Wisteria is growing in through my window. I can hear it existing as I write. Behind me I just trashed about a decades worth of webwork by a very much still alive harvestman spider, just by plugging in my mobile phone. “I thought you’d love the wisteria,” says Ellie, who could have trimmed it back before I came but knows how I love nature. I do. And I feel sorry for the spider but she’ll rebuild.
I love it here. I’m in this comfy bedroom now where the windowplant is talking to me and there’s space. High ceilings and room between the bed and the door. I sleep well in rooms like this cos I grew up in them. I haven’t closed any of the curtains. Tomorrow I want the sun to wake me, not an alarm. I’m here in the Scottish borders and I’ve never slept here before but the silence is vast compared to what I’ve grown accustomed to. I don’t have to be anywhere until 8.15 on Wednesday morning in Greenwich.
Look back two decades… Ellie and I buggered around at The Globe in the corporate leg of it just after we finished training. A load of us … we got cherry picked by some guy who wanted to make very very broad strokes populist stuff and call it a Frost Fayre. Much of it wasn’t to many of our tastes. The joy of it is how so many of us are still in touch decades later. It was a crucible of sorts. I’m glad I got stuck in. It has nothing to do with the work I still do in that place, but it has informed my friendship group – my running mates. Ellie is still making fresh work and asking questions. We’ve been trying to hang out for a long time now and finally managed it.
We walked around the gardens. There are hares here, openly loping about for evening silflay. There are badgers. On the horizon there’s even a tree with mating osprey, well enough served by the river teviot that they return year after year.
Every inch of this soil is laced with power. There’s a dormant volcano just in sight, a buried dragon. Life overlaps life in an endless drive. Yew trees and rivers, dryads and hamadryads, mud and sun and haze and moon. Ellie and I talk into the night about the lights that have always drawn us, about how we can focus those lights, about where and how we shine in their glare.
A joyful calming night. Too much wine? Never. And here now in my annex I will fall asleep and my spirit will talk to the quietly bumping wisteria and the busy harvestman. I’ll go journeying over the pastures and woods in dreams. After a full on social wedding, it becomes a quiet and reserved night here – once more the borders. The edges. The liminal space.
There’s history here, and character. Much has come before, much is to come. And this stone house is talkative and living, as all the best ones are, as Eyreton was. I’m gonna stop writing and start listening now, to the wisteria, to the air, to the stones, to the silence and to my creative soul here where I can hear my heartbeat.
AlBarclay 