Paying Ready Attention

Everything is big these days.  Big meals.  Big games. Big news.  Big risks.  Bigger promises, backed by bigger lies.  And today’s big is much bigger than yesterday’s, and will be much smaller than tomorrow’s.  Yesterday’s big TV will be tomorrow’s phone screen.  Everything is so big, and hence so uniformly forgettable, that when you come face to face with things of genuinely enormous magnitude it takes you by surprise. Four and half hours out of Melbourne airport and I’m still in Australia.  For much of that time the view down from the window has shown nothing but red soil and rock pocked hills running off into the distance.  The flight path to Darwin takes you over Australia’s red centre, over lands that are some of the most thinly populated in the world.  For the most part, over landscapes not riven by the familiar comfort of road or rail.  The straight and narrow of human transport is missing – instead t...

I woke to the sound of gulls fighting over a fish.   Possibly both herring.   I lay still and let the sounds of the day come to me.   Swallows chittered softly somewhere and house sparrows chattered to each other from the bushes in the garden below.   There was a sharp rhythmic pinging sound as a rope slapped against a flagpole that proudly flew the flag of Orkney.   Bright sun leaked around the edges of the blinds, even though it was only just gone 5 o’clock.   Here, the tilt of the Earth brings early mornings and late evenings; there is no midnight sun, but the days of summer are long.   Compared to the tram bustle and traffic drone of Melbourne, such sounds are a lullaby and I quickly fall back into sleep.    Strangely, even the morning sounds of a place I have never visited before sound more familiar than the soundscape I have awoken to for more than 20 years.   That may explain why my return to sleep was so rapid, so predictabl...

I don’t like to be late.   And I don’t like to be lost.   I find both states deeply unsettling, breaking, as they do, the temporal and spatial maps we hold fast to in our heads.   So, if I manage to be late or lost, my brain does little intracranial loops and tends to get a bit cross.   But crossness in the face of your own stupidity is a waste of time and energy – you need to save crossness for things that are important. I started to feel just a tad uneasy when I could not find my flight in the departure board, so I checked and double-checked, but no, it was not there.   I walked up to the check in desk (which was suspiciously quiet) and asked:   “Where do I go for this flight?” “Aberdeen” came the reply. I let that sink in for a while – looked at my ticket and felt pretty stupid.   There I was, in Glasgow airport, looking at a ticket to Orkney from Aberdeen airport.   A mere 3 hours away by road – and the flight was depart...