Pictured above: upside down in Leith Links, Edinburgh. The hour is 9pm. The sky is still blue, but the sun has recently set and taken with it the baby green of the trees, leaving black lung-like silhouettes and a small white-windowed tenement building. The photo-taker (me, Hannah!) is dangling from a climbing frame in the park, and this is her vantage point. Rush of blood to the head not pictured (or maybe it is, do you feel it too?)—
Quick notes from Scotland’s newest old arrival:
I love trains.
I truly love trains.
Living without a car again is the best.
People wear long coats here. Everyone blusters or breezes about with a good deal of fabric about them.
Arthur’s Seat wears its own long garment, coattails of golden gorse at the foot of the mountain.
A great many grandparents push prams in these parts.
Some streets house architectures of great glory, others great grimness.
I will need to find out exactly what funded the glory; who and what enables grimness. I will listen carefully and then learn how to add my spear to the hunt.
Maybe my new street would count as a grim one to some, but I love it. Glorious.
So many windows host Palestinian flags and CEASEFIRE NOW posters. Agony and agape.
Bluebells on embankments are the joy I didn’t dare to hope for.
One minute I feel completely normal, as though I have been here all 32 years, all along.
The next minute I have boarded an elevator only for it to drop down the lift shaft. A visceral body-shock to be here, guts akimbo, the ground of my life fallen out from under me again.
Finally finding a flat, on the top third floor of an old building (no lift shaft!), is to fly on a magic carpet. I thought I needed my feet on the ground, but I only needed to be here amongst the wheeling gulls and distant steeples. I only ever need to be able to
spot the moment the airport switches the planes’ takeoff direction from West Lothian to Fife. I only ever need to be able to look out from the shared stairwell and see the rare band of light on the distant Firth of Forth.
The Taylor Swift album release was a great frivolous thing to happen for anyone in a deracinated newcomer existence. A shared event, across timezones. Hermeneutic games aplenty, because is there anything better than everyone interpreting something at the same time?
(Don’t you think that So High School feels so much like The La’s There She Goes?)
The day we arrived into Heathrow the whole of the UK was inside a cloud — not rain, but baubles of malicious chill. I found myself sobbing for my reunion with this good mean old place.
After moving to London from Auckland at the end of 2019 as a fresh-faced masters-completer, and then back to New Zealand at the end of 2021 as a covid-displaced safety-seeker, I am finally, in 2024, back to where I always wanted to see to unfinished business—
—the place where my life started, on the east coast of Scotland. Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Dundee, Montrose, St. Cyrus, Aberdeen, inland up into the Cairngorms, and, before the lowland generations, the highlands and islands. All my strange familiars. Schooled in the warped mirror of the settler-colony, an alien has landed back amongst her ribbon of relations.
In living here I want to begin again only inasmuch as I need to live my own story and suffer my own self. I don’t want to make anyone else suffer my self. I want to be able to say this is my pain, rather than I’m going to smash this pain into you, whoever the person or group or environment might be on the receiving end.
Those who most loudly trumpet personal responsibility are often the worst at taking responsibility for their own shadowy pain. When we’re engaging in vilification there’s some crucial failure to take responsibility for our selves; we’re asking someone else to do it for us. So we can all ask—
—how can I really see my own sense of lack or hurt, and have it end with me? How do I profess my pain, as a child of fallible parents and a child of this harsh world? Everyone with the power to drop bombs and snipe schools and massacre hospitals, or anyone voting for or paying taxes to said people needs to see and feel it all.
April’s end means we’re at Beltane, between spring equinox and summer solstice. Tonight the May Queen will join with the Green Man for their summer rule. It’s at this time that the seven sisters appear near sunrise on the morning May horizon.
The pleiades constellation means so much at Matariki, too — the new year festival in Aotearoa. Sameness in relativity feels uncanny. Maybe this watchfulness is the inheritance we can all occupy. Interpret those skies, read the signs, pour playful hermeneutic labour into all of life. Is there anything better?
Until next month may you let yourself live with the full force of our agony and agape, our human pain and love,
H x
P.s. God, I love trains.
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Yes Beltane! Also, love trains so much
Does this mean you get to visit Joanie? :)
I love your adventures Han x