the right leg is marked with an arrow in case of error

Stuff Happens

*   *   *   *   *

So back in ARI the usual non-emergency routine swung into place: next of kin, blood, chat with medics, the fast, the pill, the shower, the mirth-provoking backless flowery gown. In the course of all which I tried to get a promise to keep the removed femur for me afterwards, for I fancied having it on the mantelpiece as a memento mori - a reminder to be more careful in future. No luck there; but they offered to take photos, so I gave a medical student my camera, urging complete coverage of everything.

Presently the trolley came and I was wheeled along the labyrinth of corridors and into the blackness where stuff happened that I know only from the pictures that the student took. You may prefer not to see them, in which case look away now.

removal of broken femur and failed plate, and closing up after the prosthesis in inserted

In what seemed a moment I was in a recovery place and soon thence into a ward.

Still dozy, I was shown two buttons, one to press for more morphine and the other to call for help, but registered them only vaguely. It seemed very cold, I wanted another blanket, and fumbled with the help button. And dropped it. So maybe more morphine? I groped about for the morphine button but couldn’t find it.

It got colder … I was on the summit plateau of Ben Macdui in a whiteout, hoping not to see the Fear Liath Mòr [see Attack of the Earworms. posted Sep 2013]. The fog became thicker, closed in, became a shiny tunnel. This wasn’t the Macdui of 1953, this was surely the famous shiny white Tunnel of Death? It was very peaceful, a relief not to have to deal with the prunes and the stairs and so on … just to be allowed to drift …

But no, drifting was stopped sharply. Someone was shaking me and saying urgently “Don’t you dare, don’t you DARE fade out after all that work we put in.” It was the surgeon, a most excellent, witty lady, who in no time at all dissolved the shiny tunnel with a massive input of blood. Later they said I’d lost 4 pints of blood, about half the total, so I suppose that would be how it feels to bleed out.

Farewell, tunnel, and hello, prunes and zimmer and once again that steep climb towards mobility. But it was nice to have known the moment of utter peace.

Better still, as soon as I got upright and tried zimmering, I knew it was okay. This time, I was walking feebly but properly. This time the stairs would be a doddle.

One day, when the stitches were out and everything looked fine, the question of rehab arose, because it wasn’t yet feasible to cope with living alone. Where to go, Inverurie or Woodend, just up the road from ARI? I thought I’d try Woodend.

Oh no, not another huge Nightingale ward! Too hot, too little room between beds. But no matter, soon be out of here and back home. Meantime, get walking, practise getting socks on (amazingly hard to do).

A few days passed, and one morning I felt a strange shivering tremor, and suddenly it seemed very cold. I rang to ask for another blanket, the nurse looked, checked my temperature and soon they took a sample of blood. In no time at all my bed was wheeled along to the end of the ward, where there was a separate room that used to be a cupboard, and vancomycin was dripping into a vein.

I had MRSA, it seemed, and the course of treatment would likely take 12 weeks, and I wasn’t going home until the antibiotic cleared the bug ... If it did.

*   *   *   *   *

(Will Old’n’Idle enjoy life in the Cupboard? Can vancomycin defeat the MRSA? Next instalment may possibly reveal the answer. Or not.)

Prunes and Prisons

*   *   *   *   *

“Imagine you’re walking on egg-shells” they said, as they levered my wincing carcass to its feet with one of their giant hoists, “because it’ll be a bit fragile at first.” And indeed zimmering across the open spaces of the ward to reach the toilet felt desperately fragile at first, far more so than with a knee replacement. But I was confident that it would come right in a few days, and I would go home.

How to make the fastest recovery? What are the pluses and minuses that can get you home or leave you in limbo? Medical stuff, obviously, but that isn’t in your hands; you must assume that the medics are doing their best for you. But there are bits where you can maybe help yourself a little.

For me, first priority was the unblocking of the bowels, familiar from previous post-operative dependency on morphine; but I’d already found out that the prune was the magic bullet that gets you going, so I had great wads of prunes for breakfast each day. Indeed I overdid it a bit, in view of the long time and serious effort needed to reach the toilet. It’s not easy to find the right place on the spectrum between concrete bowel and excess prune: on the one hand you are reduced to breaking through the concrete barrier with a teaspoon and unbalancing contortion, on the other a sudden speedy zimmeration is needed – hard to achieve while on eggshells. The websites that advise you on post-operative care are largely silent on this point, yet your feeling of well-(or not)-being is dependent on it to a great extent.

Food in hospitals gets a lot of criticism, but if you had to cater for all those people with different conditions. you’d find it hard to do on the budget. There is always choice, and it doesn’t take long to find out what suits you best: personally I found fish and chips on a Friday great, and macaroni-with-potato the pits. Best to stifle that longing for a bit of wine and a cup of proper coffee – it wasn’t going to happen.

Routine humiliation is unavoidable. One of my worst moments was the first compulsory shower, for which I was taken to the shower, clothes all removed, shown how it worked, by a male nurse, an ex-sergeant-major; as I sat in the chair the shower head leapt out of my soapy hand on to the floor where I couldn’t reach it, nor could I reach the controls to turn it off, nor was there any visible means of summoning help. And he had put my zimmer out of reach (all nurses do this, I think it’s an unconscious control measure). So I sat and enjoyed the steam for a long time, until the sergeant-major returned, shouted “Ach, what a mess you’ve made”, gave me a towel and my zimmer and went off to do more caring things elsewhere.

Blubbing in public is simply Not On, so you have to hold on to the thought that these are kindly people doing their best for you and you are slow and feeble (sob) and irritating, and they’ve been up since sparrow-fart and don’t get paid nearly enough … etc.

