September 2024
You may not know who I am – I’m a part time Red Lion bookseller. I’m the one who rambles on
about children’s books and often recommends contemporary fiction, as well as nature writing, a
bit of high fantasy and occasionally, historical fiction. Right now I’m far away from the bookshop. I’m in Fasaig, Torridon – a tiny community on the shores of Loch Torridon in the region of Achnasheen, Wester Ross, North West Highlands.
Nearest town, Inverness, just over an hour away. London, another galaxy…
Readers, I just wanted to share my morning with you.
After a dreich* couple of days – low cloud over the loch, windless, grey on grey – I awake this morning to bright sunshine and the certainty of colour. I pull on swimsuit and dry robe, grab a towel and walk the short distance down the road to the stone jetty. One hardy soul has beaten me to it and is already in, treading water. We trade the inevitable exclamations about water temperature, and of course it’s cold, but the needling of your nerve endings is delicious when the sun is on your back and you’re in the blue bowl of the loch with the huge sky above. I head off, grinning, towards one of the buoys in the bay. On all sides, the mountains rise and I enjoy their implacable, massive ’there’ness’; every detail of their nubbly, complicated profiles is visible, time layered in rock. Myself, tiny and blowing with the effort, arrowing out towards the big orange buoy.
Bladderwrack rubs my toes then I’m in the deep water and it’s still and clear and sparkling; I’m the first human body to move through it today. This is a sea loch, and apart from the odd clump of seaweed there is just the wave-moulded, sandy bottom beneath. A shell, a rock, a white gull patrolling the shallows. My blood is up and I’m prickling all over with cold, but intoxicated by the sky and the sun-washed mountains.
Warblers trill on the shoreline; the polite splash of my breaststroke. Why are there only two people
in this magnificent loch? Why wouldn’t you want to jump in and be a part of this, see the mountains from sea level, root to tip? It’s nothing less than knowing you’re alive in every cell of your body, here and now. Chats with fellow swimmers tend to be quite effusive – people feel happy and exhilarated and want to share it. Yes, the water was warmer at this time last year. Ah but not so many jellyfish this summer! Can it be too cold for jellyfish?
I head home to warm up but since the morning is so perfect, I get changed instead and go for a
run, hugging the loch side. The water mirrors the irregular zigzag of the mountains with only a little oily blurring. I’m accompanied by two herons, who are repeatedly disturbed by my bobbing red t-shirt. They land ahead of me and I see their sharp profiles, dark momentarily against the silver of the water, then I’m on them and they heave themselves off and fly a little farther on, lazily flapping their enormous prehistoric wings, claws dragging on the surface. We do this little dance, the herons and I, for the duration of my run: take-off-and-land, take-off-and-land. I imagine their resigned sighs. By the loch road, birch, rowan and oak saplings, bracken, heather coming vividly into purple, brambles and evilly spiky gorse, bilberries, scabious, ragwort and inevitably,
rhododendrons.
I reach the treeline of an old hunting estate, turn around and retrace my steps. Outside our cottage I have a chat with Maggie, one of the elders of Torridon, who goes up and down the street several times a day with her tubby brown spaniel, Ruby. Maggie has family in New Zealand and when quizzed will tell you that, ‘Och, it’s just like Scotland!’ A lot further to go though. Why not just head north on the A1?
What on earth am I doing up here?
Anna Johnson, Red Lion Books
*A very particular sort of Scottish weather (low cloud and rain)