Rum Diaries no. 1

A Saturday like many others, but in an unusual place

Woke up at 7.55, I consider this a good lie in, I’m usually up before seven. There was a message from one of my swimming comrades ‘swim at 8? I ignored the message for a while, since it was too late for me to mobilise in 5 minutes and, more importantly, I had not had my first of two cups of pre swimming tea.

Made the mistake of checking the weather forecast – felt like a rookie. After looking out of the window and and my phone, I saw the ferry had cancelled and that the forecast for tomorrow had worsened. It was a decreasing forecast I had said, it will improve I had said. Well, I was wrong - maybe something to do with the wind direction? – from the east - unusual. I got a bit angsty and tense for a while; I am planning to go off island tomorrow, winding my way to Norway to visit a friend for her 50^th birthday, and if the ferry cancels, it throws my well laid plans into disarray. I was so irked that, instead of going for a swim, which would have definitively improved my mood and outlook, I chose more tea and looking out of the window instead.

This is the kind of unhelpful melancholy I now try to head off at the pass and didn’t last long – I took myself off for a calm slow breathing meditation while the bread was baking in the oven and fifteen minutes later felt much better and commenced operation contingency plan.

With amended plans in the bag, I was reconciled with the outcome – I would still get away if the ferry cancelled, I would still get my haircut and still make my plane, emergency accommodation provisionally booked and the train was running to timetable.

All good, I settled down for some mindful glueing and sewing to keep my mind from straying back into disasterville. Superglue was my best friend today, I glued the arm back on my favourite glasses - it won’t bend anymore but this does not matter. I glued the towel rail back onto the wall in the bathroom - I have no idea how long this will last for and fixed the two little egyptian pharoah figures that have been hanging around since daughter no .3 was little. They were her favourite things for a while so they deserved to be fixed and returned to sit on top of the toilet cistern - back where they belong, looking very out of place.

Having random items of objet d’art/tat around your house is the price you pay for having children.

I darned the heel of a sock. I love darning and don’t do enough of it, I have a darning pile just like my mother and grandmother before me and love repairing and changing old clothes, time is the only factor limiting how much gets done. I knit most of my own socks and walk around in them without footwear so much that the heels always develop holes long before the rest of the sock is even slightly worn out. There’s a fair few socks waiting to be darned. The trip to Norway, where it will be cold, spurred me on to darn this one and its pair - they are merino socks and I’d like to keep my toes toasty in them while in a remote cabin a few degrees north of the arctic circle.

Sometime around noon my body decided it was time to eat. I popped over to the village hall where one of our number is running a cute café on a Saturday.

Leek and potato soup with roll, and yet more tea were called for. I took a book with me - latest read is Ultra Processed Food by Chris van Tulleken, a good thing to read whilst eating homemade wholesome food, but I didn’t even get chance to pick it up, as some fellow islanders came in, and we chatted instead.

We are an inventive and enterprising bunch; we mentally redesigning a currently empty building, brainstormed an idea for a membership/patreon scheme to raise funds for the community and wondered if there was potential for crowdfunding for skills instead of money to help us with projects - like workaway but maybe for architects or surveyors etc. And then it was onto choosing ridiculous names for our friend’s baby due to be born soon.

Interlude over, we talked about the imminent ( or not) sale of the local castle - it’s more of a big house, but called a castle. A bit of an eyesore to some and takes up a lot of unnecessary mental space. It’s a cross between a red herring, the elephant in the room and an existential threat. I drew a venn diagram to illustrate this.

No one is allowed inside anymore, unless they are wanting to buy it. We were discussing ways of repurposing some of the contents for the benefit of the community, but the security locks and motion activated cameras are a bit difficult to bypass – all in jest you understand, this is the Saturday afternoon banter of a few islanders eating cake and drinking tea,

waiting for a ferry that may never come.

We decided a well-timed power cut may be key.