Bryan Islip's Blog, page 14

The mystery of the seagull.

This is Loch Ewe as seen from Kirkhill House this morning. You can see it's low tide, you can see the south westerly corner of (green) Isle of Ewe and on the far side of the loch, that's the 'village' of Naast. You may also be able to see a white dot floating on the water. That's a common gull as identified through my binoculars. What you won't be able to see unless you have some kind of high magnification device is the raft of perhaps fifty eider ducks distributed all around the seagull, 'ducking' and diving to the seabed for their diet of small fish, crabs etc.

Why, I asked myself, was that one seagull apparently living with all the eiders? Could it possibly imagine itself as one of them? If so it must have been astonished when its brothers and sisters disappeared beneath the surface - a place, of course, no gull can go.

Then I saw what may be the answer. One of the ducks hurried to the side of the gull, touching beak to beak. Could it have been transferring food? If so, why?

Third question: is that seagull our Sammy?   

Spirit of Delia?

07.05 this morning. I'm sitting up in bed with my usual cup of tea watching the BBC TV news when there's a loud knocking from downstairs. What less than lovely person can be calling on me at this hour of a Sunday morning? I jump up, don my dressing gown, hurry down and open the front door. Nobody! I go to the back (kitchen) door, again nobody there. Halfway back upstairs there comes more knocking. Definitely the back door. Wierd. I creep down and peer through the kitchen window.

There's Sammy, my visitor, standing on the wheelie bin, hard yellow beak banging, literally banging the porch window.. Dee called the bird 'Sammy' because, she explained, that name would fit either gender of common gull. But this particular gull is anything but common and has not resorted to that same trick for its breakfast since - since at least a year ago when, as a result of my imploring Dee not to humor Sam with any more food in case we had to replace broken window panes he or she absented him or herself in ill-disguised ill-humour, obviously in search of a more profitable source of scraps.


So now, a year later, here he or she is again. It must be Sammy. And I think 'it' is 'she'. Very slightly smaller than the male of the species. With one final crack on the porch window she takes off, calling that demanding seagull call as if; 'Where's my breakfast?' If you've ever seen a common gull in rapid take off at two metres range you'll know the surprising size and the unsurprising beauty of the bird. Of course I have to sort out some far from out of date scraps from the bread bin and the fridge, including the left over prawns from last evening's dinner . Lucky old Sam. Stupid old me. She will return.

Now here's my own flight - a flight of fancy. If you read my blogs, the ones written after carrying out Delia's wishes by consigning her ashes, half to Loch Ewe and half to The Solent, you'll know that on both occasions seagulls circled overhead. Actually, for the half to the Solent please read a quarter. One of our sons and one of our grandsons couldn't be present back in the winter, so I'd left the last quarter of the ashes with Rudi awaiting a time when they could convene. Well, just an hour or two ago Rudi called to say that he and his brother and our grandson had got together this morning to scatter the very last of their mother / grandmother in that same appointed place in the Solent ... 

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  (W Shakespeare: Hamlet)

Rudi was calling me from a pub in Gosport called The Jolly Roger, the pub in which Dee worked when first we met ...

Whatever, I shall keep on feeding the lovely Sammy Seagull.

Pages on paper

I used to spend time in book stores; Waterstones, WHS et al, but especially in antiquarian or 'used' book stores. All the books that have influenced my life have surfaced for me is such places through random browsing: Rachel Carson's 'Silent Spring', Ernest Hemingway's 'For Whom the Bell Tolls', Logan Pearsall-Smith's 'On Reading Shakespeare', Dixon's 'Gairloch', etcetera, etcetera. 

These days of course I have my Kindle Fire. I find it very useful and certainly time saving, but I confess to not holding it in any particular affection. Kindle (and its best friend Amazon) sets out to save me the bother of book browsing with its useless pleasures of  tactile self-discovery. It does its level best to force-feed me with my reading material. To this end whole new libraries of 'how to electronically market books' have evolved. Book promotion has indeed become a science without too much regard for that old fashioned truth without which science is nothing but fraud. The fact remains that, for me at least, Kindle Fire to that old book shop in Winchester is as having sex to making love. Imitation and without much in the way of meaning.

