Tag Archives: sheep

Loch Ness ladle

There’s a cast iron swing arm that suspends the stew pot over the peat fire. Blackened, and rough to the touch. You can vary the height by removing a tapered pin and replacing it in the next hole.

Smoke and succulent steam. Firelight. The unique, highland smell of peat. The roof beams are low and blackened, and the door stands partly open to the wilds outside.

I’m mourning the real wildness that was once here. Wide tarmac intrudes on the water’s edge, and the hills are barren and sheep-scarred. When they said Highland Clearances, they weren’t joking. It’s shorn to the bone.

Still, the cloud-flecked light ripples across muscular hills, and rich browns of autumnal bracken blend with ageing purple heathers. The sun explodes from behind briefly broken cloud.

Why is it that we wish for cellophane-wrapped, ready-meal lives, when wildness and wet and muck and mud and misery still survive at the corners of our concrete creations?

I sip the steaming stew from the ladle’s bowl, and look out over dark water where no mythical monster is needed, where awe already resides.

Hat

They say “I’ll eat my hat!” And that would taste of wet, or dusty dry, wool. Like a mouthful of sheep.

The funny ear flaps that unfold from inside my woollen Tilley are black and soft. Somehow not yet needed in all my hot weather wearing. I feel the sweat prickle out of my scalp and forehead, and the sun’s heat warming the air trapped inside. The wind threatens to blow it off into the sea; I tilt the angle closer down over forehead, to counteract.

The taste of water too long warmed in a plastic bottle in the over-heating car. Don’t they say all males of all species are being slowly feminised by some kind of petro-chemical leaching into our water? The androgynous alligators?

I smell the pines baking in the heat, exuding scent of resin and hot needles. A swirl of dry dust. Wild fennel sun-bursts, smiling in sulphur-yellow splendour. Blackberries melting off the brambles, losing their edge, their bite.

Eyeing the steep, grey scree-slope with perilous path above the sea.

Window

There’s a long crack in one of the panes, running diagonally across the lower-right corner. Condensation has formed in the one-inch gap between the two. The strange loop hooks of galvanised steel tug upwards in response to inserted forefinger, and are swivelled to one side; then the textured metal knob on the sliding restraint mechanism can be loosened, and the window opened by nine inches, max. I guess that’s a safety feature for above ground floor.

The wind hazes its way, rippling across ripe barley in the gently sloping field above. Dark beech trees delineate the curve of the hill, rising up the field boundary. It’s a hissing, itinerant wind, gently playing the barley. From further up, the baaing of sheep on the heather-purpled top where the TV mast hides just out of useful sight.

Downstairs at breakfast, raspberry juice on yoghurt and muesli – the glut of berries mass-juiced and perhaps slightly fermented – intense and real.

Spinning wheel

One of my Dakini deck Tarot cards is “Maya – how she spins” – picturing an old woman with a spinning wheel, suspended out in a universe of stars.

Taking handfuls of wool from the black bag, occasional thistle prickles biting my hands, smell of lanolin and fields. The scrunch, scunch, hairbrush sound of carding – two rectangular wooden boards with L-shaped metal brushes, wool straightening, fibres lining up, rendering candy-floss-like fluffiness.

Somehow, my fingers and thumbs never mastering the art of spinning. Producing an irregular row of sausages, breaking frequently. An art to watch sisters perform, in awe.

The foot pedal has a tendency to jam, or to set off in reverse.

The taste of chives, scissored from the dew-drenched herb bed. Chopping up into short lengths to stir into white sauce, the open-plan logginess of the living-room embracing the kitchen. This space is permeable to most sides – a thoroughfare, not a retreat. The spinning happening by the hearth, the sound of boots stamping off snow on the porch, the door tugging open and bumping shut. Red cedar stain on the door somehow offends me less than in every other context in which it appears. One of the banes of urban living – the default red stain of bland panel fences.

Gravel crunches as a car pulls up on the drive. A sense of curiosity and expectancy.