North by north-west...

A Cairngorm - snow now also available on Rum!

Have been away for two weeks, on a small, personal odyssey through various places, finishing up with a stay in the Cairngorms - the other mountains on the far side (i.e. the east side) of the Highlands.  A different landscape - or it seemed like it at the time - complete with real snow, reindeer and a mountain funicular!  Now I'm back, though, it doesn't seem quite as different.  We don't have reindeer (although perhaps we should?) and don't need a funicular, but we too are getting the true Scottish winter.  And it seems our hundred-year-old boiler may be at death's door at last...

Snow, proper snow fell the night before last and yesterday morning the hills, fields and houses were covered.  All ferries cancelled today due to gales (gusts of up to 65 mph forecast for later on), even the crows can hardly fly against the wind.  Although this is nothing compared to hurricanes elsewhere in the world, here on the island, it has a meaning of its own.  Especially when last week the boiler broke down and there was no heating for a week - we can feel it, although we missed the worst! Colin came on to the island on Monday, after arguments with his bosses about weekend working (or he would have come sooner) and - thank you Colin! - managed to repair it.  I am so grateful, I make cakes for all the contractors (any excuse to be in the kitchen so I can get a bit warmer) - we have several, "Billy's gang" trying to shore up the castle towers before they let in more water over winter; "John and John's lad" shoring up the hostel, which really needs an entirely new roof as all the rooms are now leaking; and of course "Colin and Mike" without whom it seems we would not only be frozen but flooded too.  While we were away, not only did the ancient boiler stop working but the boiler room did actually flood - up to eight inches of water, no-one knows where from. Luckily Colin found a plug and pulled it and apparently all the water drained away.  But even with his most heroic efforts to repair the heating, being in the castle still feels like walking into a fridge.  We have been battening down the hatches, putting up thicker curtains and keeping them shut all day to keep some warmth in, keeping the oven on in the kitchen to warm it up whenever we have to go in there (the kitchen was formerly Sir George's bathroom, and has no radiator); moving into the back rooms where the heating works more efficiently; wearing more layers than actually would seem feasible while still moving...Not using the study at all, as it feels not just like a fridge but like a freezer.  Huddling in front of the open fire in the evening.  All in all, a pretty normal life - at least I find it, to my surprise, quite normal.

I remember I'm trained for winter, although London has spoilt me a bit.  This unaccustomed cold re-awakens physical memories of "real" winters.  Six-month, unrelenting Berlin winters.  Snow, ice, black ice, freezing rain, perpetual grey, temperatures rarely above zero, more ice indoors and out - good for iceskating, not so good for the inside of a kitchen.  My beloved Neukoelln flat with its wooden floors, wood-framed windows that I refused to replace with plastic (except in the kitchen, where the wood had actually rotted, hence the ice indoors) and no heating except for a giant oven in the bedroom. This oven was my pride and joy.  Unlike most Berlin ovens (I'm talking about coal/wood stoves used for heating, not cooking -  in the 1990s there were still lots of these on both sides of the ghostly wall), this was no purely functional, square, yellow-tiled "brick" sat squatly in the best corner of the room.  This was a tall, elegant, white wedding cake of an oven, so high I couldn't see into the top of it even with a ladder, with a tiny aperture at the bottom into which I would desperately stuff paper, kindling and briquettes and hope they would stay alight.  It took me about two years to learn the right technique. There was no ventilator to improve the air circulation, though luckily the room, thanks to my insistence on the old windows, was very draughty.  The chimney sweep (a regular acquaintance of many Berlin flat tenants), told me that really the oven was meant only for wood.  But wood didn't give out enough heat (I thought) and was hard to come by; anyway I couldn't imagine how you would get wood small enough to fit the oven.  Once when I was really poor I took to scavenging for bits of furniture in skips that I could break up and set fire to.  Other times, I lugged plastic nets of kindling (like giant satsuma nets) and even heavier bundles of coal up the three long flights of stairs to my flat and dumped them unceremoniously in the corner of the kitchen behind the door, which was covered in soot for most of the winter.  My fingers would bear the red weals from the bags for hours and my shoulders always ached from the cold and carrying the damn things.  I wasn't sensible or solvent enough to order half a ton of coal at the beginning of the winter, as my friend Astrid always did - somehow I never felt able to commit the money for a whole winter - what if I went away? Or suddenly didn't need heating any more?  Or it was too heavy and fell through the floor? Or perhaps I just liked the challenge, day by day, of keeping warm enough.