But I found myself blubbing uncontrollably quite by surprise, on being ticked off by an auxiliary for failing to step on to a weighing machine, which I found impossible to do. Nurses came and took the auxiliary away, and said “You’ve gone quite white” and brought a chair and sat me down, and indeed I felt a bit odd for a while. Emotions all over the place.

But never mind, time was passing, soon I’d be home and everything would be fine.

Came a day when they asked “Where do you want to go for rehab?” “Eh?” “Rehab. Inverurie?” and they explained all the reasons why I couldn’t go home, still needing a zimmer, to be alone in a house with two steps down to the kitchen. “How long is rehab?” “Oh, usually a fortnight.”

OK. another two weeks and then I’d be home …

*   *   *   *   *

So off in the ambulance, to Inverurie, Friday lunchtime, missing the fish and chips. Och.

It was a big Nightingale-type ward in Inverurie, and my bed was a long way from the toilet, and I couldn’t yet walk properly with the zimmer. But it’s only for two weeks, no worries. Before they’d let me home I had to be able to do stairs and make my breakfast in their kitchen, using a trolley instead of the zimmer … yeah, that would be fine. Surely.

Only two weeks later it wasn’t yet fine, the stairs were impossible, I couldn’t put weight on the right leg, I couldn’t go the length of the ward on the zimmer, it was too tiring half-hopping to keep weight off the bad leg. And I couldn’t get up the step to the kitchen to make breakfast.

Time passed, people came and after a bit they did the stairs and the breakfast and went home and new people came … And there was unavoidable TV (Eastenders etc) and CD (Daniel O’Donnell – an experience akin to drowning in warm syrup). And there was the Bed of Doom, a bed in the massive heat of big bay window where each occupant in turn went spare and had to be wheeled away – the last one after throwing her whole tray of plates, food, cup and drink hither and yon to the floor.

I washed in the basin, but eventually they insisted on a shower. But that was at the far end of the ward, so they wheeled me along and showered me, which felt great, but I couldn't stand without holding on to the pipes.

There was a phone on wheels which they would bring occasionally, and I could have a chat with the outside world. But one day my youngest daughter phoned and they said “We can’t bring it to you, you’ll have to go and answer it.” But it was at the other end of the ward. I couldn’t get there.

It was clear that their strategy was designed to make this lazy creature walk instead of sitting and lying about. But the desolation of being cut off from friends and family sent the soul into a very dark prison.

Physios came and tried to improve the walking. One physio, a blonde of perfect physique, tried to make me walk farther, and was very severe. When my daughter and her husband were visiting, I told them about her, and Will said “She’s Helga, the Horrible Hitler Handmaiden, and she keeps knives in the toes of her shoes, like Rosa Klebb”, which was a cheering thought. One day Helga the HHH got irritated and said “Let’s stop this silly hopping, shall we?” whereat tears of frustration rolled down my face. My GP, who was visiting, heard of this and had a word in high places, whereupon Helga disappeared and was seen no more.

But I still couldn’t do stairs or breakfast or walk properly, and weeks were rolling by: I’d crashed early February and now it was near the end of April.

One day an auxiliary watched me hop-zimmering and said “I saw a gentleman walking like that once. It turned out that a screw had come out and his plate had worked loose.” I wish I’d got her name because she deserves a huge bonus for observation and diagnosis; but at the time this thought was so horrible that I didn’t want to know.

My GP came a visit. “You look a bit down.” “Ug.” “I think you might be depressed, I could prescribe some antidepressant?” After a deep breath I reached for the only weaponry that was available to me: the vocabulary and tone of voice that I’d soaked up from monitoring the girls’ cloakroom at Stromness Academy, turns of phrase that I’d seen produce an effect.

Through clenched teeth, and in a monotone I said “Yes I am effing depressed, I can not effing walk, I can not effing climb the effing stairs, the effing steps to the effing breakfast are beyond my effing powers … “ and I subsided into blubbing remorse because he was a nice man and none of these words had actually been effing and many of them had been different and none of them at all nice.

“Oh!” he said, and reached for his phone. I expect I’ll be sent to a bad place now, I thought, and I heard him say “Bill? mumble mumble..” and he drifted off to where I couldn’t hear. Presently he came back and said “I’ve spoken to Bill, and he says to send you to ARI for an X-ray. That’ll convince you your leg’s all right, and you’ll find that you can walk.” Ah, Bill the head Orthopod.

And so, without packing anything, because it was only going to be a lightning visit, I was put in an ambulance and taken to ARI, where the leg was X-rayed.

The X-ray technician looked at the picture and said “Of course I’m not an expert, but no-one could walk on that leg.” It seemed that one of the screws had come loose and was gradually excavating away through the bone. But no worries, they could cut out the damaged bone and put in a prosthesis and I’d be fine.

“Hm, good”, I said, “but I need to pee, would you give me my zimmer” (which they’d put out of reach, as they do). “Oh no, you can’t walk on that leg, you’ll damage it. By the way, your GP rang with a message for you. He says to keep your sense of humour.”

*   *   *   *   *

(will the prosthesis be the end of Old'n'Idle's problems? the next instalment will reveal all, or at any rate some of it.)

They Shoot Horses

*   *   *   *   *

Yes, and I wished that I was a horse.

For I was lying on the kitchen floor, somehow the legs were failing to get me up, the phone was out of reach, and Widget, the biggest and greediest of the four cats, was looking down at me hungrily, for his plate was empty.

