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5 hours from Oban on a Calmac ferry that reminds me of a sports centre c. 1987. But there’s still a romance about ferries. I love them. Until I’m doing the Buster Keaton stagger with my lunch in my throat. A small fortune could have bought us plane tickets. There’s romance in the turbo-prop too; fighting the winds above the Little Minch to buzz-bounce out of blue-white onto a yellow beach. It’s all about the getting here, boat or air to this absolute of destination. We come to ‘escape’ and that’s how it’s sold; empty beaches and open spaces, peace of big skies and big sea. I try but he’s thrawn, that mainland self. I walk in sea haar, breathe the soft air that knocks the wee one out from 7 to 7 straight. I see ghost cows on the misted machair, vast rolling carpets of buttercup and daisy. I hear surf on surf, east to west and back again, and now and then a flash of oystercatcher orange. But it strikes me, as it always does in the islands, the west, that this is no place for escape. It’s a place of return.

across caolas shanndraigh

the empty
crofts of Sandray,
windows
black as the lapwing’s eye;
see a glowing
through the dawn mist,
a light, again,
a child’s laugh behind the surf,
a child of sepia,
then of place
and now of ‘heritage’,
framed on a wall
ever barefoot and shy;
where did she go
after that last skip on the machair,
how far beyond these sands
that pile time on time
and never bury anything?