The other day a friend lent me a book that will join my 'most influencing' list, a quite grubby little paperback called 'Once There Was A War'. It was first published in 1959. The book consists of John Steinbeck's collected WW2 despatches (from 1943) preceded by, quite possibly, the finest essay I have read on war in general and the role of the war correspondent, during that war, in particular. The despatches take the form not of factual reportage but of short stories complete with titles - true stories of minor events set around and sometimes inside the fringes of the actions in which Steinbeck's fellow American servicemen were involved. These despatches are completely as written, even down to an absence of precise time and place (because of censorship) and some self-admitted imperfections of writing (because of the heat of the moment, the fire of the action).

Even allowing for the severe restrictions imposed by the War Machine, when you read these stories today you gain a much greater understanding of what this human conflict thing is all about, especially the enforced hypocracy of its reportage, especially the notions that all private soldiers are brave and honest and leave at home the natural preoccupation of boys with girls and that all general officers are wise and fearless souls who would much rather be in the thick of the blood and bullets than hog-tied down behind some pestilential desk well behind the lines. As for the moralistic heroes on the Home Front! As for the politicians whose grave mistakes give rise to the madness in the first place! ...

This is a book you do not just read; it is a book you experience. One that, having finished it you want to read over again, most especially the author's introduction.

I shall now return my copy and try to buy one of my own. On Amazon of course: a hardback if one is available.

Down on the farm ...

Down on the Norfolk farm ... here's daughter Julie with one of five barn owl chicks. She says she's in love. Of course she is. Who wouldn't be?

Reminders of Dee - and me.

I keep on finding odd things in odd places - some trivial memorabilia that at the same time takes away my breath and brings my lady back.  The other day I came across a scallop shell. Its corrugated outside bore my painted inscription, "Happy Birthday, Dee" and inside I'd painted a rainbow and the names we had given to twenty three of our local walks, all of them off-track, none where we were likely to come across any other walkers: "The beech wood", "Beach four", "The caves", "The secret river" etc etc. I remembered that shell was my present for her sixtieth birthday 1n 2004. The fact that she kept it over the years in a secure place with other items of great value to her - well, for me emotional and thought-provoking, both.

I thought about me losing all of our worldly wealth on a business venture in Saudi Arabia, then re-basing ourselves with a pantecnicon full of furniture etc in a rented crofthouse here in the north Scottish Highlands; me, Dee and our pair of Hungarian Vizslas, Sorosh and Mati. I was going to write that novel/s, make us rich and me famous. Meantime I would paint landscapes for some kind of a living. I thought about having very little pension income and very small capital. For the first time in my life I (we) was actually 'poor'. Poor to the extent of rationing our use of electricity, reading the meter daily, of eating lots of free of charge wild provender - shellfish, berries, mushrooms et al - of calculating the cost in petrol of our each and every car journey, etc.

I also thought about having no debts, of having owed nothing to any bank or to anybody since 1989.

Another name for our situation: freedom.

Freedom to walk each and every mid-day with our dogs, discovering those wild and lonely and indescribably beautiful  places listed in private names on that scallop shell, back packs loaded with our picnic lunch of soup or coffee and sandwiches. Sometimes she would include a surprise treat for me; chocolate biscuit, piece of fruit, little message for my eyes only. We would make our way in all weathers, winter and summer to the listed, out of the way beaches or the high hills, there to sit on a favourite rock or fallen tree trunk, always with a favourite view, sometimes talking about the world or our family or local things and sometimes not needing to talk at all: sometimes simply love within the loveliness ...

Well, I've written my novels and short stories and published them for myself without becoming rich or famous. I suppose there's still time for that. I've made a kind of living from my paintings and their derivatives - cards, prints, calendars etc. Mati and Sorosh have long been gone and now Dee is with them and with our previous much loved pair of Vizslas, Seth and Chloe. And me? I'm on my own but not on my own for I have many friends and all of our family and memories and expectations and I can look at over the loch to the distant hills and soon perhaps I shall walk our scallop shell walks once more.

I am not disappointed with life or with my life.

