Time is manifold

Do you ever have memories that surface up from the depths? 

I woke up quietly, naturally to sunlight peeking in through the blinds. I went downstairs and could tell that the world hadn’t woken up yet, no noise of traffic filtering in through my front window. In a daze I went and lay down on some cushions, then my scruffy brown dog came padding over to lie beside me. The sky was a perfect pale blue. The temperature was mild like an un-buttoned shirt shrug, though I could sense outside was blustery, as if we were on the shores of a beach.

A memory of Orkney welled up from somewhere within; of when I was a child before anyone had mobile telephones. Isn’t it strange that I would remember the detail of something absent? Nowadays, on a workday, in fact every day, the moment I wake up I check my phone. It’s a source of truth for me now. Who’s been in touch while I’ve been sleeping? What’s the weather going to be like this afternoon? What’s the time right now?

Back in Orkney aged seven I would wake up on my summer holidays with no knowledge of what time it was or what was going to happen that day. I’d go into the kitchen first in case Granny was up listening to Radio Orkney, or Grancha was slicing bananas for his muesli. He always did it above his bowl working a knife in one hand like he was carving wood, no need for a chopping board. I’ve remembered on this particular day I was alone in the kitchen; the first one up. 

The light through the kitchen window was twofold, it was like a luminescent blanket thrown down from the sky which brightly shimmered off the surface of the sea. Light was mixed with water and air and that was how it filtered in through my corneas. 

I looked out and everything was so present.

Every atom of the island was alive with light and although we were in 1996 it felt timeless.

Not saying that I thought these things as a child, I wasn’t aware that the Orcadian light would infiltrate my deepest memories and spill out from my pores one day in my thirties to take me back to Burray, but it did. 

This is why time is creased – not always smooth and straight going headlong in one direction, like a fine line drawn with a metallic ruler. Time like Life is as messy as The Real World. Things can remind you of things, wires can get crossed and make like a diversion on the tracks. Our consciousness can take a wrong turning and we’ll find ourself wide awake in a long-forgotten memory today. Time is manifold. 

Power cuts are nice

The sky is teeming with stars but we kill it with our light. I never knew this until the power cuts. In the middle of the night when the storm had risen up, gale-force winds cracking against the windows, a wind buffets through the house and I feel the panes expand and contract as though they were sails and malleable like that for an instance, of a ship.

When I arrive in Orkney by ferry, on the island of Burray where we live, what strikes me is the silence.

The lack of hum from the planes and pollution, or sirens and tarmac being sped across by vehicles. It is never silent but how I imagine silence should sound. Underwritten by the purring immensity of the waves and broken by gulls and birdsong in the day.

It’s revealing for a city-dweller like me, filled with hubris, to not only see but hear Nature and how vast and unpredictable she is. Never having to endure frightful storms in the city, ones that blow the power cables out from right beneath you, and blot the street lights out completely. Torches and candles, firelighters and smoke detectors. Grubby coaled fingers. Hushed scramble.

At 1 a.m. I heard a thunderclap so loud that it shuddered through my skin and rose me out of bed. Flick the light switch on but nothing and so there was nothing. In my flimsy nightgown I walk the corridor to the porch where it’s all panes of glass and the sea close by and I peer around the island. Electricity is dead and the sky is lighting up instead.

Sheet lightning is what you would use in a film for utmost dramatic effect, because for once light does not shine up but is a blanket that comes down. Cascading all over the scene in one fell crash, lighting up every crevice and exhuming every shadow. A flash this bright and all-round emboldens angles and crooked edges, flattening out empty land, so to a loner wide-eyed looking out at open space the thought flickers of how frightened one would be if the next illumination defined the outline of a figure standing there, where there was nothing a moment before.

When the storm had passed I stayed fixed to the spot by curiosity and fear. This was silence. The air had been smashed out by thunder. I walked outside to feel the alien calmness, the winds had dropped and I couldn’t decipher the sea. Looking up I gawped at the stars and stars and more stars. Tiny million flecks like a detailed map and brighter larger ones too, they sparkle who knew, really that these lights were there all along dampened by the smog and 24-hour shop.

I stopped. And in the cold I spoke a gasp each time more stars opened up to me. I never wanted the lights to come back on and that’s when I learnt power cuts are nice.

