HOW IT LOOMS AT ME FROM NEXT DOOR.

HOW IT LOOMS AT ME FROM NEXT DOOR.

I just ran out of space on google. I have no idea why I am on google drive and although I am glad my numerous photos are stored on a cloud, I have no idea how to see them. For some time the mystery that is google has been telling me that when I exceed my permitted limits I will lose access to my email address and other googly things. This has been a source of worry to me as I keep almost everything important to me in this google land that I don’t understand.

Some time ago I tried to pay Google the money it wanted from me but it gazed at me with what seemed like contempt and refused to let me. However now, just now! I signed up to something which will cost me a pound or so a month. Now I quite like google; I have lots of space to fill and do not have to worry about my books or my letters or my accounts disappearing. Google looms somewhere misunderstood and slightly intimidating but now has a touch of kindness to it.

Helensburgh looms somehow too. A few months ago when the Northern Lights were appearing at Loch Lomond I glanced up in the night and saw a red glow on the horizon. The Northern lights I have seen, have tended to be green or white and have danced around the sky, but I have seen glimpses of red in them before so I leapt back into the house and drove my family up to an empty track above Cardross to see them better. The whole bottom of the sky was a steady red. We were pretty excited until I noticed the next day that it was red and then next and came to the grudging realisation that it was just the lights of Helensburgh we had been seeing; the electric glow reaching out to our village.

Helensburgh is our big neighbour; somewhere we sometimes contemplate living one day. However, whenever we mention that, if we get a bit more money, we might move to a bigger house the children lose their temper with us and tell us we cannot and will not. And with that Wendy resigns herself to sleeping on James single bed when the children are at their dad’s and I resign myself to the sofa bed in the kitchen when they are with us and both of us wonder just how it is we do not really have our own rooms when I am nearing sixty and Wendy manages a whole organisation! When the children are not here we look at properties on google and think to ourselves of the possibilities.

I go to Helensburgh for my jag every two weeks. I do so reluctantly but do not know why. The Jenny Deans, even if does have friendly staff now symbolises something I resent. Four decades of explaining myself to nurses and psychiatrists have made me so weary. So weary that I am now on a co-operation strike that I have not informed them of, so it is a bit silly. I don’t want to share how my mental health is or how I know I am ending the world. I don’t want to ask for help that will never end up helping me. I don’t want to be told that, after seven years of asking, I will soon get referred to a psychologist when they have finally filled the last one’s post.

I don’t want any of it really. I say I am fine. I chat to the students when they are there. I get my jag and, with mild interest, note whether it hurts or bleeds or if my muscles twitch a little at the needle. It is nothing to do with my helpers. I am pretty convinced that they are kind and good at their job but I am weary. I have given up. I do not expect to be free of my thoughts of death or my cotton wool head and do not really expect anyone to help with it. I expect the medication stops me facing a reality I don’t want to see but really should do and sometimes I puzzle why these people are so keen to give it to me. Why do they want to keep me alive? Are they Angels or are they Devils? Is something I occasionally ponder but I know they will never answer properly so I don’t enquire.

Helensburgh has, right next to the Jenny Deans the site of Jeans Bothy. This doesn’t loom over us away here in Cardross; it makes me skip a little in my heart when I see the people there. They seem more real than real and more lively and welcoming than I even expected they could be. I went with them to Hill House in its wire cage today to take what we hoped were abstract photos. Mine weren’t really; they appear here so you can work that out yourself.

To be honest I am not sure why that house is so famous but I did love wandering around it pocking my phone into obscure corners and I did like sitting in the café chatting to my other photography club people, laughing a bit, sipping at a cold drink.

Helensburgh is where I get petrol and weedkiller. It is where I buy my whisky and sometimes a place we go to for coffee or a lunch time meal. It is where all the good charity shops are and compared to Cardross it feels big: a big building, pavement slightly crowded place, with a submarine museum and a cinema in a massive church.

Our dog hates us leaving him with other people. Even when he is just with the children and their dad; he sits and howls if we leave him. We have just found someone who is keen to look after him occasionally as her work does not let her have a dog of her own, I do hope that works out. Today she said she might look after him some evenings. I thought of that. Imagined getting on the train with Wendy to have an evening meal together, maybe with candles or something or an after dinner walk, hand in hand along the promenade.

The thought made me smile. I would like that. It is a long, long, time since we have done that and Helensburgh for all its looming and red glow in the evening seems just the place for that to happen.

(photos: Hillhouse August 22 and Dash July 22)