Whenever people ask me what it is that I love so much about this place, that I want to keep coming back, I struggle to answer. I have a saying that if you have to ask the question, you won’t understand the answer…but maybe there is something that approximates to the opposite of that. If I can’t give you the answer, perhaps I don’t understand the question.
What is it that you want me to tell you?
If what you’re asking me is why you should love it as much as I do, I can’t answer that. Truth is: I suspect you probably won’t. So maybe I should answer the question as asked, for what it’s worth. What is it about this place that keeps bringing me back?
It is, simply, this: a return for a while to a simpler way of being. A slower way.
I remember when going on holiday was all about doing stuff, seeing stuff, busy busy busy, don’t miss a thing stuff.
Now it isn’t.
When the whole of my life was a round of frantic to-do and deadlines, it seems that I approached holidays the same way, endless research and itineraries, the same get-up-and-get-on-with-the-day attitude.
To be fair, if you’re hiking in the low Himalaya you need to do that – be up before dawn, on the trail at daybreak, so that you can retreat when the afternoon winds start stirring up the dust. Likewise, Cambodian temples are best seen at dawn before both the tourist buses and the noon-day heat arrive. In other places, doing other things it matters less, but I hadn’t worked all that out back then.
When we went to Wales or Dorset, I’d be frustrated by Clive’s ability to sleep away half a morning, linger over a breakfast he’d never have made for himself. I was feeling the day slipping away un-used, wasted, while he was just slowly deciding how to let it unfold. I owe him no end of apologies for that.
But then, I owe him so much else as well.
Perhaps he understood better because he was older. Maybe it was just because he was wiser.
Reasons for being how I was are various. One goes back to childhood. Not long after Christmas the latest “Camping and Caravanning Club” year book would arrive, which was the cue to thinking
about “where do you want to go this year?” In hindsight, I’m not sure how much impact anything we kids said had on the final decision. We didn’t have much information to work with. By the time we could say anything sensible in contribution, I think my fixations were basically beach and hills. Maybe castles. No surprise how often we ended up in Wales and Scotland – and how they were better holidays than the ones in places like, say, Weston-super-Mare.
When we got wherever, there would be guidebooks, and maps, and what do you want to do tomorrow? There was always somewhere to go, some historical thing to be explored, some tourist “attraction”, some story to track down, some local custom to witness.
Busy-busy.
But there were also those long hot summers when really all we wanted to do was be on the beach, and swim in the sea. Long days that were so hot that my parents were equally up for doing nothing more.
What I find fascinating now, is that those Wales and Scotland holidays when we did the least, are the ones I remember most clearly, and yet I have spent years disparaging people who travel to the sun to sit around a pool for a fortnight.
Somewhere in between my mindset must have shifted. More than once.
The activity-focus probably embedded itself that time Dad asked me to list what I wanted to do and see on a couple of day-trips to London. Rummaging through the guidebooks and deciding: Westminster Abbey (the grave of the unknown warriror) – the Crown Jewels & the Tower where
Anne Boleyn was held – Houses of Parliament – a river trip – Trafalgar Square…
I don’t know what else we did. Or what I wanted to do. I was too young to think about art galleries and museums, but maybe one or two of those were thrown in for good measure.
What I remember of those two days are just fragments: being on the boat, Dad’s watch dropping off his wrist into the Thames as he pointed out the MI5 headquarters. The way he didn’t react to losing it. My young cousin feeding pigeons in the Square. I have a sense of the Abbey, but I have been there many times since. Our images build up over time. The slow procession around the Jewels in their cases in the Tower – and not really knowing what to make of it all. Talking to the Beefeater about the ravens. Credulous, I believed every word. Literally.
Now when I believe the stories of places it is because I want them to be true, rather than assuming that they are.
I don’t remember exactly what was on the list I gave my Dad. I don’t remember if we did it all. I remember a Greek restaurant and eating with my fingers, because a waiter told me I could
do so. I remember my cousin was ill the next day and Mam stayed home. I seem to think that one day was with both parents and my cousin and the next was Dad, me and my brother. Impressions. Smudgey images. Trains that looked like they might once have been pulled by steam locos.
I could have all of it wrong and muddled, except the bit about being given the books. That I remember very clearly and I think it set the tone for future trips: there needed to be a plan, a list, a cramming in of as much as we could.
So it was for years. Decades. More than a plan. An actual itinerary. Sometimes in my own hands, sometimes in the hands of others – the freedom of choosing given over in exchange for the
managing of logistics and the opportunity to walk in some unbelievable landscapes.
Holidays were what I worked for. I put in all the effort and hours so that I could afford to pay to go to places – albeit awesome amazing places and no regrets – where I continued to put in all the effort and hours.
I need to go back to the journals of those trips, to see what I was thinking at the time. I want reassurance that I was doing more than ‘changing the wallpaper’ as the German saying has it.