I lived alone, well out of earshot of my nearest neighbour. Perhaps in another day or two the postie might bring some mail and hear me if I shouted; or perhaps he wouldn’t, and Widget would finish me off? Over the years I’d watched big, beautiful Widget and his siblings, Fidget and Mousie, and their mother, Sooty (all rescued many years back from the Cat Protection folk in Orkney).

I’d seen how Fidge would go up a tree and knock a squirrel to the ground, and then they’d all have a game of Squirrel Tennis, and I didn’t fancy the game of Human Tennis that could well be in store. Far easier to be a horse and be shot – quick and probably nearly painless.

I brooded for a while. How ironic that this was the first day since I’d had knee replacements two years ago that I felt once again totally confident walking over rough ground, that I’d come home rejoicing and cooked a celebratory casserole of chicken, mushrooms and leeks with cream and wine; and there it was in the oven, ready to eat. Out of reach.

How doubly ironic that the rug I’d just tripped over on the way from sink to table was the very rug that I myself had made many years ago, that a while back it had developed a curl at the corner, over which I had half-tripped a few times and Not Paid Attention (stupid stupid stupid) and now my own rug had turned on me, and my own cats were shortly going to eat me, little by little, aaarrrgggh.

But why had the lizard not saved me, as it had done so often in the past? [see Saved by the Lizard, posted August 2013] Sadly, it seemed that replacing the knees included cutting the connection between the lizard and the feet. I was on my own, lizardless. Shit.

Spurred on by this thought I made greater efforts: the phone was lying on the table; if I could just reach it …

Much time passed as I experimented with one-handed press-ups (not a thing that I had ever tried) and at last I swept the phone to the floor and called the neighbours, and they came and looked.

“Help me up?” Mike looked down at me. “No, I’m not touching that, I’ll call an ambulance.” For the first time I realised that something must have broken, that would be why the right leg was at such a stupid angle and not working.

Time passed, the immediate priorities - feed cats, switch off oven - were sorted out, and chaps arrived carrying a chair thingy, and with no little difficulty they got me off the floor, strapped in the chair, out to the ambulance, away to the hospital.

And I still wonder who got to eat the chicken-leek-cream-wine casserole. Because from that day to this, eight (I think) years later, dammit, I’ve not been able to make such a gourmet dish again. Och.

*   *   *   *   *

At ARI (the hospital) a young doctor laid out the alternatives for me:

1. we straighten out the femur, and you lie still until it knits together: pro: you keep bone; con: you shit into bedpan and nurses wash you and turn you regularly which isn’t easy, for many weeks.

2. we fix the break with a metal plate: pro: you keep your bone and you’ll be up and walking quite quickly; con: the bone needs to be good enough to hold the plate.

3. we cut out your femur and give you a prosthesis: pro: you walk again quickly; con: you lose the bone, and prosthesis brings the danger of infection if you get a wound, ever after.

How to choose between 2 and 3, 1 being a clear no-no? Had I known a little more and been able to speak to people and google, I might have gone for 3, but lying on a trolley and needing to decide fast, I wanted to keep my bone, and chose 2.

In no time at all, the bliss of unconsciousness. None of that showering and back-to-front flowery hospital gown stuff that had happened with the knees. Just a minute (it seemed) of blackness and I was being wheeled to a ward, tubed and doped, with a leg that lay straight again.

I was confident that I would be home within the week. I’d got back from each knee in 4 or 5 days. so a day or two longer this time?

*   *   *   *   *

(will Old'n'Idle's confidence turn out to be well-founded or seriously misplaced? the next instalment will shed some light)

The Cloned Balaclava

*   *   *   *   *

A time came when once again I could rummage through the giant stiff drawers where the olden clothing lives, and there I found many tattered comfy things - jumpers, trousers, knickers, socks – that I had thought long gone to the great recycling bins of Kemnay.

And since winter will soon be upon us I was most pleased to find the balaclava that had come into my life way back in 1954, and kept me unscathed through many an unsettling episode. Wearing this iconic headgear, I reasoned, I shall probably be able to crutch my way along the road even when the snows come, without falling over.

the 1954 balaclave on Ben Nevis

So I put it on, and once again felt the comforting warmth that had so often restored courage and rationality to the fading brain. Yes, this would surely get me through the approaching cold, and did I not remember a pair of long woollen socks that might help the failing feet? I burrowed onwards, farther into the dark recesses of the mighty bottom drawer.

But what can this be? Another black balaclava, and then yet another, dark grey? How have they come here? I bought only one black one in 1954, and never another, except for a navy one some years later, which I didn’t like (too small, too colourful), and never wore. Now there are two black balaclavas (balaclavae?), and one dark grey one, and nowhere is there a navy one. Nowhere. I have rummaged at the cost of great effort through every piece of furniture that holds any kind of clothing, and there is no navy balaclava anywhere. Yet there are two extra balaclavas that I have never bought/borrowed/stolen. How can this be?

Being of an age where I have plenty of thinking time, I have thought out the only rational explanation. Call the original balaclava the parent, and the extra black and grey ones the offspring (who knows whether any of them are m or f? gender in a balaclava is relatively unimportant), and call the navy one the reject. Here is my thesis: the parent, bored by years of living in a drawer without adventures, cloned a black offspring, and some years later another offspring, slightly lighter in colour as his ageing powers began to fade. For some years the parent and his two offspring lived on in the drawer in harmony but increasingly hungry for action; eventually they turned on the navy reject, formulating the convenient idea that navy was not the right colour for a proper balaclava, pounced on it, tore it shreds and … (the horror!) … ATE it, in a misguided cloud of Anti-Navyism.

