If I think about island life, an image predominates: of harshness. It may be inaccurate – but the image persists nonetheless: of a black and white world, where there is little ‘give’; rather, it is a world all of ‘take’, and what return there is, is earned in hardship and sacrifice, within a cultural context as unremitting as the physical, predetermined to humourless devotion.
Of the more immediate prescience viz-a-viz of the physical context, it is ally, and hardly illuminates an appreciation of the place by contradiction: for the climate is harsh, as is the architecture. Buildings, and in particular dwellings, are set low into the landscape, tightly compacted, and barely decorated. Consequently, they are miserably plain – product certainly of response to such unforgiving climatic conditions, but reflective also of predominantly Presbyterian beliefs…..perhaps…….
Whatever the causes, the overriding effect is one of joylessness, which extends beyond the individual buildings to the whole: and to the streets too, and inevitably, to the street where the finalist of this epidode is situated. A street….even to call it a street? It is hardly that, a lane promoted under objection, wherein lives would hardly be inclined to rejoice: it would not host bunting; for if it ever did it would only amplify that unavoidable impression: of inflicted stoicism above all else. Delight would be ashamed to wander here, and likely would be hounded regardless – and even time would be unable to mitigate; age has not softened such an appreciation. No quaint adverts celebrating bygone living would be filmed here, no recalcitrant children would deliver bread-loafs still warm from their cooking, despite the comparability of the steeply rising street, for there are no cobbles nor crumbling textures engaging, nor daylight long enough, nor ever the slightest expectation that such a street could be rendered romantically in sepia tinged tones, no matter how potent such tones can be.
Indeed, if a rendering were ever instructed, it would not be difficult to imagine it being produced instead, in charcoals and of a tonality blacker than the reality. Such a render might feasibly incorporate a man, his back to the viewer, obviously aged by his huddled and hunched form, more hunched than it need be despite the weight of the rain and the darkness of the unlit night, his weary figure trudging lamentably homewards, and discernible only by fault of the moon and slender light escaping from deliberately sealed shutters in the windows of alike neighbours.
It’s a bleak impression; and to be sure, the biting rain didn’t help; nevertheless, it was indisputably a mean street……but, whilst thinking on it, other thoughts invaded, other thoughts less so about the immediacy of the place, to the more expansive context where those preliminary thoughts had their origin: of island life, and the unavoidable relationship to the sea, and all the subsequent myriad of unavoidable associations.
I have never sailed the high seas; I’ve taken ferries, that’s all (and admittedly, never more so than whilst filming this series); land has rarely been out of sight. Yet I’ve long loved the attendant tales: of pirates, and sea monsters, of Verne, and Conrad, and Moby Dick, and Shackleton, and Bligh, and Poseidon and his adventures……and of Navarone, and Moonfleet, and Rebecca, and of lighthouses, and the perpetual sense of trepidation, of being at the mercy of nature, being forever ‘subject’, as opposed to ‘object’; and the need then for places of shelter and safety, of harbours and smugglers caves; and the imperative of being able to find ones way, to navigate, and in turn, owning the skill to use sextant, and compass, and the ability to sense by dead reckoning, and to be able to read the stars, and more latterly: to have the trust in mankind’s invention, or Prometheus intervention: of lights created – lights, which by their colouring alone can indicate place, by relatively: I know I am on one side, or another, port, starboard; I know, by light alone, where the danger lies, and how to avoid it…..and even if I cannot, there are always lifebelts……lifebelts and lights….those same two features, fixed externally, embellishing an otherwise blank façade, which subtly announced: this home is different…..the entering of which would transpire to provoke a completely different impression of this place. Hanging above the door: there were the lights; and adjacent symmetrically on either side of the door, the lifebelts…… life belts; that simple invention of transparently ergonomic purpose, designed to serve likewise a solitary purpose: to save life ….
I read once that all too familiar adage, that a life saved and not lived, was not worth saving. What then is a life lived? And if lived, less so how, but most pertinent to this programme: where? And I have read too. an adage oft repeated regarding home: that a truck driver may be at home on the road; but he is not home at home. Why then not bring that home so keenly felt in one’s industry, into one’s home? Why not rescue the character of that time so assiduously and joyously spent, and flavour one’s home accordingly? Why leave, ever, one for the other? Why not be home, at home, whether one is at home or not?
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It would of course take quite a leap of decorative courage to do so – for the trappings of truck, or in this instance, seafaring, don’t immediately lend themselves to the normal trappings of homemaking – but I forgot in my instinctive assessment of the island life to remember the humour, the likes of which I have easy reference: to Whiskey Galore, Para Handy, Local Hero …… tales of characters and attitudes that delighted in the individual, and each individual uniquely identifiable, notably distinct and hardly blurred. Such individualism has been translated here, into as memorable a picture of a home as I will treasure, as I treasure the memory of first watching those humour ridden references. From the moment of stepping through that so slightly yet uniquely decorated façade, the tide turned, from a black and less white prospect, Powell and Pressburger-esque into startling Technicolor.
I left the land and stepped onto the sea, and more so, despite my tender experience of sea faring life, was made to feel to utterly welcome …and warm, it must be said!
The colliding of two worlds so abruptly executed, and by the quality of the interior inventiveness, its consistency and obvious passion – that alone might have been enough to warrant this home as suitable finalist. But then there was the inside-out shower – and my initial impression of island life literally turned on its head, and made to make me ashamed to be honest, to have even endorsed for one second such an impression. Island life may well have been harsh, but to implicate all into some collective identity, reduced in capacity and capability – hardly……
I will therefore never forget this home; for its personality so transmuted, certainly, but most of all I’ll never forget this home because of the shower. It cannot be easy being the outside of any building in such a locale. To bring those materials indoors, and furthermore, to allow them to remain, and be warmed as opposed to being continually battered by sea spray and bitter wind and rain – now that is a home with some amount of compassion; and more so: of a remarkable capacity to provide shelter from the storm……
MA (Jan 21)