My more recent mind shift happened unnoticed. Slowly. It happened here. On Guernsey. Or, more accurately, it happened because of Guernsey. It happened between being here, and being home, and the knowing that I had to come back, to keep coming back. It happened because I didn’t know what it was that was happening. Or why.
I still don’t know for sure but when people ask, the word I use most often is ‘slow’.
It is because life on the island is somehow slower, and I suspect that is intrinsically connected with the slowing up of my life generally.
I want to underline that: slowing up.
Not slowing down.
When we talk about older people slowing down, it has such a negative connotation. It sounds like a running out of steam, a winding down towards an involuntary stop. I need to say, boldly, loudly, joyfully, here and now, that is NOT happening. I am not slowing down.
I am slowing up.
I am putting on the brakes, deliberately and intermittently. I am choosing the speed (by which I mean the degree of busyness) of my life. I am taking control of how much and how little I want in any given day.
I’ve said elsewhere and will say again: accepting the word ‘retirement’ was hard for me. I had handed-on views of what that looked like. Little old ladies, blue rinses, sadness, the shrinking of lives ever inwards. Or maybe worse: the opposite. The fight against aging, the dressing mutton as lamb, the surgical procedures, the pretence. I didn’t want to be either of those women. I want to be me.
This - the island - is the place is where I began to learn who I am. So it is also the place is where I come to learn the next little bit of my self.
This is my sixth time on the island. Five of them spent in this same small apartment complex. All of them spent learning a little bit more about who I am now and what I want from this final third of my
life.
So that is part of it. The island is where I came the year Clive died. It is the place I came back to twelve months later having outlived one possible version of my future. It is the place I missed when we were all locked down at home. I cancelled other trips that were on the books back then. I didn’t even consider cancelling coming back here. We rescheduled, and rescheduled, and eventually I got back on the boat.
And I have done so each year since – so that now when I get off the boat and call a cab, they don’t only know who I am, they know where I’m going, and they’re not surprised when I say – just as we start up the winding road of Val des Terres – “it’s so good to be back”. Breathing in the sea air and the deep misted woodland air of the valley…it is good to be back.
Back to this place of slow and simple, back to my out-of-time place.
Back to this...
A simple apartment, with very basic furniture. The living room strikes me that it is arranged more for ease of cleaning than comfort of living. Hard-flooring, all the furniture pushed back against the walls. It does not speak of comfort, but of function. One upside is the space it gives me to practice tai chi. A long narrow space which, if I choose my north carefully, works perfectly.
An apartment that allows me to cook.
An apartment that has its bedroom window high enough above the road that I can leave the curtains open and wake at night to stars in the sky, or in the morning to whatever the weather is doing. Last night was such a clear sky, Orion watching over me. This morning was wild wind and rain.
An apartment that is only a few feet away from the pool.
A pool. I can swim every morning. Fifty lengths is about half the fifty I would do at home, but I will do it every day I am here. At least once a day. Sometimes twice.
The sea. Fermain Bay. A sea-swimming spot that is about fifteen minutes walk away. An almost-every-day sea swim. Every good weather day, anyway. On a good year.
Sitting on the beach in that bay…out of the water…half-dressed…unexpected return of the sun…writing…suddenly noticing I have the beach to myself…there is a single gull, and the black diving bird I had been swimming with, probably a Common Scooter. This too.
And the black cat that comes to wrap itself around my legs, while rejecting the advances of other visitors.
Waking up. Going to sleep. Not watching clocks.
Learning the back-roads: the zigzag routes to places, the “pedestrian only” alleyways shaded by trees, warmed by stone walls, and at this time of year beginning to acquire their soft underfoot leaf mulch.
The wayward way of weather. The speed with which it squalls through. Days that I decide will be indoor days of darkness and rain somehow turn into afternoons of swimming and sunbathing.
Thunder storms. Heatwaves.
The way I can decide to just walk down to the local co-op and find myself wandering back streets I hadn’t previously discovered, more RouettesTranquilles that twist back on themselves and lose my bearings and remind me I should always come out with the map or the phone, both of which I have
invariably left behind.
Stone walls with flowers growing out of them.
Gateways, doorways, portals…untold stories.
The way I come with a list of things I might do this time…and the way in which I sink happily into not doing them.
Slowness. Wandering. There is something about wandering the lanes of this island that I haven’t found anywhere else. Maybe it is the freedom to allow myself to wander aimlessly, knowing that however lost I get – and I get very lost, in the sense of not knowing where I am, of being disoriented, of being concerned about how to find myself again – but nevertheless somewhere underneath the feeling of the moment is the knowledge that the island is very small and the bus service is very good and failing that there are taxis and that in any event I will almost certainly find my way back and walk it.
At the end of the day: however lost you get on a small island, you will find yourself again.
I think that is why I keep coming back. To give myself that feeling of being able to get lost while knowing that in doing so I will find myself again.
3.9.25
