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soba

Soft green onions, gluey white daikon, and skin-coloured flakes of fish, curling gently in the heat of our breaths. Add these to the blue and white porcelain bowl which you’ve half-filled with a thin soy-based sauce, poured from a round ceramic jug. Break apart the cheap wooden hashi (chopsticks) and mix the green onion, the white daikon, the skin-like fish flakes, and a dab of gloopy green wasabi into the sauce. Pick up some of the dark dry green strips of nori (seaweed) and sprinkle them on top of the pale slippery soba (buckwheat) noodles. Lift some of the noodles from their red and black lacquered box, handling them with your hashi as best you can as they slide and slither, and place them into the bowl of sauce.

Now and then pick out one of the assorted shapes of lightly fried battered vegetables (tempura) that sit in another of the bowls on your tray (the one which looks like it’s red underneath is sweet pepper, the one which forms a lattice shape like a noughts and crosses board you don’t know). Dip these into the sauce too. And eat. Oishi desu. Delicious.

When you are finished plucking and sucking and mixing and crunching, pour half a cup of liquid from the square teapot you’ve just been given – it’s the water the noodles were cooked with – into the small handle-less cup, and pour in the remainder of your sauce. And drink. And look from the counter where you sit through the hatch into the compact kitchen, stacked with bowls and trays and black and red boxes, where the cook-proprietor stands resting in the heat with a white rolled-up towel tied round his forehead. His sweat beads as the condensation does on the sides of your glass of iced (and probably mildly radioactive) water. It’s so hot the air is chewy. A typhoon is on the way. It was hard to sleep last night because of the building heat but also because intermittently your room was trembling slightly. The tremors were subtle, barely perceptible, but you woke and knew that nothing was stable, not even the ground beneath you. But the food is good here. And since almost nobody talks about it, it’s easy to forget to question its radiation content.

Itabashi, Tokyo, Japan
22nd September 2014

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Yes

The flag flaps indifferently outside. You wrote your hope on it and you raised it on the sail for good measure: the affirmative doubled, and reflected twice in the still sea that surrounds.

The polls are perfectly balanced. Tonight the tide rose as the sun set and in that moment of golden fullness, you wished that it all could hold itself, poised here; your country’s hope as buoyant as its doubt, spreading out on this wide blue salt mirror.

But the sun set, the tide drew out, and you had to fold in your sail as the moon sailed up instead, round and full and sure of itself in the high and silent sky. If the glow would grow, if the people would assent, if this time turning will be for the best, if we will all say yes –

Ara' Deg mainsail raised with 'yes' banner pinned to it

Lochinver harbour, Assynt, Scotland
14th September 2014

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rowing

I go for rows most of the days when this loch of the river mouth is relatively calm.

I row partly because each day I need to look at the horizon. Some days I want the height of the headland or the boulder-piled breakwater and the prospect of Harris and Lewis rising a little higher. However, other days I want to be on the same surface as the horizon, to be level with its elongating distance, the flat bottom of our tender licked fast to its constituent sea.

The rowing also has the purpose of holding my nerve. Since we’ve been docked on pontoons all summer, indirectly land-tied, I miss living at anchor and fear I’ll lose my hard and slowly-won ability to row solo on the sea.

My rowing ritual isn’t grand. I untie myself from our floating dock, push myself out from the sheltered pocket of water behind Ara’ Deg, slide the oars into the oarlocks, plash quietly round the last finger of the pontoons, and ease out alongside the breakwater. I keep an eye out for any large fishing boats that look like they might be about to head out, or fast ribs, which make big wakes which scare me. But all the same, while I’m still in the harbour, I am in man-made shelter – until I work myself round the end of the breakwater and into the pull of the open horizon.

This is the turning point, where I feel us – the boat and I – rock as the ripples of wave or rib or fishing boat reach us, where I feel the breeze rise and ruffle, feel the tide ease us back or on.

