A BLOKE CALLED HARRIS

I was in Lindisfarne, last autumn; I never tire of it, really,  a site  of Celtic Christianity,  before Rome, the GlobaCorp of its day, took over everything. 

 

I like the causeway, the isolation caused by tides,  I like the idea of hermits, of being reclusive; an island dweller, I am a bit reclusive, myself.

And there's something about these ancient, sacred sites.  Doesn't matter about beliefs, some places have just become weighted down with imaginations and superstitions and with admiration for the albeit ruined constructions.  If I didn't live where I live - itself a historical site of - what - worship, piety, magistracy, these old manses doled-out far more punishments than blessings - in 1797 mine was a new manse, is the longest continuously inhabited building in the parish - anyway, if I didn't live here, on the shore, then a holy island, Iona, Lindisfarne would float my domiciliary boat, tick my habitation boxes.

We know Religion Incorporated has always adapted the premises of its competitors, adapted the festivals, too and early open-air Christian altars - before there were any built churches - were just modified Pagan sites; in a land littered with pleasing Norman churches few are aware of the pagan symbology carved into old church timbers by carpenters still revering the Green Man, at least as much as the Man from Galilee.  The sites, therefore, I believe, have a significance that - although we cannot understand it - speaks to us, in some strange way.

There's a tiny, holy island a few miles from me; like Lindisfarne, it is Christian, seventh or eighth century and approached by a tidal causeway.

 

 It looks tranquil but this is where the North Atlantic fetches up; in summer the energy,  the ions boom off the ocean, frazzling your brains in the nicest possible way;  in winter it is the Devil's maelstrom.

         

I am sure these few stones are neatened, homogenised by the tourist people but even so, fourteen, fifteen hundred years ago, humans like us  chose to live and worship in this Godforsaken place, probably didn't have an i-thing between them, hard not to feel a bit feely, when you visit.

A few years ago, one summer's afternoon I was just sittting on Birsay with my friend Dick, enjoying the light and the Atlantic breeze.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a minibus, across the causeway, on the mainland, disgorging a dozen or so people and them walking across the causeway to what we call the brough.  A few minutes later, in the chapel ruins, one of them started singing a strange song, in a strange tongue.

Fuck me, I thought, looking at Dick, the loony on the 'bus, even here there's one,  I think we both felt a mixture of species' embarrassment and irritation but within seconds the whole dozen minibussers had joined-in.  I had never heard anything even remotely like this song, these harmonies,  they were perfect but alien.  I scanned a lifetime's  musicological data banks - nothing;  it was hair on the back of the neck stuff and after a few minutes it was over,  the ensemble drifting back to the minibus and away.

Later I phoned the tour operators who ran the 'bus.  They're from Georgia, y'know, back in the USSR and they're singing the sacred sites. Sacred sites of where? Everywhere. Where everywhere? Everywhere in the world.  They're probably still at it, on a magical, mystery tour.    

I think as far as I have travelled along that route is to visit most of the English cathedrals, old and new and  a lot of the henges.  There's more such here, where I live, than anywhere else; rings of stones, chambered cairns, ancient causeways,  they're still finding them, finding an ancient, incredible knowledge of astronomy interwoven with Leylinery and with murderous, shamanistic powerplay.  Don't know that I'd take my guitar to them and sing Hey, Mr Tambourine Man but who knows.

The sacred site thing, anyway, is banished and sterilised by the ghastly old biddies of English Heritage/National Trust who tyrannise visitors to places like Lindisfarne.  When I was last there, Mrs Ishmael's grandson, Jack, five and a featherweight, was climbing over the tumbled blocks of the ruined priory.  Screech, howl, tut-tut-tut went the trouty old custodian.  It's alright, I said, lifting him down, he's only a kid, he's not doing any harm.  Oh but he is. No, but he isn't.  Yes, he is, it is strictly forbidden.  He's not much heavier than a couple of seagulls and anyway, children have been climbing over these rocks for centuries, who in the name of God, are you, to stop them, now?

