A HOST OF GOLDEN DAFFODILS

 

Spring has been threatening for several weeks now, and for me it’s always the bugling bulbs that herald the lifting of spirits. That and the arrival of the cuckoo this Thursday. As regular as the German black forest clock that carries its name, the cuckoo arrives all the way from Africa. Our Scottish cuckoos are not the same as those from England. They are better fed and migrate via Italy, not Spain. The distance flown by birds was in days gone by hard to imagine, when Whooper Swans headed north to their breeding grounds in Iceland each spring it was thought they carried with them the souls of the dead. It is hardly surprising that those of us capable of flying can only manage that in our dreams.

Like squirrels hiding their stash of nuts in autumn we plant those bulbs, and if you’re anything like me you promptly forget where. I’ve often heard friends say, where did they come from, I sure I never planted anything there, and so an added magic is achieved. I do remember planting my host of golden daffodils. About fifteen years ago the wooden tubs that were dotted around New Tolsta had rotted out, and were disposed of in the quarry along with their contents. When dumping some of my own garden waste I noticed some bulbs poking out form the old compost and retrieved as many as I could find. Since then the few clumps have multiplied and miraculously have spread fifty yards up the road as far as the junction. It must be that forgetful squirrel at work.   

HANDS

 

When looking at the massive working hands of someone who has spent a lifetime on the land it seems hardly surprising that people profess to be able to read ones palms. These are not hands to be hidden between folded arms or stuffed away into pockets, they are hands to be shaken, and discovered within that grip, an age when tools had handles and machines were only for those who could afford them. A pre-plastic age when there was still pride in doing and creating all manner of things by hand. When the washing was taken out in a hand-woven basket, vegetables were wrapped in paper bags and milk came in glass bottles.

There amongst the modern supermarket shelves I saw him, a lumbering fossil of a man. Something has been prized from between the pages of my youth, and I await the smell of oily sheep’s wool to waft by. He examines a plastic bag of mixed chopped veg and I wonder does he know about stir fry, wasn’t it just tatties and swede in his time? His Harris Tweed jacket is almost shiny at collar and cuffs as he slumps forward on the bars of the trolley for support. His glasses are half way down his nose, a nose that sprout hair externally as well as internally. The white stubble sunken leathery cheeks speak of ages past, of evening sipping whiskey in smoke filled rooms, and those gnarled oversized hands that attained such grandeur with professional skill of shearing sheep from dawn to dusk. Now they grip the bar of the trolley like two great claws of a perching raptor long since extinct. This is a man of my childhood, from Tarbert market, that lent heavily on the iron gated pens as he tipped his head to the auctioneer and twitched his mouth in a silent bid. The man that held at arm’s length an ash crook with carved rams horn handle to catch a young lamb by the neck. The man who for endless summer afternoons walked with even pace behind the clanking binder, standing oat sheaves into stooks. The man that took my tiny smooth white hand in his and shook it with a grip both firm and tender, leaving me confident that in his presence I would always be safe.

The old man passed and I pulled myself back from another age and century with the strangeness and abruptness of a moon landing, as I stared at the short shopping list in my own hands.