The Blackbird Diaries by Karen Lloyd

Author:Karen Lloyd [Lloyd, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nature writing
Publisher: Saraband
Published: 2017-10-11T11:59:42+00:00

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11 Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze, Vintage, 2010.

Eight

The World Aglow

July 1

Waiting by the slipway in Tobermory. Dr Conor Ryan of the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust had offered a lift to Ulva Ferry on Mull’s west coast; we were catching an evening sailing to Staffa.

It was late afternoon. The fish-and-chip queue at the van on the pier was long and growing longer. The smell of frying fish was good, and suddenly the sandwiches I’d packed seemed boring. Something black and tattered fluttered onto the slipway. There were feathers poking up at strange angles, interspersed with bald patches. New feathers sprouted like a double-layered Mohican along the bird’s back, though in far less orderly fashion. The tail feathers were ragged, and the wingtips were scrag ends ready to fall away. A male blackbird in full moult: this is what bringing up babies does to you.

Conor arrived and we set off. He told me he’s from Cobh Harbour, near Cork in Ireland. I’d been there once, I told him, and I remembered the sculpture of a man in what was half bath, half boat, holding another tiny paper boat in his hands, as if about to set it down, all flimsy and insubstantial. Cobh – the place from where the Titanic set sail.

At the top of the hill, Conor’s girlfriend Vivvi jumped in, and the three of us fell into conversation.

After a while I asked Vivvi, ‘Are you from Cork, too?’ She spoke perfect English with a definite Irish burr.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m from Finland.’

We stopped again to pick up Gemma – the director of the Whale and Dolphin Trust, then zipped down the island road to Salen, crossing Mull at its narrowest point and following the winding road around the coast of Loch na Keal. Mull’s highest mountain, Ben More, loomed into view. Gribbun’s sea cliffs carved themselves out of the sea. The Ross of Mull and Iona floated distantly to the south, and the wide sea was set with the jewels of small islands. This: my idea of paradise.

The boat set out, silky water reflecting the evening light and the land-shadows as we slipped past Ulva’s layer-cake geology and rounded into the Sea of the Hebrides. Then the remote and unlikely big house and cottages of smaller Gometra swung into view, only visible from the seaward side – there’s remote for you. The boat pushed on. A layer of light cloud had developed, and the sea began to swell into broad troughs and smooth hills. Seabirds rafting on the water dropped from view, reappearing moments later as the boat rode the next mounded wave. Clouds thickened, the sun tantalised, brightening the water and vanishing again.

We motored towards the Treshnish Isles, each with its own distinctive silhouette. Bac Mòr – the Dutchman’s Cap – humpbacked, brimmed with a rim of low rock: Lunga, named from the Norse for ‘Longship Island’. Fladda, and coming closer, the ruins of buildings became clearer – notched crenulations, a gable wall in the shape of an upturned hull.

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