So that’s six years since we woke up in Fife. Longer than a doctorate, not far short of three postdoctoral fellowships. The amount of intellectual discovery, contribution, growth that might have been is a little depressing; but there are other things.
A rhythm of escaping north has developed again. It is good and as familiar as it should be, in a slightly richer way. The connection through Perth that was so mind-blowingly accessible that first year, or the obscure Saturday bus that facilitates getting beyond Stirling to where it all began long before that.
I don’t particularly care for the spat about whatever we’re supposed to call them now; the list has given solitude and, when combined with the transport logistics, a decent workout. It has felt like winter and the feet know again why a certain outdoor shop in Edinburgh joined the list of four-letter words for what it sold me to put them in. But the body remembers soon enough.
A lot of pleasure has come from marching back around nightfall. The roads are so quiet this time of year that one can absorb everything and understand a little of the scales of change. There was even time to nip into the inn with iron gates the other week. Would that I could keep going that long.
The Fife Coastal Path has come to resonate differently since I first started exploring it. Rather than fielding phone calls about dustmites and condiments on the work surface, we have a place of our own. But it has felt as much about retrospect as grounding: conference travel to Leuchars, Dundee and everything that happened there, an old university town again.
When I realized the path could serve as a training option closer to home over the past few months, the approach became more methodical; and now it’s done. I have quite enjoyed the fact that it isn’t just seascape; it feels more honest for the other layers of the urban, once-industrial, agricultural, wealth and its absence. Perhaps the sense of imperfection is a necessary consequence of that – the miles that lend themselves to bad jokes about the coastal pavement, or the last section, which is really more a discovery of the Fife interior and builds the horizon to west and north in a manner that can only be a transition to other things.
Probably my bones were somewhere else all along. That much was clear in the last run down to the Tay and sunset far out behind Stuc a’Chroin. Typically, the end was missed at first, and with it the planned transport. Once I doubled back and worked it out, I was through the arch, past the forlorn spruce and picnic table – and into a carpark lined with recycling bins. By this point it was almost dark, and I was off to try my luck with the buses. It seemed at once a lost opportunity – surely one could make more of it, even just putting the end in the town? – and true to character.
I’m sure I’ll be back, to check more things out than the clock. Some highlights – getting lost in the Rosyth Europarc after the bridges at night, the space at the end of Largo Bay and disproportionate sense of height on the headland thereafter, the colours of flowers, the fascination of the spaces in-between when one reaches or leaves the shore.
Dog, house, baby. My world has changed since exiting academia; and now that I am venturing out to train back some fitness for the wide spaces, I’m still not sure quite where I belong in it. Fife will be home to Ella in a way it can never be for me; but the Coastal Path feels a little firmer under the feet … when one is on it. I missed the train the other day, so jogging another section was swapped at the last minute for jogging one of the humps in the Borders.
Desperate measures, but there is an attractiveness to the scenery and a different kind of apartness from Edinburgh; and sufficient heathery quagmire to make the body start to remember. In that, there is a contentment, an opportunity to stop ruminating about the brown boxes containing the private research library in the office, hardly worth unpacking but somehow still needed.
They must keep hold of a potential, I suppose, however starved the mind actually is without an intellectual belonging, the commonality of thinking, discovering, passing on in any number of places.
But I don’t really want to be anywhere else than plotting a visit to the far north, in June, when there is much light and no necessity to stop …
There was an element of desperation in staring at the wall chart again, trying to find something – anything – that would make a feasible objective in the middle of the strikes. But there was this Graham – I suppose that is what they always will be for me – near Aberfeldy and Stagecoach had a £9 day ticket, so …
A slick, dark beginning with the commuters rattling into Edinburgh, a frosted bus shelter and sunrise coffee in Perth, more rattling and feet in motion just before 11. Late for mid-December, and it was still very cold, one of those cases where the effort has to be forced out for a bit.
But it turned into a full span of hours. Hoar frost and sun, phantom tracks in the forestry, heather to the knees, a wicked sunset, the warm scent of deer, a jog down through the night.
Deacclimatization was sudden. Smells – it is always the smells – of laundry, dinners, a wood fire, neatness; two kids sharing a fag. More hours of buses. Maybe it is no wonder somebody asked whether I was all right as I roamed Perth in search of the stop for the X56. It was slick and dark again by the time the circle was finally closed.
It’s a blessing to have these places so accessible, however fraught and relative that is in practice for those of us without a car. But it can also be disorienting, disconcerting somehow. How easy – and it is still easy compared to weeks or months of advance planning, multiple flights, and all that – to find bare life, the elemental need to keep moving or freeze. As if there were two worlds in one.
