What your florist won’t tell you about Pampas Grass…

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Willies punt

Is this Willies punt?

Shortly after I met my wife (she wasn’t my wife when we met, of course, she was a complete stranger to me) we went on holiday to the Island of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. I wanted to take her somewhere from which she couldn’t easily escape.

We drove up from London to stay in a croft – it was the kind of holiday where you pitch-in with crofting life, milking sheep, shearing cows… that kind of thing; and on one of the days was trusted with Willy McPherson’s skiff – a boat built by his grandfather – to go and trip the Lobster pots which we’d watched him lay the previous day. It was glorious weather; flat calm, dazzling sun – we caught 40 mackerel (Linda 39, me 1) (this was back in the days when there were 40 mackerel in the sea to catch) and lifted the pots to find four lobsters.

Taking the following day off to recover from our exertions and explore the island by motor car (their words), as we left the croft-house we were unexpectedly handed a picnic lunch on a tray covered by a crisp linen tea-towel.  It seemed rude to peek under the tea towel and inspect our gift so we waited until we’d driven to the end of their gravel track.  I watched Linda pinch the tea towel to lift it by one corner, and saw her jaw fall open: Four Lobsters, cooked, halved, and served with sauce boat of mayonnaise, twist of lemon, and crusty bread. Where in the world are there people more generous than Scottish Islanders?

That’s why Linda and I now live in the Hebrides.   And, of course, what with booking the ferry and everything, Linda finds it easier to stay than to leave.

If you heard our Radio 4 interview (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01bsmdd)… it won’t have escaped your notice that once-upon-a-time we had a house fire in which we lost everything.

On the evening following the broadcast I was celebrating how marvellous we both sounded with a glass of whisky when I accidentally started another.

Earlier in the week I’d mentioned that I thought it was dangerous to keep a display of dried Pampas grass on the mantle-piece directly above the wood-burning stove… ‘Suppose a spark flies up from the fire?’ I asked. Putting the whisky to my lips I found I’d inadvertently poured myself a brand I don’t like so, puffed-up by the days’ events, and imagining that there were things to which I was superior, I opened the door of the wood-burning stove and chucked it on. There was an explosion, of course, followed by a ball of fire which took off lazily – like a hot air balloon filled with sightseers – until it reached the height of our pampas grass which it stopped to admire; all of a sudden there was a phenomenon which I think firemen call a ‘flash-over’.

Sitting in our dining room, for the next few moments, was like sitting in a wood-fired pizza oven… and I think I remember Linda calling my name from her side of it. When I came to my senses I grabbed the vase – more aware of the roar of the flames than the heat they threw off – ran to the front door, and launched it into the darkness to arch over the gate like a terrible comet.

Back in the house the first thing that struck me as the fire alarms throbbed was how black were the walls and the ceilings – which a moment earlier had been white – and how miserable the room looked as our lamps struggled to illuminate it.

This incident, small as it was, shocked Linda. After all our years together I’ve become pretty-good at spotting subtle changes in her behaviour, and couldn’t help noticing that as soon as I’d got the house clear of smoke – by opening everything up, on what unfortunately was one of the coldest nights of the winter – she took herself off to bed without wishing me ‘Good Night’

Justin

The story of how Justin and Linda came to be live on a boat, following a house fire, is told in his book: Phoenix from the ashes; published by Bloomsbury    http://amzn.to/xc4qn3

Is this Willies punt?

Lovely bit of Oak, that.

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I quite like wood.

And I’ve been interested in ‘medieval’  Oak-Framed houses since I was ten. I’ve always wanted to live in one; and now, in the late summer of my life, I’m racing to build one before my body crumbles. It’s old technology – a thousand years old – and reached it’s perfection in the 1700′s with the development of wood-joints (no nails, no glue) upon which our Higgs-Boson age has been unable to improve. Crikey – a goodly number of Oak-framed houses that Chaucer would have passed on his way to Canterbury are still standing! So why is it that now that I want to build one… these days… when houses are built with a target life of 60 years – but nobody expects them to reach it -  that after three-and-half years of head-scratching our architects have yet to produce one on paper… never mind the ground?

Another life-long interest of mine has flourished even more slowly. It, too, began when I was 10 and I got my first toy typewriter. At 17 I confided to my English teacher that I wanted to write. As a career. His reply to me was the reason I become an advertising salesman.