You may feel that this scenario is unlikely. Yet how do you explain away the scraps of navy woolly fluff that are to be seen in that drawer and nowhere else? No, I think we have to accept that the balaclava is a more dangerous animal than we had realised, mild and comforting so long as its emotional needs are met, but prone to cannibalism in the sufficiently long term.

But I shall still wear it: it may be a cannibal but it is still an old friend, and deserves some excitement in the evening of its days. Probably it would be best to wear the offspring as well, from time to time.

Just in case.

*   *   *   *   *

… so off I went to take a picture, to show that it wasn’t all pure fantasy; and here they are, the parent and its two offspring crouched on envelopes on the little sewing desk (!) in the window …

… and clearly one of the offspring is navy. Not eaten. No cannibalism

The relief! After all that speculation and fear, it was just that the cataract-clouded eyes can’t see colours properly any longer. (Though why can they see the navy easily in a photograph and not in real life? eh?)

Now we have merely a parent, a reject and a mystery offspring. Cloning in a balaclava I can live with, free from the threat of cannibalism.

Only now, every time I buy something online I have to wonder what colour it really is.

*   *   *   *   *

upping sticks

well!

~~~~~

the Old Man

The Old Man of Hoy lurched past as I gripped the rail of the Ola and wondered if this was an act of more than ordinary stupidity. Not, of course, gripping the rail of the Ola, for it was heaving quite a bit, but ending 21 years of living in Orkney, leaving behind many good friends and a way of life that probably would be hard to find elsewhere. Not to speak of finally, after nearly thirty years, separating from a spouse who, even if we had latterly drifted very far apart, remained a friend. The Ola rail was not merely a protection against falling, it somehow steadied the nerve for this leap into the murk. And looking as though I was about to throw up would protect me from idle chat.

Once off the boat at Scrabster, there was no time to look back, for I needed to get to Inverurie, find the estate agents and pick up the keys before they closed, and that focussed the attention wonderfully, for it wasn’t a road where you could rely on being able to pass the many lorries that inevitably got off the boat first. So no time to idle along admiring the passing scenic splendours, no time for lunch, on past Inverness, no stopping to get grape and ginger syllabub at Markies, all that could come later: living on the mainland I would be able to do these things any old time without having to book a ferry crossing. But even if I wasn’t in time to get the keys, in the back of the van were tent, sleeping-bag, camping stove, I could stay overnight very comfortably in the half-acre of garden.

Which however wasn’t necessary, for I got the keys with half an hour to spare, and moved in, unloading from the van all that was necessary to live in comfort: mattress, camping stove, saucepan, some biscuits and cheese, coffee, knife, teaspoon … and my radio/CD player, into which I loaded Jacques Loussier and danced around the room to the sound of jazz Bach. This was better than the tent.

hut and half-acre

And better than any house I’d lived in before. It was, I suppose, the most decrepit structure (if you exclude bothies) of the many, old and new, sound and crumbling, that I’d previously stayed in; for it was basically just a wooden hut clad in concrete blocks, and there was no telling what state the inner timber was in – the whole thing could fall apart any time. But this was the first place to be completely mine; I could repair, adjust, decorate (or not) just as I pleased and could afford; and if it fell to bits I still had that half-acre (and, of course, the tent, sleeping-bag, camping stove …) though playing the CDs might be a problem.

woodland on the doorstep

As it has turned out, 25 years on it hasn’t fallen to bits, though there has been much to do.

Shortly after moving in I went to Majorca with Kay and A for a previously booked holiday. December in Majorca was pleasantly warm, but back home it had been very icy indeed. Before leaving, I’d turned the water off and drained the system, and when I got back I turned it on again confidently … and the ceiling fell in, water gushed out. I turned it back off again and reached for a plumber. It emerged that a piece of water pipe had a bend in it that hadn’t drained, so it had frozen and burst. The plumber mended the pipe and I turned the water on again; a little water came out of the tap and then stopped; a mystery that was solved when we looked into the well a few hundred yards away that supplied water to three houses, and found it to be dry. Hmm, no water, how to get round that one and why had it happened?

The why was apparently “nae guid sna” over the past two winters; the solution was the purchase of a 500-gallon tank that the water board would fill when necessary, for at the time the cost of connecting to the mains was beyond my means – that came a lot later.

So presently there was water once more, but then the hot water tank started to emit a fine spray, and the plumber had to be reached for again. I got to know the plumber pretty well over the years, and to appreciate him: he fixed things fast, and they stayed fixed.

The kitchen and bathroom had been added on to that basic hut structure by a previous owner, and had a flat roof whose felt covering was beginning to sag and crack in places; for a while, patching worked, but eventually in wet weather the rain would start to drip into the bathroom; roof replacement was going to cost thousands of pounds so I rigged up a gutter below the crack in the bathroom ceiling, at the lower end of which hung a bucket that I could empty into the bath. This was fine for a time, because we don’t usually get a lot of rain, though some visitors found it a bit weird sharing their bath with a gutter and bucket, especially when it rained.

