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And so I wondered… as there we stood on Slappin’s shore below the wood as sun at last turned grey cloud to gauze and sent it on its way thinning as far as we might see towards the Cuillins’ majesty now as if painted by Paul Henry over from Connemara on holiday. * * * And then another round we made that night but sleepier and not so late with music at our cradle: ‘Corn Bunting’, ‘Airy Plover’ and MacIntosh lamenting, ‘Isobel Mackay’, with pipes dispensing poignant melancholy; ineffable pibroch from Rideout’s fiddle, ‘Dreaming of Islands’ to escape our trouble – all at our leisure, in a stolen break… Now try to find your way back. Wherever that is to the like of us, tenants of a half-way mad house. Still, next morning we must board and wave farewell, to sail the road. And as we went, defragged and ready for the fray, that wide load came to mind again, and a question: whether its boat had been bound for a breaker’s yard or the ocean. 316
page 319
Much as I wonder here and now about the future, and my letter to you. Ca staway I knew all along there’d come a day that would turn out to be today, and I must say goodbye to the island, and so to my life: a castaway in spirit and letter, adrift on England’s darkling plain. Certain that where, and whatever, days came down to, and however I got by, there’d be no going back to then – when life was lived in the round – and I drained my glass to the last, staring into the middle-distance meditating, making up my mind, as I’ve tried ever since to do here: making to stay something, as an island does, coming and going on the horizon, holding its ground in the tide through the vagaries of weather. A Song Snow chalked to windward through the little wood, monochrome, as if on scraper-board. Look closely and find traces of new life on pause in the thin cold. Human-seeming, heart-ruled, 317

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And so I wondered… as there we stood on Slappin’s shore below the wood as sun at last turned grey cloud to gauze and sent it on its way thinning as far as we might see towards the Cuillins’ majesty now as if painted by Paul Henry over from Connemara on holiday.

* * * And then another round we made that night but sleepier and not so late with music at our cradle: ‘Corn Bunting’, ‘Airy Plover’ and MacIntosh lamenting, ‘Isobel Mackay’, with pipes dispensing poignant melancholy; ineffable pibroch from Rideout’s fiddle, ‘Dreaming of Islands’ to escape our trouble – all at our leisure, in a stolen break… Now try to find your way back. Wherever that is to the like of us, tenants of a half-way mad house. Still, next morning we must board and wave farewell, to sail the road. And as we went, defragged and ready for the fray, that wide load came to mind again, and a question: whether its boat had been bound for a breaker’s yard or the ocean.

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