But some desires won’t go away, and twenty years ago I decided that I wanted to write a book. I enrolled on a correspondence course – they were awfully pleased with me: they told me that if I ‘keep up this good work, my success is assured‘. Following their advice I sent off a stream of articles to National newspapers, Magazines, and Publishing houses; and got back, six weeks later, a rejection slip for each submission. I was responsible for our postman getting a trolley.

One day, by chance, I happened to send a list of suggestions for radio interviews to our local BBC radio station. They didn’t read it, but the arrival of my letter coincided with the departure of one of their ‘researchers’… and so I filled his shoes.

But a book deal proved elusive.  One hurdle to it was that I don’t write fiction (well, not knowingly) and in order to write non-fiction you have to have done something interesting. A blessing came one night when our house burned to the ground… so I tried to write about that, but found it too painful.

Another barrier for me was trying to find ‘my voice’. When I’m not trying to be funny, I’m trying to be a smart-arse… and people aren’t interested in that – they get enough of that from their neighbours; or in management meetings; or when they go to buy a mobile phone.

And the advice they give you in these correspondence courses is lamentable: ‘Just be yourself’; they say – as if people are interested in reading the words of someone tormented by self-doubt, failure, and insecurity.

If you can pop back to my blog in a few days, and you’re at all interested in hearing it – I’ll tell you how brutal editing helped get me into print.

Thanks for following me.

Best Wishes

Justin

The story of how Justin and Linda came to be live on a boat, following a house fire, is told in his book: Phoenix from the ashes; published by Bloomsbury    http://amzn.to/xc4qn3

…lovely bit of Oak, that.

 

Wild Goose

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Elm Chest

The latest masterpiece

You may be surprised to hear from me again after eating that raw sea urchin – but my urge to bring you another installment of how we live on a Hebridean Island has pulled me through.

Sea urchin doesn’t form a large part of our diet… but nature’s larder does – we only draw  the line at carrion. Although I have to admit that looking out of the kitchen window one day last summer, onto the single track road which winds its way across the moor for four miles to reach a dead-end, I noticed lying in the road what I took at first to be a small deer.  I knew it hadn’t been there five minutes earlier, and deduced that it must have been hit by a car within the last few minutes; and so went to see if it was alive – but injured; or dead. When I got there I found that it was a huge Hare – dead as a stone but without a mark upon it… and realized that it must have been clouted by a passing car under which it had insufficient head room. Two things make me hesitate to pick that, or any other animal up: the first is a feeling of deep foreboding about whether or not it is ‘all right’; the second is that I don’t want to look like Norbert Colon out of Viz.

The meat we buy from a butcher, or supermarket, is kept alive only for as long as necessary, in a large and choleric herd by the administration of a cocktail of drugs; and has been precociously fattened through an un-natural diet of growth-promoting feed and hormones. It’s also quite expensive.  Yet the meat we get from the wildernesses of land and sea is better than free-range; so organic it doesn’t need a certificate; and doesn’t cost a penny. Once we’re over the emotional hurdles of ‘wild food’ – we’re better-off in every way. And for flavour, it has no equal.

But even a looter of the hill has to earn money, so let me move on a chapter with my early island career. Having brought myself to attention by advertising that I could ‘make furniture with real wood and traditional joints so cheaply you’ll wonder how I eat.‘ …queues formed; my wood pile diminished; and a great number of the days I counted as my future, become those I counted amongst my past… yet at the end of it all it was me who wondered how I would eat. Badly priced jobs saw me working long days without pay, and giving the wood away. So I stopped doing all that and began to design and build unusual pieces according to my own whim.

During the long years of building a 15 ton classic boat we learned some ‘curved’ carpentry tricks; designed the appearance of the ‘rooms’ which were to become our home for seven years… and they had attracted so many admirers that it made sense to continue building one-off pieces of furniture. For houses.

The latest piece – pictured above – is an Elm chest elevated on dowels, with wooden hinges and latches. That is now one of my Islay jobs. The other two are illustration; and writing for ‘sports and leisure’ press.

I spent the whole of last year writing a book… a career so littered with screwed-up manuscripts and rejection slips, that it’ll be the subject of my next blog.

It’s late on Sunday afternoon, and I’m just off to prepare Ballotine of wild goose with Savigny-les-Beune and a Chestnut custard. (Larousse Gastronomique). I can’t tell you where the goose came from – but if you pop back in a couple of days I can tell you how it went down.

Thanks for following me.

