Normandy Fahrt Day 3: Omaha Beach

We spent our third day in France reliving the American experience on Omaha Beach. I felt I knew most of what happened there from endless re-runs of The Longest Day (shot on location: we saw photos of local involvement in the filming) and the more recent Saving Private Ryan, but nothing had prepared me for the sheer size of the cemetery that takes up the whole area on the cliffs where the German defences were sited above the main beach. There is something about the starkness of the white crosses rising straight out of the cropped grass, crosses that had name, rank and company as well as home state and date of death, that depersonalised the loss for me - no emblems, no age given for the dead, no flowerbeds around the graves. Instead, I was forcibly aware of the anonymity of these ranks - look at the lines, which flow straight in every direction - and the dedication that ensures that every single grave has this cropped grass round the foot of the cross (or Star of David: you can see one to the right of centre in the photo). There were clumps of heather round the pine trees grouped occasionally around the site, a multi-faith chapel that was too over-run by visitors to give me any sense of anything, and a Garden of the Missing where a 22-foot statue ‘The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves’ looks west over the headstones - over 9,000 graves,  among which are the stones of 45 sets of brothers, and 1,557 missing in action.

But even more than among the graves, it was down on the beach that I felt the hopelessness of the  task faced by these young men from halfway across the world as the ramps of their landing craft fell forward and they saw what they had to climb, under withering fire, if the invasion was to succeed.

 The photo on the left shows Mr B and friend on the sand where so many died just as they left the sea, and beyond them, the trees standing distinct on the skyline show where the guns overlooked the whole area, while other fortifications were, I think, among the dunes where the vegetation starts. The photo below shows the same section of beach from what is now the viewpoint; it would have been a  viewpoint with a rather different purpose in 1944. The area to be covered is now traversed by a neat path that you can see disappearing in the middle of this photo, but even with its steps and easy gradient it took us a
good 15 minutes to climb back up. The area in between is now covered in shrubs that I imagine have been planted to deter wandering in this site, which is entirely given over as a memorial.

After a break for lunch had turned into a truly French affair (because some of us went looking for a crêperie and ordered galettes complètes and while this is fast food for one it isn't for 14), we visited another sobering site above the Pointe du Hoc, where the American Rangers had to climb the cliffs to reach the huge guns which actually for the most part faced inland because the Germans didn't think anyone would make that climb. The whole area was pitted with the holes from the shellfire from the Allied ships, and we were able to go inside the concrete gun emplacements and see the view made famous by a scene in The Longest Day when a German officer first saw the invasion on the horizon.  We went from there to another iconic site, where an American paratrooper famously caught on the roof of the church in Ste Mere Eglise and hung there for hours pretending to be dead to avoid being shot. A museum stands on the site where on the fateful night a house was on fire, and - somewhat bizarrely - we could see from the town square the torn parachute and (model) paratrooper still hanging from the church roof.

That evening, like the previous one, was spent in raucous entertainment. The young staff of the Chateau flocked, like little moths, to the door of the room where this mob of ancients acted Allo Allo in execrable French accents and sang wartime favourites and French songs at the top of their still-unbelievably-loud voices to the accompaniment of a small keyboard pounded to great effect by Mr B.

As I've said on previous occasions, you really had to be there ...

6

Radio 4 discusses Maths - a poem of bewilderment

Radio 4 discusses Maths

There’s a magic number

called e, that has the 

power to solve the world’s

problems, to be practical in ways

we never dreamed, and I

think of pi and other

imponderables, and I feel my brain

reeling, eyes fluttering, under

the onslaught. It was ever

thus, x years ago, when I sat, 

uniformed but uninformed

at a wooden desk scarred quite

fascinatingly by the past.

Are there any numbers out there

that cannot be written as a 

fraction? That’s it. I break, 

fractured by fractions

and irrational numbers.

© C.M.M. 09/14

I wrote the above yesterday, on the proverbial back of an envelope, while listening to Radio 4's Melvyn Bragg discussion on the radio. I stopped eating my toast while a horribly familiar sensation from my distant schooldays crept over me. My brain had gone into free fall  and my tenuous grasp on the discussion had snapped. However, I was happy that normal activity was still intact: the poem just flowed out and I've only changed one line since. 

I am grateful to my friend Frank for sending me the mathematical statement that provides me with an illustration when all else would have been as meaningless as ... e.

Referendum Question - a poem for the aftermath

Referendum Question

Would there have been tears
when the old Union died,
a bitter mourning for the loss
of joyous hope denied?
Or is this death forever theirs
who dare to look beyond the past?
The autumn sun is lower now,
the wind blows cool, the petals drop; 
the hills lie purple as the pheasants’ cry
foretells their death before the guns,
and far from here contending claims
engulf the promises held out
to save a tryst whose love was spent.
The question asks the aftermath:
would there, would there have been tears?

© C.M.M 09/14

A post-Referendum letter to the 45%

I'm writing this at the end of the kind of grey day I yesterday remembered from the '80s. It's hard for me to feel the optimism expressed by some communicators, and as I hear the news of Alex Salmond's stepping down from his leadership post I feel a deepening of the gloom even as I recognise that in his position I would do exactly the same.

But I'm writing now to the 45% who voted for a different Scotland. A little digging shows that what I sensed throughout the campaign was true: most of you are much younger than I am. So I'd like first to apologise for my generation, for our failure of nerve and of the imagination; for our fears about our pensions and our East Enders; for our unwillingness to listen and to read enough.

And then I'd like to charge you, all you of the 45% who are between the ages of 25 and 55, not to grow to be like the 73% of NO voters who are in my age group. Don't ever settle down inside your head, don't ever mentally don a white cardigan or a sensible skirt or a pair of tartan carpet slippers. Don't ever think that all life holds is a straitened existence in which you hold onto the past and condemn future generations to what they now find acceptable. Never allow yourselves to think that because you're no longer in daily, paid employment all you are fit for is to go for your morning paper or speak increasingly in pious platitudes and meaningless, safe clichés. If you have a mind now, you will - death or Alzheimer's permitting - have a life then. You will have more time to inform yourself about the world than you ever enjoyed when you were running after kids or working in full-time employment. You are currently, I imagine, au fait with Facebook and other social media. By the time you are my age there will be other forms of engagement available - learn to use them. 

So once more, I say I'm sorry. Sorry that my co-aevals lacked your vision and paid no attention to what you wanted. Sorry that we are the selfish and blinkered generation we turned out to be. Sorry that we were fearful, sorry that we were ignorant, sorry that we claim proudly to have no truck with social media, sorry that we didn't engage with you. 