An evening in Aultbea

Last evening I hosted one of our Wester-Ross Burns Club's occasional evenings. These are always focussed on the Scottish Bard via a certain 'theme', are always replete with more in the way of food and drink than our most ambitious members can possibly consume, always exhausting as the Highland dancing gets going, always emotional when the singing starts - always FUN! Last evening was no exception. From the new sunhouse you can view through panoramic windows two hundred and seventy degrees all around to the south, west and north. The weather was kind, as has generally been the case this Summer and its preceding Spring and, indeed, an exceptionally mild Winter. Of course the sun never really sets at this time of a Wester-Ross year, but as the skies relaxed above a millpond Loch Ewe the effects were truly astonishing, even for we who should by now be unsurprised.

Back to Burns ... our theme was 'Burns the farmer'. Our Chair read his prose contribution, by way of a chronologically compelling narrative of the great man's progress from farm to farm. Strangely enough, my own effort took the same chronological format, but this time in verse rather than prose. This is it ...



Robert Burns, the Scottish Bard, was born into a farming family and worked on four farms during his thirty seven years of life. This narrative follows his progress …

The Ayrshire Farmer
1. Mount Oliphant farm
Seventeen seventy four, imagine this …November, rainswept shire of Ayra wintry field, and yonder see that adolescent stumbling after father’s plodding mare? Whilst iron plough turns stony earth the youth turns  words into his special story-verseof harvesting here not long since, and Nell Kilpatrick, special pearl amongst the rigs o’ barley: the girlwho, on this poor, unyielding earth had yielded what’s of real worth.Yes, here upon this sullen field, at fifteen he has found his shieldagainst th’unfairness of the world:enriched, he makes himself a vow, that what comes next comes now,verse and music (before the plough)and love, sweet lady love of course.The youth walks on behind the horse,for him, a glass half full belongsto someone else. As rain pelts down,he thinks of this field’s green gown:despite dark skies young Robert Burns, strong force of nature, never crassbegins, O, once I loved a bonnie lass …


2. Lochlea Farm 1777-84
Tired of flogging horses (very dead) Burnes and family move instead, tolook for better things at Lochlea farm‘twixt Mauchline and Tarbolton where Rab is soon to bring upon himself stern censure of the kirkand his father’s great displeasure,by targeting things not just of work. He treasures Scots and other poesy,writes verse of his own symmetrydebates with drinking friends amidstthe ribald cheer of the hostelry, and finds the joys of dancing, romancing the fairer sex - too much, too often some might say but living in this waythree hard farming years pass bythen a brief venture in Tarboltonlearning to dress and sell the flax, (undressing not just flax, perhaps)before our prodigal son comes home;three years more until eighty fourwhen William Burnes’s day is done - good, upright father nevermore:Rabbie and his brother struggle on‘though love for Lochlea has all gone.


3. Mossgiel farm - 1784-88
Out of the frying pan into the fire!The brothers move to Mossgiel farm.‘Though Rabbie does his level bestto fashion silk from that sow’s earthe Belles of Mauchline give him little rest - the trials of love outstripthose of the plough, with the kirk still unimpressed by his carousing, and stormy waters become no calmerespecially over fair Jean Armour,whose father clean fainted ‘awaw’ at the prospect of having a feckless, potless Rabbie Burns for son-in-law,the farmboy sire to the daughter of his long suff’ring mother’s servant.even when sweet Jean was with child  number one (of nine) in eighty sixhe had not done with his wild oats,wild ways; they didn’t marry ‘til eighty-eight, (better than never, late)and ‘though he says he loves his girlthe most, that claim he also makesto other lady loves in verse and song.As life at Mossgiel rollocks along,he versifies a wee timorous beastieand a gun-shot hare and twa dogs and even a louse on a lady’s hat and, with less compassion, Holy Willie at prayer - even Willie’s cat.Wha hae! for Scotland, the nation - or perhaps a Jamaican plantation?But fame now is the Burns admission with the great Kilmarnock edition   and the capital gives wealth and balm, so no fond farewell to Mossgiel farm.