Justin

The story of how Justin and Linda came to be live on a boat, following a house fire, is told in his book: Phoenix from the ashes; published by Bloomsbury    http://amzn.to/xc4qn3

You’ll wonder how I eat…

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Sea Urchin

My early attempts to find work on the Hebridean Island of Islay were not  promising.

There are barns attached to the farmhouse in which we live which have accumulated decay since the days when the farm was last a dairy – more than 30 years ago – and which occurred to me could be used as a wood-workshop if I were to drive a thousand miles to collect my old boat-building tools from Devon. I cleared the cobwebs, carried in a stash-load of timber I’d put-by ten years earlier and never used; and set myself up as a furniture maker… advertising in the local paper that I could make real furniture with proper joints ‘at prices so low you’ll wonder how I eat‘; and then waited for this surprising news to percolate down to the islands’ 3,500 population.

A car pulled up; and a man in his sixties got out, stretched (as though he, too, had driven a thousand miles, and hoped his journey would be worth it) and then waited for his wife to haul herself out through the passenger door before crunching over the gravel towards me with the unhurried gait of someone who has retired, and feels they’ve earned it:

Are you Justin?

I nodded. He tossed his head to indicate his wife – she looked as though she was going somewhere smart after this: She’s after a Coffee Table in Solid Oak he told me …bout that size – here he chopped the air with his hands like that ever-so-slightly arthritic Kung-Fu master in ‘The Karate Kid’. Can you do it for a tenner?

A tenner? I said.

Aye, he confirmed, with a single nod; that’s my best offer.

I began to wonder if I had hit the wording off perfectly in my advertisement.

Walking the dog along the low water beach this lunchtime I found a sea urchin – they feel heavy for their size, like a cricket ball; and it’s positively marvellous, as the pricks of their hundreds of spines – each moving slowly back and forth like eye-stalks, tickling the palm of your outstretched hand – to notice how the urgent curiosity you felt a moment earlier to find out what it tastes like, quickly wanes to ambivilance as you watch it; ebbing away until you find you are overcome by feelings of charity for the thing; and thoughts of chucking it back.

I don’t enjoy them particularly – inside there is a kind of coffee-and-cream coloured roe forming a ball of 5 segments; pull one gently away, roll it in a leaf of wild garlic, pop it in your mouth, and you’ll have plenty to think about as the soft flesh yields to your bite. I don’t think I know how it forms part of the answer… I don’t eat more than a dozen a year; but I was struck by how this food-along-the-shore is a metaphor for our Hebridean life; and for our life on board.

I’ve got more to say about my early attempts to find work – can you pop back here in a couple of days?

Thanks for following me.

Justin

The story of how Justin and Linda came to be live on a boat, following a house fire, is told in his book: Phoenix from the ashes; published by Bloomsbury    http://amzn.to/xc4qn3

 

 

Yes but… how do you live?

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Home

Our House

The question most on my mind, whenever I hear that someone has moved to a remote Scottish Island, is how do they live?

So I find myself in a strange circumstance – without ever having found the answer to that question - I now live on a remote Scottish Island, and I’m answering (or trying to answer) the question straight from the coal face.

Over the next few weeks, ending on the 3rd of March (for a reason which will become clear), I shall be recounting my own experiences of settling onto a Hebridean Island… and explaining how we live.

Firstly, a bit of background information might be useful: I’m 51, and live with my wife and dog (no children) in a Farmhouse on the Hebridean Island of Islay, which we rent from the laird. ‘Big owse… an’ a big dog’; as a Devon labourer once described me, taking a bleak view of my living expenses.

Before we moved here, four years ago, we had spent seven years living on board our boat – a timber classic sailing boat which we had built ourselves; and in which we explored the coasts between France, Ireland, Cornwall and Scotland. We would work in the winters and sail in the summers. Our expenses were few: the upkeep of the vessel might be a couple of thousand pounds a year; there were mooring fees to pay – but not many as we preferred to anchor in some secluded spot, far from yachting Marinas. For heating in the winter – why, we were surrounded by trees some of which had dropped limbs in unremembered seasons, and they now lay dry, scattered about the forest floor, ready to be added to the cheerful embers of our wood-burning stove which kept us as warm as toast.

