When you live in the remote Scottish Highlands with only an oil rig to lighten the view from the window, and when you spend most of the day in some fantasy writer's space and when even the real world is edging on the fantistic, being of sea and sand and stone and waves and cliffs and dear and seals, you can get to feel as though the hip, clever, cultural bus is going on down the road and you ain't on it. Ain't even close to catching it. Then the question tugs and challenges - well? And if that hip-street-wise-arty-culture-laden bus you imagine did stop - would you get on? Um!

Yes - if I could get on and off. That's how it seems to sit. Living the rural life, hens out back clucking and waves out front sucking and me in between - mostly liking this life - and then these days when I just have to click on some hip blog and there it is - the world where people live in cities, go to lectures, art galleries, workshops, seem so up there and out there and engaging with the witty and wonderful.

I pull on my wellies, rain trousers, rain jacket, hat or two, scarf a mile long and on days like today tip my head earthwards and strain into the wind. Slosh, slosh, boots hitting down through mud and rain. Three dear startled by dog, turn and become silhouettes on the rim of hill. Dead seal is tossed about by waves, its body blown up, floating but not brought into shore. I see more oyster catchers than folk.

There is something about, or not about, the beach, that makes it hard to bring on the Christmas feeling. Beach in winter, seaweed strewn. I have taken to writing poetry in the sand - scoring words with sticks. Words where you are unsure what will come next, even what letter. They are public art works for the two other dog walkers because the tide has not erased them. So - as we dip into the solstice in the far north accept my poetry from the sand -

poem 1 - scaffold turn into sugar. poem 2 - when the night jumps. poem 3 - such wild holds back the numb and smashes it into life.

As read by gulls and oyster catchers in the far north x happy solstice.x

What a day of darkness! Dog whines, my alarm clock after darling has gone to work, leaving a loving cup of green tea by the bed. I sleep on knowing the dog will not allow this for long. Whine, whine. But Flora, I moan, it's still pitch dark. Even after a bath it was still pitch dark. By eight fifteen I have layered myself sufficiently against December and out we go, into the dawn. It is a slither of tangerine lying over the sea in the east and above it dark clouds. I stand on the sand and speak some words to the morning but it is only half an hour later that the lying down slice of tangerine has seeped the sky. For an hour it is painterly and hopeful then the clouds assail the light and come two thirty the dusk drops followed swiftly by night. For a few hours in this dark day I wrote so at least in this activity, the activity Freud said only creative writers can get away with and still be called sane (that of living in a fantasy world) I inhabited the world of warmth and light and colour.

And I wanted to write about things I saw as I walked out. What did I see in the half light? That they had filled the pot holes in the track. That my neighbour was not in. That a raft of gulls were racketing on the waves, getting tossed about in the wine coloured seaweed. That rain was splatting the stones. That the love heart I had made on the sand from stones last summer is still there - partly. That the wings from oyster catchers that for ages have been lying on the grass in more or less the same place have been moved.

Had I posted this last week it would have been more interesting. A few days ago - as I walked out ( to overdo the thing) I saw the antlers of a deer behind me on the horizon and in front of me, lifting its head from the sea was a seal. Deer, human, dog and seal - all poised for a minute or so, kind of geometrically lined up. As though we planned this line in space and time. Then we all moved on. Life, I thought, is like that. I like to notice this. May your fusions be to the good. x

Christmas comes in slow up here. Across the river we have a few decorations that suspend from the lamposts - there's a star and an angel and a santa and a candle that flickers on and off and a robin in red and green and outside the fire station there is a tree lit up and outside the bus stop there is another tree, lit up and doing us proud. And that is it. Yesterday we put up a tree in the living room and strung a length of coloured lights around the picture above our bed and the blue and red and yellow and green lights reflect in the window which reflects onto the sea.

I know, In Edinburgh, where I used to live - most beautiful city on the planet - that in George street outside a very swish bar lavish decorations get wound around columns in October! And I walk past trying not to see, thinking, at least let us have Halloween first. Give us a pumpkin and a witch at least.

Here, in the local town twenty miles away the town Christmas lights are switched on at the beginning of December by Mr and Mrs Claus and the local primary school children belting out a few festive songs. And maybe it's the time of year and its tendency towards provoking memories but as I wait for Mrs Santa Claus to finish her rendition of 'it was the night before Christmas' being, as she told us and I quite agree, Santa's favourite story, my mind ambles into Christmases past.

Like Dortmund and one ginormous Christmas tree and the smell of gluwein and bratwurst and stalls with candles and cake and people in gloves and red noses. It's obviously a social thing. Friends gather round the gluwein stalls laughing and reminiscing, in for the night, you can tell.

Then there was a Greek island where Christmas dinner was cooked in an outside oven and a group of us sat cross legged, and, if I can remember correctly, meditated.

Then there were the Christmases in Sussex with the real candles on the tree and the hushed feeling that comes with seeing that, no matter where you've been and how you've been feeling, some peace comes with a lit tree and people under it singing Holy Night in as many launguages as we can muster and in those days there were many.

Then the time I played the angel Gabriel and sang while trying to hold a very heavy star and there was my dad in the audience and I am not six but twenty two. Better late than never.