We are not all like that, and I am one of the 27% of over-65s who voted YES. I'm still up for a fight, and I can see one looming as the Westminster machine starts coming apart. But it will now be in your lifetimes, not mine, that we will see off the idea that it is better to spend on our children what we currently spend on nuclear weapons, better to shape our own destiny than be allowed scraps from the Westminster table. 

Don't lose heart. Don't shut down the vision. And don't ever grow old inside your heads.

I voted YES because ...

By the time I have finished writing this post, the polls will have closed. In fact, I shall shortly stop writing so that I can watch the 10 o'clock news, not because I expect to learn anything new about the Referendum Poll just closing all over Scotland, but because I feel I'm living through a moment in history that I can't bear to miss.

Today I voted YES. Actually, I voted ... what? three weeks ago? Because I had a postal vote, left over from a previous election which clashed with a holiday. I felt excited when I posted it, and I felt excited today, all over again. Not that my local polling station gave much sign of its huge importance in  today's events - it's a dreary place, in a rather dull street, and there is little on the pavement outside to lift the heart.

Today I voted YES. And in that vote, and in my hopes, are all the memories. Memories of the first time I began to feel aware of the effect on my life of the policies that I had always imagined affected ... other people. I shall never forget the sudden pang of realisation that I had brought my young firstborn baby to live next to a foreign nuclear submarine base: the US Navy's Site One. When that first child was joined by a second, I was on the road to activism. Throughout the miserable '80s I demonstrated, made speeches, appeared on radio and television and went to court as an expert witness in several trials of Greenham Women arrested when they came to join us in demonstrating against the Holy Loch base. I picketed polling stations; I leafleted countless households. Always the word came back: What can we do?

I remember more. I remember hearing a British Naval officer addressing a meeting in Ardentinny Hall, telling us that in the event of an accidental explosion at the Coulport base across the loch, Glenfinart Bay would somehow, miraculously avoid the blast as there would be a ... dent, a distortion of the blast circle. I remember the day Thatcher was re-elected, and the despair I felt; I remember drinking champagne in the sun that day in 1997 when Tony Blair was elected, and I remember the fading of that hope as his government ploughed on, betraying all that we had hoped for. I remember marching with thousands through a frosty Glasgow, protesting against the Iraq war. It happened anyway.

I remember too that day I stood on the Royal Mile watching the strange assortment of people that told us Scotland had its own parliament again - the Queen, Donald Dewar, Sean Connery. The Red Arrows thundered overhead. Something was changing. And of course I remember - how could we forget? - the day we learned that something else had happened against all expectation, that the SNP had won an overwhelming majority and that we were bound to have a referendum.

All this streams behind us tonight. Whatever the result of this closely-contested poll, we will never be the same. We have engaged with the issues in an unprecedented fashion and we have grown in confidence as a nation. I hope personally that the fearful have not prevailed this night, and that our new hope and new alignments will carry us forward from tomorrow morning. But even if the NO vote wins, we cannot go back to the old certainties, the old obedience.

And as I finish, I can be proud that the children I so feared for in their infancy have grown into the men they are - one with a vote today, the other disqualified by living elsewhere. My vote in this Referendum began with them, and the future is theirs.

Normandy Fahrt Day 2: Gott hat das letzte wort

Our first full day begins early. (We soon discover that this will be the norm throughout - brisk breakfasts and trotting toilettes). It is more or less dark when we get up, with that chilly, mist-laden dawn that characterises the early morning in France where mornings are earlier than they are in Scotland because they're not really far enough east to justify being an hour ahead. But I digress. We drive through misty fields with picturesque rolls of whatever crop it is they grow in these parts and find ourselves on the headland above the small town of Arromanches. This is where most of the British troops came ashore on D-Day, and where the Mulberry Harbour was built to allow equipment and supplies to be brought ashore. Several bits of the harbour remain visible in the sea as well as abandoned on the beach (above).

The visit takes on what will become a familiar pattern: an overview, a museum visit, extended free time to explore and ponder. I add to this the pressing need for coffee and insist that a small cafe across the road from the museum should be our first stop. There is something wonderfully sinful about lunching on an espresso, a bottle of water and a crêpe au caramel salé ...

Four of us, feeling relatively lithe and fit, set off through the town towards the headland. We pass several of our fellow-Fahrters eating substantially in various hostelries, but do not yield. We clamber on a concrete gun emplacement, we walk along a cliff path that is forbidden because of erosion. No-one falls off, and we return to the town for a small pichet of rosé before the coach drive to our next visit, noting as we go that several objects along the shop fronts are cosily wrapped in squares of ... knitting. I know. I don't get it either.

The remainder of the afternoon is spent visiting the German war graveyard at La Cambe. This site was developed between 1958 and 1961, with a great deal of work being done by an international youth camp in 1959. Now more than 21,000 German soldiers are buried here. I found it a sombre place; the graves are marked by flat dark basalt lava plaques about the size of an open book, and watched over by groups of low crosses in dark stone. We are so accustomed to seeing movies like The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan, where the German soldiers are anonymous figures to be killed or captured by the invading Allies; it is all too easy to forget the humanity of individual boys and men who fought in their thousands and died far from home. Albert Schweitzer said "the soldiers' graves are the greatest preachers of peace", and on the plinth below the heavy cross at the centre of the cemetery there is an inscription which ends with the words: Gott hat das letzte wort. This was one of the places where I felt an overwhelming need to be on my own, and I wandered far, looking at the stones where two or even three names were recorded together. Several were dedicated simply to Ein Deutscher Soldat.

The day ended not in pious reflection but in raucous singing of songs associated with the period of WW2. Several years ago, when we paid a similar visit to the battlefields of the Somme, I thought I would find this jarring, but realised that we were no different from the soldiers who would celebrate the fact that they were still alive by being ... themselves. The Château rang with the noise until well on in the evening and I was glad we were sleeping on the top floor. As I went to bed I could hear an owl among the trees outside and then it was silent. Another early start awaited us ...

Normandy Fahrt: Day 1

I've been away. And although I've been back for several days now, my days in Normandy are still very much with me - so much so that I feel a diarist's approach might be better than trying to encompass everything in one post. So here we are with Day1: the journey...