The fullness of experience accumulates in contrasts. The last time I visited the tarmac behind Kirriemuir, I was emerging from Glen Prosen. The roads were all that counted, so it was not going to matter that failing toner had blanked out the contours … in fact it made the discovery of summer visceral, all the way down to the last curving release from from the still-thin shading of the Mounth.
That is six months gone. The buses in May had necessitated the leaving of a gap, and it happened to be the right size for filling after several weeks off the hill a few days ago. There was no sweep of colours to make the hours now; the way out of town was bare and damp and that is how it stayed. The ups-and-downs on the roads were inconsequential for a fresh body. Even the bulldozed horror that followed was not worth getting worked up about.
Some drenching of the feet, an incipient chill, a brief production of the compass, and – this time – wandering back slowly for a later bus to draw it out a little. It had been silly to hope of getting above the inversion, I decided at some point in that time, as it grew dimmer.
It is curious how one builds up different connections with different parts of the country in the course of this game. I have no idea whether I’ll ever be back in Kirriemuir – but if I am, I know I would be able to find without a thought the way hard by the houses out towards the high ground.
Mount Blair, Badandun Hill, Mayar, Driesh51km/1810m(May)
Life goes as it will. One is blessed, and one is struck, and feels more closely a constancy ground into the bones in the course of a life …
I have been returning to earlier years since taking to the hill became more of a normality again. This has been rationalized by practicalities of transport and gaps in the lists, but there may also be a draw to the almost-familiar after the destabilization of the recent past.
Sought or not, it is simply found – across a sizeable portion of Scotland, it turns out, in laybys, certain stretches of road, the shape of land flexing itself. This accretion of memories was never noticed as it happened, and retains something of that innocence now: for all the intimacy, it will know nothing of the fact I would never have been jogging into Lochearnhead from the east back then, or waiting for anything other than a number 59 bus in Stirling.
I doubt also. We couldn’t not have been taken up Ben Venue when we were small … could we? Beinn Dearg in Glen Lyon … was that one summer? Did we continue to the last Top of Creag Leacach, whichever December that was – and with no more certainty than that it would have been twenty years ago or so, it was time to take out the rest of the sprawl, where it cleared and I surveyed the esoteric way taken to Driesh and Mayar a few months ago. Present again, and certainty.
*
None of this fusion of place and memory is unique to the Highlands, of course. I am sure it would feel similar if I were to wander around somewhere like Oxford – less physical, perhaps, for as the body recovers fitness, it picks up the continuity again in which all those uncertainties are grounded. And it would likely be a wandering through gaps, what-might-have-beens, whereas here is complete – even without, for now, the a.
Work had been full-on for some weeks so a certain effort was needed to make the mental space to return to the Highlands. The Glen Lyon Graham could be taken from Kinloch Rannoch; and Kinloch Rannoch can be reached by train and bus …
It was all very quiet. Still road by the water. The now-usual assortment of DO NOT signs, almost gratuitous on a weekday in March. Some traditional p*ssing around to find the right track into the woods and half a bag of Bombay Mix, and the distance of latent freshness emerged that has to be spring.
The outpouring to north and west seemed of a different order from the closer, jumbled skyline in the other direction. After all the change of the past years there is such a sense of sameness and apartness when I’m put this close to places wandered and worked through two, sometimes three decades ago during summer or Christmas holidays in Lochearnhead.
It being some time, neither the past nor present self could remember whether the Corbett next door had been visited back then. The rationale that it is all training brought a surprising openness away down Glen Lyon, as if the landscape was simplifying itself.
At the last, a moist, softening chill and a messed-up knee that couldn’t be jogged down through the woods, and consequently was battered up on the road instead to make up the lost time in a fraught dash for the last bus.
*
These are, at base, heathery humps, and, as the old book observes on the Corbett, ‘the approaches from the north are much longer’. But as a romp through the sun and clearest air, it was just a perfect here-and-now; it is as well to be reminded, consciously, that one of those changes was a lifestyle choice, after all.
So that’s another year gone. Almost four in business – longer than any contract I had in academia, and the one-man enterprise is happily growing. But the old world seems to be there still, waiting, before me in the texts on the desk every day. It is not always easy to refuse the offer: I cannot consult on a funding proposal without the thought processes from formulating my own ideas – and there I am imagining the case for projects that will never be. After all, the shelves in the office still carry the books I thought worth unpacking because ‘they might be used’.
