Witness Notes 9
Cercal, Portugal. August 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.
Cercal, Portugal, August 2020.
No place has but four seasons, and Alentejo is no different. Summer, yes, of course it is, but it is no longer the days of the wildflower-rich, high-sun summer, nor the screaming-swift summer, nor the misty, haar-wreathed nights summer. Now is the time for the wind, for warning of extreme fire risk, of small but perfectly succulent blackberries, bursting with flavour, of the nights cooling, and the ever-swelling green globes of the next crop of oranges, hiding in plain sight. This is the summer which whispers of autumn.
The swifts have gone. For a few weeks their numbers had halved, the adults bidding tchau! to their progeny, leaving them to swoop and swallow, to carve the air with new wings, calling to their classmates and then, suddenly, disappear themselves. When this happened, I am unsure. I just noticed they were all gone on the 1st of August, the skies still speckled with swallows and martins, but silent of swifts. The summer whispers of autumn.
At night, the owls call, and the comet has passed, no longer a feature to be admired with naked eyes or, even better, with binoculars. All ages of change have a fiery-tailed star, and ours is no different. I wonder what those in this corner of the world thought of the comet’s last appearance, 6800 years ago? This was also a period of great change, hunter-fisher-gathering beginning to be replaced by farming. Here, in this period, the very first Dolmen, or Cromlech, tombs anywhere in the world were first constructed (and we do not really know if they were tombs, or something else). It is tempting to wonder what this same comet meant to those long ago people. For me, it was a chance to be reminded of how fleeting life is, how marvellous and how wonderful it is to be such a small part of an intricate whole and, I suspect, they felt a similar way. The owls still hoot, as their ancestors undoubtedly did then; they call to one another across the valley, reciting the story of summer, of a summer now whispering of autumn.
Finally
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Finally, many thanks for reading. I truly appreciate each and every one of you who does.
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.