By the time the 2014 Fahrt (German for 'journey', natch, but capable of other interpretation) arrives on the Continent, it has already been on the road for 24 hours. (Collective noun in use, as well as 'road' standing also for 'sea'). Around 40 people have been gathered into a coach from Linlithgow lay-byes, Asda carparks and the like and driven to Hull - a city which, as Philip Larkin apparently observed, people only visit if they have business there. Our business was the P&O ferry to Zeebrugge, on which we had booked basic cabins (no porthole, bunk beds). Some of us chickened out of this and paid for upgrades ... The food and service were excellent; most of us have slept. I have not. I blame the decaff. I think it wasn't.

But onward. Onward south and west, into France and on to the Chateau du Molay, where we are staying in the accommodation usually used by school trips. We have visited our first war graves, in the War Graves Commission cemetery in Bayeux (above). There we have laid a wreath in memory of a Linlithgow soldier buried there, and have been moved by the sight of so many graves and the sound of the Last Post echoing through the birdsong of early evening. (Mr B had his iPod and Bose dock with him). I am forcibly struck by the dates of birth on so many of the stones - so many of these soldiers had been born in the years when my parents were born and I realise that we represent the children they never had.

We soon find, Mr B and I, that although we have to consign our luggage to the lift and will henceforth be scampering up 3 flights of stairs to reach our room, which is in the roof and has a Velux window, we are blessed with two single beds (some rooms have multiple bunks) and a kettle. I even seem to have a feather pillow. My cup is already full before I eat; the rest of me is soon full of an excellent dinner. The noise level in the dining room is startling. Mr B and I slip out as the Fahrters head for the bar. Outside, the moon is shining and it is silent apart from the residual hum in our ears. The chateau looks romantic and peaceful. It is going to be a good Fahrt.

Summer reading

What have I been reading recently? Nice of you to ask - I have been reading more than I might, because it's been the kind of weather that allows you to read outside, and I'm an outdoorsy sort who can't bear to sit in if the sun's shining or even if it's not and ... and ... Enough. Right now I've started on Lucretia Grindle's The Lost Daughter  and I'm enjoying it hugely, in the way you  do when you've read several of an author's books and settle comfortably into the environment - in this case Florence - and the characters (Italian cops) you've met before. I continue to be slightly irritated by the writer's tick of consigning adjectival clauses to a separate sentence more than once (once is fine, but it's too distinctive a trait to use more often), but she writes a good tale and the setting is terrific.

I'll not go on about that, however, because I'm just settling in - though I may return for a final thought. Before embarking on the Grindle I was reading the deeply unsettling The Disappeared, by Kim Echlin. Set in Canada and Cambodia, this is a story of the Killing Fields, so I'm now considerably more clued up on Pol Pot and the horrors of that era than I was in the 70s, when I was too preoccupied with bringing up children. As I shall be visiting Cambodia and Vietnam next year, it seemed a good way for a fiction fiend to pick up some history, and a pretty ghastly history it is. Echlin writes in an elegiac way that incorporates Cambodian words into her dialogue and reflects the music that brings the lovers of her story together, but under the poetry of her language is an undercurrent of tension that meant I sometimes had to stop reading (at bedtime, usually) before I was ready to.

I read another thought-provoking book in Frankie and Stankie, by Barbara Trapido. This is a delightfully-narrated account of growing up in the South Africa that existed while I was a child, the South Africa of growing apartheid seen through the eyes of the child of white liberals who nevertheless mingled with the rest of white society - though they took a dim view of the Afrikaaners, whom they saw as boorish country clods. The child-like clarity of the prose means that events happen without necessarily being interpreted; with our hindsight we are able to see how things gathered their own ghastly momentum and changed a world even as its inhabitants watched. I'm glad to have read it.

And then there was the appropriately seasonal Instructions for a Heatwave, by Maggie O'Farrell. This is the story of a family, beautifully and lovingly told, with fascinating flashbacks gradually explaining what is happening and making it possible for the family to continue. I especially enjoyed the seemingly effortless mastery of the writer, the firm grasp of tense, the fine strokes of characterisation. Set in the heatwave of July 1976 - a heatwave in London which was not, I can tell you with all the authority of a diarist, a heatwave in Dunoon - the writer keeps the heat there, oppressively present without being over-described, so that you are constantly aware of the difficulties of coping rationally with any crisis. I saved this one up for the appropriate season, and it went down a treat.

And now, chums, I'm away back to Florence. I'm not after all going to say any more till I'm finished. The sun is shining in the garden and I want to read ...

A unique privilege

On the kind of day when I look out at the rain and mist and breathe a prayer of thankfulness that I have no visitors staying, no children hoping for a visit to the beach or an adventure in the forest, I find myself reflecting - for solace, as it were - on what it is that makes being a grandparent so special. Remember, I never thought of myself as the maternal type - until my first son was born. Then I was maternal, but actually only towards him, and towards the second son who followed four years later. I still found other people's children attractive only insofar as they met my criteria, not simply because they were children, and I taught adolescents in the assumption that they were doing what the name suggests - growing older, becoming people. And I liked people.

So when my sons were men and became husbands and announced that they were to be fathers, I was not at all sure how that would feel. Maybe mothers are always like that; it's not something I've discussed. And then the babies were born and my world was turned upside down for the second time in my life. The connection to these tiny infants was unbelievable in its impact, maternal instinct or no. What today's reflection consolidated was that for almost seven years now I've enjoyed the immense privilege of a chance to experience the uncritical acceptance and love from children who seem to know, whether we meet frequently or seldom, that there is a bond that can be trusted and a love that will never be withheld. I regard it as a unique privilege, even though it is shared by other grandparents, because it is unique in any one life - unique and undreamed-of.

When we are parents, we are so busy being parents that we tend not to notice the passage of time other than in landmarks like walking, talking and teeth. Our own lives are so full with the minutiae of care that there is little time to reflect - and then the time has passed, the children are drifting out of our orbit, sharing their lives with increasing numbers of strangers, becoming people just as we did before them. There is a sense of a faint regret, perhaps, but we are caught up in the amazement that these new people came from us, and the anxiety or exhilaration that surrounds their achievements. Finally, they leave - and I think sons do this more conclusively than daughters - and the cycle begins again.

The grandchildren, that golden second chance to be with children and love them and have them smother you in sticky kisses and tell you they are going to miss you when they say goodbye, come and bring with them that added bonus of perspective. A grandparent knows all too well how swiftly that chariot careers along on its breathless wings; this grandparent has learned that every moment - even the tired, grumpy moment - has to be cherished and savoured like a mouthful of fine wine, like the perfect cadence hanging in the silence that applause will soon break.

