Amazing how easy it is to survive without the internet!
I was away on holiday last week in a Highland cottage in the rain with a lot of books and some paper (and my Loved-one). I wrote four letters, on paper, and I put them in envelopes with stamps on them. It’s a bit like going to a museum and having hands-on experience of the Old Ways of Doing Things, except I was living in the museum.
In another way, it was like time-travelling back to the twentieth century, since I took some of the future with me, including a Kindle (though I didn’t use it much) and a laptop – ditto. I actually read real books – only two of them, but one was very long. I managed to read NO POETRY AT ALL. It’s amazingly easy to survive without that too, oddly enough.
And I did the HappenStance accounts, or pretty much brought them up to date. It all served to prove how insane the whole enterprise is. Even after the Michael Marks money in 2010, Inland Revenue will owe me money, rather than the other way around. This hardened my heart to the untimely submissions waiting for me on the mat when I got home. Such a shame!
What sort of things do you buy on holiday in the rain with no poetry? I bought a necklace made of little stones (even though I already have about fifty necklaces made of other little stones), some Goddard’s silver cleaner (don’t ask) and a snow shovel. It wasn’t snowing or anything, it was just the fact that last winter when I wanted one, I couldn’t find one, and there they were, standing in a barrel outside a hardware shop in Kingussie—blue ones. So I went in and rather apologetically forked out twelve quid for the snow shovel. “It must seem weird,” I said, when people come here on holiday from Fife and buy snow shovels.”
“Not at all,” grinned the shop man. “Since they came in, we’ve sold eight” (I think it was eight) “and all of them to people on holiday. Can’t get them, you know, down south.”
I have my doubts about their unavailability. There seem to be rather a lot on Twenga, but last week I was felicitously (for the man in the shop) netless. I also have my doubts about the much-predicted snow. There was another man in the shovel shop, talking to the shopman. I remember him well because he seemed to be about twice as tall as me. Anyway, the other man said there would be a lot of snow again this winter – it was certain.
“How can you be so sure?” I asked.
“It’s the activity in the sun,” he said. “There was a lot of it last winter, and now there’s even more.”
I didn’t ask what kind of activity, though I am pretty sure he would have expanded the point. I just thought how ironic it was that activity in the sun should bring us snow.
There was very little sun last week in Scotland, and therefore very little activity in it on our part, but it did snow on Wednesday. Not enough to shovel but enough to turn the hills white, while we sat by the fire reading old-fashioned books made of paper.
The next day it got warmer and wetter, and the day after that even warmer and even wetter, and now we are home. It is unseasonably warm for October and not quite raining.
Nevertheless, we have one brand-new snow shovel and quite a lot of salt. Bring on the white stuff! We are READY.