itinerant honeysuckle

But clearly the roof had to be replaced before long, and how was this to be afforded? I got lucky: I was offered a job in the Chemistry department of the university, entering data into their computer – my total ignorance of chemistry didn’t matter, all I had to do was copy things reliably – and before the roof disintegrated I was able to have it replaced, which took a brilliant team just two days, with timber, a big tub of boiling tar, blowtorch, rolls of roofing felt, and a beautiful ladder that I coveted.

Compared to these rather urgent upgrades, the installation of a proper kitchen (B&Q’s second cheapest, excellent, installed by Kay and A) and replacing old cracked draughty windows with double glazing were less pressingly needed but improved the comfort and cooking possibilities enormously.

Correen

Meanwhile the garden had needed its bit of attention, for it was almost completely covered to knee height in thistles, dockens, nettles and tall grass; somewhere amongst this were a few apple trees, some gooseberry bushes, a lot of blackcurrants and an amazing number of strawberries hiding among the weeds.

Castle Fraser

A scythe was the obvious starting point, and after many weeks of short bursts of scything the growth was down to a height that a power mower could cope with, though the ground was lumpy and the mower would often grind to a halt in some of the bigger holes.

A cutting from the honeysuckle that we had brought years ago in our yawl across from the Pegal Burn on Hoy to Orphir, and then moved to Stromness, came south with me. I planted it near the front gate where it flourished, seeming not to miss the salt-laden air of its native island.

the Don and Bennachie

Time rolled by, comfort and fruit increased, weeds decreased and occasionally I would remember the need for mountainous wilderness that had pulled me away from island life. But now that I could go there any time I liked without needing to book a ferry, there was no urgency: I could go tomorrow, or next week … but there was just that little bit more to sort out first … and how lovely it was just here …

the Maiden Stone

For instance, there are wee hills (e.g. Bennachie, Cairn William, Correen), from whose summits the big Cairngorms are visible not far away; heaps of castles with quirky ancient lavatorial arrangements, a laird’s lug to let the owner know what the underlings are plotting against him (an early kind of Twitter?), beautiful gardens, interesting sundials and lairds who all seem to be related and over seven feet tall; the river Don flows past nearby, and the Dee is not far away; local stone circles and standing stones, though less majestic than the Orkney examples, are no less interesting; pleasant woodland everywhere, not least on my doorstep; lots of wildlife in garden – toad, deer, fox, owl, woodpecker, lizard, vole, pheasant, squirrel (red), buzzard, various sbb.

Above all, the immediate neighbours, while at a distance where none of us can irritate any of the others by our choice of music, are not merely pleasant and benign people, but helpful to a degree that I will never be able to repay.  

July full moon

And as it has turned out, 25 years have passed, and although I’ve been to Africa and the Algarve, and visited Cee on the west coast and my sister near Oxford, only once have I actually gone back to the old playground, Glencoe, and lived in the tent below the Buachaille, one July with a full moon; but - such was the state of the knees - I couldn’t even reach the lowest rocks, all I could do was look from a distance; the memories crowded in:

hard men on the Rannoch Wall

up there was the Rannoch Wall, once rated “impossible”, now criss-crossed with climbs of all grades of difficulty; there was the line of Curved Ridge, the easy route up and down, where long ago, after sewing up January Jigsaw, we ate our snacks and watched the hard men of the Creag Dhu on the Wall and heard the music of their pitons being hammered into the rock; they were revered in the climbing world: they walked, singing in harmony down climbs that others struggled to get up, and called it “balance walking”; higher up on the summit, at sunset, we had looked eastwards and seen the shadow of the Earth climb up through the distant haze above the Rannoch Moor, and then picked our way down Curved Ridge in the gathering dark; one midsummer night had been filled with the sound of conversation high up on Slime Wall, as a medical student's broken leg was rescued from a place of severely difficult access:
     Broken Leg: "for goodness sake, keep it straight, don't bend it sideways"
     Rescuer: "shut up or we'll break the other one"
just the normal spirit of camaraderie, you understand; away in the other direction was Meall a’ Bhuiridh and the peaks we’d trudged over one evil winter day on the way over to Bridge of Orchy …

visiting the playground

Waves of nostalgia, until dusk brought the dread midge in its millions and the door of the tent had to be closed; present need ousted past reminiscence – all that had been when the limbs functioned, it had been great while it lasted, but that was way back, all those friends (though maybe not the immortals of the Creag Dhu) were long gone. It was time to say goodbye to a long addiction.

Widget, Fidget, Midget aka Mousie

Well, gaps get filled; a new addiction, of a very different kind, leapt in when I went back to Orkney for a short visit and came away with a big cardboard box containing a family of four cats: a completely white mother and her three fortnight-old long-haired dark grey kittens, who moved in and took command and enslaved me. But they – Sooty and the Idgets – need a post to themselves. 

