Diary of a Deckhand - February 2008

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehar it snowed. Dont know if it will all be gone in the morning, but the white stuff put on a good enough display for me..

Stenness is the other ancient ring of stones famous in Orkney. Having visited there a few times i always get the feeling that people step off the tour bus, snap a few token piccies and then jump back on to go to Brodgar just up the road, a much more intact and well known ring of stones. I find the stones at Stenness much more....i dont know.....meaningful. They look fragile, thin slivers of time embedded in the close cropped grass. The gnomon of an enourmous sundial, ticking away the years of the millennia as if they were seconds. And the people who know about these things tell us what these places meant all that time ago, but since the day those stones were slid into the soil it has made it a place of people. Human beings gather there to do whatever it is they want to, the meanings lost under the endless skies.
I wonder how long they will last and find it almost comforting to know they will be standing many years after i have shuffled off this mortal coil (probably with my trouser leg bottoms dragging in the mud and odd socks as usual). The pock marked surfaces resist the wind and the rain like a stubborn reminder to the weather that people live here too and that Orkney is not the place where gale force winds come on their holidays and try to lift roofs off barns and blow over bins. Maybe the stones were the equivalent to carving your name on a tree trunk. Now it is a place where i can point my camera and take striking images of a unique and beautiful place.

The end is in sight, the galley rennovations which seem to have taken over my life recently are drawing to an end of the messy, noisy welding, grinding stage and are about to enter the sweary cursing fiddly joinery stage. You will be able to see our boat from the cloud of blue four letter words circling around the VHF antennas.



Anyhoo, here are the latest pics from friday night when it was so still it looked like someone had ironed the harbour.
















The tears fell from my eyes and onto my keyboard as I typed the response to my friend, making the keys slippy as my fingers splashed into the tiny puddles. We were discussing his will, and what he was going to leave me in it, a camera and some equipment. How the conversation got there is strange, I had shown him some photos I had taken with my new camera, and he said he would leave me his as I would get better use from it than he ever would.
His impending death from a horrible disease is thoroughly accepted, no screaming, crying, clawing at options to try to stave off the guy in the dark robe and the scythe but more an attitude of yeah, bring it on, catch me if you can. No way is he at deaths door, the aforementioned dark character has a long way to catch up to stalk his footsteps. But he is on his trail and the deep seated unfairness of it all stings like a fresh cut in my consciousness.
The strength gained from knowing the grains of sand are falling through the pinch in your personal egg timer is strange. I filled in an online game to see when I would die, and found I wouldn’t ever make it to retirement (which is probably a good thing as I have no pension). I always thought I would never see 21, and then it came and went. Then 25 and it came and went. Now I look at 30 and somehow feel the inevitable mid life crisis is thundering down the road like an out of control artic lorry down a steep hill. Hey, if I ain’t making it to 70 (or whatever the retirement age is then…probably 85 with good behaviour), I’m damned if I’m going to wait for my crisis, I want it now and buy a motorbike!