One day I will realise that there is no point in my setting out to do something specific, when I’m here. Every year I come with intentions that do not materialise. Every year, my time slips through the glass quicker than I can blink, every year I do something-&-nothing or a nothing-that-is-something.
I ramble, in every sense of that expression.
One day I will understand that this is precisely why I keep coming back. I will learn that this island – perhaps every island – has its own ideas about why I’m here, and it will keep whispering and nudging and push-pulling until I figure out what they are. It doesn’t help that they seem to differ year-on-year. Last year I started walking round the island. I got about half-way. I had a notion I’d finish it this year…but this year, the island is asking something else of me, something slower, something more random, something that is more being than doing.
It has been a wet year, and that continues, which gives me the excuse to spend more time indoors, reading, writing, practising, cooking. Spending more time indoors means most of my swimming is in the pool, rather than the sea…but the pool is outdoors, immediately outside my door, and that is reason enough to come here to write: being able to get up from my desk and into the water in a matter of seconds, even when it’s raining, especially when it’s raining.
When it’s not raining, I can walk out and down the steep path to the bay and be in the sea inside of twenty minutes. I do that too. One day I discover that the steep climb up the gully path is actually easier than the long wind up the tarmac road. It’s a harder walk, but the payback is how quickly I gain the height.
Every year the island gives me a little gift – not just a memory – there are untold numbers of those – but a practical thing that I can keep and re-use. The first one was this place, Del Mar. These simple apartments that have everything I need and nothing I don’t. On other occasions it has been viewpoints. Of course, one year it was Fermain Bay, which is still my favourite swim spot. This year’s discovery is simply a short-cut, a dark, leafy alleyway. I can’t believe I haven’t used it before. It doesn’t make a lot of difference, but using it makes me feel a bit more like a local, like I belong here, like a tiny bit more of the paths and roads and layout of this land have been mapped onto
my brain.
I want to know what the locals call such a path. Where I come from it would be “a cut”. Where I live it might be “a twitchel” – but I’m not sure if that needs to be between hedges, or if it counts for between walls.
In the meantime, I love that it was felt important enough to be preserved, given that it is hounded by properties on both sides, and is usable only on foot (By order of the Constables) and on foot it saves less than five minutes of amble-time. These paths are ancient and even the shortest remnants of them tie us back to the people who were here before. Someone, a long time ago, used this short, bending route from one road to another often enough for it to become a way. I have to wonder who they were, why they came that way so often. I will never know – but sometimes I think just having that curiosity, that reaching back through time question that asks “who were you?”– sometimes I think that is enough to connect us a little more deeply.
One evening I go out for a walk down to the point. Or, of course, not.
I’m led astray by walls draped in rosemary, still rain-damp. I stroke my fingers through it as I would with lavender. They come away sticky, but just as sweet-scented.
I am led to nature’s abstract art in the form of giant succulents and dying branches, architectural against a white-washed wall. Visual haikus.
I sneak pictures of ancient one-story cottages, with deep-set windows and low door-ways, places I wish I could step inside. I imagine fires in open grates, and fresh bread, and harsh wine, and someone telling the old stories of this place. I’m probably wrong. They’ve probably been super-modernised inside. The people who live there probably work in finance or insurance and know less of the myth of these places than I do. Or perhaps no-one actually lives there any more, only comes to visit. I wonder how old homesteads feel about that. Do their ghosts walk uneasily in these commercial times, or are they merely grateful that their walls survive?
I know that when places are abandoned, they slowly slip back into the earth. They weep away the memories of all the people who lived there, died there, fought there, loved there. Sooner or later, if no-one intervenes, they simply return back to the earth. They crumble of their own accord, or they wait patiently for the strength of ivy and her kind to pull them apart and lay them to rest. Ruins are romantic, because they are slowly letting go of their stories. Giving them up to be forgotten. They simply grow old, and a little sad, knowing that they are dying.
I do not know how places feel when they are neglected for months on end. How do they feel when they are part-time places, part-time homes, for owners or visitors? Are they grateful that – at least for a time – someone wants to inhabit them? Or do they resent the unsettled, unsettling, nature of holiday homers? Are they angry? I wonder what it might feel like to have your soul re-modelled, to be inhabited – is possessed too strong a word? – by people who know nothing and care nothing for who you were centuries before, who have no tie to, or worse no interest in, your story.
These are the moments, these aimless evening strolls, when I wish I were the kind of person who could take on such a building. I wish I had the strength of character to dwell in a small community, to become part of its story, to delve the depth of its previous story. I wish I were a better person than I am.
The cottages will be there when I come back again. Maybe one day I will delve deeper and find out some of their stories.
On this evening though, I simply walk on. The road drops steeply down. There is a wall on one side and a depth of culvert and running water and trees on the other. I think of the Ardennes. I walk down the lane.
I pass the Courtes Fallaizes abreuveur. Later I will look for translations of Courtes Fallaizes and find none. This is often the case on this island, because I assume the language is French, when it may be Guernésiaise. I need to learn its own language, its own way of naming things. Perhaps all of these places are simply named for the people who once owned them. Some names have meanings. Many do not.
I think maybe I will come back one year and make a tour of the abreuveurs. Look into their stories. And then I think no doubt someone has already done that.
And I hear a friend of mine saying: yes, but not you, not told in your voice.I file the idea away and keep on walking.
It is a bright yellow Autumn leaf that makes me pay attention to the ground. Then a snow-white mushroom…and then my eyes are transfixed by the leaf-litter and the fungus growing in the shelter of the wall: chalk-white, rose-pink, blush-cheeked with yellow-rose stockings, pale-sun-tan brown, tiger-bread broken caps – these could all be the same species at different ages, different exposures, and all I can think is: What are you? Can I eat you?
Because I cannot safely answer the second question and my book to answer the first is back at home, I leave them be. But I hold the delight of having seen them, so unexpectedly, until I emerge with a view of the headland I’d originally intended to walk down to.
I’m not a painter. I’m not really a photographer, though I pretend. It strikes me that there are times when the greatest compliment you can pay an artist is that their work looks like a photograph, and then there are times when the sight in front of you looks like a painting – and if you’re really lucky,
you might just manage to capture it in a photograph. This was an evening when I think I came close. I took the shot because of the light on the rocks, but whenever I look at it, it is the sky that draws me in.
Island sky. Random clouds, subtle colours, magical light.