And that is why I will walk away from other demands if my family, my two-generational family, asks me to; that is why I defer final commitment to other tasks; that is why I add caveats to most of the arrangements I make these days. For it is a fact that to be a grandmother who can tell interesting stories and supply adventures when asked, I still need to be living my own interesting life - so there are arrangements made, commitments given, and life sometimes feels almost as hectic as it was when I was a young parent.

The difference is that I can lay a great deal of it aside. And when I have to be grandma, I do.

Cloudy morning

I started writing this before the current spell of dry weather, when I was longing for it to look and feel like summer. As the solstice is rather cloudier than anything we've seen in the past week, it seems a suitable time to finish it off and publish it...


As I step outside
the damp, birdsong air opens wide
freeing my claustrophobic brain
from the confines of waking thought
and the fears of night. Why do we
close ourselves in grey, these days
that threaten rain? I want to
sing with the birds in the promise
of the new light, the freshness of green - to forget 
to fear the darkness that awaits 
at this day’s end, at all our ends.

And in the rain-washed morning
a hidden bird repeats why
not, why not, why not?

© C.M.M. 06/14

Time to think ... about Synod

P's & G's, complete with MDF gallery?

By the time I finish writing this, I'm sure everyone else will have moved on. But if I had attempted a blog post about Synod at the weekend, when all the other bloggers (sounds rude, that) were getting their posts out, I would have written something I'd subsequently regret. No; I needed time to reflect. And I'm glad I did - I hope I remember to return to why later.

Having been one of the signatories to a Rule 10 motion that would have hastened us along the path to legislating for same-sex marriage in church, I was pretty fed up when the motion failed to attract the two-thirds majority that would have allowed us to deal with the subject in open debate. Synod wanted the debate - but not quite enough of us wanted it. I have a strong suspicion that the secret ballot, as we tautologously referred to it, along with the confusion resulting from a bishop-led objection to a show of hands, led to several inattentive or merely poor souls voting the wrong way - in other words, not as they actually thought they were voting.

This raises another scunner (no, auto-correct, not scanner: I'm Scottish.) The venue for this year, the once-grand and now modernised cavern of P's & G's, didn't make for the same contact with the chair as we had in the more regimented but better-lit surroundings of Palmerston Place. Punters in the middle or rear of the space couldn't communicate confusion or unreadiness without a great deal of palaver involving roving mikes and the bearers of the mikes peering into the throng to try to find the confused/challenged/challenging one. This being the case, it was more than ever important for the various chairs to speak with clarity and decision, and certainly not to rely on the overhead screens to make up for the deficiencies in their own communication skills. (People don't always cast their eyes screenwards in moments of stress, especially when they're rummaging through their Synod papers and have their reading glasses on anyway.) And, as every teacher knows, you can't simply assume that everyone is paying attention the moment you open your mouth; the table-group layout makes (again, as every teacher knows) for covert communication or simple distraction.

But the single thing that got to me this year was the sudden descent of a whole bunch of protagonists into fuzzy, warm and ultimately vapid religious jargon. And tone. There. That's it. There's a whole raft of expressions that belong in this jargon, and some others that are pressed into service and will never be quite the same again (like Francis of Assisi after Margaret Thatcher had appropriated his words).  "Unpack" comes to mind, and they're not talking about the messages (shopping, if you're not from these parts). No-one called a spade a spade, let alone a bloody shovel, and there was no place for what one commentator has described as "honest fury". Those who were feeling such fury had nowhere to go, because it would have been smothered in soft fuzziness, smiled at and forgiven.

Now, I was personally grateful for individual kindness and concern in the aftermath, even as I still raged for friends old and new whose hurt and frustration were all too apparent - but I have huge problems for this kind of institutionalised, forced gentleness. For a start, I think it betrays the god I believe in. I think it castrates the prophet and makes a virtue of passivity. And where was the passion, the leadership that would have given some sense of a vibrant community realising its past and grasping the opportunity to move into a new, juster present?

I can't at the moment think if I'm actually at the end of my time on Synod, or if I have another year to go. Maybe someone reading this will be able to tell me. The Primus gave us a sliver of hope that things may move in 2015, but who knows whereI'll be then? A friend gave me even more hope in that  his perceptions have changed post-Synod, and that is joyous news. That's the news that makes me glad I waited to post this, as there would have been nothing to redeem the situation had I leapt in. But if anyone is planning any more soft play areas for the church, any more padded "conversations", I'll be returning to a quip that was going the rounds on Facebook recently:

If anyone asks you "What would Jesus do?", remember that overturning tables is always an option.

Of fear (with a nod to Bacon)

Does anyone read Bacon's Essay's in school any more? I doubt it. They don't really strike one as everyday fare for your average 16 year old. And yet ... I have provided a link there that leads to one of the essays, Of Death, that I read when I was in S4, one whose opening sentence sticks in my mind to this day - and I have not exactly read them regularly since. I did, however, on one occasion in living memory - in the 90s, I think - find myself being given sole charge of a wonderfully sparky group of new S3 pupils for the whole of their Standard Grade course, and filled the short month of June with a crash course in Bacon. They rose to the challenge, and when I set them the further challenge of 'doing a Bacon' over the summer holidays, came up with some wonderful almost-parodies.

And in a way, that's what I'm doing now. Only I'm not bothering to write in a Baconesque style - I doubt I could - but rather seek to examine fear in much the same spirit as Bacon might. That adventure that formed the hub of my last post - we've been dining out on it, as I knew we would, and some people - in the comments on the blog, or on Facebook, or to my face - have expressed wonder at our bravery in surviving all this. Of course, it wasn't bravery. It was necessity - and I suspect that though they sometimes coincide, that wasn't the case for us. Why? Because there was no fear to overcome.

Think back to Bacon (for of course you've checked the link by now - no?) Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark. That's the line that sticks - and it's true, even if we'd object to the male presumption these days. But that's because we have time in which to contemplate our mortality, worry about the nature of our dying, fret about its propinquity. (I think I'm being infected ...) But when we were in that little speedboat, weighed down with boots and packs so that if we'd fallen into the sea we'd have had a job ever coming up again, all during that time when the waves were breaking over us and the cliffs seemed too close, there was really no time to feel afraid. I wasn't happy, and in fact every fibre of my being was screaming - but it wasn't in fear. No, it was screaming something like "You stupid people - this is not a good place to be! It's wet and dangerous!" - and so on, like a nagging parent you soon get used to ignoring.

