“He’s from Cornwall, actually, which is why he moved here…it’s so like home.”
“Why move it out of the pub? The Wee Free people don’t come anyway…”
“I’m in the middle of my three weeks holiday, but they say the job’s gonna be done anyway…I take it as a sign there’s gonna be nothing to come back to.”
***
I am eavesdropping, though it is more accident than choice.
I’m in a bookshop on Stornoway harbour on the Isle of Lewis, in a corner chair, Morris-upholstered. On the shelf is a cookbook I have at home. It is one of those early fall days on a northern island where the sun is high and the water sparkles, blindingly. I have been effectively alone for six days, isolating with COVID. I tested clear this morning.
My release from isolation makes the human conversation around me enchanting. My ears perk up at all these negotiations of the world. Many are debates about religion and Sunday shopping – the last Tesco in the UK to be closed on Sundays is planning to open here come November – but not all. The conversations weave in and out, young dudes. Older women. Mixed groups whose ties I cannot scry. Opinions and prejudices and economics and humour all intermixed. A young server convinces a patron to take the bigger slice of cake left on the tray.
Here, I hear snippets of Gaelic, casually, for the first time in my life. I took six months of DuoLingo Scottish Gaelic lessons during lockdown, learning cultural bangers like “I like turnips” and “You are stupid, Ian,” neither of which I wish to test out in practice. Still. To recognize the cadence and the roll of the language in daily conversation moves me, even if I catch little meaning.
But to hear Gaelic spoken in the street also sparks a sorrow I hadn’t anticipated, a catch in my breath. Four generations lost from me, this language of my ancestors.
I had never noticed how the word belonging has ‘longing’ in it, hidden in plain sight.
***
But there are things even older than Gaelic. Things whose people – whoever they may have been – are so long gone from this earth that none can claim them, or even fully grasp them.
The Callanish (Gaelic: Calanais) standing stones are the oldest works of human hands that I have ever seen. Older than the pyramids, Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China.
I posted this picture and only managed to be a thousand years off. They’re not 4000 years old. They’re 5000 years old. I cannot get my mind around it.
Nor can I capture it in words in any way that isn’t clumsy. They are surreal, if tonnes of stone – by its nature, not so ephemeral – can be surreal.
It is a pilgrimage, walking up to the circle at the hilltop, between guardstones that flank the muddy path. The view is unbroken in all directions, nothing but sheep and small clusters of houses, hills and water. And then these ancient, sacred stones, warmed by the sun. Rough and textured. Almost friendly.
That’s the extraordinary thing, the one I bumbled over in the post above. It’s not meant to be “look, I touched them!”
Rather, it is that they are so accessible as to be touchable. I felt awe and humility in their shadow. But I also felt at home. To touch them is to remind the body that they are of the earth and we are of the earth.
Apparently they were not seen as friendly, locally, for a long time. My former colleague from Windsor lives on Lewis, and works for UHI. She picked me up today after my coffee shop exploits, and took me to Callanish. Her granny grew up at the foot of the hill…where no one talked about the stones. Some of the church stories suggested they were evil, men turned to stone for refusing Christianity.
‘The false men,’ they were called – “fir bhrèige,” in Gaelic.
We are all so very small.
We are a superstitious and migratory lot, we humans, fraught with longings, across time and space. We strut and fret our hours and leave our breadcrumbs, on hilltops or in coffeeshops. All – whether comment or monument – only strange snippets, often to be misunderstood, much of the time.
And yet. So much beauty in it all, even that which I know I do not understand.
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