I’m Back From Outer Space
Hello, all you lovely people out there! Shall we dance again?
It’s been more than three years since my last confession – er, I mean blog post. But the contents of those three years would probably generate a post a day for the next year, had I made enough notes. A lot has happened in my life, and I’m still considering what to say about it all, if anything. There’s an argument for simply pretending there was no hiatus and writing another post and getting on with things as before… but if anyone is actually reading this they’re going to be wondering what I was up to all that time, so I feel obliged to write something.
My last entry was on October 23rd 2019, and obviously the year that followed wasn’t exactly normal!
Covid
My experience of the pandemic became very vivid on the day that I went out in the morning to post a letter and found the A27 (which runs right past the flat) almost entirely free of traffic. It felt distinctly Wyndhamesque to stroll across a piece of tarmac that would usually have been a death trap at that time of the morning, pausing lazily at the pedestrian refuge in the middle of the road to photograph the extraordinary scene. I could hear the birdsong. It was a serene bleakness: one that felt like jumping to a parallel timeline in which cars had been ended and everyone walked everywhere – and I’ve since noticed a lot of other people with similar wistful recollections.
The company I work for switched to remote working for most staff, and working from home was an interesting experience too. A lot has been said about this topic elsewhere, but my perspective is that I’m able to get more work done that way, and that it makes for less wasted time sitting in traffic. A win-win as far as I’m concerned, but of course I’m lucky enough to have a software job, which means that my presence in the office is almost never necessary. Those early days were kind of fun in some ways, and lots of online interaction took place; we made a music video together, and there were regular quizzes held using Microsoft Teams.
Northward
I’m not going to dwell on the political upheaval that took place around that time and since, but one thing that definitely changed for me was my attitude to my nationality. There came a point at which I no longer felt tied to England, and I realised that the time had come to do something I’d thought of doing for quite a while. I began looking for a place to live in Scotland.
All in all, I took about three trips to Scotland to look at properties in the year or so that I was trying to move. In the end, I found a rented farmhouse in Aberdeenshire that I fell in love with instantly. Among other reasons for moving, isolation and a rural location were important to me. Given my budget, I was never going to find a perfect place, but the one I’ve ended up in, although only about 200m from a moderately busy road, is easily both quiet enough and a beautiful location.
Teething
Of course, a 120-year-old stone farmhouse in the country is not going to be without its drawbacks. I’ve dealt with minor leaks from the skylights and porch roof, mice infestations, issues with the water supply, broken gutters, ill-fitting windows that let the freezing wind in… and until a few months ago none of the rooms had carpets (now there’s just one).
Most of these issues have been easy enough to deal with, but the biggest challenge of all came just a couple of weeks after I’d moved in. Storm Arwen hit the entire country, and I was in one of the “red zones” and hadn’t had time to prepare. I didn’t even have any firewood or anything. As the storm blew up on the Friday I was just finishing work – and the power shut off.
I’ve lived with power cuts before in my life: I grew up in the seventies for a start, and it’s not as if it never happened back in Southampton. But in Southampton I never had a power cut that lasted more than a few hours, the temperatures were not -5C, and I wasn’t living in a house that tended to remain cool even when the heating was on. Without electricity I can’t use my heating, any of my cooking equipment, or my fridge, and even my water is pumped through a UV treatment device so drinking it would be slightly more risky if the power is off. I discovered a few things that I’d never considered before, among them the fact that when the only water you have to drink is extremely cold, it’s hard to drink enough of it. You end up, ironically, dehydrated in midwinter. I also discovered that while the imagined idea of cold baked beans might seem quite palatable, the reality is that they are rather horrible after the first couple of mouthfuls.
Friday night was quite nightmarish, with the wind blowing in through the brickwork vents and creating so much pressure in the floor spaces that I could literally feel my bed moving while I was trying to sleep. Using the toilet was also interesting, since my bathroom is built as a cube jutting out of the roof at the back, and was right in the storm’s line of fire: it felt as if the whole room were moving about, which is quite distracting when you’re trying to pee.
The power restoration was estimated originally for the next morning, but I had a feeling that wouldn’t happen because the wind was still gusting 90mph and I was on a rural spur line that obviously wouldn’t be prioritised for repair. But I wasn’t quite prepared for the eventual duration of the thing. I was without power for over four days in the end, during which time I was living in what amounted to a dark fridge. I had to use tea-lights and lanterns for light in the evenings, and although I slept in full thermals, dressing gown and woollen hat under two duvets and a blanket and was quite warm, getting out of bed in the morning took some effort. The room was so cold that the wooden floorboards smelled just like the cardboard packaging of food that’s been in the freezer too long.