Then us huddled in the hall, six for real now, and dad saying we had to go back to bed, Santa hadn't come, and the excitement, the heart rush no amount of wine since can ever re-create and us shouting from the wonderful banishment of our room - has he come yet? And then the answer from heaven itself - YES.

golden

the sky right now. amber liquid and edible, or drinkable perhaps, and the sea, oh God the sea. the waves are leaping, rising high cry then cresting and spraying whiteness as they curl. When this happens the sea pongs. And this huge wave time seems independant of the wind. But there they go, elemental and unceasing, wave after wave yards from where I write - saying yes. I have travelled miles, been so far away, now here it is - land and here I go, giving, the whole thing is so total I can't help but be impressed and wish I could write like that, live like that. It reminds me of the last line of Ulysses which I can't remember. Something about here I go to forge for the millionth time.. which is also a kind of hurling, saying yes, mistakes and all. Living by waves there is no need for television which I gave up thirty years ago. It poisoned me. I felt that as a teenager sitting there five hours a night. Sitting up at eleven pm and feeling as though some inertia that was not me had seeped in. I counted the hours, the hundreds of teenage hours and come eighteen I thought - basta! The amount of people who look incredulous when I say i have no television is amazing. I think, is it not so much more incredulous, that we - human beings - have given ourselves to totally to this entity? Some people I know never turn it off - it's there, buzzing away as they sleep, it's there, chattering inanely while people visit, it's there, trying to sell you this that and the next while dinner cooks. Not only have we married it, we can't it seems, get enough of it. How many channels? You may say - not everyone has waves at their window. True. I had a window once in London near Balham. I looked on this tree. It was the one thing in this view that spoke nature. I waited for spring. It never came. The neighbours killed it, my landlady said, the leaves choked the drains.
Do not kill the waves, I ask. And think, if I cans till look on them with wonder they and their majesty are alive.

darkness

almost seventeen hours of it each day. I am wrung out from over much driving with the low slanted sun blinding me and the window washer not working - six hours of that - ah poor me. But all this way to be a mentee and for that I am delighted. This writing needs guidance - others to show us the way. Living almost in the artic archipeligo long drives are necessary for most things. Take not the local Pilates class for granted yea who live where others live also! While in Inverness today, enjoying cappuccino(she doesn't get out much!) prior to meeting my mentor I longingly perused a brochure on a Pilates class. Next to writing and running and a bit of therapy thrown in now and again nothing does it quite like Pilates. I was even considering driving 100 miles to suck in the core and pull up my pelvis floor but after the strain of driving and peering hunched up through a dirty windscreen I probably won't.
now home after the dirty window trip and partner wants to go out - another fifty miles or so and I can't quite face it. I see his disappointment and I feel old and I know sometimes the renewing comes in the saying yes, having now learnt to say no. And I find myself at almost fifty years of age having just bought (not intentionally, it just happened to have the extras) a little zooped up car with alloys, spoiler, and four very throaty exhausts and a gear stick that twinkles red! The car is green and too noisy but I didn't say no. Did I say I have learnt that no lesson? Ha-ha! Listen as I pass, somewhere far north of Inverness, roaring the single track roads in search of cappucino and pilates! The dirty windscreen - that was old car - that was Audi on her last day out. A life in the banger derby awaits her then crushed to a sheet.
I have a wonderful blog friend who describes her life as being in the slow lane. I veer; sometimes it is sea and sky and beach and dog and writing and fresh air and the speed is as fast as feet move. At other times it is over taking every slow coach on the A9 and doing many things and juggling coloured balls high in the air. And on those days, where the windscreen makes the world a place of muck, the lure of the slow lane is calling.

have been round the world. in a short space of time. in paradise in sunnyside guest farm in south Africa near Lesotho where baboons bark at you in the early dawn and where, because you have travelled so far for so short a time, you get up at five and climb that golden rock, yes, the one called face rock because of the shape of the wise ancient one, where the dangerous baboons live and sit and swing and pull up roots and snakes and make a right racket, and walking through the valley before the sun has come up you hear a crack resonate like gun fire but it's not gun fire, it's a bull whip and a man on horse back is encouraging the cows to pasture - crack, crack and its echo is still in my imagination, the way the sun did come up from behind the rocks is also there and the way twenty of us met together under this mighty rock to tell stories and bring to our work and our lives the food of story. And to it the rhythm of good food, of people of walk slow and bend close, and to the stories we shared - some in the workshop, some over breakfast. Here's a breakfast story.

A man called Roland runs a hotel. There is a staff member he values highly called Thomas. Thomas is perhaps sixty now and has never gone to school. Thomas though, can speak thirteen languages and Thomas will remember you. If you come to the hotel and order a drink then return a year of two later, he'll remember what drink you ordered and he'll bring it to you on a tray, without you having to ask for it. Recently Roland found Thomas in great distress, crying in a cupboard, sobbing his heart out. Roland couldn't console him. He tried to ask him what was the matter but Thomas couldn't stop the tears. It was only after his tears had run dry he was able to turn to his manager and say - it's my daughter - she's passed her matric with 13 honours.

After Roland told me the story over breakfast both of us had tears in our eyes. We too cried for the black girl who had what her father never got.

And many more such stories.

I went via Dubai. There's a melting pot of a place - in some ways like a brave new world where racism is an ugly fact of history.

and back to Scotland where Hamish Henderson wrote -

roch the wind in the clear day's dawing

blaws the cloods heilster gaudy o'er the bay

but there's mair nor a roch wind blawing

through the great glen o the world the day

.....broken faimlies in lands we've harried

will curse Scotland the brave nae mair nae mair

black and white ane tae l'ither mairried

view from a writer's window

Been walking - not enough - feel the need for good miles - out over the bracken that's gone all coppery. Here the sea. I can't walk on that. My eyes walk over it. Been watching a cormorant's black rubbery neck dive hopeful for an hour.