Many years and miles away I worked as an assistant teacher in middle schools in the north of Hiroshima prefecture. I worked out of the local authority education office alongside the, experienced and erudite, subject advisors. When I left to return to the UK I was given a seal with my full name written in kanji. I already had a seal with my surname written phonetically (you needed this to open a bank account) in katakana but, since the kanji ideograms have meaning as well as (multiple) pronunciations, this was a more personal gift. My office deliberated and discussed and eventually the characters were selected for my surname, pronounced 'sen' and 'puru'. These translated as an archaic and obscure description of a 'thousand raindrops falling from a roof'.
On days like this out on Scotland's west coast I comfort myself with the fact that this weather is my destiny: the sodden birds are sheltering on windowsills and the steady drip from the eaves is drowning out the birdsong.
I was woken at 5am this morning in the half-light of a northern spring morning by a hooded crow repeatedly banging the porch window (and knocking off my inappropriate geranium plantings). The porch faces west so, as the eastern sky lightened, the crow, in a breeding season frenzy, must have seen its reflection in the dark window and decided to attack. One of the side effects of staying somewhere so quiet (our nearest neighbours are about 7km away) is that any noise, no matter how small, can be disturbing. I find the scariest thing is a mousetrap going off just as I'm falling asleep: part of my mind interprets it as a footstep and before I know it my mind is racing through paranoid ideas of invasion. An even stranger side effect is auditory hallucinations which occur when it's completely silent. My mind doesn't like the absence and so invents something (generally the diesel generator running ... not that gothic really) to fill the gap.
Although being woken by mad birds to a damp day is not ideal, this is a great time of year: it's mild out and the days are long but the midges haven't quite started yet. C is finding it increasingly difficult to cope with anything apart from hot, dry, mediterranean weather and he's headed back down to Glasgow to get gloomy about the cost of building untested wind turbines. This means I'm completely alone up here and, since it won't last for too long, revelling in the peace and freedom. Which I'm using to weed the garden and plant out some brassicas. As you do.
