Quiet Days of The Mind

 

Letters from the Falkland Islands

I woke at 6am. It was a calm, bright morning. At some point later on the heavens opened and a hailstorm ensued. The hail set a few car alarms off. That surprised me a little; most people don’t seem to bother locking their cars here. The weather is incredibly changeable, even more so than a Scottish summer. Given the frequent shift between sunshine and showers, I was surprised that I hadn’t seen any rainbows yet. I asked Brad about it, asked how many rainbows he had seen since he moved here. I hadn’t asked him anything for a good few days, and I also had a question about MI6. He couldn’t confirm an exact number, only that he had seen some. He wondered if it was a bad thing that he hadn’t been keeping count. There was also some confusion about the photo of a gull that I had sent him. He wondered if it was a Black-Footed Albatross, or a completely new species. I hurriedly informed him that it was a pink-footed gull of some sort, it was just that I had turned the photo into black and white.

It was one of those tired sort of mornings if I’m honest, one of those days when you can’t really focus on anything in particular. Yesterday, I suppose, was a day of many thoughts, and the kind of thoughts which your brain will only let you access for a certain period. I wonder why that is, why we don’t seem to be able to keep the important things front and centre. Why is it that we continually seem to revert to a largely unintentional, unexamined existence? Maybe it’s some kind of self-protection, a way of stopping us thinking or feeling too much. Maybe the mind just needs some quiet days. Either way, I found myself quite content to watch the comings and goings of this world, watching the cars pass, and seeing a few people wearing festive jumpers. I did have a little mystery to solve, though. Well, it was more someone else’s mystery than my own. I received a message from one of my cousins, complete with a photograph of the inside of a Christmas card. “Can you confirm whether this is your brother’s writing? We think it is, but we can’t make out the name for sure.” Now, my brothers; all three of them are really pretty smart. But for all they know, and for all they have learnt, I sometimes wonder if they were ever taught how to form letters properly. It’s quite remarkable that not one of them ended up becoming a medical doctor.

I had a nice afternoon out-the-window chat with Mags and Catrin. We tried to do a back-issue Guardian magazine quiz. We consoled ourselves by all agreeing that knowledge of certain things is vastly overrated. We talked about what we had ordered for dinner, but we are getting to the point where we can’t really remember. Mags, though, had finally got around to asking for a bath robe. It was after several days of me going on about how it had revolutionised quarantine life. But there was a bit of confusion somewhere along the line, and they ended up delivering her a bathmat. Unbelievable really, given that she had described it so wonderfully as a ‘towelling sort of jacket’.

The evening wore on, and it was soon time for my second outside slot of the day. Despite a slight mental weariness, or at least no real interest in being mentally engaged, I was feeling, physically, quite energised. I went out to the sheep pen and ran the second 5km of the day. There was sunshine, and then there were showers, and with that came the rainbows which I had wondered about earlier in the day. I smiled, and it was a smile that comes from not only seeing something of such beauty, but of feeling the wonder of it in your soul.