Witness Notes 10

The Alps, Isere, France. September 2020.

(After you have read these introductory paragraphs once, you can skip to the new/old content below. If you are listening, then the time stamp is around the two minute 45 second mark.)

Introduction

The word settled, to me, carries connotations I am keen to avoid. I have never felt settled or, perhaps, I cannot recall a time I felt settled. I do not feel settled now, writing this, and I’ve lived in the same house for three and a half years.

Without even discussing the obvious issues of colonisation, I just don’t feel like I could, or should, settle; better to keep my constituent parts shook up, agitated perhaps, rather than separating and stagnant.

Instead, I feel as though I have been travelling for years, maybe because I have not lived in my ‘home’¹ nation of Scotland for eight and a half years, perhaps because I know I won’t stay here forever, or maybe because I carry that concept of home in a way which differs from many?

More precisely, I still think of myself as a slow traveller, globally feral.

Recently, I have been revisiting places through the photographs and words I recorded when my feet crossed their soil. This is a way of reminding myself of where I have been, not just in space and time, but in mind, too. It is a wonderful thing, to come out of a low and rediscover myself through words I crafted, through the lens of a camera, when memory has wandered in the fog for too long. Thank you, past me.

When I first started sharing letters with the world in this fashion, six or more years ago, I usually began them with a vignette of where I was, a sort-of travel diary, mixed with nature observation, locking in the setting for the reader, before I spoke of other things—and, by so doing, ensuring that place fed into the whole. It was a useful device, for reader and myself both but, as these letters were sent to so few readers, and now languish archived behind a paywall, I thought it a shame not to share these snippets again.

As such, I am going to share a short series of these sketches, accompanied by a photograph from that time, sent to you in date order.

I shall include the above paragraphs in each of the letters in this series, but I shall also include a link at the very start, so you can skip ahead once you are familiar with the above words. If you are listening and similarly want to skip, then the timestamp you want to navigate to will be in the same place.

Taken without these paragraphs, each is a short read, and I hope you enjoy them.

The Alps, Isère, France. September 2020.

It comes not through taste or sight, sound, or touch, or scent, but through something other, another one of our senses the majority somehow forget we possess. It is a pressing down inside, something foreboding, ancient, deep and utterly, utterly untamed.

The clouds build, towers of moisture tumbling and billowing, trying to outdo one another, ever higher, faster and faster. Their bases widen, their tops level and they begin to move together, energy gathering, a meeting of lovers, their dance electric.

Here, in the glacial valleys of the French Alps, it is a time of storms. My head often hurts a warning, my brain whispering of coming downpour, sometimes long before I even notice the genesis of the clouds. Then azure skies are darkened, summer glare disappearing into dim murk and sudden, swift, gunmetal grey. My head continues to be tightened within atmospheric vice; wine helps, paracetamol surprisingly less effective.

Then the first distant rumble is felt through the air, through the ground, inside my chest. Another. And another. Before five minutes have passed, the mountains funnel the storm, echoing from cliff-face to cliff-face, ricocheting from building to building, cracks and booms, or the deepest bass you could possibly hear, rolling, loud, long, at the very edge of hearing.

They say that the buildings of Grenoble and this corner of Isère are utilitarian, simply because how could they possibly compete with the surrounding beauty? Yet the same, otherwise nondescript, sheer surfaces of tower blocks and modernity come into their own during a storm, channeling the sound, adding reverb and returning the same thunder from an entirely unexpected direction. The effect is powerful, a reflection of the sheer thumping beauty of the storm itself.

Then the gap between peals lengthens and the centre of the downpour moves away as quickly as it arrived. Thousands of litres of water have been dumped in the valley and on the steep slopes all around the city. This all feeds into the Isère—a river of considerable power and danger, never placid—which, in turn, flows to the mighty Rhône.

Yet, even with the funnelling of storm along the valley, this is not the end. Often, the shape of the earth itself will play a surprise hand of its own, the clouds bouncing—a mountain and storm pinball—back into the direction from which it came.

Then it is spent, and the air is fresh, my head recovered, the loam and soil rich in my nostrils, puddles and pools begin to gently steam in the summer warmth and birds bathe and drink their fill.

I love storms, no matter where I am. It is the same sensation as when I climb to a high place, or stand in the shadow of a wonder of nature—I feel small and, by feeling small, I grow.

Finally

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Finally, many thanks for reading. I truly appreciate each and every one of you who does.

1. And ‘home’ is another of those words. A subject I have been writing around for decades now, one I keep threatening to try and pin down in a long essay, but an essay which has now escaped the confines of a compact base and rambled out into something wilder, more feral. One day I’ll share that with you.