Even when we had to transfer from one bouncing boat to another, all I could feel was a kind of distaste - and a strong desire not to make a fool of myself. I realise now that the latter pushed aside the realisation that people could be trapped between boats, crushed or killed - because it was afterwards that I thought about these outcomes. At the time there was a bit of swearing, the odd shriek, and obedience ("Now, lady - jump!" and I jumped). There was none of the paralysing fear that grips your gullet, gives you pins and needles in your hands, makes you want to vomit. How do I know these symptoms? Because I can get them - when I have to catch an early flight, perhaps, or when I think something awful has happened/might happen to someone I care about - not consistently or predictably, but with hideous randomness of occasion and severity, rendering me useless and nauseous and able to think only of the worst possible outcome.

Perhaps Hamlet had it all along. It's "some craven scruple of thinking too precisely on th'event" (outcome, here). I wasn't thinking of the outcome, I was thinking only of the present - or, to be more precise, I wasn't thinking at all. I was doing. Hamlet again, fighting pirates - "In the grapple, I boarded them": he wasn't thinking while he fought, because he had to get on with it; it was only when he allowed himself to fret about the morality of killing his uncle in cold blood that he was in trouble. When his uncle was obviously indulging in wickedness, Hamlet could bump him off in hot blood and die content. (Sorry for the spoiler, if you don't know the story ...)

To round this off, I want to think briefly about war. We've been watching these old guys who were once young and seasick on the approach to the Normandy beaches and who are now lauded as heroes - and yes, they are heroes, and survivors, and human, and ordinary, all at once. When I was a post-war child, listening to my parents' stories, whether of bombs on neighbouring tenements or booby-trapped oases in the Western Desert, I used to wonder how people could bear it. How did they survive at all? Why did they not simply die of fear, curl up in a corner and never come out again? And I suspect that the answer is that when something frightening is happening to you, you get on with it. As long as it's actually happening, and you have to act in some way, there isn't time for the fear to overflow. The adrenaline has other uses than to make you feel sick.  These soldiers who landed on the beaches - they were sick with the sea and God knows what else, but when the ramps were down they were off, and they were soldiers.

And of course, I know all this - but actually I know it as I know far too many things: from fiction. From reading. But it has taken me till now, because someone else landed me in a situation that could have had a very different ending, to own the knowledge  that fear will only paralyse if you let it.

And, not to end on a moralising note, I have to confess that I've been seduced by Bacon, and may read some more of his essays before I close that tab. Because the books are gone, long gone ...

Turkish saga - not a Saga holiday

I'm going to tell you a story. It's a true story, and it's already been told  in the form of a letter to a holiday company, but I feel the need to tell it with less restraint. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin ...

Kayaköy

It's another glorious day in the area of Fethiye, Turkey, the second last day in a week of guided walking among the hills of the this beautiful place. Our group, the one doing the more challenging walk of the day, has enjoyed a morning hike over the hills into a lovely valley, a lunch of mezze and beer and Turkish coffee, an amble down the road to see some Lycian tombs. Now we are going to be taken to the entrance to the deserted village of Kayaköy, where our Turkish guide will show our leader - who is new to the area but has a map, of sorts, and instructions - which route to take in order to end up on the right path to get us all, eventually, to the Blue Lagoon at Olu Deniz. So far, so ...

So bloody disastrous, actually. For this is where the story really begins. Bear with me.

We feel we're  being rushed through Kayaköy, the village that inspired Louis de Berniere's novel "Birds without Wings", a sad, ghostly testament to the folly of politics. If we were closer, we might be able to see our leader's worried expression and be worried ourselves - for we know he's already lost the way on an earlier walk. But we take our photos, and wonder where the church is, the one we're supposed to be able to see inside, and by the time we arrive at the upper limits of the village the onward path has been chosen and we're ready to head out of the valley and down to the sea.

For a while, it seems ok. Even when we have to retrace our steps uphill when a chosen path (all way- marked, but with varying degrees of authority) proves to be leading in the opposite direction to the way we want to go, even then we feel we might be heading, eventually, to the Blue Lagoon. After all, is that not sea ahead, is it not vivid blue, is that not a pleasure-boat we can see through the trees ...? And we come to a halt.

Not the Blue Lagoon

We are on a small cliff, beside a stone water-cistern. The path leads to the left - the correct direction - and peters out. We try a short foray, return to the cistern. Our leader by this time has disappeared down the hill. Someone has heard him mention a boat. We think it's a joke - but hey, that big pleasure-yacht-thingy is still moored below us, belting out pop music. We sit on the ground under the trees; we drink some water; some of us obey the call of nature. I check my phone - great signal, so can see Google maps ... and we're a very long way indeed from where we should be. I point this out to a few people, but it is a rule on these holidays that the Leader has to be followed and obeyed or the company takes no responsibility for you. (We later learned that the Turkish guide had been told to accompany us to the start of the hill path. Had he misunderstood?)

And so it is that we find ourselves on a small beach, with the promise of a boat. The large boat with the music is preparing to sail - but to sail out of the bay, not towards us. We can see an inflatable dinghy beside a jetty; there is a rowing-boat, and there is a speed boat with an outboard motor. We are still making jokes, wondering how many will be left behind, when a man in a sports jacket appears magically (I must have been looking elsewhere; it seems magical) in the speedboat, fires up the engine, makes a showy sweep round the headland and returns to the jetty: our lift.

Waiting for the speedboat

The boat looks ... small. I later find it has a maximum capacity of 10. We are twelve, and we have rucksacks, walking boots and poles. Somehow, we are all squeezed onto the hard plastic seats and told to hang on. Some manage to get their packs off; mine is still fastened firmly to my back. There is not a life preserver to be seen - other than the decorative traditional lifebelt in front of the tiny wheelhouse. We move away from the jetty. The man driving us turns to me. "You will get wet," he says.

I shrug. What can I do? The woman next to me gives me a spare jacket to cover my camera, make me feel better, just as a wave curls over the boat and soaks me, and her, and the other two women in the stern. The engine roars as we hit the open sea and the open sea hits us. Through sea-streaked sunglasses I can see Mr Blethers and our friend Leo, who is next to him, rise into the air as the prow lifts with the acceleration. He seems to bounce, crash down again. I duck as more sea heads my way. When I look again Leo is crouched in the bottom of the boat. She later told me she'd slid off the seat and at that point was untying her boot laces in case she ended up in the sea. To port (notice the nautical terminology), uncomfortably close, there is a grey rocky cliff - the end of the promontory we'd have had to walk over had there been a path. To starboard, the large pleasure-boat, still playing pop music, scooshes along, swifter even than us, adding its wake to the turbulence of the open sea. I can see people looking at us, smiling. I have no spare energy to curse them.