She fills her face with senses

I have a few heroes in my life and whilst in Japan I met one of them. Her name is Saeko and she doesn’t seem real. We crossed paths when I was 18 or 19, about to set off for university and whilst working as a kitchen porter at a Japanese restaurant in Soho. It was great. I washed dishes, I cut sushi rolls, I sliced raw meat and washed and drained the rice, multiple times. She was a waitress, so she was customer-facing and looked presentable and pretty all the time whilst I looked sweaty and smelled of onions and had my hair scrunched up in a bun under a grubby white cap. We had loads of laughs over the internal restaurant phone as she sent up orders in a funny voice pretending to be a monster or like a mouse and stuff. After work we’d go out and have fun sometimes too. She danced professionally in the arts clubs, there was one in Notting Hill with a strange sloping floor and eerie ultraviolet mood lighting, like a cave for neon night creatures. She had a room in Paddington in a shared flat with too many cables running across the ceilings, and in her own room she had a wardrobe that doubled-up as a mirror the size of a dance studio’s to practice her movements in. Against the opposite wall was her bed and although the whole room was coloured an off-yellow, possibly darkened by the cigarette smoke, there was one pale blue circle painted above her bed. Just off-centre. The blue little moon floated there since she had arrived. Her theory was that someone had painted the whole room yellow whilst leaving a clock permanently stuck to the wall. And so, when a new tenant arrived they had removed the clock and behind it was blue, the original colour of the room. I thought the circle could likely have been painted on top of the yellow for some unknown reason, but I preferred her theory in the end. Because I imagined her staring at the pale blue moon for days - between dancing and the restaurant - and coming to the fixed conclusion that a small wall clock had hung there first and found peace in it. I really didn’t mind, it was a nice feature.

The day was so bright it hurt and I waited outside Harajuku station for Saeko to arrive, she had come all the way from Shizuoka to see me. When she was there standing in front of me it was like no time had passed since - forever - and the moods were all the same, like they always have been, goofy and full of surprises. Lots of corners to turn and things to stare at. We laughed and joked and reflected and found a gluten-free cafe (neither of us have an intolerance it was simply the first thing we found down a busy narrow street filled with too much) and sat down. 

‘How is your singing going?’ She was now part of a few bands in Shizuoka ever since she won her local karaoke contest in her village in the mountains. 

‘I have bookings as a sessions singer for some older people’s ballroom dancing’ she looked wide-eyed and around with a smile forming across her lips, ‘but they are really old’. 

*

I always forget that the Japanese sky looks so different and not only that it feels different. Like flat, like a mass of something rolled-out with a sheen, and it’s clear but a vapour and it goes on for much longer than you would expect it to. Perspectives don’t exist in the distance everything looks flat and right there. Here’s a funny thing that I forgot I wrote when straight off the plane: 

The sky and the sea

Fool me

It’s bigger than any giant

You’ll see

And you know in Japanese the word for ‘sky’ is the same as for ‘air’ and ‘empty’ and ‘open’. It’s that sort of sky that I’m talking about that isn’t just a thing but the lack of a thing. It spreads out to nothingness. We walked and talked and got accosted by a vlogger who made us do a pose and say happy new year to her ipad and arrived at Meiji Jingu - the shrine in the middle of Tokyo - slap bang next to Harajuku filled with fake nails and vloggers. But here it’s another world: serene. At the start of the new year people do Hatsumode, which is the first few visits to a shrine to pay your respects and maybe eat some market food and pull a few fortunes. I love Meiji Jingu because of the trees, there are so many trees there that it feels cool in the summer and warm in the winter and the woodland shot up from seedlings in only 200 years, which I think is impressive in tree terms. I got out two 500 yen coins and bought us a ticket in to the private gardens inside the shrine’s grounds, where we met an old man and a woman who had staked out a kingfisher with their telescope and let us have a look through too. He was cobalt blue with a sash of ginger red round his chest. He flew not too soon after we’d seen him, so I guess we had been lucky. Later on we turned a corner in the woods and there was a flurry of tiny wings, perching and then flapping, perching and then swooping. A small pair of children, brother and sister, had their hands raised and out flat above their heads and the little birds were flocking to their palms to eat some crumbs, then to disappear. They were so excited, we were so excited. A groundskeeper-cum-priest who was passing through said it had become the highway of the birds and told us, ‘If you young ladies place you hands out flat they will surely perch because they think you have food for them’. Saeko went first and soon one hopped on and stopped, had a look and flew off. I did the same and a tiny thing perched on my hand, gently clasping my ring finger as if a twig with her dark delicate feet, she searched and failed to peck and left. It was a joy and the rest of the day continued as it had been set out for us. We laughed and joked and reflected.

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.