Home and away (Day 33)

It was strange coming back to England and then driving up to Scotland.

My overwhelming feeling was: where did those two years ago?

The strange sensation of sadness and a sort of disembodied bewilderment struck me most when I was standing in our lovely Edinburgh flat looking out across the artificial hockey pitches in all their well ordered cleanliness and up over the trees of Inverleith Park to the castle in the distance.

Or when I had gone up early to town one morning to look around the shops determined to make up for two years of austerity. ‘How could it be’, I said to myself, ‘that Princess Street and George Street were simply empty month after month during the lockdown?’

It did feel surreal and, compared to our rural retreat in upland Tuscany, the contrast between lockdown and life before seemed massive and almost impossible to comprehend.

As I passed through the Welsh borders near Hay-on-Wye my friends there seemed to have achieved so much during that strange and, yes, awful time.

I remembered weakly rereading favourite books as a way of trying to stay centred in that storm. And, of course, it was during that time that my lovely mum passed away and, closer to us in Italy, Silverio met his terrible untimely death, the first victim of Covid in the large and populous province of Bologna.

On the surface not that much seemed to have changed: daffodils were out; the hawthorn leaves were breaking out of their winter buds; the herring gulls where eyeing up flat roofs around us for their chicks-to-be.

Travelling still has its challenges with Covid Passes and passenger locator forms and hours wiling away time behind FFP2 masks.

The Alps were still there if somewhat spare of snow on the Italian side, evidence of the winter drought that threatens harvests later in the year in the most agriculturally productive part of Italy.

The small hedgerow fields on the approach to Gatwick looked as green and soggy as I remembered them.

Although I was thrown by the plane landing at the north terminal and feeling disoriented as I marched through to pick up the rental car. The South Terminal reopened for the first time since lockdown the day after I passed through.

I had thought maybe to pass by the nursing home that I had visited so many times in the years before Covid but in the end it seemed an emotional stretch too far.

I had heard from my sister, Al, that most of the staff I had come to know had moved on after something of a managerial crisis during what must have been a dreadful, exhausting and frightening time.

It was such a joy to see Al in her new, if temporary, home in the surprisingly lovely edge-of-the-Cotswolds village of Tackley.

We had a busy day and a half collecting an improbable amount of Mum’s stuff from the lock-up and attempting to wedge it into the VW Polo I had rented. We also went and looked at a couple of prospective houses that Al thought might be good as a new permanent home. And in the process drove by many familiar places in the unseasonably warm and brilliant weather.

I left her on the Wednesday after viewing a bungalow in Charlbury with her. That day it absolutely poured with rain but the bungalow was very appealing and Al’s subsequent offer to purchase was accepted at the exorbitant, shocking, almost unbelievable, prices that property in Oxfordshire commands.

I then drove by the satnav‘s back road route to the Welsh border. The rain had washed mud from the spring fields out onto the roads. In places they were ox red with run-off and huge puddles lurked in the hilly dips.

By the time I had worked my way around Worcester and was in the Wye valley the weather began to clear. It is such a beautiful part of the world where Mick and Sara’s kitchen looks out across sheep meadows to Hergest Ridge and Wales beyond.

How lovely it was to sit in the warm proximity of friendship in their new and stunning kitchen that had been much delayed by supply chain issues and tradesmen dropping to Covid.

The next day we took a very windy and increasingly foggy walk up and over Hay Bluff.

It was, naturally, a delight to speak my native tongue, the words coming without clumsy pauses and deeper searching for the right translation.

From Brilley Mountain I set off on Friday for York and my long-awaited reunion with Peg, my daughter, her wife, Amy, and the amazing Tom.

It was an easy journey mainly on motorways as I had learned to my cost the time it takes, although delightful, to drive along the narrow winding switchback lanes of the Welsh border feeling all the time the tug of all those days I spent in Merionethshire in the house tucked under Moel Ysgyfarnodod.

Tom was an absolute delight and thankfully we were soon best buddies. It has clearly not been easy what with endless lockdowns and isolation, self isolating from one another at home before Tom’s birth and then the absolute raft of different colds and ear infections that Tom got and passed on once he began to circulate with kids of his tender year.

But he is more than anyone could wish for and he has two kind, attentive and absolutely doting parents.

The laughter of a small child unabashed by the world is surely the loveliest thing.

I stayed on a day and a half extra to help out in my own way with a few small DIY tasks in the new house to which it,should be said, me and J have made a considerable contribution.

I visited Screwfix three times in one day as I wrestled with a recalcitrant toilet inlet valve which then had the temerity to start leaking. I found the big B&Q out on the Hull road and bought downpipes and fittings and various tools that will clearly come in handy over the years.

It was a wrench to leave and head north to Edinburgh. But we will be back shortly and the long painful period of separation feels hopefully behind us.

I had thought of doing the A68 over Carter Bar but in the end I took the Tyne tunnel and the A1. It was a pleasant enough drive and thrilling to cross the border just beyond Berwick upon Tweed.

There is a beautiful song by Abdullah Ibrahim called simply ‘Cape Town’. And although Edinburgh is still yet really to become home it felt very much like being home.

The weather was glorious and it was lovely to see Terry. J and I walked up the Black Mount beyond West Linton: skylarks and meadow pipits sang; a raven croaked overhead; a wren chortled its shrill song from a heather bluff; a hare zigzagged by us; what might possibly have been two ring ouzels scooted low across the tight valley we followed to the rising moor top and a dipper twittered about in the fast flowing stream.

We also actually made it to a pub to meet the Kerry Star for fish and chips and a few wonderful pints of Belhaven bitter. And with Terry and Poppy we drove out to a very crowded North Berwick but found a road down to the beach by a big old golfing hotel and then ate more fish and chips sitting on a bench watching the traffic pass through Gullane.

I bought a load of clothes and some walking gear mindful of the hot weather to come in Italy when I shall be taking refuge up the steep slopes of Monte Falterona.

It was a brilliant visit; a homecoming; a new start; touching base with so many familiar faces and places.

Neither of us was ready or particularly willing to leave but we shall be hastening back soon and often.

The war was always in the background. Stark, improbable and deadly. And was hard to look at amongst such beguiling and refound familiarity.

But there it was.

With Putin’s death’s head on the front of every missile, bomb and artillery shell crashing into the flesh and blood of Ukraine.