I don't know how long this goes on. There is little to hold on to, and I am soaked. I have my hat clasped over my camera which is strapped to my chest; my poles are in my left hand and with my right I'm straining to keep hold of the plastic side of the hull (fibreglass?) I feel there is a strong possibility that I may throw up. Then the engine slows, and the sea stops coming in beside us: we are in Olu Deniz bay and the beach lies ahead. The beach ... sloping quite steeply into the waves, which are breaking enthusiastically, the beach where there is ... no sign of a jetty.

Before the significance of this can register, I become aware that our gallant rescuer, still unsullied and unsoaked in his sports jacket, is on his phone. And gradually, as we cruise in gentle circles just beyond the surf, we realise that he is negotiating our transfer to another boat, one with a prow gangplank that will let us land without risking his boat. The first to offer is rejected as being too high out of the water, with no scramble nets (come on, you're joking ...) but another, smaller craft is approaching. (I'm a strong swimmer. Would it be better to swim?)

Now I need you, dear, empathising reader, to picture this moment. You may have been lulled into imagining a boatload of fit, lithe forty-somethings having an adventure, but it's time for the reality check. There may be as many as four of us under the age of 60, though I doubt it. I know that at least three are 70 or over, and that the oldest is 75. Normal pensioners we are not - we have already hiked at least 40 miles of Turkish countryside over the past four and a bit days. But transferring from a small boat to a larger one in a lumpy sea is not easy, and this is a truly unpleasant moment.

I am in the last four to make the transfer, as we have been in the stern. I have just watched the oldest of our group, an indomitable Irish Californian woman, launch herself onto her belly on a table in the bigger boat. Now it's my turn. As our boat rises on a wave, our driver shouts "Go, lady!" I put my foot onto the side of the bigger boat, shove my poles ahead to give me two free hands, grab the rail of the big boat. At that moment, the speedboat - and my left foot, on which my weight is still balanced - drops a couple of feet and I am left stranded, hanging on like grim death, my right foot on the big boat, my rucksack pulling me back,  and my right knee bent at a tighter angle than it's experienced in a decade. I can see Mr B's anxious face suddenly vanish as he is pushed aside by some macho soul, then a young Turkish seaman grabs my belt and pulls and I find myself sprawled in the bar of the boat we've boarded.

Preparing to land

It isn't quite over - no sooner are we all aboard when the cry goes up that we've to remove our boots and prepare to enter the water. (After all that ...) The gangplank can't reach the beach, but is waving in the air about four feet out in the surf. So I end up edging along an increasingly slippy gangplank, now holding my boots and socks in one hand (along with my poles) and the rail of the gangway in the other. The Normandy landings flash into my mind as I take the hand of a seaman and jump - and find myself scrabbling up the shingly sand onto dry land.

And there, best beloved, I shall leave us, lying like beached whales in a row just above the surf line. It has not been what we signed up for, on this walking holiday, but I will admit one thing.

It makes for a great story ...

Exam stress? What exam stress?

I have a feeling that Scottish school pupils are sitting their English SQA exams today. If not, it was yesterday - we retired teachers become quite hazy about these once crucial dates - and, incidentally, I'd be fascinated to see what the new English exam paper looked like, if anyone reading this can tell me. But the discussion on the radio took me further back, as I was suddenly overcome with the sensation of being 17 and in the middle of my own Highers.

I am one of the age group who sat the very first Scottish O-Grade. Because I attended a selective senior secondary school, in the double-language stream, we were told that we would merely take such O-Grades as were deemed necessary for us individually, "in the by-going" as they said. No exam leave as such - just the day of the exam itself. We all sat Arithmetic; I also took the exams in Physics, Chemistry and Maths (not my best subjects, so an insurance policy) as well as Geography (which I would then drop until S6).

So my memory of being 17 actually slipped back to one day in S4, when I was 16. I think it may have been yesterday's sun that did it; I sat O-Grade Arithmetic on a glorious sunny morning in Hillhead High School and then I took off. I met my mother at Queen Street station at lunchtime - she coming from the school where she taught mornings, I fresh from the sums - and we hopped on a train to Edinburgh. There we climbed Salisbury Crags, sat in the sun, and went for our tea before the train home. It was my first taste of freedom.

And it was this freedom that came back to me as I listened to people recounting their exam horrors, the stress they were under, the nerves and the late night studying and the lack of sleep. I honestly remember nothing of these. I recall the freedom of being alone in the empty house with hours of study before me - for we did have exam leave in S5 - and the chance to do what I wanted when I wanted. As the sun moved round to the back garden I would take my chemistry notebook outside to swot equations (I never really understood chemistry, so everything had to be learned by rote. I scraped a Higher). I grew tanned and relaxed, though there was always some turquoise ink staining the hand I'd used to cover what I was learning. I'd take afternoons off and walk the half-hour or so to school for orchestra practice, sauntering in as the bell went at 4pm, enjoying seeing friends and adored music teachers as we rehearsed for the Glasgow Music Festival (unaccountably, this was always at the end of May, so we were actually working our butts off at the same time as studying; I actually found the tension of the Festival much worse than that produced by exams).

By the time I reached my last exams (what were they in S5? French? Chemistry?) I had been off school for perhaps a fortnight and was bored with my holiday. Yes, I did last-minute revision, but it never felt more than a kind of obligation. Maybe we'd been so rigorously pushed in class that we knew most of the stuff already. The Hamlet stuff I'd mugged up so assiduously went out of the window when I saw the question (about Shakespeare's tragic heroines - I ask you!) and switched regretfully to comedy with Twelfth Night; the Latin was its usual slightly worrying breeze of being finished almost an hour early (I never liked going over what I'd written in an exam). I always assumed, I think, that I'd pass - even in the subjects I was destined to scrape through I never believed I'd actually fail - and I was eager to get on with orchestra and end-of-term nonsense and being out in the sun with my pals. (Hillhead in these days had open corridors ...)

So my memories clashed happily with the programme on the radio as I wandered in and out of the sunny garden and felt 17 again. As to whether I'd care to be 17 again ... that's another matter.

Ah. There's something I forgot to mention: I experimented with cigarettes, in exam leave. Daring, huh?

Cascading across the years ...

