1984 'n all that....

Pale Green Vortex has always prided itself in its position (or non-position) of non-alignment. We live in troubled times, and words of wisdom will be readily welcomed whatever their source. Should Ed Miliband, David Cameron, or Nicola Sturgeon communicate words of intelligence, compassion, insight, and integrity, they will be happily embraced. We are, however, still waiting.

Labels and political -isms and -ologies are irrelevant to the style of this blog. Socialism, liberalism, communism; Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem; left-wing, right-wing. None of them work. If someone comes to me and says 'Hey, Mister Pale Green Vortex, some of your ideas seem a bit left-wing to me', I shall reply 'That's your personal take on it. Those are your own pigeon holes, which I do not personally accept. I simply say what seems at the moment to be getting nearer to the reality of things.'

Ideology is a worn-out, dangerous mask. Ideologies are products of insecurity, egos searching for an identity. I crave to know who I am, what I am, what I believe, and how it all fits together. So I go in search of my belief system. Then I can stop having to think for myself,  and I can relax. I have my own Bible of choice, which I can refer to for my views and opinions.

This desperate search for certainty in the shifting sands of being has to go, if we want to seriously get closer to the reality of things, both in terms of consciousness and of the 'outside world'. We don't need heavy sackful of beliefs to carry round with us, blinkering us to what is really going on. Any beliefs we do decide to hold, we can hold lightly, pragmatically.

So we're not playing this game of unreality, of one-size-fits-all. One aim of Pale Green Vortex is to tear asunder the constructed veils obscuring our direct vision of reality.

Bearing all this in mind, I include below a quotation from Tom Sunic (from nonalignedmedia.com), in which he succintly expresses some ideas similar to what have been occasionally put forward on Pale Green Vortex. Tom's father and sister were both sentenced to jail in the former communist Yugoslavia in 1984 (!) for communicating 'hostile propaganda'. Tom himself was granted political asylum in the USA. So he probably doesn't suffer from an anti-western bias! Nevertheless, he has been astounded at the curtailment of free speech in the west, through 'political correctness' and 'hate speech laws'. In this quote, he is talking about Canada; but he could be talking about many countries in western Europe, I feel. Including the UK.

'This is very scary stuff..... the privilege of living in the Communist Yugoslavia and the Communist Soviet Union was very simple: you could, even a person without a university degree, tell right away that this was a brutal system, that it punished people savagely..... and this was a privilege. Why? Because everybody could detect this system; it was physical, it was palpable, it was tangible. Even for a Joe Six-Pack in Communist Yugoslavia.....

Now the problem with the Canadian legislation and specifically the criminal code, or for that matter the criminal code in Germany, is that it is far better veiled in this Mickey Mouse - excuse my language - in this Mickey Mouse language full of euphemisms, full of coverage with human rights, tolerance, diversity, and you really have to be a master of the language first and a master of the psychology of the people who wrote those paragraphs in order to detect the omnipresence of this surveillance state.'

In actual fact, a lot of the time it's not even about law. The most successful form of policing is self-policing by society, and the relentless messages given out by the mainstream media.

Maybe you don't know what I'm talking about. Then you could usefully do a bit of homework. For starters, you could take the words 'racist' and 'sexist'. To be labelled a racist or sexist is one of the worst things in modern society; nobody wants it on their CV. Check out the way that these words are often used nowadays by certain sections of the media and the political/power classes. The use of these words has been severely distorted, away from the original laudable goals of providing unprejudiced, equal opportunities in life for folk regardless of their race or sex. They are more normally employed as tools of thought repression these days. You need to do your own thinking and homework, though, reader. I can't do it for you.

In the UK, I predict a concerted attack over the coming months on UKIP from certain sections of the media. Much of this will focus on trying to demonstrate that UKIP is awash with racists and sexists. Now, I have no doubt that there are plenty of slightly dodgy dudes among the UKIP people. But the whole thing is a sick joke, a piece of Orwellian thought control. Suddenly the racist UKIPpers are being pitted against the decent folk: Cameron's Tories, Miliband's Labour dudes, Clegg and his Lib Dems. To repeat, this is indeed a sick joke. These are largely people of little honour, who steadfastly come out with their own matchbox version of reality and shove it down people's throats until they will hopefully believe that is all there is to life. Disgusting people in the main, really, killers of dreams, purveyors of a crappy vision of life with a blatant disregard for truth, acting in wilful ignorance of what many people are concerned about.