~~~~~

Arran

time after time

~~~~~

Goatfell summit: Kay and A

The sun beat down on Goatfell and everything distant was obscured by heat haze; the Rebolg’s tongues hung out thirstily and they eyed the huge granite blocks without enthusiasm: this was no fun, never a woolly thing to chase (a massive relief to the humans).

We had all – Kay, A (her partner), their doberpeople (Rebel and Olga, aka the Rebolg), Cee and Em - met in Arran, joined later by Maude and her Porsche and big tin of biscuits; we were staying in Lochranza; but Arran is small enough to get easily to any bit of it, and this day we had nipped across to Brodick to sew up the highest point, just short of Munro height, but you start from sea level, so it’s far more worthy than the A9 horizontal slagheap Munros.

This is the thing about hills: mere summit height above sea level tells you little of interest; the height from starting point is what matters, and so is angle, type of rock, view, even remoteness. When you open your box of chocolates is your first choice a choc whose summit measures over x mm from base? I think not. If Mr Munro had shredded his list down the toilet, everyone would have had a lot more enjoyment – apart from compulsive list-collectors. Only a personal opinion.

ascent by push chair

Anyway, here we were in Arran, where I’d been several times, first as an infant in the ‘30s, when we crossed to Brodick (in the Waverley paddle steamer, whose career ended in WWII during the Dunkirk episode) and stayed there several years for a month in the summer. Dad, an inveterate hillwalker, pushed me in a wheelchair halfway up Goatfell, while Joan, a couple of years older, walked; perhaps this is why Joan was never a keen hillwalker while I became an addict.

Much later, when we were both at university, Joan and I spent a week there in a hotel, where the food, in those days of rationing, was unbelievable – real eggs, heaps of bacon, actual whipped cream, gosh! (years after, Joan could still remember every meal we had in that hotel). The last day, I felt a need to do Goatfell, and an equal need to be in time for every bit of food; going at top speed all the way to the summit and running all the way back, slithering and sliding on the peat, I reached the lunch table, just in time, covered in perspiration and peat.

decadence

Later still, Allen and I took our tents past the notice that told us to BEWARE OF THE BULL, up Glen Rosa and spent a weekend enjoying the decadent new comfort of airbeds, being wary of the unseen bull and sewing up Caliban’s Creep, an amusing wee route on the Rosa Pinnacle of Cir Mhòr.

And now, some 60 years since I’d first been there as an infant, I was back on Goatfell, longing to be an infant in a pushchair again, because the sun was fierce and my companions, Kay, A and the dobers, were all bounding upwards as though gravity had been halved, while advancing years dragged me back like a massive block of concrete. Somewhere down below, at sea level, Cee and Em were touring the shore road on their bikes, good choice in this heat.

granite ridges

Fine as it was to be back among those high granite ridges, the best place during the heat of the day was in the pools and waterfalls of a stream a few miles from Lochranza. In the evenings, towards sunset, it was a pleasant stroll in the cool of the evening up the track to Loch na Davie, or up the hill between Lochranza and Sannox, to watch the sun go down over the Paps of Jura over thirty miles away.

evening stroll

Back down at the cottage, the sunset-induced communal peace was shattered by a scream from Maude, who had opened her tin of biscuits and found it almost empty, raided by the Hunter-Gatherers.  It seems that girls – natural predatory survivors – will scoff any available fodder, while boys wait to be offered. My offspring were all girls, Maude’s all boys, and we fell to discussing this interesting gender difference, though I had a sneaking suspicion that my girls might have learnt to be predators because of their upbringing. (A generation onwards I notice that Kay’s three boys do not raid my chocolate hoard, but who knows whether this is due to their gender or their upbringing?)

distant Jura

No big achievements, but no frights either - apart from the biscuits - just a good holiday before the stressful upheaval that now shimmered in the pipeline – the move from Orkney to Aberdeenshire.

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Great Art

south of the Alps

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approaching Venice across the lagoon

The call of the cuckoo woke me. It was comfortably warm, though still only March or early April, to the best of my rather fuzzy memory, so where could this be? Sliding back the nearest door of the van I looked out: hmm, a camp site - not the homeland, then. Nearby was my tent. Cuckoo again … gradually the little grey cells got a grip: this was across the lagoon from Venice, in the tent were Cee and her current boyfriend Wimbil (Bill, a denizen of Wimbledon), and home was several days’ driving, around 2,000 miles away.

Cee had happened to be at a loose end, and would quite like to look at places like Venice and Florence, stuffed with Great Art; Wimbil was also interested, and on the way I could maybe have a nostalgic look at an Alp or two. I would sleep in the Mitsubishi van; they would have the tent.

Leaving Orkney in a spring blizzard, the driving needed care until the central belt, where snow gave way to rain, and on we went, hour after hour through the huge boredom of that long, long bit through Englandshire: mile after mile of 70+ mph across an almost completely flat landscape, on and on, till you had the illusion that you were standing still and the other cars were drifting gradually towards you or away from you, and you lost all sense that there was a road surface down underneath, hurtling backwards at a rate that could damage you badly if things went just a tiny bit wrong.

By the time we reached the outskirts of Abingdon, where my sister Joan lived and we could stop for a night or two, my brain cells had nearly ceased to function.

I used to know this bit very well indeed, having lived in Oxford for several years and cycled all around. But now the roads were new bypasses, and I didn’t recognise where exactly we were. Obviously I could ask someone, or find a phone box and ring Joan, but in the brain death of the long drive I couldn’t remember her number, nor her address, nor even her married name. Could this be early-onset dementia? I cruised around until we came upon a recognisable part of the town, upon which everything fell into place and soon we were at Joan’s house. She wondered why I hadn’t rung earlier when we were getting near, but I hardly liked to tell her about the dementia.

Since then I’ve wondered: could one possible cause of dementia be extreme long-term boredom? Ah well, wait and see.