Next week there is to be a meeting in Pitlochry - a Cascade Conversation called Listening across the Spectrum. Cascading I understand - I was once sent on a course on managing stress, on the understanding that I would share with my colleagues in school the insights gained over four sessions. Perhaps it was my failure to induce a hypnotic trance in my cascadees that rendered the cascading less than fruitful; I did enjoy the afternoons away from the weans, and found the experience of being almost-hypnotised fascinating but that wasn't really the point. But this conversation won't be about stress, and I shouldn't imagine it will be facilitated by a hypnotherapist. No, this is part of the process for discussing same sex relationships throughout the Scottish Episcopal Church.

What - again, do I hear you ask? Well you might, especially if you have nothing to do with church circles. But I'm saying it too. I was invited to attend this conversation, and part of me is deeply scunnered that a standing commitment prevents my going - but part of me is cheering quietly. Why? Because it's years - yes: years - since I asked the previous Bishop of Argyll when we were going to begin the so-called "Listening Process" in our neck of the woods; it's years since the powerful day of intense conversations in Oban led to a province-wide day in Stirling. It's almost two years since our Synod threw out the Anglican Covenant. I don't think I can bear to pussyfoot around the same elephant in the room again. What are we playing at?

This is what it says in the most recent online Inspires: The Cascade Conversation is being held because the subject of human sexuality is one on which there are differing views and because it raises controversial and challenging issues not just for the Scottish Episcopal Church but for all denominations.  During the Cascade Conversation, it is hoped that participants will engage with the subject, and with one another, in a way which synodical procedure does not always permit. In trying an alternative way of addressing a complex subject such as human sexuality, it is hoped that the Church as a whole will both learn and benefit.

And that sounds just fine, doesn't it? Or does it? What do we actually mean by "trying an alternative way of addressing a complex subject such as human sexuality"? I shudder to think. In my no doubt naive and thoughtless fashion, I long ago reached the realisation that the faith I had come to well into my adult life meant that I was going to have to get away from the comfortable and the customary and do things that part of me shrank from - like lying down in the road in front of a foreign power's nuclear sub base, for example, like standing up in a court of law and saying yes I was a Christian and that yes in moments of extreme provocation I would use bad language to a police officer (the Sheriff thought that was perfectly reasonable, since you ask), like making political speeches from the back of a lorry, like going on telly. And it meant also that I was going to have to stand up for justice and truth and fairness in society - and in the church.

I have to confess that I've shed much of the respect for form and authority that I had half a lifetime ago. So any injunction that what transpired in the confines of an assembly was to remain secret would tend to have the opposite effect on me - because I've had enough of hugger-mugger discussions and decision-making. People find it difficult to accept that some of their fellow-Christians are different from themselves? Tough. I find it difficult to accept that some of my fellow-Christians are narrow-minded bigots. I find it really tough to keep a civil tongue in my head when provoked. And I really, really struggle to love people who behave in an unlovely fashion - and that includes myself. But I look at congregations and I see in them gay people, with and without partners, and I see people like me who have been a part of the conversations in the wider church, and I wonder: why are we ignoring this elephant in the very rooms it currently inhabits? Why do we need to wait till conversations between carefully selected people have taken place before we learn more and learn to be more whole? Are we so terrified of the real struggle that loving and understanding will involve?

And it's that struggle that matters. If this Cascade Conversation is going to pour over the church (see - I'm expanding the metaphor) in such a fashion that it will sweep away complacency and sheer bloody ignorance and will in its place bring understanding and a sense of shame for the awfulness of our past  attitudes and an urgent desire to right the wrongs done to LGBT Christians over the years, then it will be a joyful flood indeed, and I shall be deeply sorry not to have been a part of it.

I'm not holding my breath. But I'd love to be proved wrong.

Luke 10:38

It is late afternoon. The sun is heading for the rim of hills behind the village. The dust rises from the footfall of the arriving walkers. The woman is clearly eager to offer her hospitality as she bustles out to invite them inside her white cube of a house. They fill the room, which is already dark with the departure of the sun; Martha lights the oil lamps that sit on the shelf, on the long wooden table. The room fills with the smell of maleness, of dust, sweat, mingling with the not dissimilar smell of a vegetable stew, in which there are pieces of goat meat - slightly stringy, but a welcome addition for hungry men. There is bread, baked this morning, already toughening in the dry air, and rough red wine. A jug of water, earthenware, chipped. The voices are guttural, deep, with a counterpoint of Martha's shrill encouragement to eat, there is more - and to Mary to get up and help her. Jesus' voice is clear. She should stay.
                                 
                                                                     * * *

That wee lassie must be the younger sister - look: she's sat down on the floor. Martha's clearly stressed by all this clutter of visitors - she wants help. I don't blame the wee one, though. We can listen to Jesus all the time - she's snatching her chance. What a shame - now she's blushing, scrambling to her feet ... hey! He's put out a hand, he's stopping her going. Bit harsh, though, to say that - if Martha sat and listened too we'd all get no supper. There's no easy answer, but I'm glad there's someone willing to do the necessary.

                                                                     * * *

I want to listen. This is the most important moment in my entire life. I know Martha is trauchled, but... and I think one or two of these men think I should be serving them more. But when Jesus says I've chosen the better way I'm overcome - all the guilt evaporating in a burst of joy. Or is it smugness ...?


From Iona retreat, March 2014

The Well

©Sieger Köder

It is a well, God, a pool

so dark as to show me only

myself. It draws me to look 

compels my absorption

demands my irretrievable commitment

to its depths. And there

within that dark mystery

I am at once lost and no longer

alone. Can there be returning

to the brightness of a sunlit

morning? I think not. Will it feel

like loss? Or will the fearful leap

reward me with the companionship for ever

of the love that in the shining air

I wear like a wound?

The ripples spread on the darkness that

enfolds my falling soul.

©C.M.M., Iona, March ’14        

A second product of meditation on retreat on Iona. A response to an intriguing postcard as well as an even more intriguing - and to some disturbing - video.

Greylag - a poem out of meditation

 Eileen Lawrence: Greylag 1978

GREYLAG : watercolour and handmade papers

It disturbs me, this feather, plucked

from a hurrying greylag goose, or

caught by the wind’s impetuous 

wing and now quiet on the

artist’s page. I see myself in

the sharp-cut shine of the

leading edge, the vulnerable

wisps from deeper down, 

close to the panicked heart of things.

But that swift-curving quill - what

can I see in that but only

the Spirit’s arrow, clear and keen,

piercing the soul but in its arc

the colourless strength

that keeps me whole?

C.M.M. Iona, March ’14.

                                                                                                             

On our recent retreat, we spent time in silence. Sometimes we had a visual aid for our meditation, and this card was the first of these. 

Churchgoing, anyone?

