Isolation Blog, Largs - Climbing the walls

Four weeks into this I get a redirected letter dated 01 April from Nicola – I’m shielded and not to go out for 12 (TWELVE) weeks! I gasp in disbelief. But I’m climbing the walls already, I say to no-one in the room. There is no-one in the flat. I’m isolated and living on my own.

I tell people on the phone that we need routine, structure, something to root our existence in a regular reality. In common with other correspondents, we’re staring at walls, as if in some kind of unconscious self-correction from hours of nothing much we’re dreaming actively and graphically about nothing that seems of any consequence, we’re trying to cook interesting food (though, in my case, not much interested in eating it) and we’re reading and reading – news, features, morbidly anything with the horror of Donald Trump’s name in it, and books.*

Twelve weeks in solitary is too much. I break the rules on day one. I go out for exercise and air and some sense of purpose, actually just OUT. Around Largs, along the beach, out to Pencil Point and then the 200m Knock Hill. Two weeks ago I climbed Knock Hill [6 miles from the flat door and back] up through the closed but still neatly manicured Routenburn Golf Course and onto the rough gorse bedecked ground of the last 400 yards in the company of only sheep. I am no nearer any other human than 25 metres. I tell myself I am only shielded on a technicality and I have no symptoms – who would I catch them from?

On the third ascent of Knock Hill in 8 days where the view in this clear Spring weather is a treat – the entire Firth of Clyde north to the Argyll hills, Holy Loch to Toward, Loch Striven, Bute, Cumbraes, Arran and the Ayrshire coast - I nevertheless observe that this may become compulsive, so look for other distractions. But what?

People in the street are skittish in conversation. They want the distance. A socially distanced conversation in the garden with Les and Mandy who own this flat and live upstairs touches a nerve in my artisanal memory. I can paint the close door. Then it’s the stonework around windows and door on the front of their building. I’ll get my ladder and stuff from my toolstore. Passers-by call 20 feet up to me from the street. I’m making new friends. Still reading and trying to eat I put in two full days and need another day to heal my aching ladder-bound legs. Heh, we’ll soon be seven weeks in. This is a breeze.

I remember the film director, the late Bill Douglas, in his trilogy of short but arresting autobiographical films set around his Newcraighall home, My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home. They are an exercise in unrelieved emotional grimness and a metaphor for political anomie which I remember being profoundly touched by when I first saw them in the early 1980s. I remember in the last of the three which offers a glimpse of hope when our young hero, Jamie, is conscripted into the RAF and posted to an unprepossessing desert station in Egypt. He is put to painting stones which guide their jeep through the desert. Dull and repetitive tasks provide some kind of solace when faced with nothing much and in Jamie’s case the residual anxiety of an un-nurtured life. 

So I’m up the ladder painting stone. And not for the first time in these weeks the empty solace of the thought enters my brain – there’s always someone worse off than yourself!  

Derek Rodger

* Okay, I’ll tell you. The list is long but there’s been no shortage of time:

Joe Bradley - Celtic Minded 4 – essays on Celtic football culture identities

John Burnside - The Music of Time - poetry in the twentieth century 

Jim Carruth - Bale Fire

Jim Carruth - Black Cart

Carol Craig - Hiding in Plain Sight – exploring Scotland’s ill-health

Tom Crainey - The Hidden Story of the Kilsyth Weavers

Lucy Ellmann - Ducks, Newburyport

EM Forster - A Passage to India

Lesley McDowell - Between the Sheets – nine 20th century women writers and their famous literary partnerships

Phil Mac Giolla Bhain - Downfall – how Rangers self-destructed

Ben Macintyre - The Spy and the Traitor – the greatest espionage story of the Cold War

Hector Macmillan - Handful of Rogues – Thomas Muir’s Enemies of the People

David Nasaw - Andrew Carnegie

Deborah Orr - Motherwell – a girlhood

Alan Stewart - Walking with Wildlife – a year on a Scottish estate