The question raised itself again and again…as it does on islands. Could I live in such a quiet place as this?
It whispered to me on the year’s longest day, when the sky came down to meet me, alone, in a place so thin that I felt the reverence of the ancients, those who lived in the place we now call Halangy and maybe walked to the one we call Peninnis…and echoed when I finally settled to imagine the older story. Not even a story really, an evocation, a maybe, a feeling.
Feeling. That’s the thing. Coming to an island, especially coming back to an island where I have some vague recollections of where the roads road, where I am slowly feeling my way into having a sense of its history (even though it’s not my own) and a sense of direction (beyond the geographical, but that too) … doing all of that is such a strong feeling.
It is one I can only describe as coming back or coming home. It is one my friend would call recognising.
And it makes no sense. I have not lived in any of these places for more than a few days at a time. Even so, when I land, I breathe out, the same way as I do when I step through my own front door…like I have found somewhere to be, like I have left behind the parts of the world I cannot bear.
It makes even less sense when I land on an island I do not know, where I have yet to gain the concept of time and distance. Both of these are different on small islands to what we know on larger land masses.
I listened (ok, eavesdropped) on a conversation on the train during the week. A Canadian visitor was trying to explain to her friend that although, yes, they were heading up to the North Norfolk coast at lunchtime, but that was no reason they couldn’t go for a drink in Cambridge that evening. “It’s not that far,” she said, scrolling maps and timetables on her phone. By Canada standards, by the standards of someone who had gone to Copenhagen for lunch, when she was holidaying in
Norway, it really wasn’t.
Our perception of time and space is shaped by how much of those we have, but also by how much we have within them. We live in relativity.
I remember an American friend who thought nothing of driving 75 miles for dinner. If that’s the closest decent restaurant, I guess that’s what you do. If the roads are big and so is your car and petrol or diesel is cheap, I guess that’s what you do. If your concept of your state is bigger (or do I mean smaller?) than my concept of a country, I guess that’s what you do. Because you can. Or maybe because you need to.
What we call mainland Britain is really an island, the distance from north to south is only 600 miles, across its widest point it is 300 miles. No point is more than 75 miles from the sea…the distance my friend would drive for a dinner date…but we feel that some places are a long way from the sea. I would not want to live so far from the sea. So far away…a relative term.
What we call mainland Britain is roughly the same size as the state of Oregon. But maybe Oregon feels like more of an island to its residents, just with different parameters for space and time.
Oregon has about 4.3 million residents. Mainland Britain has just over 65 million. To put that into a deeper context, just in case, London has 8.9 million residents. Twice as many people live in London as do in the entire U.S. State of Oregon.
That has a lot of implications, but one of them is how little distance we Brits have to travel to find new people, therefore new art, new ideas, new restaurants, new styles, new ways of being in the world…news. Our sense of distance may be shaped not by how much land-mass we have available to us, or even by how long it takes, how easy or hard it is to traverse, but by how much ‘newness’ we can access close at hand.
Fishes might like shiny…magpies, too…human people like new. New is our shiny.
New is not necessarily actually shiny, or even actually 'new'. New is ‘new-to-me’. It is all the things I haven’t seen before, not heard, not tasted, not met, not shared. Newness isn’t a thing or even an attribute of a thing, ‘newness’ is our ‘experience’ of the thing.
Like I said: feeling.
Does this mean that my feeling of being ‘at home’ on small islands is shaped by the fact that I don’t know them very well? Do I feel time and space expanded there, because of the very fact that they are NOT home, that every lane walked down is likely to get me lost, that the building styles and local gardens intrigue me?
Or is it something approaching the reverse? Is it that I want to be gently constrained, to live for a time in a place that makes me focus on the close-at-hand, because that is all there is? Do I want to live in a place where the ‘newness’ might wear off quite quickly?
I don’t know.
And maybe it actually wouldn’t wear off. Things I have learned about islands…small ones…is that the weather shifts within minutes, the light is never static, there is always water to play in but you can never rely on its mood. I have also learned that their history is older and deeper and more complex than we imagine. It is also closer to the surface if we care to look.
I begin to think that I don’t need to know why I want to spend longer periods of time on an island, until I answer the primary question as to whether I could actually do it, and then I realise that the “why I might want to” is the strongest thread in the answer to the “whether I could”.
I do what I do when I have no answers. I try to poem them into being. I sit down on Porthcressa sand and I write…
I could live here.
I could sell everything I own and come here.
I could spend every evening looking at this bay.
Through all the sunset hours of calm,
through all the brief brewings of storms,
I could learn to swim here,
by which I mean to brave the winter waters
as well as the summers.
I could pick up sea glass
and do more with it than fill up jars.
I could learn all the flowers
that grow in old walls,
name and tame the gulls.
I could learn the locals
by the sound of their bicycle tyres,
their footsteps, the shape of their shadows
that pass while my eye is on my hand
and my hand on the page.
I could judge the hour of the day
by who is on the beach, or in the water,
learn to know that momentary thunder storms
give way so quickly that they may have been imagined,
to scent the wind, to sleep and wake by the light
through uncurtained windows.
I could write,
poems and fables
and simple daily rambles
through a simpler way of being
of how it is.
I could…
do all of this,
if I were braver,
if I could but face starting over
yet again
alone.
I thought the question was about whether I could handle living in a small, isolated community, whether I could be happy with one grocery shop, and few of any other kind, whether I could be happy in a place that was ‘limited’ in so many ways. I thought it was about my love of exploring and the restrictions placed on travel, when going more than a few miles is SO dependent upon the weather: boats and planes and helicopters – storms and fogs and winds.
I didn’t realise that the question wasn’t at all about the “to” and was all about the “from”. It wasn’t about what might be waiting for me – and honestly, I am still entranced by the possibility – it is all about what I would have to leave behind.
I find that my answer is ‘yes’, I could. I could live in such a quiet place. I could delve. I could wander and swim. I could cook with whatever was available on the day. I could do all of the things. But I am not (at this point) willing to pay the price. I am not ready – I may never be – to leave new-found friends, a home that took such love and time and ancestor-connection to create, a garden that fights me every step of the way, a city that has been my home for three-quarters of my life. I am not ready to leave.
So, then, now that I know, what do I do with that information?