4. Ellisland farm 1788 - 91
Burns returns to Dumphries-shire:‘though unsurprised at being lionised.it’s not the fulfilment of his desire, sohe’s back at the hoe and the plough,enough for now of  flickering fame - and dear Clarinda’s away overseawith tears and doubtless some kissing,with heavy heart her love he’s missing.Ellisland farm gives him little restmuch as he tries to give it his best it will not respond to the poet’s handso the farmer bids farewell to his land;a man of the soil he can no longer bewhen rhyme still fills his waking mind.But in a racing canter he writes great Tam O’Shanter, a tale of witches, dark, of Meg and cutty sark, (short chemise,a source of young men’s fantasies).Appeasing the constitution’s distrustof his talk of reform and revolution,enlists in the Excise to quiet his peersplus the Royal Dumphries Volunteersand turns to the composition of songsof love and Scottish folklore he hearsthat often seek to right Man’s wrongs,his words immortal for such a fine pen;and Auld Lang Syne again and again.
How now our ploughboy of Ayrshire?our champion of love and of nature?of laughter and satire, truth and saltire?‘Though Robert Burns wore many a hat, the man was a man for all that, for all that.

Bryan Islip: June 2014

Westminster v Europe

 If you looked at my last post 'A View from the far north' you won't be surprised to see today's headlines. It seems that our Prime Minister is doing all possible to block the appointment of M. Jean-Claude Juncker as next EC President. Well, surprise, surprise!

Why is our leader adopting this heroic stance (Little Britain v Goliath Europe)? Because he and his cohorts believe, rightly, that Juncker will further the power erosion of Westminster / City of London in favour of a fast unifying European Community. A unification political, social, military and - above all for the distress of Cameron's banker family of friends - financial.

That's a bit of a bloody cheek. How could a nation with only one tentative and perhaps temporary foot in the European community of nations hope to 'overpower' the combined wills of the whole, fully paid up family? Isn't it about time, I ask, for my nation to apply for full membership, including financial (the Euro), or, if it really needs to commit a form of hari kari, secedes itself altogether - stops trying to run the damn thing? Long term sitting on fences is going to damage your cojones as well as your influence.

Cameron and his cohorts consistently say that the only thing they want from an association with the European Community is money (trade and exports). That's like me saying that the reason for me being an associate member of your golf club is because I sell golfing paraphanalia and want to be Captain.

Winston Churchill (my unashamed hero) who created the whole concept of a united Europe, may well now be turning in his exalted grave. The money changers have indeed occupied the City temple.

I doubt Cameron will prevail over Merkel and the merry band of fully paid up members. And I look forward (albeit with limited confidence) to a situation where  ...
 an independent Scotland will join up as a full member of the European Community the rest of the UK will ditto. (Better late than never? Maybe). Westminster is relegated to its natural status, as per, for instance, Houston vis a viz Texas vis a viz the United States of America

A view from the far north

Please read this as a commentary - a rant if you like! It calls for no action, for the possibilities for action are ... you guessed it!

I write as a tax paying citizen of the UK who, as a young man, owned by right of birth a percentage of his nation's supplies of water, gas and electricity and of the nation's transport by rail and air (not sea - and the roads thus far have not been 'privatised). Oh, and the telephone system and the post office, etcetera etcetera.

These massive, world leading industries were created by the hard work and ingenuity our fathers and grandfathers and their fathers and grandfathers under the auspices of a Westminster government truly representing the people, using money syphoned into the nation's treasury through the taxation of the people.

I now own none of these things and neither do you, unless you have been persuaded to pay for the shares that you and/or other folk already owned.

So, having taken from the 60 million odd owners of these industries where, now, are the proceeds of this 'privatisation'? Just like the proceeds of north sea oil, much of it has been frittered away by successive Westminster governments on a National Health Service now threatening to implode under its own over-burgeoning weight, a welfare system open to any of the world's Toms, Dicks or Flavias caring to dip in, a military far, far in excess of any possible national need (but useful to maintain the seat of our P.M. at the world's conference tables) - and not to mention an overfed, often corrupted system of government designed in the age of the carrier pigeon and the horse drawn carriage.  

But most of all, if you want to know where your money went you need look no further than the City of London, folks. Yes, that same City of London  grown hugely rich and fat in my lifetime, that is responsible 'though was never punished for the great public distress of the recent (and ongoing) five year 'depression', that is still persisting in its gobbling up of the nation's wealth-creation. 'The City' that calls itself an 'industry' and which, in all fairness, it surely is as industrious as is any other parasitic cancer.

Remember the saying, "Old soldiers never die, they only fade away"? Think "Old politicians never die, they only join the City" (with or without the knighthood or peerage bestowed on them by a grateful government of the day.) Is it any wonder that everything UK has to be subjugated to the interests of the money-changers and gamblers?