I adjust our direction and pull straight out to sea for a few strokes, veering slightly north-west or south-west to be riding directly into the wind, if there is any, keeping perpendicular to the line of waves to take the rise under our bow and avoid being rolled side-on. Then I steer us round the back of the breakwater, out of sight of the visual security of the harbour.

Now I am alone with the horizon, held between the long-ridged arms which hold it out afar. A couple of small humped islands hover at the mouth of the loch and beyond those Harris and Lewis sometimes float on the other side of the Minch. I stare out and attempt to read the horizon, attempt to absorb and understand whatever lies upon it. And then I just sit, or bring in the oars and lie back on the steady lilt of the water, closing my eyes or gazing skywards, letting myself drift in this rolling sheen between the sea surface and the underbelly of the sky.

I never rest completely, my mind taut with watchfulness and fear of the water. And after a little time I rouse myself, rise, dip the oars back in, and turn us around to row back, watching the horizon close gradually with each small stroke, relieved and sad to be returning.

This ritual is always the same and always different. Sometimes the whole sea is sunny, like an open blue field. Other days it is closed, distant and grey. Today it was cloudy where I sat and swayed and drifted but the clouds were shifting and splitting and, further out, a bright patch of water lay under the sun, broken by the wind into shimmering speckles of light.

Looking at it filled me with an acute longing. It was irresistible: a glad glimmering, a golden gleaming, a meadow of heaven cast to the surface of the sea… so I rowed towards it but it was impossible to reach. As I approached, the scattered glimmers widened to slim liquid lines, sliding along the ridge of each rippling wavelet. Even as I felt the sun on my face and arms and knew I had arrived, the flickering shimmers receded and receded.

It’s always further on, you see; it’s always further on.

Loch Inver, Assynt Sutherland
2nd August 2014

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Easdale

We sailed not far from Easdale last summer. We were going to sail right in and anchor by the island but, as we drew out from Colonsay and glided along its east coast, clouds began to gather in the distance ahead and, by the time we reached Colonsay’s northern tip, the Firth of Lorn looked dark and ominous. The wind had moved round too and was bearing down upon us and the sun was shining in the west, so we changed course and sailed into the sunset instead.

This year we were again going to sail there but our boat was in the north and the winds were from the south, so instead I took a collection of cars, buses and ferries to arrive, crossing the final short stretch of sea in cold windy rain.

I came to visit friends and took shelter in their cosy cottage with a cup of tea until the rain eased off and we set off round the island with wellies and children, sliding over the slate-heaped beaches and exhilarating in the wild washing of the waves over the sharp serrated lines of rock.

A big mist was still hanging around the coast but bits of brightness were starting to seep through and, as the others trailed slowly round the path, I quickly climbed the lumpy slice of hill. The island from up here looked astonishing, a strange gouged-out darkness with whiteness and lights crashing all along its shattered shores. As the air gradually cleared, the whole cauldron of island-ringed water beyond stretched itself out – to Seil, Luing, Scarba, Jura, Islay, the Garvellachs, Colonsay, Mull. I let myself drift out to meet them, following their rising rims, slowly navigating them in my imagination and last summer’s memory.

I was in a gentle dream; but as I picked my way back down the hill and ran the thin path round the north of the island to catch up with the others, I was caught by the quarry pools. They were so deep, so still, so blue, they seemed to gather into them all the wide distance of the waters outside, and to concentrate all their colour. I stopped at one, then another, then another – the deepest blue of all. A fine drizzle soaked into my skin as I stood gazing down and in.

Eventually I pulled myself away and now I stand in a glowing pink evening at the back shore staring out over that island-rimmed horizon. The wind comes across the waters, breaking them in white froth on the dark slate at my feet, but still my eyes are in the deep blue quarry pool on the other side of the island where all the wet world is, secretly, hidden and held.

deep blue quarry pool on Easdale

Easdale, Argyll, Scotland
7th July 2014