What a busy month it's been... (Twenty PT posts -- unequalled since October 2020...)

Lots of NHS-related peregrinations, aimed at getting our vaccination records put straight (it looks as if we've finally been successful); a wonderful memorial trip to Skegness; lots more cheese...





And then we had the journey to the Isle of Man, which is where we are at present.

The weather has been pretty full-on since we've been here (three named storms, plus rain, hail, snow, and so, so much wind...), but it has been a total delight to reacquaint myself with this very special place. On the one hand, I'm amazed at how much is new to me (ie, how little I actually did while I lived here); on the other, I'm enjoying retracing old footsteps, and reliving memories of childhood. (For accounts of our expeditions so far, start here, and work forward.)




I guess many of us find that our relations with our places of origin change over time. Growing up here, I didn't appreciate it sufficiently, and railed against its lack of sophistication and refusal of anonymity (you were never YOU, I felt, since everyone you ever met could instantly place you: "Oh, so you're so-and-so's daughter...")

At university, I was torn between defending the place from the digs that it always seems to attract from the British, and laughing along with them. But as friends came to stay, always exclaiming at its beauty, and as I travelled more widely myself, I started to see it with new eyes. How extraordinarily good it looked... Surely, those bleak mountain tops and those craggy cliffs and those tiny fields were the absolute quintessence of natural beauty...

But as my parents aged and died, the place became imbued with irreparable sadness. Things that could never be put right, things I would always regret, that painful meld of memory and loss and inescapability -- it all seemed to find expression in the mournful call of the seagulls, the sad keening of the wind, the eternal crashing of the sea. For more than 10 years I didn't visit at all.

Then I came back in 2014, and again in 2018. Both times I reconnected. Now it was a place that was more than just sad. The sadness was still there, but it had been transmuted into something softer. I still felt the melancholy of roads not travelled and choices not made, but I had gained more of an ability to hold that pain with a steady gaze, and not shy away from it.

We were due a visit here in 2020, but that, like so much else in that frightening period, didn't happen. So this year I was determined that this trip wouldn't just be a flying visit, but would encompass a few weeks -- long enough not only to remember, but also to explore afresh, and create new memories and connections.

I'm loving it...




All the busyness of the month, of course, has meant that there has been less time for other things. So there has again been a dearth of new posts on Vintage Travel, and a low number of entries on The Velvet Cushion (one on The Thursday Murder Club, an entertaining but thought-provoking novel by Richard Osman; another on Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, which I briefly mentioned in January's review, but have since completed; and a long-overdue language post).



Post-Isle of Man, our plans are still very fluid. It's now looking like some time back in England, and then some weeks in Turkey on the way back to Sarawak. Nothing booked yet, though.

Meanwhile, the big tragedy of the month has been Russia's attack on Ukraine. I always feared that we would start to emerge from pandemic only to tip over into war... And in facing either eventuality, our current crop of international leaders seems sadly under-qualified.

From a recent compilation of literary voices from Ukraine, I was particularly struck by this poem by Lyudmyla Khersonska (translated by Katherine E. Young):

The whole soldier doesn’t suffer --
it’s just the legs, the arms,
just blowing snow,
just meager rain.
The whole soldier shrugs off hurt --
it’s just missile systems “Hail” and “Beech,”
just bullets on the wing,
just happiness ahead.
Just meteorological pogroms,
geo-Herostratos wannabes,
just the girl with the pointer
poking the map in the stomach.
Just thunder, lightning,
just dreadful losses,
just the day with a dented helmet,
just God, who doesn’t protect.