Don't be deceived! Turn off your television if need be, tear up the newspapers, spend a maximum of ten minutes daily checking the 'headlines' on the internet. spend an equal amount of time with 'alternative media' - not that it's always any better than the Guardian, but at least to get a different perspective on things.

Kill an idea and it's gone. Make a viewpoint unacceptable enough and it will wither away - that's the hope, anyway. Empires and control freaks have been familiar with the tactic for centuries. The libraries at Carthage were burned, removing the accumulated wisdom, ideas and discoveries of the 'pagan' cultures forever. What did they know? We have no idea. A treasure of wisdom was lost. Similarly with the witch hunts and burnings in Europe. taking out those with special knowledge that was inconvenient to the ruling tyrants of the time. What angle on life did these non-Christians of Europe have? We don't really know. Take out the knowledge. Take out the ideas, the viewpoints, that are antithetical to the mainstream endgame. It's continuing today. 1984, over and over and over again.



            

Notes From a Sick Room

During the final years of her life, my mother was chronically ill physically, in a whole number of ways. I was known to refer to her as a walking medical dictionary - until she was no longer able to walk. When people asked me what was wrong with her, I would reply 'Everything.'

During this period, my mother endured an amount of physical pain that I can only wonder at. Despite periods of intense physical suffering, she remained remarkably - miraculously - cheerful. Then one day, after yet another angina attack, breathing crisis, or whatever, she turned to my sister and said 'I've had enough.' Within a matter of weeks, we were sitting at her bedside as she breathed her final few heaving breaths in this life. I've always wondered about all that.......

During December gone I felt unhappy about the way the winter had begun. The weather was hostile, the sky uniformly threatening, and there were hardly any more benign days. I counted the days to the solstice, and felt relief when it arrived.

At the same time, I felt a quiet contentment about affairs, and how I was getting on with matters practical. Work, as usual at this time of year, was more than I wanted - but I felt relatively contented with it at the time. I was feeling some satisfaction in preparing for the festive season, something I often don't do. And I was delighted to see my sister and her husband over New Year, for the first time in a decade.

During December, there was this background hum to everything. It felt warm, soothing. In part it concerned death. For me at the time, death had lost its terror, its sting. This seemed not a bad space to be in at all. What's more, I felt that there were no great ambitions still to be achieved in this life. I had more or less done what I needed to do.

On January 2nd, at 9.30 am, I was walking to work. It was still half dark, Inverness was silent and empty. There seemed something deeply wrong about the situation. Nearly the whole of Inverness was still in bed, save one or two intrepid runners and dog walkers. And here was I, pacing the darkened streets in order to go and make a few pennies (not much more).

When I arrived at work, the mild head cold that I had been nursing for a few days exploded into a deadly rainbow of sneezes and splutters. I finished my shift with difficulty, then went home.

For years, I had wondered what it would be like to have a migraine while already ill. I was about to find out. The following day the sharp migraine pain focussed on the right sinus area, and the vomiting of copious bile from deep retching gave me an experience I hope never to repeat. In the late afternoon my sister, her husband and dog came round on their last day in the Highlands. I could barely speak a word.

The following day I slowly began to feel better. Then, in the evening, a vice-like grip caught the bottom of my chest. There followed one of the most viciously painful nights of coughing in all my life. I've never known such symptoms turn up so quickly.

And so it began. Ill, ill, ill. I am accustomed to the intense but fairly short-lived pain of a migraine, but not this. Day after day of almost constant coughing, all the energy poured out of me. I would get up, have a shower if I felt I could manage it, get a little unappetising food down me, check my emails, before going to sit in a chair for the rest of the day. The effort required to get up and close the curtains on the other side of the room was the same as that normally reserved for climbing a remote mountain peak. I hadn't experienced anything remotely approaching this level of seriousness since arriving in Inverness almost a decade ago.

