The Move

We have moved to the island, the furniture is roughly in place, the house is warm and well insulated. We were indignant that there was no back door but local knowledge advises against such an opportunity for the winds ...

I walked up along the beach from the Knap of Howar to St Boniface Kirk, a cold wind and rain clouds constantly obscuring the sun to good visual effect. The uncanniness of the islands is that such a circumscribed space seems little altered from a time of Picts or Irish monks or Norsemen, the same turf, the same sand, no doubt also the spilling of blood over many generations. and land already under the sea. The wise lady from North Ronaldsay, Ragna, had a farm somehere here. I walked to the old pier, looking out to the Holm, from our bedroom window we can see the loch below us and the twae Heids of Eday in the distance, and always the sky. Most of all we have been made welcome here, though naturally enough are subject to quiet, observant scrutiny. We walked together around North Hill and were puzzled because suddenly there seemed another island ahead of us, which couldn't be, until R realised that we had rounded the head without knowing it and were looking to the south west.

I think I can write here, but not now, surrounded by boxes ... though we have emptied most of them, the kitchen is functioning, the beds are assembled and in place, the books are in shelves ... Note to self: get up to speed on the history of the Scottish Kirk ... St Anne's was the first of the Free Church kirks after the Great Disruption, and the manse was built at the same time, so it has an ecclesiastical history worth investigating. Who were the ministers and what did they do? Back via Edinburgh to Liverpool for the beginning of term. I was met by M at Edinburgh airport and we went straight to St Giles for an organ recital, of Bach, Messiaen and Lizst, then back to the flat to wait for D to return from a Scandinavian visit. Read Kenny's review of Darwin's Angel in M's copy of The Tablet, a little Catholic agnostic moment. Can there be purposes (other than human ones) in nature without the implication that there is a designer? Of course, says Kenny, following Aristotle, though this also fits Schopenhauer: what we see around us in nature is what we experience ourselves of will, only in more rudimentary form ... and perhaps this is the problem with certain forms of sociobiology: it seems implausible to use the more primitive form to explain the more developed: the whole point is that the human form is a self-conscious development that has to be understood in its own terms, even though the primitive form remains in sight as the point of departure which we cannot dissociate ourselves from as though we had little to do with the beasts and much to do with the angels.

R remains on the island for the rest of the week, sounds contented and absorbed on the phone ... was off to Kirkwall today.