She spoiled the visit for me completely, it's what custodians of anything like to do, that's why they do it.  And so I got on my new i-pad, looking for a dog, a stand-in for little Buster.  I was on the English mainland, surely I could find a nice little dog in need of a pampered, luxurious home, maybe one who was star-struck, seeking global fame as a blog-dog.

I went online to Dogs Trust, Darlington, a hundred miles or so south.   There were a couple of wee dogs who we could've cared for.  I explained the situation over the phone.  I was on holiday, far from home, if I came down to-morrow and we liked a dog, could we take him;  I had a reference from the local 'vet and the local SSPCA inspector  knew us well, knew our home, our grounds, their safety and suitability;  among dog-scroungers, in short, I was the elite.  Yes, of course, said the lady on the phone, come on down.  The next day we hit the A1 M;  it was a shit journey, two and a half hours of rainy, muddy traffic, wipers metronoming in vain, and on entering the dog shelter we were greeted by a handful of the most obnoxious people I have ever met, anywhere.  They weren't remotely interested in re-homing dogs and there was no way on Earth that they would let me take one away, no matter what I had been told by-one-of-my-junior-colleagues, sneered one ghastly little fairy, about twenty.  I felt like telling him that we had been homing rescue dogs for longer than he'd been alive, the dirty little shit-shuffler.  But I didn't.  We just fucked off.

I've encountered more of the same in the burgeoning animal welfare charity sector.  They're cunts, all of them.

Back when my daughter, for shame, showed her Beardie, Barney, at Crufts, I briefly met some dogbreeders and I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire in my drawing room, any of them.  Barney came to us, eventually, his fashion accessoryship no longer required.  And I never forgot the whole process, he cost getting on for a grand but in the end was deemed worthless.  Breeding more dogs when so many already need homes, seems to me it should be against the law.

So, although we had decided we did want a dog again,  there didn't seem any acceptable way of acquiring one.

  But then there was a conversation. 

There was a conversation on a previous thread.  mr tezza asked me and no, I hadn't found a dog yet.  The dog shelters, especially the Dogs' Trust, are run by imbeciles and the breeders need killing, painfully, ideally after genetic modification. And I told him, mr tezza, this wee story that had also been hindering me, dogwise,

A little story. I was walking through Alnwick, one day, with my first Yorkie, Rocky and an older gentleman stopped to fuss him. We chatted and he mentioned that he had recently lost his own Yorkie. You not getting another one? I bluderingly enquired. He gave me a long, ancient look, a mixture of sorrow and weary impatience. I'm seventy-two, he said, and these blokes live to be sixteen; if I had another dog, what would happen to him? I froze-up inside at the realisation that you can be too old to properly take on such a responsibility.

I'm a long way off that age but I'm not one of those swimming, cycling, sparkling Saga people either. I normally accomplish more than healthy people but that's bloody-mindedness and not predictable longevity; I have been hesitant, therefore, mindful of my deeply moving Alnwick experience, to buy a brand new dog but it looks like it's a brand new dog or no dog. He or she, like us, will just have to hope for the best. At least home will be like home again. 

But that little cyber-interchange  rattled me.  Even laid low by illness, I am passing capable; surely I can find a wee dog, somewhere.  And so it was, not a charity, an individual, too ill to care for her dog and needing a new home for him.  And guess who he looked like?

I spoke to her daughter on the 'phone. I told her my tale and she told me her's and her mother's  and I said I would try to collect him next weekend.  He's almost in England, so it's two ferries and hundreds of miles through Ayrshire, Perthshire, the dark Highlands and the boggy  Badlands of Caithness.

Stuff may happen to delay or  even  prevent the journey but already Mrs Ishmael is looking for Tweed overcoats to fit a Yorkie.

His name, I am told, in memory of his person's happy times in the Inner Hebrides, is Harris.       

THERE'S A GOOD BOY