Discovering the A68

Amy and I left Thurso at 0610 hrs and reached Leeds at about four o'clock, taking turns to drive. There was not much dawn light as we travelled down the A9 towards Inverness, except that we could see the lights of ships and boats out in the North Sea. But what was most memorable was driving down along the A68 from Jedburgh to Corbridge, across the Scottish-English border and along the tops of the hills of Northumberland, the home of the Brigantes. I have always wanted to be in that county and it was quite wonderful to drive across through that misty, mysterious landscape. Strange about the Brigantes ... I have been reading Hound by George Green, which is a re-telling of the story of Cuchullainn and Queen Maeve and the Red Branch, of Emer and Deidre of the Sorrows. (One of the things I like is the idea that story-telling might be woven around a basis of fact, and it recalls to me the strange transitional status of the Gospels, though I am probably completely wrong about that). Green uses the device of an outsider to guide us through some of the customs and history, the German charioteer washed up on the shores of Ulster. The thing about characters who are also devices is the extent to which their success as a character can match their function as a device. Sometimes it worked well, but at other times I could hardly distinguish him from characters from Lyndsey Davies or Stephen Saylor who have both written fictional accounts (of detectives) in the Roman Republic and early Empire). I have also started on a new version of The Tain by Ciaran Carson ... but, with the sense of the Picts in Orkney, etc., I am starting to see people as the descendants of the tribes. It is a bit like seeing the history of a face one knew of old in the lines of the face one sees now, exceept here it is reversed, one gets a sense of the earlier by looking at the later. In Orkney I feel as though I am surrounded by Vikings ... or of Picts or Celts, mostly living like crofters, with dark realities much more immediate, as immediate as it might be in an Afghan village, perhaps, a sudden alarm, and at least this man would be useful with a sword or other weapon ... And you know that under adverse circumstances, of alienation and neglect, young men in particular will revert to the darker aspect of tribal life, without the honour or the hospitality, as though our default positon, if we are not educated and nurtured, is that of war lords and henchmen (gangs, territory, raids, reprisals, revenge killings) Lord of the Flies, I suppose, and well enough known. Green's references to routine beheadings in skirmishes reminds one of some of the grim Al Quaeda videos. We are particularly shocked because we have forgotten all this ancestry, 'the backward half-look'. It comes to me the more strongly because Island life shows the possibility of the antithesis. Whatever might lurk uneasily beneath the surface, people are acknowledged ... and usually needed. And then one returns to Birkenhead and becomes anonymous again. But that is hardly it. One sees a kind of cultural dispossession and worse, the unemployment and the resentment and the alienation and the drugs and alcohol.

Rather washed out today after all the driving. Julia's Bistro next to the Ferry in Stromness was good.