There’s news at last that being isolated and restricted is going to come to an end in April hopefully. I’m dying for a break away...I remember my last break away to Arisaig where I seriously damaged my ankle on an epic walk. This is the picture of my world the following day:
I am wearing my walking boots in a lounge bar, lying along a short couch with my legs hanging over the end. Every so often the hilarious proprietor of the B&B comes in to remark on the difference between laziness and taking a rest, or some other such drollery. He has already remarked that I should take myself off to FortWilliam on the bus, “have a wee look around the shops...” he says. He wants me out. There is a notice in the lounge ‘No food to be consumed here’.
“I’ve been to Fort William,” I answer thinly, implying more than he cares to grasp. But my foot is so terribly painful that I know I should stay here and recover for a complete day before attempting to walk to the train tomorrow. If I were only left in peace.
Thankfully I have a great novel, Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster, but every so often I get the notion that my foot is feeling much better and I swing my legs down and start to stand. It is a pitiful sight. The ankle is not much better. I have the utmost difficulty walking.
I have time to ruminate while prone here of course. I appear to be distracted by myself which is a pitfall of lone travel. I don’t intend it to be this way, but it turns out that it is and I’m grid-locked in the internal discussion. So I’ve gone back to reading my book, and here, the Irish author Colm Tóibín is writing about the very same thing. I am also Irish, although I now live in Scotland, and Irish writing continues to sustain me.
In this excellent book he is discussing the pumped up nature of politicians or the personal power attributed to them by others “As they stood by the Minister (Dr Ryan, Minister for Finance) in all his considered grace in the hallway they became less than themselves.” “Less than themselves...” Enough subject matter for a month in a cave much less four days in a B&B in Arisaig. ”Tóibin goes on to discuss Charles Haughey before he became Taoiseach of Ireland. Before his rise to political success, Tóibín mentions: “the ease with which the minister dismissed Haughey, saying “he was a young pup in too big a hurry with no roots in Fianna Fáil.” So, there was no apparent whiff of success about the man at that stage. And what about an epitaph then? What did Haughey believe about himself having reigned as Ireland’s premier, and indeed what did others believe about him at the end of his life? Had he grown into himself, had he grown greater than his apparent potential?
I remember my own father’s comment on Charles Haughey at the time of his death. Dad had the early stages of dementia by then and this condition provided him with as many violent swings between juvenile naivety and acid superiority as he had enjoyed for the whole of his former life.
“Look at him lying there with his nostrils on show,” remarked my Father, looking at a photo of the laid-out Haughey in a newspaper. No doubt my father was more than half aware that he would be in for a similar inadvertent display in the not too distant future. However he was not one for existential considerations, so I guessed he heard the remark about the laid-out Haughey from some somebody else. Nevertheless, he made it his own with poignant delivery.
Is there anyone who doesn’t compare what they are to what they think others are? Or compare what they think they are to what they think others think they are? And I know none of it matters in any case, but every step of the way I need to decide what to do - what steps to take, which decision to make, the next choice - and then dismissing all the other thinking, chose my action in favour of a spontaneity which will not lead back to being the person I believe I was, but have left behind. Choose my action with a new spontaneity born of finding my true inner self - devoid of ego? I can barely get the concept together enough to put it coherently down, never mind put it into action. But sometimes it bothers me. It bothered me yesterday. It doesn’t bother me so much today. My ankle hurts, and I want a bit of peace.