What saved me, in the end, was my electric car. Luckily the battery had been almost fully charged when the storm hit, and so I decided to spend each day sitting out in the farmyard in the car with the seat heaters on to keep warm. I was able to use my phone to connect to the internet (4G was working fine) and on the Monday and Tuesday, when the power was still off, I was even able to do my job, though with a few limitations. I’d estimate that the car battery would have lasted until the Wednesday at least, but in the end I didn’t need to test its limits. The power was restored on the Tuesday night, just after I went to bed! I immediately got up, switched the heating on, and made a cup of hot chocolate, rejoicing. As a twisted form of welcome, Scotland had thrown me in at the deep end. The fact that I’d got through it unscathed gave me courage: if I could deal with Arwen, I could deal with the usual winters here. Several locals reported to me that it was the worst storm they had ever seen in the area.
Speaking of welcomes, on New Year’s Eve I opened my bedroom window at midnight to see what was going on. There were fireworks in a village a few miles away… and then I heard the bagpipes. Someone just over the hill was playing Amazing Grace. It was eerily lovely, and at that moment I felt that I truly had left England.
Eternal Springs
Moving on to Spring, the sparrows were abundant, the lawn needed cutting and the garden was beyond me to manage properly – but at least the weather had warmed up. It was time to install myself fully. I’d had to wait until a few things like window latches had been repaired, but now I was ready to rebuild my music studio.
The upstairs rooms in the house are all under the sloping roofs, and the one I’d selected for the studio was going to be a little cramped, but still way more space than I’d had in the old flat. I set to work, and after a couple of months I finally had it pretty much how I wanted it.
I came up with the name Eternal Springs for a number of reasons. My old music-making area in Southampton had had the name Stepping Stone Studios, since I viewed it as a way-station on my way to greater productivity, so I was sticking with the river/water themes – and I’d also once been involved in a collaboration with some other composers, writing music for a tabletop RPG called Eternal Lies.
And of course the other reason was that the world had been getting rather depressing for a few years, and I wanted to rekindle my sense of that which proverbially “springs eternal”. Anyway, here’s a time lapse video showing the build process from start to finish.
Writing
I’ve now been here a year, and I finally feel that I belong. I recently took a trip back to England, to visit my parents and see my son, who is at university in Cambridge – and I felt that I was “away”, rather than “returning home”. I guess I’m a Scot now, and that suits me fine. On balance, I haven’t regretted my move once. There are some down sides, but nothing that I consider a deal breaker. Emotionally and politically I feel more at home in Scotland. I’ve been learning Gaelic (originally so that I could pronounce place names better, but I got hooked); I’ve explored some of the coastline and walked up a small mountain; I’ve learned a lot about farming from my neighbour at the bottom of the track, who’s a retired farmer himself…
And finally – finally – after years of feeling cramped and uninspired in my flat in Southampton, besieged by noisy neighbours, traffic and pollution… I’m beginning to get creatively motivated again! I’m finishing a lot of little projects that were hanging around.
I began by finishing off the publication of a book my dad wrote in the 1970s.
Dad wrote this while he was teaching at a primary school and trying to find ways to encourage reluctant readers to pick up a book. There was a boy in his class who didn’t want to read, but who loved fishing, so this book was Dad’s way of dealing with that. It’s amazing that publishing your own books is so much easier now, fifty years later. I’m very pleased to have been able to do this and I know Dad appreciates finally holding his own work in his hands in printed form!
And talking of publishing… here’s another one, this time from yours truly! I haven’t finished any of my big novels yet (that will come eventually), but there was this web comic that used to be on SmackJeeves for a while, before the site collapsed… and for a long time I’d wanted to see it printed as a book, so I went ahead. I think it would make a great stocking filler for Christmas… (nudge, nudge, wink, wink!)
Next in the pipeline will be the publication of a collection of my piano solos I’ve written over the years, so watch this space!
I hope that in future I’ll be updating this blog more frequently. I haven’t quite decided yet whether to have a separate page about my music and keep this one for writing-related posts, but we’ll see how it works out.
My best to you. Stay safe and well, try to survive the slow motion apocalypse, and I’ll see you on the other side.
