Isolation Blog, Ardnamurchan – Perched on a Hillside

People tell me that these days the towns are full of birdsong and that the scent of Maytime blossom seems stronger, easier to pick up.  With the fall-away of traffic and relatively empty streets this must present an extraordinarily different alternative to what for so long has been normal.  

Here, perched as I am high on a hillside, with the only houses visible some 15 kilometres away across the open sea, lockdown hardly seems to have bitten.  Lovely neighbours do my shopping—and whilst my work and income have come to a complete halt, I am free to walk the hill behind my house where I can be sure of being the only person.  

These past few weeks of good, calm weather have seen me outside, doing the necessary to my wooden house and to the seeming kilometres of rail-and-post fencing, cans of paint emptied in my annual attempt to ward off the ravages of winter, its arrival perhaps one of the very few things of any certainty this year.  It’s quiet, almost silent work, partly because of the decline in seabird numbers, partly because the shining sea is empty of the chug of boats, presumably because the quayside fish markets, with their hustle and bustle and the ring of the auctioneer’s voice, have fallen foul of current restrictions.

From time to time in the silences of the painting I find myself paused and staring, sometimes at the half-painted rail, sometimes at the vast expanses of blue beyond.  In this quiet, the longer one stares, the more the ever-present sense of surrounding eternity grows—and an awareness that our tiny, pinprick existences, even the grimness of this current incarceration, are not in the long run what is important for the world.  Dunking the brush into the pot yet again and staring at the long strakes of the fence ahead, I find myself praying that at the end of it all we’ll somehow persuade ourselves to opt for a route forward that’ll give us more of a chance of health and happiness than before. 

Dominic Cooper