All the time, the warm, fuzzy feeling was playing quietly in the background.

On Wednesday of the second week of the illness I made an appointment to see a doctor. However, I needed to cancel due to lack of energy. I sat in the chair by the window as the light was fading, about four o'clock. I felt myself sink down, down, down. All sorts of things began to fade away: my ideas and opinions about life, about who I am. Habits, preferences, identity. Everything that goes to make 'me'. Just slowly dropping into the warm, fuzzy, oceanic space.

I felt as if I was descending into a realm of the cthonic (netherworld/underworld) gods. And there they were. Clear at centre stage was Cernunnos, the antlered one. The one about whom so little is definitively written, yet about so much is said: Cernunnos Lord of Nature and of the Underworld. Cernunnos the psychopomp, guide of souls from one life to the next.

In this space, there is no striving for life. The matter of life or death bears little relevance, is of little concern. It is viewed with indifference. In this pain-ridden, god-inhabited space, with its peculiar peacefulness, certain qualities of mystical experience reared their head. There was the oceanic feeling in and of itself. And there was time. I closed my eyes, drifted off (I had no strength to do anything else), then looked up, hoping that time was passing quickly and this would all come to an end. Half an hour seemed to have passed, but when I looked at the clock, it was a mere five minutes! I tried again. Twenty minutes, please. No, three.

(Incidentally, the only other context in which I have come across anything bearing any relation to this oceanic fuzz is Stan Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrix One in the pre-birth drama).

Things continued to focus around stasis, stagnation, intermittent feelings of despair, pain. On Saturday  morning I looked out of the bedroom window. For once the weather, though still cold, was more benign. It was bright, with the sun sparkling on the snowy hills beyond.

All of a sudden, a change came upon me. This was the world, and I wanted to be part of it. This was the medium for my soul's journey, and was where I belonged. This was where 'my' consciousness had turned up for this lifetime as a suitable place for it to do whatever it had to do. It's here that things happen, all manner of wondrous thing, and it befits me to be out there in this phenomenal world. This is still the place for me, not the fuzzy, quiescent world I had inadvertedly allowed myself to sink into over recent times.

I felt a bit of energy move. Recuperation was on its way. Slowly, fitfully, at times painfully, the road to recovery stretches out before me.  I walk it with gratitude.

 

    

Peaches and Pears

'If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.'  George Orwell, 1945

It is, I have to say, a fascinating case. It involves the geneticist James Watson, co-discoverer with Francis Crick of DNA (discoverers in the mainstream western narrative, that is: it seems likely that shamans of the Amazon have known about DNA for ages). He recently decided to auction off his 1962 Nobel Prize (and received big bucks for it). He needed the cash it seems, having become, in his own words, an 'unperson' in 2007. The reason for his fall into unpersonhood was comments he made about Africa. He was, he confessed one fateful day in 2007, not optimistic about the future of Africa because of what he perceived to be the generally lower intelligence of Africans. Not exactly PC, eh. As a result of his remarks, he was banned from speaking at the Science Museum in London at short notice, fired from the boards of several companies, and not invited to give any more public lectures anywhere. As he says, he became an unperson.

I am not, in this short piece, considering the rights or wrongs, the wisdom or folly, of James Watson's remarks. I am concerned with the way that certain opinions cannot be held or discussed. You just can't say that. And if you can't say it, you can't think it either. And that is the end of freedom of speech.

This is how things pan out in the western world of today. Governments, authorities, have realised that taking out the opposition by torture or killing isn't very clever - at least on home ground, People start to get upset and angry. It's not a good long-term strategy. No. What you do is take out the undesirables through denying them airspace, and through public censure. This has the added advantage of getting lots of decent, well-intentioned but inadequately researched people on your side. I mean, nobody likes racism, do they? Or sexists. We all want a fair and equal society, don't we? So we simply shift the goalposts a bit, so that our catchwords of evil, such as 'racist', encompass pretty much anything and everything we want. Note that, whatever its value as a point of view, Watson's on intelligence contained no hatred or ill-will. He was simply reporting what he felt to be true.

