Getting to Arthur’s Seat is a bit of a clamber. We’re not dressed for it, of course. We’ve come to Edinburgh to visit art galleries and the Scottish Parliament. But there it is, rising above the city, an extinct volcano with a 250 metre peak, an end point, a destination. It calls and so, in our city shoes and our city jackets, we set off.
We’ve just spent three days with friends, Angie and Nick, at their stunning manor house in Fife. I used to work with Angie and we lived relatively close to each other, but now the intervals between visits have expanded. When we arrive, Nick is in the process of laying slates over yet another roof leak at a height that gives me vertigo even on the ground, and Angie is in full tilt, organising events for the Franco-Scottish Society. These two don’t know the meaning of retirement.
We take a walk in the Maspie Den woods at Falkland, familiar from our visit three years earlier – see https://joannaharperwrites.com/hell-is-canned-music/ and, in the afternoon, walk the beach at St Andrews and the ruins of the monastery. There’s a bitter wind and, once we’ve located Nick and left Angie at a lecture, we gratefully slink into the Students Union cafe for a hot pot of tea. We’ve arranged to all meet up at a ‘pop up’ Thai restaurant which popped up two years earlier and never popped back. It’s extremely popular and the food, although only vaguely Thai (or perhaps Scottish Thai), is none the less delicious.
On Friday, we all drive to Perth to see a Millais exhibition and I’m introduced to the Scottish painter John Duncan Ferguson, one of the most prominent artists of the Scottish Colourist Movement. His portraits are more stylised than representational and, although he spent many years with the Paris impressionists, Matisse and Picasso, this influence is only vaguely there, overlayed by his smooth strokes of colour. I’m captivated. While we wander the gallery, Angie uses this visit to organise two lectures for the FSS in conjunction with the Sorbonne.
So, it’s our last day north of the border and we’re stripping off any layer we can as we sweat our way up to the peak of Arthur’s Seat. The final fifty yards is a literally rock climb and, blinded by the low afternoon sun, we guess rather than judge where our feet should go. Then we’re there, with a 360 degree view and a piper heightening the feeling that we’re part of some historic pilgrimage. It’s very very windy, and that adds to the sense of some primeval connection with nature; like the urge to climb, to be at the top of a hill, out in the elements, is built into the human DNA.
Before flying off to Scotland, we have a flying visit from our daughter, Kate. She’s now settled into life in Copenhagen and, with her residency finalised, can leave and return without the convoluted process of visas. We spend a warm, chatty couple of days together and then she’s off again. It was always thus and probably forever shall be. But there’s an exciting plan afoot to gather again at Alex and Lia’s London house for Christmas and we respond to this plan with enthusiasm.
Since returning from Australia, life has settled into a new rhythm; a bit like the old one but with a difference. I feel more at ease, more relaxed, no longer so driven to achieve. It’s as if I’ve found an old part of myself, like a hole has been filled in, and yet, I can’t say exactly how that happened. Only that I think it has something to do with my mother – the reduction of my relationship with her to some core visceral level. The loosening of the tie that is bound up with memories she no longer has. Is it a release? Possibly.
But it’s also to do with those letters she kept (see https://joannaharperwrites.com/searching-for-ghosts/). A realisation that the stranger who wrote them is also me. As if I’m a Ferguson painting that he never got round to finishing, with that bit in the middle of my torso left blank. Until now. Would it be too much of a cliché to claim that in losing part of my mother, I’ve gained something of myself? . . . Probably. So all in all and for the sake of the reader’s sensibilities, it’s best if I leave it unsaid.