And used they were, for a time, on some articles that seemed necessary to draw a line under things. That dynamic has changed – it is partly the practical fact of spending more time now earning a living, but there is also a groundlessness to it. I suspect that the real line was drawn when I pulled out after that last interview and abandoned some vague idea of potential, the notion that this state of affairs might be temporary. My world has become clearer since then: a town with rhythms and life of its own, a place we don’t have to abandon for another country in a few months’ time, a job that is defined in the first instance by its commercial viability for the rest of my life. Gulp.
In many ways, this is all very healthy and hardly a bad context in which to keep research going for its own sake. But there remains the question of to what end. It is the harder to answer because of the Marie Curie. With time has come a recognition that, if it didn’t at base change the way I think, it really did shift it into a frame quite different from the usual disciplinary-institutional structures. There is thus a sense in which there would have been no going back anyway; and the inevitable what-might-have-been comparisons with erstwhile peers who did, in one way or another, ‘make it’, seem to involve a different person as well as a different world.
I have ideas, I have pipe-dreams, ones that won’t happen and ones that might be made to happen. To what end? I keep returning to the word ‘community’. Perhaps it is time to start building a new one.
So that’s almost the first coherent geographical region completed in the reading the world project. I suppose the whole undertaking has indeed become more methodical since Covid started. Before that I obtained as much as possible by browsing the store in Dunfermline’s Kingsgate centre. In a way that was just delegating responsibility of course, but it did also help bring in the element of unplannedness that I settled on very early: this was never meant to be an exercise in working through canons, or pointedly not working through canons, or such like. I like to think something of that unpredictability has remained, even as now I find myself reliant on the limitless freedom to identify anything online.
*
I was working on my mini-commentary on Viajero when I scribbled a letter ‘y’ that was just like the handwriting of an esteemed colleague back in academia. It was a cold resemblance, entirely accidental, far off from when I would, more or less deliberately, model my identity in that way. Past like the books that are still parcelled up in cardboard boxes, crushed boxes, splitting boxes, bursting boxes, wherever there is room to spare; the shelf is filled instead with this broadening span.
Early in my postgraduate time I made a point of reading widely, whatever that means, in that existence where scholarship and life seemed an easy whole, but that ceased quietly at some point; and now here we are back there, almost. Yet the commentary was as much of the academic me – or the me I thought to be academic – as ever, obsessed with tracking down minutiae to actually understand a text.
*
There is a lot of richness in this undertaking, and pleasure. Like certain other lists . . . the means are more than the ends, a guide to finding one’s own path.
They’ve not necessarily been making it simple for us carless types. The trains on Sundays are struck out and the bus from Aviemore to the ski centre has been cut back, at weekends likewise to the point of non-existence. In some ways it is hardly surprising after the past year-and-a-bit. With so many prevented from holidaying abroad, why would anyone want to make it easier for them to experience their own country this summer.
But part of the attraction, I reminded myself, of being bound to public transport is how it forces one off the beaten track, into roundabout approaches, unnecessary measures and out-of-the-way parts. And so the mopping up of the northern top of Cairn Gorm at the end of May became a little more than it would really need to be for the more conventional.
The journey on Friday dragged. The body deposited at the Coire Cas carpark that afternoon was not fresh. The built paths were clunkier than usual, the Miadan a meltwater quagmire, and it was cold. After the months of containment the plain reality was hard to accept. But at some point rhythm took over and the light changed and I had the whole rim almost entirely to myself, flooded in brightness.
Night, just downslope of the weather station, was a fading, stars, a wispy dim, between fits of sleep. When the sun seemed high enough, I scurried down until there was warmth – proper heat then – for a second breakfast, and time to stop and revel in the scale of it all. Cnap Coire na Spreidhe was passed somewhere on the way, but it was merely part of a bigger whole; there is a degree of separation here that brings out the shape of these northern extremities and the ground into which they subside, and it is accentuated when the eye follows it all the way down to the Spey and realizes it has to be taken on foot.
I found a means down to the Ryvoan track. The return through the forest was, as the good decisions so often are, in equal measure sporting and aesthetic. I was second-guessing the clock because the phone had failed, but this way everything became complete, from the snowfields to the boulders and grit to the heather and the pines and water. Spots I had last passed on the first visits after the move came and went, registered as much as the years elapsed – and yet still when I panted onto the platform a minute too late, but not half as late as the train!, it could almost have been like old times. The same feeling of discovery made; only a little more rounded, perhaps.
Experiencing one’s own country, I pondered again as Saturday returned. Yes, there was the old disorientation when I emerged from the jungle near the Body of Water To Which We Must Not Refer In English, an element of selfish frustration even. Noises and scents. Banality. Yet busy as it was, nobody there, or on The Beach, was doing anything other than enjoying themselves, and outside the few kilometres between them I was alone for hours on end. There is still so much space out there, if one contrives to seek it out.
timesresonant 