CAUTION: Otters Crossing

Good morning! First, some boring admin. Now that I am on a more settled schedule and head down with the book, I will be aiming to write a newsletter twice a week. One will be for paid subscribers (thank you, always) and one free one. I know myself that not everyone is anywhere near being able to support my writing, and that we are all mobbed to subscribe to everything any time we even peep at the world wide web. If you can you can (and I am more grateful than you know), if you can’t, you can’t. Both are more than fine. Thank you for reading either way.

On to business. This week I was fortunate enough to get to the Outer Hebrides for a thing that will become much clearer in time. After the hike to Glasgow and a night with new friends, my oldest friend and I drove slowly to Mallaig, over Rannoch Moor and through Glencoe, pausing to chat and watch the Hidden Valley for a few moments. Time slowed as the mist seeped down the valley and the great emptiness of the glens engulfed us. The lone walker on a dreich summer’s day appeared no more than a distant ant, on a lonely quest for something. The profundity of it all struck me, as the glens always do. Our irrelevance in the face of nature. The wonder of human endeavour embracing such terrain. So then we drove past Jimmy Savile’s old ‘croft’ to make rude hand gestures and laugh at the disgusting profanities it is now decorated with, burned out and ruined. And order was restored to the universe.

Onwards to Glenfinnan and the memorial to the Highlander, where some sentimental bastard was piping and Loch Sheil was defying the mist and showing her fineness. Just on, I said, ‘Who are these criminals abandoning their cars on the side of the road?’ and my travelling companion said, ‘Don’t you know? This is where Dumbledore is buried’. I said, ‘They all know Dumbledore isn’t real, don’t they’. He parked the car and said, ‘Who knows, let’s see’.

Dumbledore’s Island. If you look very closely at the slightly off right pair of trees, there’s a genny that apparently powers a light show ‘in season’. I tripped over the cable on the way back to the car and had to pick the contacts out of the mud (sorry). The magic was real.

Onwards again, Corpach and Fort William, where hope goes to die. Then finally, after that, you leave the Highland and enter the Islands, even though you are still on the mainland. Mallaig. You can’t not love Mallaig. It’s a fishing port that ferries people onto Skye, and could easily have sold itself out to tat and rubbish half a century ago, yet it remains itself. We had a minute so I walked around and there was a true Scot examining ropes, sea-tanned, unlit fag in his mouth, in waders. He could have been fifty, or seventy. His life is not measured like ours.

There is a pub in Mallaig with a foul mouthed grey parrot of equal longevity. We did not have time in this instance to greet him again. But the last time Mr I & I encountered him, as we picked up our glasses to return them to the bar he said, ‘That’s right, Fuck Off, Fuck Off, Fuck Off’. The chef said, ‘Well done, he’s not been chatty for a day or so, now I know he’s back on form‘.

So over the sea to Skye. The Skye ferry is, well, you’ve got to take it to know. Skye is now, to put it mildly lacklustre fudge and tourism, and Range Rovers. And not our destination. Next stop, Uist. The beginning of the Outer Hebrides.

I had never been to Uist before. An archipelago riven with history, and so utterly unexpected. Islands filled with Stone Age burial sites and stone circles. On the putter-boat over, we saw dolphins playing and puffins and a seal who sneezed at us in disgust. Shipwrecks and a stag browsing on kelp.

Uist is, what Uist is. Unexpected.

A community built entirely upon trust and mutual support. Generations carve out a life there. Wilder and bolder and bigger than mine, in the face of nature. Whisky sits on the bar on free pour, and everyone knows that someone has had a ‘drop’ because his son died last year. The Co-Op stocks wild foods, local producers, then microwave rice and Marmite.

We stayed in a hostel that was formerly a care home. With a communal kitchen. Bleak was the word I was looking for, but then I opened the curtains and a pair of Connemara ponies were looking right back, in the rain, but unbothered.

Our true journey was to Kilda, but the weather and a 2-3 metre swell defeated us, and we had to return to Uist. Where everyone was so delighted to see us. We did a day of nature hunting and got to see a family of sea otters playing, feeding and sleeping. (Pictures to follow, too fancy for me).

And we were delighted to see them. And the lily ponds, and the otters, and the dolphins, and puffins, the oystercatchers, the shearwaters, and the seal and the most lovely people. Uist is remarkable. If you get the chance, go.

So we returned. A harbour porpoise shepherded us back to Mallaig, showing off a beautiful belly, waltzing with a tiny ferry, full of the joy of life and power. I will miss the Outer Hebrides, for now. But I will see them again, soon.