We ate as well or better than most people – foraging for deliceuse de mer (I attempt it in french – probably incorrect french – because in England it is frowned upon to find your dinner by turning stones at low water) to satisfy our appetite for Haute Cuisine (rather than out of necessity) and when that sideline failed, or we had temporarily lost interest in it, we visited the butcher, and bought the finest cuts.

Living simply presented us with surprisingly few bills: on the proceeds of a winter’s work which might produce for us £10,000 we lived as well as anyone – but, anchored at the top of a leafy creek for the night – enjoyed better views.

My wife, Linda, is a Health Visitor – a community nurse speacializing in infant care; and when she isn’t at that kind of work, she doesn’t hesitate to labour for me – whether I’m slating a church roof in November; or gluing something woody in the workshop. Which brings me to my own occupations: I don’t have a formal training in anything; and during the last twenty years – the itinerant half of my life – I have worked variously as Writer; Illustrator; Slater; Roofer; Furniture maker; General Builder and Boat Builder.

Armed with these skills to offer the world, we have drifted about in what some people generously describe as an idyll. Sometimes we agree.

Mindful that your own time to listen to these blogs from the Hebrides is limited; I’ll close now, and hope that you’ll come back in a couple of days to hear the next installment of how we live on Islay.

Thanks for following me.

Justin

 

Justin’s first book is Phoenix from the ashes; is published by Bloomsbury, and comes out on March 1st. http://amzn.to/xc4qn3

Otter in the chicken shed?

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Otter

An otter near the farm.

A month ago we had sixteen bantams… today we’ve got three. Fresh feathers blow back and forth through the barns – but no bodies… just a head; once.

On the mainland, if a riot breaks out in the chicken coup – you know that a fox has found his way in; but on the Hebridean islands there are no foxes.  A dead fox was found on the neighbouring island of Jura the other day – but old-timers shrug and say ‘Someone put it there, just’. We do have Otters, they’re the chief suspect when poultry goes missing.

The weather has been wet and windy for so long here that the carcasses of animals that didn’t make it litter the hill…pheasant, sheep, hare. This evening, on the moor, Scooter – our Weimaraner – found a long eared owl concealing itself in the heather. It leapt uncertainly from cover and took flight when he approached, lost a couple of feathers to him, then landed silently just twenty yards away, looking exhausted. I called Scooter off, crept up to take a look, took a photo of the owl, and all along the bird only watched me with wide orange eyes; his mouth opened – threateningly. He can’t have been feeling very well even before the dog found him – to have let us come so close.

It must be hard for the wildlife that remains after months of wind, cold, and rain to make a living. Perhaps that’s why whoever is taking our bantams is emboldened to come right up to the farm, and help themselves – a chicken every two days for a month. Even I couldn’t eat all that.

The hurricane winds we had a fortnight ago – 108 mph was recorded in the south of the island – blew the door off the chicken loft, and when that went, the windows went with it; they’re still scattered about the ground awaiting repair… along with the roof to the farmhouse and outbuildings.

And in all the chaos the chickens haven’t yet decided where to roost now that their loft is shot to pieces; those that choose badly, dissappear. I’ve taken to catching them at dusk and climbing into the rafters to place them on the beams. It’s part of my routine now… and I wonder what normal people are doing at 4:30 in the afternoon.

Remember Summer?

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Paradise IslandNow that is blue…

Remember Summer?

It stopped raining in the Hebrides today – for nearly an hour – for the first time since last September.

Early in the new year The Met Office, was boasting on behalf of Eskdale Muir, Scotland, that they had had the wettest year on record, with over 2.1 metres of rain. You’d think they’d keep that kind of thing quiet – unless they want to kill Scottish tourism completely.

My neighbour, who farms sheep – and lived in the very house we now live in for the twenty-five years before we got here, had been telling me for months that he’d ‘never known a year like it for wet’. He’s always right, is our neighbour – whenever there’s a cloud girdling the summit of the mountain on the island of Jura, a couple of miles away over the water, he shakes his head and says: ‘there’ll be no drooth today’ .

But it’s not always that bad: I’ve just found this photo of our boat, taken last summer – the very sight of it makes me want to claw off a couple of these jumpers; and reach for the Midge repellent.

Cabin Fever

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Paps

Across the waterlogged ground to the 'Paps' on the Isle of Jura.

I don’t know how the Innuit deal with it, but there comes a stage during a stormy winter on Islay when even the islanders get cabin fever …now, in late December, we’ve reached that stage. We’ve had our third storm in three weeks; lost slates in all of them – even lost a door in one. Yesterday I ducked to avoid being knocked over, as I thought, by an RAF jet flying too low – yet when I straightened myself, I found it had only been the screaming of a particularly angry squall as it sung through the winter branches of a tree close by.