A couple of days in Abingdon, then via the Great Wen of London to pick up Wimbil, thence to Felixstowe and Zeebrugge, and the challenge of driving on the right in a van – on the motorbike it was a doddle, in the car, not too bad, but in the van, visibility from the wrong side was crap.    

Wheeching through the Ardennes, through Luxembourg, a bit of France, across Switzerland (my, how these little European countries flashed past), over the St Bernard Pass, suddenly we were south of the Alps, in sunshine and peach blossom. A nerve-racking hurtle from Milan to Venice, everything going 80+ mph, up tight together; if someone had a puncture a mile away we’d all crunch into mangled tin, aaarrggh.

But at last we could relax, for just across the lagoon lay Venice, the Stromness of the south, pulsing with must-see paintings; and it was quiet, apart from an aircraft lifting off from Marco Polo airport away in the distance, and the cuckoo, bird of midsummer back home.

dilapidated, beautiful

We crossed the lagoon on the hydrofoil and wandered about, soaking up the atmosphere: dilapidated, sinister, beautiful. (Only my personal feeling: others may find it romantic.) And very expensive, for tourism is a large part of what keeps it afloat so a coffee costs the tourist big bucks.

Mere words are inadequate for describing Venice. There’s nowhere like it, and you have to go there before the rising water level drowns its marvels. Apart from the vaporetti, and what the people are wearing, you could be wandering through a Canaletto painting.

I’m not sure how Cee and Wimbil spent the time, whether they got into the Accademia, where you can see European classical art up to the 19th century, if that’s the kind of thing that lights your fire.

art aficionados

Sadly, art is not the thing that hits the spot for me: I can read about it and appreciate it intellectually, and be mildly overwhelmed by the impact of the monstrous real-life size of all those famous paintings that I’ve seen reproductions of in art books; but I don’t feel it the way I see art aficionados feeling it. If the waters rose and drowned all those amazing works of art I would be only mildly regretful: after all, the thousands of reproductions in the art books would not have been drowned, only the size and texture would have been lost.

Whereas if, in some unimaginable way, music were to be lost, then I would feel bereft of much of what makes life worth living. For all it takes is a bar or two of J.S. Bach, D. Scarlatti, Chopin, Brahms, Ravel (to name but a few) and the world becomes beautiful, even the world of a hospital ward with macaroni and potato for lunch.

across the river

Florence needed a look, so away south we bowled, through Padua, Ferrara, Bologna, arriving on the outskirts of Florence around commuter time; after a bit of increasingly desperate circling we found a camp site high above the river across from the Duomo. Nearby was the Piazzale Michelangelo, with a copy of the famous David statue, which so gripped Wimbil that he copied the stance thereafter (though remaining fully clad) in any photo that he knew was being taken.

view from window of the Uffizi

Great Art is everywhere in Florence, and no doubt the bairns trundled around finding it, but I limited myself to the Uffizi, where among the famous names I rather like Sandro Botticelli, not for bland, bored madonnas holding grumpy babies, but for portraits of people who look real. I’d seen photographs of two portraits that looked real, Simonetta Vespucci (if that’s who it was) and Flora in the Primavera; both faces wore expressions I recognised from Thick Arithmetic in Stromness Academy, Simonetta having just found out that her boyfriend had been seen in a car in a dark layby with her best friend, and Flora tottering out of the dance hall the worse for home-brew; it mattered little that Simonetta was swathed in jewellery and Flora in little flowers, or that they weren’t wearing distressed jeans and anoraks, or that they’d spent a goodish time with the hairdresser, inside those gorgeous exteriors lived people that I recognised from the classroom.

Simonetta (?)

Would the original paintings give any clue about what Sandro was thinking as he painted them? It was rumoured that he fancied Simonetta (who was married). Her pouting glare looked as though she had maybe been giving Sandro a hard time, Flora as if she’d enjoyed winding him up. There were those who thought these were both the same woman, and that the rather vacant Venus floating ashore on the shell was also Simonetta, which I found incredible – quite different hair colour, quite different expressions, but that was possibly due to the camera, and the actual originals might show more similarity.

Flora

The pouting Simonetta wasn’t anywhere in the Uffizi (I should have checked - she’s in New York); flowery Flora was there, in that enormous painting of Spring, but she was surely not the same person as vacant Venus, who was also there. Not that it mattered to a non-aficionado, of course.

What was striking, wandering through the Renaissance, was that all the females were either pregnant or holding a baby on their knees, the baby usually unattractive and grumpy, the mother bored, bewildered or tired, not looking like someone who changed the nappies, wiped up the vomit, bathed the infant – but ladies who were painted would all be rich, and someone else would be doing all that messy stuff, unseen by the painter.

If you could time-travel to live whenever you liked, the Renaissance would be an interesting time for a man, but mostly boring if you were female; the same could be said for classical Greece, and in fact for any era up to the present day, when opportunities for females have expanded hugely during my own lifetime.

San Gimignano

We cruised about Tuscany a bit, visiting Siena (amusing striped cathedral, like a gigantic liquorice allsort) and San Gimignano, famed for its towers: in olden days you demonstrated your wealth and power by building a tower taller than any of your rivals’ efforts - your tower was a kind of gold-plated stretch limo. The bairns were a tad hungover and disinclined for effort, but I went up the tallest tower to admire the view: nearby the architecture and roof tiles surpassed anything to be seen at home; the middle distance was pleasant, without anything eye-catching; but away in the distance was a snow-covered range of mountains, part of the Apennines, the spine of Italy, recalling the sight of the distant Cairngorms from above the Devil’s Elbow.

big tower, distant Apennines

Some day, I thought, I would come back and investigate the Apennines – there were a lot of them and they reached twice the height of a Cairngorm. It would still be on my to-do list if I were able for it.

The problem with Tuscany is that you need a lifetime to explore it, and we couldn’t spend the rest of our lives here, so we turned north and visited friends in Rivara, near Turin, where the bairns played football in the huge garden and then caught a train in Turin to go home.

I stayed on in Rivara a few days, in the course of which Sandro and his friend who was a park ranger took me for a day in the Gran Paradiso National Park, which I’d last seen in the distance some thirty years before, from the French/Italian border above Courmayeur.