That was a romantic time.  I didn't think about the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning or even connect my regular January to March cough, chest infections and headaches with the fact I was living in a really cold place.  I loved lighting the fire.  I loved getting home in the dark, putting the fire on, leaving it to heat up the room (fingers crossed) and going out again for adventures into the sparkling Berlin night.  I loved watching the whirling snow outside my window falling on dirty Neukoelln, the ever-grey sky turning white, pink or orange.  There were times also when the fire would not light and when it was so cold in the kitchen that I would actually try to light the "other" stove that never worked and that you had to use curiously shaped "Eierkohlen" (egg-coals) for.  They would sit stubbornly at the bottom of the oven, while the paper and wood caught light around them, and refuse to even smoulder.  In my gloves and hat and scarf I would try for hours, returning to them with firelighters, more wood and paper and sheer force of will to get them to glow. Nothing doing.  But usually I didn't care.

Here, there is more than the cold to contend with.  The cold in itself is fine.  But there's no sparkle in these November nights.  People are in their houses, snuggled up, or mending things before the winter gets worse.  It is lonely.  Many people "go off" for winter although Christmas and Hogmanay are supposed to be a hoot.  Animals and birds go quieter.  It's a strange life, as if the island was gradually withdrawing even further from the rest of the world.  I'm reminded of a classic Austrian book I read (prophetically?) last year, called "Eine Frau erlebt die Polarnacht" (The Polar Night - A Woman's Story).  Written by a woman in the 1930s, it feels timeless; I wasn't sure what period of time it was referring to until I got quite a way through it.  This woman, Christine Ritter, follows her sailor husband to a hut in Spitzbergen within the Arctic Circle, after he has decided it is something he has to do to fulfil a lifelong dream.  The two of them are joined by a friend, but as the winter and 24 hour darkness approaches, the three of them know they are unlikely to see another human being, or any sunlight, for several months.  Both psychologically and physically they have made their preparations, but nonetheless, the isolation and darkness are so complete that Christine and her two companions are justifiably scared they might go out of their minds or become suicidal.  With awe and disbelief I read how instead, they managed to fend off despair and boredom by establishing a disciplined routine of housekeeping, card games, writing up scientific observations, hunting, and keeping watch for danger (polar bears were a real threat to them, and they had to kill one towards the end of the winter) by sleeping in a rota system.  Christine added knitting and clothes-making, and, of course, writing, to her "anti-despair" kit.  Nowadays they would have (probably) internet access, GPS, a variety of technology.  But not necessarily.  And this would not necessarily change the way they felt about the darkness or their physical isolation.  Christine was changed forever by the experience, describing both the beauty and horror of the dark world they lived in and the amazing feeling of seeing the sunlight come back in the spring.

I am not trying to compare our isolation to hers, although I wonder if it's possible to attain such a Zen-like acceptance of "nothing happening" - I don't think I would ever manage it.  But there is a feeling I share that to live on an island with so few inhabitants and with virtually no infrastructure, demands a different way of being - psychologically you need to be self-sufficient, resilient, maybe not too interested in other people or their needs, or what's going on elsewhere, but able to focus totally on the present.  I don't think any of that applies to me! So I'm relieved and even somewhat smug to find that in a report written about Rum in the 1970s, described in a recently unearthed archive we found, a Government adviser suggests that anyone planning to live on Rum should undergo a form of psychological testing "similar to that used for the British Antarctic Survey team" to see whether they are suitable for island living.  Ha! It's not just me who thinks it's extreme! Apart from the winter darkness, which here is only around 17-18 hours out of 24 at its worst, and the unpredictable weather, he was referring to the isolation that can be felt by those living somewhere completely dependent on a ferry and postal service for contact with other human beings.  At that time, there were far fewer people of course - and no internet or email.  It was still the "Forbidden Isle" with only SNH employees and scientists here.  Discontent, gossip and even theft were rife. 

That seems to have changed.  You can't stop gossip, but I haven't noticed anyone being discontented with Rum itself or the way they live.  They can be discontented about all sorts of other things, of course (mostly the other inhabitants).  But there is little or no crime, and from what I've seen, most people seem to be good at being here.  Forays on to the mainland seem mostly to be for short breaks or necessities, not out of desperation.   Even the contractors who come here (bless them for coming to Rum in winter), mending the castle and hostel roofs in the snow or today, a gale, seem to be philosophical about the strangeness of the island - the most they will say is "At least it's not bloody raining today, eh".  Though I feel this possibly doesn't express the whole range of their thoughts on the matter - especially when Colin woke up in the night to find his bed soaked from the leaks coming through the hostel roof...

Right, I'm off to move around a bit more and check the radiators - we have had them re-set to be on all night, to stop anything freezing and the pipes bursting.  And I need to go and get more logs from downstairs.  I can't help feeling that a hut would be easier to heat than a ten-room castle flat...