THEY lie there waiting for you, the special places. I found this one, or it found me, when I explored behind the cottage I'd hired for the week, deep in the Galloway forests.
I'd been out front, across the road, to the loch. But, generally, as soon as I'd finished another 30 words of my novel, I'd jumped in the car and headed off to explore small towns.
But, this day, as I sat drinking coffee at the picnic table – with
goldfinches and tits fluttering a few feet away on a feeder – I thought to myself: "I wonder what's behind the belt of trees at the back there."
It was a blazing hot morning. I'd woken about 9:30 and lay in bed reading a cowboy book and some Wodehouse. Then I did tai chi and dumbbells – separately – out on the grass. Had some boiled eggs on toast, and coffee. Felt I ought to get down to writing something. But the brain doesn't like writing (comments to yourselves, please). If you want to get your house tidy or complete a normally unpleasant chore, just say to yourself: "I think I'll write a novel today." This sends the brain into a panic, prompting it to instruct the body to indulge in manual labour that needs little thought.
Today, it wasn't my house to tidy. And I felt I should be outdoors. So I set off, more or less fearlessly. Although I'm frightened of exploring social situations, I'm less afeared of nature. My biggest nightmare there is of meeting a wax-jacketed thrall or gillie. I do not believe in ownership of the land. In particular, the idea of someone forbidding me from walking in my own country, because they have sectioned it off so they can shoot things, moves me to such a rage that I fear I will not be responsible for my actions.
On this occasion, too, I had my top off, which brings out a primitive, Tarzan thing. However, the rational part of me was also saying that, if I came upon hostile forces, they would look and say: "Look, it's a potato-skinned man with love-handles. Let's bash him."
But the beauty of this place was that they didn't seem to go in for such savagery and, besides, there was never anyone around. This is a difficult state to find. The human race is everywhere, and it's a nuisance. So, making as little nuisance of myself as I could, I cut through the back garden, passing the little nibbling fieldmouse – with whom I'd become buddies (it thought I was cute) – and, after climbing a fence, clumped through the dried, tussocky grass that skirted the piney woods.
I'd a brief encounter with something muddy, and felt my bare skin lashed by gleeful branches after I took an ill-advised turn. But the adventure was otherwise free of setbacks. Then I came to the edge of the trees and looked out on a beautiful, fir-fringed loch, with little islets in it. Beyond these rose hazy hills. I was entranced. At the corner of the wood, I lay down beneath the beaming sun.
This is a worry, of course. I burn easily. I'd bought sunscreen in town, but it made my eyes water. My idea was that a few minutes would do no harm, and would indeed very likely do good, as our peelly-wally, northern bodies rarely absorb any of the life-giving, death-dealing rays, and this cannot be right. So I lay down on my t-shirt and did what I do best: went into a dwam and looked up at a blue sky through high branches.
I thought: "It's amazing that I'm here. We get so caught up in work and suburbia and shopping, and we go round and round in circles, ploughing the same furrows of habit until we get so deep we can barely get out again. And all the time, places like this are here, waiting for us." Here, too, as I lay ostensibly comatose, I solved the problem of heaven. The difficulty is that we find bits of heaven like this, and we love them. But, after ten minutes, we always get up and leave. The important point to grasp, however, is that there is no concept of time in heaven. It's a false construct. Every moment is eternal. Contentment, therefore, is not the endurance test we make it here.
Accordingly, after ten minutes, and frightened by the risk of serious illness (thank you, Jehovah the Merciless), I made my way back to the cottage, ambling in a dream, smitten by a love of place. Back at the ranch, the fieldmouse still nibbled the grass. The birds still dangled from the feeder. "Fine day," I said, to no-one in particular.
Read Robert McNeil every Tuesday and Friday in The Scotsman.The full article contains 827 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