I came across this post in my 'drafts' folder, and had a sudden memory of a Blogger failure which prevented me from posting it. Never one to let a bit of writing slide into oblivion ...

I had cause a few days ago to think, not for the first time, about what it is that makes people go to church. I mentioned the question in a recent issue of the SEC magazine Inspires, when I wrote about a young child's reaction to services full of colour, music and exotic scents, but I'm not going to think about young children today. Indeed, when people talk about the need to have children in church, I often think rather of the need to have their parents there, especially in a town that young people tend to leave for further education and not return to until they are parents themselves. So what is it that a forty-something finds to draw them to a church? Or someone in their 50s, or a pensioner who suddenly discovers in himself a hunger to be more serious?* And what keeps them there? And why should they bother at all?

People who know me - or indeed who have read this blog over the years - know that I came to church through music. That sounds simple, but it's misleading. Music was the vehicle, yes - but I was singing the music, not listening to it. So am I still in church forty years on because of music? Not really. I am fortunate in that when I go to my own church I know that I can rely on the organist to meet my standards and supply the conditions under which worship is possible - but I'm married to him, and this isn't possible for the rest of the congregation. Not all at once anyway. I still like to sing - preferably plainsong or music of the Renaissance - but I'm not in a church choir on a regular basis. And I do not care to have to listen to a choir as part of my participation in the Eucharist - I long ago decided that the fun there is in the doing rather than the passive listening. It becomes positively painful when the choir isn't up to the music they sing, just as it is trying to have to listen to a poor organist.

So music can't be the whole story, can it? Time to stop thinking about myself, to consider the people among whom I worship and the church where I have been a member for the whole 40 years since I fell off my donkey. The institution, the people and the atmosphere have changed enormously in that time, and give me hope for the future. So what is it that trails us up that trying hill, to the not-very-easy carpark, to the church-that-could-be-warmer, at the very back of the town where it peters out into the hills?

Here's a list of attributes that I perceive as being the reason for people to come to a church - and to come back again. For a start, the atmosphere should be welcoming. Not just on the part of the official person at the door giving out the books, but of everyone else too - not intrusively, not oppressively, but welcoming so that the visitor can decide how much of herself to commit in conversation afterwards, feels able to ask questions. And it should be a safe place - safe to be sad, joyful, mad; safe to weep or to laugh; safe to ask for help. Ideally, the human nastiness that lurks in us all should be kept well out of the public arena: no bitching in the pews, no glares or sniffs because someone forgot their place in the rota or sat in the wrong seat. And there needs to be no self-importance on view - an inflated ego in the wrong place in a church setting can put the fragile enquirer right off their scone.

Do we come to church because we are always sure we shall be entertained or swayed emotionally? It might be pleasant to say 'yes' to that, but it wouldn't be true. What would be true, however, is that people come to church to be loved, loved for themselves and as themselves; that the people of God will reflect the love of the God they are there to worship; that in that setting, be it never so chilly or lacking in adornment, the combination of liturgy, music, prayerfulness and mystery will open a door to the bright places beyond. When that happens, it is no longer a question of why people come to church.

No. When that has happened, the question - one that is asked if for any reason someone is missing on a Sunday - that question will be a different one: why are they not there? Is something wrong?

And I believe I am fortunate, for after all these years in one church, I believe we are becoming that place.

*Philip Larkin: Churchgoing

Meditation, corncrakes and rattling slates

People who follow me on Twitter will have realised from my sparse tweets that I've been away. In fact I've been on a 3-day retreat on Iona, one of the last places in Scotland where you find 3G phone connection, with such a sporadic signal to my Vodafone iPhone that all I could manage was the odd text message and wait for the signal to show before I hit 'send'. I think I could have managed the odd peek at Facebook, except that Facebook chose that week to demand my password, which of course I'd forgotten. So, quite unintentionally, it turned out to be a far more complete retreat for me than for any of my companions - and I found out how it's actually communication via my computer that keeps me up at night. For the first time in ages I was averaging a full 8 hours' sleep and still wakening before the alarm went at 7am.

I haven't been on a proper retreat for ages. Even my own Cursillo weekend - the last time I went off on a holy break and had people look after me - was over 13 years ago. Every other similar time away has involved me in some kind of work, usually providing some kind of service for others. My last silent retreat was in the '80s, I think - unless you count the one on Cumbrae where a certain blogger and I found silence in the same room challenging (it had to do with the ticking of the clock ...) So when the diocese offered some of us who had done facilitation work over the past few years a reward in the shape of a retreat in one of the diocesan retreat houses, I took it up, along with two others and a wonderful retreat leader.

I don't intend to go into the details, though I shall publish the writing that came out of the sudden focussing of my brain (it was a tad surprised by the opportunity, I think). But looking back, I notice how hard it was at first to switch off and then how much harder to switch back on again on our return. Both experiences were strangely exhausting in their own way. I realise that the first evening, when I was beside myself with the effects of a day that had begun at 5.30am in Dunoon, landed us on Iona in time to attend an unexpected concert in the Abbey at 1pm and had me scrambling up a dun before we even began our retreat, I was actually lulled into relaxation by staying up to talk for an hour after I'd started heading for my room. It all depends on the talk, and the surroundings (in this case, the gallery of Bishop's House chapel, which is used as a quiet room but is also the upstairs route from one end of the house to the other).

This was not a silent retreat. We had silences, but we also had intense discussion and some hilarious mealtimes. We walked, in sun and in gale-driven rain, and we ate scones in the middle of the afternoon (I don't do afternoon tea). We were well fed, our dietary peccadilloes well cared for. We met another guest who arrived for dinner on our second day; it turned out he knew my #1 son from university days. (We'd just been talking about degrees of separation ...) I was allowed to sing - the Lent Prose and other joys - in the chapel. I slept like a log even when the slates on the roof round my little room were rattling in the gale that would prevent us getting off the island on our planned ferry.

On our departure morning, we sat in the new residents' sitting room and waited to hear if the ferries would go on later. We watched as it crept out from its mooring on Mull and headed for Fionnphort. By the time it was making for Iona, we were halfway down the road, our cases preceding us on the back of a tractor-drawn trailer. We had to dash through the sea onto the ferry ramp, and were fairly hurled into the cabin by a random lurch of the boat. The crossing took twice as long as usual, as we made a deep V-shaped course into and with the waves. We were not sick.

The three of us who were there learned, I think, something about ourselves and something about each other - even though we've known one another for years. It was a wonderful experience.

And we saw two corn crakes scuttling under the hedge beside Bishop's House. Joy!