As a resident of Scotland but an Englishman intensely proud of his heritage and disgusted by the Westminster / City cabal I shall vote YES to Scotland's independance on 18th September. I don't know whether, in time, Holyrood will fall into the Westminster malaise, or not, but right now I would rather vote for Brussells and Angela than Westminster. Can't any longer stand the stink of it.

Fisherboy

I 'published' the following narrative poem in separate sections here on my blog. Now I'm submitting the whole thing in fully edited form ...

These are, as I remember, the opening lines of a hymn (song? anthem?) that was sung in Abingdon (Roysses’s) School chapel, Sunday Evensong …

When to the days of our childhood returning, Backwards our footsteps will wander afar;Strong be our love and long be our yearning, When we remember the days that are gone
Fisherboy
1. Catching the bug
Not long ago, fast-driven round northLondon, south of Epping Forestold trees fresh green-gowned,I remembered that enchanted dayas sharp and clean and clearas the pebble bottomed stream that must still be somewhere there, just as in nineteen thirty ninefor father and my five year old self(Mother, sisters Shirley and Tina,too, certainly, although them -as hard as I might right now try -  I can’t recall on that enchanted day.)
But I remember the finger-feelof warm black earth, uprooted turfthat we hand-dug in search of bait from the soft bank, wriggly worms,for whom I felt that sadness: and still I feel the sleepy weight of summer through sun-shaft foliageoverhead; green, golden, shifting, and still the moving water glistens, hear the ruckle of its slow running, swirling, cold to my bare feet, and the insect drone of tiny wings amidst the waxy drowse of that forest.
Most of all I remember my fatherand the thrill of watching himsetting up to try to catch a fish:to cast a line and catch a fish!with tackle from his canvas bag -the smell: the warm, sweet, rotten, rusty, cat gut, dead fish smell of it.I remembered as I was driven byleafy Epping Forest, though thatwas three whole fourths of a centuryago, although they say I’m old,therefore my story’s almost told,I see the red and yellow quilltrip-dancing the current, father and I,waiting for the sudden tip and dipthat never came on that enchanted day,catching nothing but having much, my father and I, (not ‘me’, he’d say),of embrionic fishing love, and such.


2. A small pond in Lancashire
‘Come in now and listen, son,’mother and father tell me, that day in September nineteen thirty nine:War! Our guns versus theirs, of course before we trounce The Hun,whosoever they might be, all soexciting to a five year old boy;(not as much as fishing, but still …)
We drove north, my father and Iin his Morgan sports to Lancashire new ‘job’ far from Chigwell bombs,mother, sisters following by trainI so well recall that journey andin Walton-le-Dale what children do -but this is fishing, nineteen forty two.Lancashire pond, shiveringly deeprush fringed, overhanging willows,dark skies, menace, mirror calm,whatever monster swims down there?My father is handing me his rod, shiny soft feel of its cork handletiny bobble float red and white, with quill upright out in the middle. ‘Watch it, now, pay attention’,he instructed, (as if I needed it),and yet I miss the strike when, dis-believing, I no more see a float,just plop within those circle ripples,gone. ‘Too late, Bryan’, father says,and I feel his disappointment in me in spite of all my good intent,me in myself for passion spent.
I reel in line and empty hook,trembling hands transfix a wormfingers tight on hopeless writhing - painful death to make another (worms can feel no pain, he says)and anyway such a thrill to try to catch and kill a fish deep downhowever small, perhaps how great now biting hard on my living baitand this time I feel the line tighten,the bounce of the greenheart rod (green? heart of what I wonder)in my clenched fists, heart thuddingfather issuing unheard instructionsuntil with a heave, airborne was that first so well remembered fishfive inches of  silver red-fin landing, gasping at my feet, looking - yes, looking at me: ‘pick him up, son,’ my father says, ‘Bryan, well done.’ So lovely my fish, I could have cried. Yes, I smell today his fresh-sour scentknow now the first time catcher’s pride and joy; same for man as little boy.