Meanwhile, from Scandinavia, I read this: 'A new law will come into effect in Sweden in Christmas 2014 that will allow people to be prosecuted for criticizing immigration or politicians' unwillingness to tackle the issue...... This new law is meant to stop Swedish people from complaining about their country being turned into a third world nation.' (speisa.com)

I read a little bit about Sweden since Red Ice Creations is based there. During 2014, interviews and articles have appeared in abundance on the themes of uncontrolled immigration in Europe and the development of the destruction of European cultures in what is sometimes termed 'white genocide', the systematic destruction of the traditional cultures of the nations and peoples of Europe. Red Ice has pushed this topic so much that I almost stopped looking at their stuff a while ago!

I was personally very sceptical of this notion of methodical eradication of our cultures. My view softened, however, following a visit to Paris in spring this year. What I saw in an admittedly brief and partial stay I found dismaying. A social and cultural mish-mash that seemed to benefit nobody. Not the folk of black African descent on the Metro in varied states of depression and/or aggression. Nor the Rumanians hanging around on the street corners or fleecing tourists on their way to the Eiffel Tower. Nor again the people whose families had inhabited the city for generations, and who were trying to hang onto their sense of identity. And all this has been presided over by the French authorities, who have either sat back and allowed it all to happen, or actively encouraged it through European policy and legislation.

To return to Sweden. Rec Ice comments thus: 'In the last three decades Sweden has been transformed into an unrecognizable heap of chaos....... The criticism that now is beginning to take place against these undemocratic policies has caused the government to turn on its own  native population. Swedes themselves are not protected under the new 'hate speech laws', for example. The country is on the verge of utter totalitarianism, only comparable with the USSR.'

Clever, huh? And you thought Sweden was the perfect model for the future. Totalitarianism in the name of the good, the fair, justice, FREEDOM!! Ha Ha! The least we can do is continue to speak freely, honestly, whatever appears to us to be true. We actually have no rights. But we do have our own power, inner spirit, integrity, and sovereignty, which nobody can take away. 'If liberty means anything at all....'





         

  

A Democracy of Fruit

One day Captain West, Leader of the People of the Nation of Many Fruit, judged that the time had come to address the multitudes on a matter of great importance. 'Friends' he said to the assembled masses. 'Here in the Nation of Many Fruit we are a proud and privileged people. We are not like the aggressive, troublemaking people of Russland. Neither are we like the sly and cunning hard-as-nails Ironians. Again, we hold nothing in common with the slave-driven and pathological people of Northern Careers. And we are not at all like the repressive Rubik Cubans. No, friends, we have Freedom. We have Choice. And, above all else, we have Democracy!'

At this, the gathered throng squealed in delight. 'Here in the Nation of Many Fruit, we have democracy and choice' reiterated the Great Captain. 'Yes indeed, we give you a choice of fruit. It's for you to decide. We give you Coxes, Russets, or Golden Delicious!'

Once more, the people exploded into rapturous applause. 'Freedom, freedom, freedom' they chanted as of one voice. 'Coxes, Russets, Golden Delicious.'  One man at the back of the crowd, a surly-looking fellow with lank orange-brown hair and a wispy beard, slowly raised his head and spoke: 'I want a banana' he muttered. The crowd fell silent for a moment before breaking into a disparaging and slightly nervous chuckle. Then a young woman with long blond hair, porcelain pale skin, and painted red lips piped up: 'I'd rather like some strawberries.' At this, the people gathered in the square took to murmuring, then started to boo and hiss loudly.

The Captain stood still and stared for a moment. Then he spoke. 'Such nonsense' he declared. 'We have freedom. We have choice. We have democracy.'  'Bananas? Strawberries?' whinnied his left-hand man. 'Poisonous. toxic. Never heard of them. Probably don't even exist.'  'These people are terrorists' chimed in his right-hand man authoritatively. 'Conspiracy theorists. Out to destroy our Great Nation. Don't worry: we have their details.'

