Life goes on
Back to work
After the trials and tribulations of the previous week, the gap in our season came as a greatly appreciated break. It was strange, I didn’t truly relax until I knew the divers had left the boat, no longer my responsibility, the full force of the weeks events hit home. The support from my friends was unreal, the huge bunch of flowers which appeared on the boat was wonderful - I don’t remember the last time anyone got me flowers. Several emails and PM’s had me in tears. As the doctor had said “that’s going to hurt tomorrow” and it did. Several baths eased the aches and pains, as the days passed bruises went from blue and purple to green and faded to shadows.
The events were discussed every minute of every hour in the wheelhouse, in the car, on the farm, in my own head. Things replayed again and again. What we could have done differently, how we felt about it. How it had left scars on us both. My mind seemed to wander back to it whenever I wasn’t busy, I couldn’t help replaying things, mental images taking me right back there, the sights, the smells, the cold, feeling so totally helpless - the weird way your brain works when you are under huge stress.
The two articles in the newspapers read strangely - they had both quoted this blog and it is so strange to see your words that were never written to be used that way in the newspaper. Although I knew putting what happened on the blog was making it public, it was public by my design. It is so easy to turn the blog off, to delete or edit the posts but this was out of my control and it felt very unnerving.
Why make it public in the first instance? Well, the post was actually what I would call a brain dump - for a long time now I have found solace in simply writing down anything that has bothered me or affected me. It helps me make sense of it and work out how I feel. Most of these writings are deleted - but what is said often forms the base for a blog entry. This dump helped me see if I had acted in the right way, how I felt about it all and squished any demons before they had time to get nice and comfortable, set up house and start to try to have kids.
I also feel that people could learn from what happened - that we should never give up, even when it seems impossible to succeed. Maybe that training kicks in, tucked away deep in your subconscious it tramples a path worthy of an enraged pachyderm to the very forefront of your brain when you need it, guiding you when all your conscious mind wants to do is scream and shout and run around in circles waving its little neurone arms in the air.
This has been a large event in my life, and when I set up this blog I wanted to catalogue my life as best I could. Not mentioning it would have been strange and somehow wrong. I guess its like throwing a stone into a pond. You might not see the actual event, but you would notice the ripples. Its easy to see what I do as some kind of utopian dream for divers - living and working on a dive boat in a world class diving destination. No worries! But it has its hard side, the times that you don’t see as a visitor, the decisions we have to make when the shit hit’s the fan. I remember someone telling me he was becoming an RAF fireman as it was such an easy job. Until it isn’t, and you are dealing with a crashed aircraft, fuel fires and injured friends.
Finally there were a lot of people involved that day - several boat loads of divers, the coastguard, the lifeboat and the emergency services. Someone somewhere would make it public, and there thankfully are few of us who were there throughout the whole thing, with the ability to say exactly what really happened. I would rather it was my version being read than that of a person who hadn’t been there and had heard fourth hand via a friend of a friend. I know the jungle drums were beating out, I had heard that the outcome had been bad. So this hopefully set the record straight.
Oh yeah, and one thing I did miss out - I have never sworn quite so sincerely in all my life. Never have I exclaimed fuck and really totally meant it in such an utterly engulfing way. In fact, if swear words were pennies, I generated the GDP of a small African nation that day - I could have paid off my damned credit card too. One skipper said he could hear me cursing and he was a long way off and up wind. Swearing often is out of place, but that day few other words could have portrayed quite how I felt. Fuck - she hinted.
***********************************************************************************************
Extremes
Orkney is never known for its stunning weather. Chatting about this we decided that Orkney is a land of extremes - stillness where all you can hear is your own breathing and the call of distant birds. I swear if it was any quieter you could hear the grass growing and the worms shagging in the mud. Wind so strong it takes a chicken house and smashes it into bits none larger than 6 inches long, howling outside like a fierce animal destroying everything it can. Fog so thick you wonder if you could physically take a slice of it, making noises muffled and distances confusing. Sunny days so hot (to me anyway) that icecream is never nearly enough and the blueness of the sky is blinding.
South (which is anywhere over the Pentland Firth really) seems to have been getting a hammering, maybe a taste of Orcadian weather - torrential rain, wind and storms. Up here we have force 7 winds in June and July, but then we are used to it really. Ironically enough when south was being battered by the weather, it was pretty nice up here.
Escapees
Sitting in the office on the farm I see the avian equivalent of a B52 bomber go past - one of the Cape Barron geese has moulted his feathers and re-grown his flight ones, meaning he is now capable of slightly wobbly flight, only just missing the top of the deer fence he touches down in the next field. Ok, maybe not a B52 bomber, maybe a semi-guided feathery missile. I’m sure if I could see a close up of his face he would be biting his tongue and have a look of intense concentration on his beak. Anyhow, returning back to the farm we find no geese and some messages on the answering machine from the neighbours saying that they were making a break for freedom towards the distant sea. Hazel and Carolyn disappear to try to find them and return around 30 minutes later with all but one of the slightly guilty looking birds.
Escape? Me? Noooo I was just off for a small flight, to…. erm…… escape a deranged cat. Honest.
My response to catch them where they had landed and clip their wings there and then - make the little buggers walk back - didn’t go down too well.
Cruise Ships
Stromness seems to be getting regularly invaded by people in beige chino’s carrying huge cameras and wearing brightly coloured waterproofs. Herded like little sheep by a flapping skinny guy complete with clipboard and walkie talkie towards the waiting busses to whisk them away to Skara Brae and the Ring of Brodgar. The Island Sky is a regular visitor these days, but the Bremen is a new one today entering the harbour with all the subtlety of a fart in a lift. Bow thrusters inching her alongside the quay opposite us, suddenly there is a block of flats tied up.
New Music
For a long time now I have really liked a singer called Tom McRae. His music is what Hazel would call “music to kill yourself to”, but when you really listen to it actually it isn’t. Back on the farm for the brief time I cruised iTunes and found that he had released a new album in May. Checking the bank balance I knew I could download it and was immersed in aural heaven. Much more upbeat than his previous albums, he has lost none of what drew me to him in the first place.
Readings
I have just completed Backwards by Rob Grant of Red Dwarf fame. It is a cracking story linking in several of the story lines from the TV series with a really strange and almost sad ending. For anyone who knows Red Dwarf you will know Rimmer had an alter ego - Ace Rimmer a super attractive incredibly successful pilot, ironically with the nickname our Rimmer would have loved as a child (but people called him bonehead). At some point in their past their lives took different paths and reality split. A reality jumping test ship enabled Ace to get into Rimmer’s reality. In the TV show it is so easy to hate Rimmer - his ineptitude, his attitude his whole….well everything really. In the book there is the sad epilogue of where their lives split. Makes you wonder how the small decisions around us affect us for the rest of our existence.
Back on the wagon
A while before Christmas last year I embarked on a diet which was then splatted by lambing where you really don’t care what you are eating as long as its food. The diet I did hasn’t really got a name, but it comes from the book - “Why do you overeat when all you want to be is slim” by Zoë Harcombe. Sick of feeling miserable and fat and really rather unhappy with myself (plus I had run out of things I wanted to read) I picked up the book and started to re-read it. So as of yesterday I am back on the wagon, back on the diet which makes an astounding amount of sense. Basically for the first week you are on a very restricted diet simply to stabilise your blood sugar. See what happens - if it works, great, if not, at least I tried.