‘Two nights in Braehead, would do me…’ you hear people say, hopelessly, referring to a retail park just on the outskirts of Glasgow, a hundred miles away; ‘and mebbe a wee nozzy round IKEA.’ They don’t ask for much – which is perhaps why there is just a five-aisle Co-Op to serve the needs of 3,500 people. And when the ferry doesn’t run for a day or two because of the wind, and the plane doesn’t fly, the shelves get lonely.

We moved here from Cornwall five years ago, and love it, but this time of year is when we are closest to becoming unglued to the place. We dread receiving calls from friends back in the west country who have phoned to tell us that they’re having the mildest weather for 800 years, and that the daffs are already out.

It’s at this time of year that we have to count our blessings, like priests thumbing rosary beads. Everyday I look at my weather station to see by how much longer the sun will be above the horizon than it was yesterday.

Have I got cabin fever?

 

Island transport

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The Islanders have made us particularly welcome on the isle of Islay.

Twin boys – who would be about fifty – arrived last night with their mum by tractor. Jim drove, John squeezed in behind, and their mum stood, as usual, hunched over the pair of them with her shoulders braced against the cab roof, peering through the crook of an arm which gripped onto the roof handles whilst they waited for a severe hailstorm, which hammered down on their arrival, to pass.

Their tractor had just been returned to them after 11 weeks in the garage, awaiting repair. They have a second tractor – so they weren’t completely marooned at home during those 11 weeks, ten miles from the shops – but the second tractor has no cab. It’s one of those classic tractors – like the ones you see ploughing summer fields in the film The Landgirls whilst its driver bounces along filling his (or her) lungs with heavy scented air – but it’s no tractor to be growling along a Hebridean road, at 15 mph, in December.

Or am I missing the point? Unlike a car, bought on lease, they would have finished paying for the tractor years ago – decades ago. And do they need an MOT; insurance; a driving licence; or white diesel, to enjoy the freedom of the island roads?

Last night they popped round with christmas presents; and kippers. We have found, to our embarrassment, that we only have to mention in passing that we like something – kippers, for example – and the article arrives, by tractor, a week or two later; along with the bright, smiling faces of the whole family, who step into our parlour incidentally carrying some award-winning vegetables, for which they are famed throughout the region …winning over fifty cups this year alone.

For an hour they bring us up to date with the island scandal, which is of course reassuringly tame, satisfies us that we have come to the right place to live; that we have left the world and all its troubles far behind; and that we may sleep peacefully in our cots.

At last one of the boys jumps to his feet, stretches, and announces that they must hit the road.

They thank us profusely for the cup of tea they took – as though it had come just in time to save their lives …brush aside our thanks for the very substantial gifts they have brought; pull on their wellingtons; climb all three back into the cab, and with many a backward glance, bounce down the drive, illuminating the dark single track moorland road with the floodlight beam of their headlights, sweep around the corner, and they are gone.

For the next quarter of an hour Linda and I find spaces in our fridge and larder for all the produce that they have brought us, wondering what on earth we have done to deserve it.

About the blogger…

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My name is Justin Ruthven-Tyers and I live on the Hebridean Island of Islay – world famous for making whiskies such as Bowmore, Laphroaig, Lagavulin and Caol Ila. I am here owing to a quirk of fate: ten years ago I built a wooden gaff-rigged classic sailing boat as a complete amateur, together with my wife, linda, and we called the boat Caol Ila. Having lived on board our boat for seven years, the long hand of fate reached out, seized hold of us, and drew us irresistably back to the island. The islanders, called ‘ileach’ are among the most welcoming people in the world; and so we accepted a tacit invitation to settle here, in an old farmhouse; with our boat moored not far away on the crystal waters of her shores, protected from wild Atlantic storms by a few judiciously place rocks which show themselves above the water as black teeth standing in a ring of seething foam.

You may already have heard of my forthcoming book: Phoenix from the ashes http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1408151413 written once we had moved in; it is publishes by Bloomsbury on March 1st 2012.

Welcome to my blog – thank you for visiting it; and please come back, and back again, to hear about life on this interesting island; about living on board a boat; and our experiences of sailing a classic gaff-rigg.

Best wishes

Justin