Filey 2.9: 3 – 9 June

Each night, as I soak my dry eyes in a warm cloth, I listen to 10 minutes of Proust as an audiobook. The books aren’t so much a novel as a fictionalised autobiography, an extraordinarily detailed meditation on time, childhood, and how we behave when we’re in love (so far, at least: I live in hopes that it may contain scenes of wacky nude alien mud-wrestling later on, but I’m only on book 2).

I find it strange how fascinating Proust’s narrator finds his own life, sent spinning back through the years by a piece of madeleine soaked in a teaspoon of tea; for in my own case, I try to avoid thinking about the past as much as possible.

In fact, it wouldn’t be too much to say that I regard my own memories as a sort of asylum for the insane, each recollection firmly locked away—but in the night I can hear them howling and banging on the doors to their cells, demanding to be let out.

You think I’m exaggerating? Suppose we open a door at random, lulled by the silence within, in the hopes of finding a docile patient.

The River at Helmsdale

Here is the café in Birmingham New Street railway station one dreary, wet Saturday afternoon in 1979, and here is our hero, sitting at a table, waiting for his connection home after the ugly termination of some commonplace affair or other. In front of him is a big cup of coca-cola of the kind you find in movie theatres, untouched.

A smart wedding party enters the café, which is crowded, and settle at his table. Just then, our hero hears his train called and gets to his feet—and in doing so, with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, knocks over the cup of coke. A tidal wave of black, sticky liquid is launched across the table, directly towards the middle-aged lady opposite: it resembles the blast wave of a nuclear explosion as seen from the air, or one of those animations of the Black Death spreading across Europe in the 1340s.

Gorse in bloom above Helmsdale

Everyone freezes and stares, fascinated, as it pours remorselessly across the surface, reaches the lip, and cascades in a frothing waterfall directly into the lady’s lap… And when the mist clears, our hero realises that his well-intentioned attempts to dab up the stuff with a napkin have left glistening handprints on her dress in places that…

But no. Best we close the door again, and leave this inmate to rave on in dark seclusion. And after all, if I’m going to spend my time reminiscing, I think it’s best if it’s somebody else’s life, such as Proust’s; mine is a bit too, well, personal.

Back in the present, this weekend we went for a jaunt south down the coast to Helmsdale (which always sounds to me like it should’ve been besieged by an army of slavering orcs in The Lord of the Rings); it’s a scenic fishing village just over the border into Sutherland, with a harbour and a museum—which was the reason for our trip.

There’s gold in them thar hills?

The museum has a modern feel, open and airy, well worth a visit if you’re in the area: it’s not bursting with exhibits, but the ones they have are well displayed. (Or at least I presume they are: when we went they were having trouble with the lighting, which kept flicking on and off as if a 10 year-old with ADD was operating the switch; such was the effect on epileptics that the foyer resembled the “Atlanta wounded” sequence from Gone With The Wind.)

I’d been told they didn’t have any ganseys, but we were delighted to find that this wasn’t the case—there was one on display, knit in that lovely old-fashioned silvery-grey yarn you don’t see any more. It had a buttoned collar and the body consisted of an open diamond pattern; the shoulders were patterned with a > > > > .

(By the way, strange but true, did you know there was a short-lived gold rush in the hills behind Helmsdale in 1869? Over 600 prospectors piled in and a shanty town of huts sprang up in the bare uplands. But the gold ran out, winter set in and within a year most had gone back to the herring fishing. You can still buy a licence and go prospecting up in the hills, though whether you’d find even enough gold for a filling these days is an open question.)

Finally, the gansey: I’ve almost finished the back—just 3 more rows and it’s on to the “rig ’n’ fur” shoulder straps. (I’ve also, mirabile dictu, just finished the first cone of Frangipani yarn, something I was beginning to doubt would ever happen: like those magical goblets of wine in Irish legend that replenish themselves when emptied I thought I’d discovered a cone of fairy yarn.) Hopefully by next week I’ll have started the front.

And now it’s time to go soak my eyes, and listen to some more reminiscences. As the great Bob Dylan says in one of his songs, “Maybe someday I’ll remember to forget…”