The ranger took us deep into the park to see an abandoned village with houses through whose cellars flowed the stream in which they kept their cheeses fresh; the school still had its little desks and the last lesson chalked on the blackboard. I’m not sure if I understood all the information, though the ranger spoke slowly and clearly for the foreigner, but I understood him to say that the people had used the chestnut tree for all of their fuel and much of their food, the meat coming from chamois and ibex. This early in the year these animals were down here in the valley and the noise of ibex horns clashing was all around. A memorable day, but no photos, because the whole film that I used that day turned out to be far too dark.

near Rivara

Next day I was taken a tour of the village: the cemetery – mostly niches in a wall with photos of the departed, but one big tomb with railings around it contained the Contessa, whom we had met in her castle ten years back on a previous visit; we had sat at the enormous table, highly polished and riddled with fat woodworm (unless they were bullet holes) and admired her accentless colloquial English, for she had been brought up by an Edinburgh nanny; over the great creaking door was engraved the family motto:

VINCENDUM AUT MORIENDUM

(ONE MUST CONQUER OR DIE)

Now she was in this tomb, so she had died sometime in the last decade, but, sadly, had failed to conquer, on account of having married, late in life and wearing a black velvet wedding dress, an unreliable chap wearing co-respondent shoes and a panama hat, who used up her money and quickly abandoned her, and had now sold the castle. (If I understood everything I was being told, of course.)

In the evening my friends took me out, together with the whole extended family, to eat at a restaurant, where my hosts ordered the main dish, telling me that since I lived on an island I obviously liked frutti di mare; in the seconds that it took me to (a) realise this was seafood, a thing I detest beyond all other types of nosh, and (b) arrive at a polite way to express this in Italian, it was too late, and the octopus tentacles were on their way. Though managing to stuff these shiny worms with their predatory suckers into my mouth, I could not swallow them, and sat with bulging cheeks, speaking through lips tightly pursed to block the escape of the imprisoned frutti; fortunately they were talking so animatedly among themselves that speech was not called for, and presently I managed a visit to the loo where I unloaded the burden.

On the road again I made a leisurely way up the Val d’Aosta, heading for Courmayeur and Entrèves where there was now a tunnel under Mont Blanc to Chamonix. Leisurely, because there were many alluring side-valleys worth exploring. But I soon realised it was too early in the year, the snow too deep, the little roads impassable, so, pressing on to Entrèves, I entered the tunnel.

The last time I’d been hereabouts was thirty years before, at a time when there was no tunnel, and I’d been walking on the glaciers and rocks above where the tunnel now existed. They’d drilled simultaneously from the French and Italian sides, and when they met, somewhere in the middle, the error was less than 13 cm, an impressive feat.

Mont Blanc from tunnel entrance

In the tunnel I was very aware of the huge mass of Mont Blanc sitting up above, and the tunnel was very long (over 7 miles) … and very empty … no other traffic … nothing at all … and now it was going down, and you couldn’t see where it ended … still no other traffic, on this, the major road link between Italy and France, why? there had been a lot of notices about speed and not overtaking or turning around, was there something I’d missed, had Mont Blanc come crashing through the roof? … still no other traffic … why?

I found I was sweating. It was taking too long. It couldn’t take this long, could it? The ancient lizard-brain had gone into red-alert mode and was mucking about with time, slowing it down, like when you have an accident. Had it seen something that I hadn’t? Where were the other cars? Still going downhill, still no visible exit.
It couldn’t have taken that long, 7 miles at between 30 and 45 mph (the minimum and maximum speeds permitted), say ten minutes, possibly the longest ten minutes I’ve ever lived through. A speck of daylight appeared, grew larger, the exit, Chamonix, phew.

I was puzzled at the level of unease I'd been feeling, though if things go wrong a tunnel is obviously a bad place to be. But quite how bad became clear only many years later, in 1999, when a lorry carrying margarine and flour went on fire half-way through the tunnel, and the fire services were beaten back by black toxic smoke and heat; it took over two days to put the fire out, the temperature rose to 1000^oC and 39 people died.

North of the Alps now, I’d escaped from all that wall-to-wall sunshine and peach-blossom; in fact it was dreich, and the farther north the dreicher it got; one camp site was deep in snow. I suppose I must have got the ferry back from Zeebrugge to Felixstowe but it’s a complete blank in my memory, and so is the rest of the way home …

Unless that was the time I went to visit an aged (90+) aunt in Devon and got mauled by her Alsatian, after which a gliding course at Husbands Bosworth, near Leicester: a gripping experience sailing noiselessly over Bosworth Field (Richard III vs Henry VII, 1485), looking for the little cumulus clouds that meant lift; my instructor, Reg, who had flown Spitfires, could find lift where none should be – it was rumoured that he switched on an electric fire in his hearth to generate a secret column of rising hot air that only he could find; there were tales of reaching Didcot power station which would lift you to a height where you could ride the wave generated by the mountains of Wales far away to the west: a whole fascinating new dimension, from whose allure, after a week, I tore free and drove north overnight, stopped at dawn for breakfast on the A68 at the top of the Soutra, there was Edinburgh, where I’d been to University, where the early years of marriage had flitted past, on north through Perth, where I’d been to school, up the A9 past those horizontal slagheap Munros that I never sewed up, past the snow-covered Cairngorms, which the sight of the Apennines had brought to mind ...

big hair, distant Cairngorms

... through Inverness, past the layby where I’d been diverted by the sight of the mountains of the west and failed to go the rest of the way to Ulan Bator, on and on, whole pieces of my life rolling by, till the trees gave way to bleak moorland and loch, and Scrabster, to wait for a space on the Ola for the Pentland Firth and Stromness. Was all that on the same journey that I’d started in the March blizzard? The memory is none too reliable, but it’s sure that the last bit was in a blizzard. In May.

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