3. The Estuary
Wales: there’s a place called Laugharne(say it like barn like the boathousewhere here lived Dylan Thomas), whereI was sent on holiday in forty fourto stay at my auntie’s and uncle John’s.I recall getting water from the pumpand standing by the muddy shore of that estuarine river, mother seafeeling a small boy’s first affinitywith what is vasty wild, untamed.I run home to steal a fishing hook (one of uncle’s brightest sea-trout flies) a ball of twine from the garden shedand with jam jar of worms run back again to bait, stone-weight my line, throw it out into the tide, far as I could:awaiting what good luck might bring,waiting in slow rain with bated breath,imagining, yes, imagining a catch, this game of life and death And so it was, first fishing time alone.I feel that twitch, drag, steady pull enough to move my weight, then tight line cutting water to and fro, I would not let my caught fish go.
What kind of flat fish, this, my prize?mud-brown on the side of its eyes,dirty white below, fan tail flipping, edge fins waving, gills pulsating;beautiful, though, in a special wayI can feel its thrilling, slimy cold, near too slippery for me to holdsolid fish of tea plate type and size and with a look of mild surprise.I smell that same sour fishy scent as,fast as I could, back home I went.‘What’s that?’ my auntie unimpressed.‘It stinks, what kind of fish is that?'‘A flounder,’ uncle said, ‘Well done’.But only, ‘Close the door,’ she said, ‘Oh well, should be good for the cat.’ And pride’s now flatter than that flat.

4. Rockpool Magic
So many changes, year of forty fiveworld war ending, mother gone awaywith somebody else, so they say Walter somebody? Me, a boy alonecrying in secret on ‘holiday’ exile; ‘Get Bryan out the way,’ she says,blonde stranger to father that day,‘Send ‘im to your ma and pa, Ted,  on Hastings front, he loves his fishingthen soon he’ll stop bloody wishingfor mummy dear to come back ‘ere;  she can’t make up for leaving ‘im - nor you for that sod, Eddy, dear.’ And thus the small boy learns to fear,that grown up thing without a name, oh this unruly life and hate, the stateof soon to be - except his magic sea;unchanging; salty sea, its mystery,and fishy life that swims so free. By his window the boy just watches,in his dreams, the fish he catches.
‘Why don’t you go to the beach, boy?’ asks grandfather, ‘Catch some prawns? ‘It’s low tide now so take this drop-net.’ He ruffles my hair, shows how it’s set: ‘Prise limpets off the rocks for baitskewer them in the mesh, lower it into a deep rock pool out of sight,leave good time for them to get inthen hook it out quick with this stick; quick! 'fore they flick over the rim!’Grandfather! I do remember him,and more, those juicy fat beauties transparent, black pin eyed, jumping, flip-flopping, trapped in the netother kids gathering round me to seehow and what my secret might be,but, scrambling ashore as the tide rose,falling, knee bleeding over my clothesand grandma says it’s all right, see,we’ll have prawns for a special tea.’ Cooked, pink, plated, I catch their scent,proud and content, my energies spent.

5. The Wierpool
Old Abingdon School, now my home,prefects and masters and neat, bare dormunbending rules, grey granite stone; If clever you sit in front of the form, or a back seat for a dreamer like medreaming of birds eggs, fishing the seaor that wierpool, a Thames tributarywith shiny new reel and split cane rodtwelfth birthday present as if from God;‘Islip, attention!’ The master speaks;but small interest, I, in Latin or Greek.
Where the pools are bright and deepWhere the grey trout lies asleepUp the river and over the leaThat’s the way for Billy and me (James Hogg, 1770-1835: A Boy’s Song)
Where the pool lies, bubbling clearwhere green weed grows down the weirAlong the Thames and over the leathat’s the way for Harris and me.Only surnames at Abingdon School -did Harris have a forename I wonderno matter and no need to ponder, forwe had our secret wierpool yonder.In our free time we take our tacklefree at last from the schoolroom shackle snag with bare hook some whispy weed (with tiny mites on which fishes feed)crouching behind the fringing reedwe hold our breath, await the bite: yes! the chub would plunge and fight and once a two pound redfin roach I caught; I see those fins cerise andflanks silver bright as a sixpenny piece.As on green grass she lay that dayso strong that hunter-gatherer’s joy, andone golden moment for a motherless boy.
‘To be or not to be, then’, jokes Harris‘You can have it stuffed, Islip, you knowor perhaps you might think to let him go.’I kissed her, my lips to her slippery nose, and through the mists of a long gone MayI catch the scent of the wild and free,as I watch my lovely swim slowly away.

