Layers

I can hardly move.

This is because I am wearing two pairs of trousers, a vest, a shirt, two jerseys and a body warmer. I have been wearing a waxed jacket with a extra fleece lining as well today, along with a woolly hat, scarf and gloves, but I have taken the top layers off because we are indoors now.

It is chilly in Orkney.

We have come back into the camper van after a day of exploration, and just in time too, because as we closed the door behind Mark the rain started to blow.

Within minutes the winds were howling around the van, and sleet was battering against the roof. The weather has begun to close in and if it does not get better we will not be getting off the island in a hurry.

This does not matter in the least. We are very snug in here, and actually we are going out again later. We have been invited to have a drink with some islanders, and so I am writing this now in case I have an alcohol misfortune later on.

We have had the most fantastically brilliant day imaginable, being on holiday is amazing. I do not want to leave. I am enjoying myself very much indeed.

Shapinsay is a wonderful place.

We woke up to look out at the sea, and at the peculiar translucent Orcadian daylight, and once we had spent ages over the usual morning ritual of coffee and milling about with the dogs, we went to look at the broch.

A broch is a sort of primitive castle. There were at least four on Shapinsay once, but now there is only one, and it is thousands and thousands of years old.

There is a lot left of it, because nothing much has happened on Shapinsay in the intervening eight thousand years since its inhabitants left it. It is a round tower with a well in the middle, and some stone shelves and some steps.

It is very thoroughly protective. The early Orcadians must have been expecting some very unkindly-disposed visitors, even worse than Japanese cruise ships. There is an outer wall, and an inner wall, and some tiny rooms between. There are spy holes and little unexpected hiding places, and it is still possible to see it all because it had all been built of stone.

Timber is rare on Orkney. Trees do not grow well, because of the wind. There is a wood around the castle, by which I mean the actual castle, not the broch. It was planted in the seventeen hundreds, and the trees get taller and taller the further into the wood you go. There was a tree in the garden at Ness which was a hundred years old, but no taller than my shoulders.

We looked at it for ages, and wondered. We do not know that Orkney was ever invaded, but either it was, or the inhabitants had been taking some very unpleasant mushrooms, because it is a castle that means business.

We thought probably the islanders would have stored important things like grain inside it. The well is very clever and intricate, and still works properly today. The description on the poster suggested that the inhabitants tried so hard because they believed in some water deities, but we thought that perhaps they just preferred not to run out of water.

We walked on the beach and stared at the sky, and then we did the thing that I was most wanting to do but was scared of.

We went to look at the house I built.

I was scared to do this because I had a very hard time during the building of it. I had a particularly disastrous relationship at the time, which ground to a conclusion before the house was finished. This was a good thing, but all the same it is not easy building a house at the end of the world in ghastly weather with no cash whatsoever, especially when you have not got the first idea what you are doing.

I had got to build it because I had borrowed money from the bank which had to be paid back. This seemed like an impossibly huge amount to me in those days, although actually it was rather less than Mark could take out on his credit card this afternoon if he wanted to.

Nobody would want to buy an unfinished house, and I wanted to go back to live in a country where women were allowed to have jobs and where you could read books and watch films if you wanted to. This was before the days of the internet, and if you wanted to watch a film you had got to go to the mainland on a boat on a Thursday, and find somewhere you could stay overnight, because there was no boat coming back after the film had finished.

You could not buy books. There was no Amazon.

The Orcadian word for woman is Wifie, whether she is married or not.

Finishing it was very hard indeed, but I did it. The house sold for almost exactly what I had borrowed. In the end there was nothing left at all, and I had broken even with not the smallest bit spare.

I built it not quite by myself, but with the help of a young man who was trying to get over his heroin addiction who lived just up the road. He had no more idea how to build a house than I had, and the instruction book became well thumbed.

It was a horrible adventure, being cold and frightened in a ruin at the end of the world with the bank breathing down my neck.

Today I went to look at the house for the first time in twenty years.

It was quite the loveliest house imaginable.

It took my breath away.

I was so astonished that I almost cried.

It looked like something that Walt Disney might have drawn, and it was all my work. The very fascia boards were still there.

It had a long, low roof, and a little front door, only just high enough for Mark. It was a stable door, because that is my favourite sort of door, and pretty windows and a couple of chimneys.

I remembered sitting on the top of the chimney pot one sunny day whilst I was trying to work out how you attach fascia boards to a roof.

For the builders among you, the whole roof thing was made really difficult by the detail that the house was a long rectangular shape, but a metre wider at one end than the other.

It is such a pretty little house. Mark laughed, and said that it looked like the original of the house that is painted on the side of the camper van.

There was nobody there. We banged hopefully on the door, but nobody answered, so we walked all around it and marvelled.

I had expected it to be as dark and forbidding as my memories. I had not expected this bright, sheltered, welcoming little house.

I was very pleased indeed.

The  first picture below is the broch, not the house.