(After you have read these introductory paragraphs once, you can skip to the new/old content here. If you are listening, then the time stamp is around the two minute 45 second mark.)
Introduction
The word settled, to me, carries connotations I am keen to avoid. I have never felt settled or, perhaps, I cannot recall a time I felt settled. I do not feel settled now, writing this, and I’ve lived in the same house for three and a half years.
Without even discussing the obvious issues of colonisation, I just don’t feel like I could, or should, settle; better to keep my constituent parts shook up, agitated perhaps, rather than separating and stagnant.
Instead, I feel as though I have been travelling for years, maybe because I have not lived in my ‘home’ nation of Scotland for eight and a half years, perhaps because I know I won’t stay here forever, or maybe because I carry that concept of home in a way which differs from many?
More precisely, I still think of myself as a slow traveller, globally feral.
Recently, I have been revisiting places through the photographs and words I recorded when my feet crossed their soil. This is a way of reminding myself of where I have been, not just in space and time, but in mind, too. It is a wonderful thing, to come out of a low and rediscover myself through words I crafted, through the lens of a camera, when memory has wandered in the fog for too long. Thank you, past me.
When I first started sharing letters with the world in this fashion, six or more years ago, I usually began them with a vignette of where I was, a sort-of travel diary, mixed with nature observation, locking in the setting for the reader, before I spoke of other things—and, by so doing, ensuring that place fed into the whole. It was a useful device, for reader and myself both but, as these letters were sent to so few readers, and now languish archived behind a paywall, I thought it a shame not to share these snippets again.
As such, I am going to share a short series of these sketches, accompanied by a photograph from that time, sent to you in date order.
I shall include the above paragraphs in each of the letters in this series, but I shall also include a link at the very start, so you can skip ahead once you are familiar with the above words. If you are listening and similarly want to skip, then the timestamp you want to navigate to will be in the same place.
Taken without these paragraphs, each is a short read, and I hope you enjoy them.
Cercal, Alentejo, Portugal. April 2020
My local world is bounded by windmills. Round hilltop towers, now shorn of their sails, some falling back to nature, others repurposed into circular homes. Many of the taller hilltops near this village are capped with a windmill, their curves juxtaposing with the angles of the distant line of pylons stepping southward in great cable-linked, invasive metallic strides.
Throughout the day, from the first light until the last, these stunted sentinels act as giant sundials, barometers against the azure or beneath the grey, sometimes vanishing for hours at a time, only to reappear in evening brilliance, all between us bejewelled by fresh spring rain and the low angle of the sun.
I live beside ancient hills, just where the flat plain rises to my back, to the south, the east and, for a short distance, the west. The dawn is swift and the sun stays in the sky, no cover once the day breaks. The dusk, however, is the opposite, a ballet of light and shadow, as the sun slips behind a hill, to usher in night, only to suddenly reappear, before repeating this dance, forest-clad hills skirted, and the patchwork of fields and white of the buildings lit again.
Throughout the evening, the windmills are points in this play, bright pinnacles, gnomon, casting long fingers of shadow. As the sun moves into hiding I swear the world begins to whisper, only to regain its voice as the daylight returns once more; birds sing, dogs bark, the sheep reassure one another, as a wave of technicolor rolls towards my position, at a speed which serves to reminds me how fast our planet spins, making me feel a little dizzy.
I wonder whether the missing sails once cast corkscrewing shadows of their own. Whether they were broad and slow enough to add to this marvel, or whether the miller had always locked them by the time the sun was setting. I wonder who else gazed from this village to this interplay of light and dark, what they thought at the end of a long day in the fields, or working with the local iron. You can find slag from the smelting here, dating back to the time of the Romans, or earlier, when the Miróbrigenses spoke the now long-extinct Tartessian. Names, an alphabet, lumps of melted rock, all surviving long after their makers are dust.
All those days spinning into years, those years into centuries and millennia, time adding layers to this place, sunset after sunset, no two ever alike. The windmills watch, as do I, one day both to return to dust, as the hills themselves are worn away as the world turns. I find this oddly reassuring.
Finally
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