6. On Hastings Pier
My sister and I were away at schoolin that post war Spring of forty sevenwhen father and (brand new) mother, moved down to Newmarket townbut when home on holidays aloneI would walk along the racecourseeach morning, watching racehorsesstrutting like haughty kings and queensor ridden by on thundering gallops(and that girl at the swimming pool,the churning, choking, wishing for things more thrilling even than fishing).Back in Hastings that summer with cousin Jenny, the games we playedin Bottle Alley down by the beach, and in grandfather’s house (especially),and watching the pier end fishermencasting lead weights and bait far outinto the white-streaked, green-grey ocean.
Then grandfather gave me the keysto his locker in the Sea Angling Club. (Keys to my Kingdom I thought,) andsixpence for lug worms, wrapped upin last week’s guts-yellowed paper, but what a tasty sea fish snack, long, fat, slow moving, wet jet black! That locker was my Pandora’s Boxwooden reel, brass bound, a greasedflax line and etcetera, now mine,heavy old rod to lift a great codfrom the seas rose and fell and were surging around the legs of the pier.My great cod dream was unrealisedand blank days came as no surprise,or little whiting or flip-flop plaice- one such as these no way a disgrace,walking them home down the prom,grandpa’s repeated tale of the seatowed in a dinghy for miles, no wonder,when into a forty or fifty pound conger!I believed him then, and still I do,‘though that was in nineteen twenty two!
That gruff old angler had no time for myover-run casting, tangles and troubles: ‘Bugger off, that’s my place,’ he says‘though he’d no right to his own base.But you are neither heard nor seen,when men are men and you thirteenon Hastings pier; I learned the broadertruths about the fisher’s pecking order

7. Mighty Pike
At fourteen years and nine long months,I said goodbye with perhaps a sigh,to Abingdon School, gown and town, father unwilling to expend any more on his angst-tied dreamer of an only sonand I can’t blame him for that, orfor a shy head filled with fishing lorein spite of some surprisingly (for some)excellent School Leaving Certificates- a certainty for Oxford, said the Head,too late. By then I had been shed.
I remember not much of what came next(‘til Boots then the air force in fifty one),but one frosty morning out on my bikerod to the crossbar, tackle bag bumpingmy back, cycling the flatland lanesover miles of fens to try for a pike,double-treble hooks, live dace for bait … Float steady mid-canal I wait and I waityet still am surprised by the run, so I snatch the strike, back up the bank,for what on earth could be on my line,dangerously matching its power to mine?I’m shocked by what I haul from the water- a true lethal weapon of pisces slaughter -dappled green, lean, with underslung jawbait half gorged deep down the pink mawwhite rows of raked-back razor teeth;steeling myself, my knife I unsheathe.
I hang him, dead, from my handlebars, for twenty odd miles cycle him homeand once I fell and saw the starsspade tail in my front wheel spokes and my bloody elbows were no jokebut why oh why was I the only one who thought my catch a thing of beauty,so little moved were they that day; ‘Take it away. I'm not cooking thatbloody great monster,’ she exclaims, Bryan, why did you bring the thing home?‘I’d really of thought you ‘ad more brains.’
Bryan IslipMay / June 2014
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I gave up childish things.    (1 Corinthians 13:11) 
Except fishing (Bryan Islip)

Dee's seat at Rua Reidh

To the Rua Reidh lighthouse for a light lunch today. Invitation of Tracey and Roger. Wonderful. Another world out there, half an hour's slow drive out of Gairloch along what might be the windiest, most up and down single track in the Western Highlands.

"Come outside, I want to show you something," said Tracey. This was it ....


The carved wooden artwork of a bench seat (the one on the right) has been dedicated by our friends the owners to the memory of Dee; leaping salmon on the left, dog otter on the right. My girl would have loved it, (perhaps does, who can tell?) as do I. Spirit of freedom, of the wild ...

Tracey and Roger have worked hard to bring their unique B&B up to scratch. You've heard of getting away from it all? Well, the lighthouse at Rua Reidh is archtypical of that and very reasonable into the (real) bargain. But mind that road in! Not for those of a nervous disposition!