What boat?’

‘Could have been your ferry. About the right timing.’

‘Hey, I was not involved in the murder of this sacred seal.’ I protest and I have an urge to get close up to it, it doesn’t smell yet and it’s fresh just headless, that’s all.

‘Don’t go near it. Sea-knits.’ Dad walks away and so do I. I don’t believe in sea-knits but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. 

‘Merry Christmas, dead Sacred Seal, I’ll pass on your regards to dead Mr. Turkey.’ Another year washes by.