'We have Freedom' restated the Captain to the gathered throng. 'We have Choice. Above all, we have Democracy. I wish you all a good night.'

At this, the crowd applauded as one, before dispersing homewards, to discuss late into the night the Big Question: Coxes, Russets, or Golden Delicious.

Image: Cezanne, innit.



      

More Fruit, Please....... Part One

                  Ah, wild figs. These are the babies.....

I've always been fascinated by the past. Not yesterday - World Wars, the Victorians, the Tudors and Stuarts - but the really past past. I am not alone in this. The abiding, almost universal, love affair of children with dinosaurs resonates with a largely unconscious intuition of our dim and distant origins. Young people can identify with the prehistoric for good reason.

One of the foremost aims of the growing-up process is to remove fanciful notions such as this, instead introducing the child to the 'real world', and preparing it for life the way it should be led: go to school, get a job, get a mortgage, raise a family, grow old, and die. Fortunately for me - and to the acute discomfort of my father - this claustrophobic version of the Freudian reality principle failed to take proper root in my own psyche. I continued to fruitfully dream, and track back, back, back......

Fascinated as I was by our ancient past, I became further preoccupied with the nature of the human condition. Inherent to my status as a young human being was a compelling musing on the big and vital questions: what? who? why? how come? Distant past and perplexing present appeared to collide when I came across Robert Ardrey and his two books, 'African Genesis' and 'The Territorial Imperative'. Ardrey took a hard look at what he thought we know about our distant ancestors on the African plains, and concluded that hard-wired into our nature is the aggression, competitiveness, and power-based hierarchies that have been the cause of so much pain and suffering throughout human history. His bleak, nasty-by-nature vision was one that, even then, I suspected to be flawed; and how much we can deduce about human nature by looking at the past in this way remained a vexing question. Yet Ardrey's writings vividly conjured up a version of primordial humanity, and had a profound impact on me. I saw dominance structures and latent viciousness everywhere.

Two or three years down the line, age around twenty, I had pretty much discarded the 'killer ape' theory of humanity. I also began to write an occasional journal called 'Journey to the Centre of the Brain'. As the title suggests, it was intended as a head-on collision with the deepest existential questions of life. This sporadic, three-year venture contains no narrative, just a jumble of pieces falling fairly randomly onto the page on the subjects of Zen, freak philosophy, consciousness, LSD, and renunciation. Most of it is unpublishable. The relevant feature here is the opening chapter. titled 'My life during the Cretaceous'. The first paragraph goes like this:

'I suppose it could really be any time, the Carboniferous, the Triassic, the Pleistocene, but I feel that the Cretaceous has some sort of significance, because the present-day life forms and life styles seem to have started to come together at this time. Like the dopey dinosaurs were going down, disappearing for now and possibly forever, and mammals and 20th century vegetation types were really coming into prominence. It's like I can feel the Cretaceous within me, because somewhere along the line I was back there in the Cretaceous, and that's an inheritance that's within my bones; my mind and body.'

If there is any structure to 'Journey' it is just this. The investigation - the experience, even - must begin here, with the beginnings. And they need to be traced back as far as possible - to moments when we are, maybe, unrecognisable even to ourselves. We are not who we think we are. Not at all....

Fast forward to the year 2014 and the publication of 'Return to the Brain of Eden', essentially an update of 'Left in the Dark' from 2007. From time to time a book appears that is intriguing, and possibly very important: 'Return to the Brain of Eden' is one such book. Authors Tony Wright ('inspiration and research') and Graham Gynn ('translation and scribe') take a serious look at the human condition in the light of both modern brain neuroscience and what we now know about deep human and pre-human prehistory. In particular, they muster the courage to stare straight into the abyss of mystery and inconvenience, where lurk a bundle of unexplained and/or ignored anomalies and peculiarities about the human species. One-handedness, hairlessness, bipedalism, and female orgasm, to mention a few. Of greatest significance, however, and most remarkable of all, is our brain. Not so much its current size, but the astonishing trajectory of its growth through time. '....the assumption of a straight progression from a pea-brained ancestor to the ultrabrainy modern homo sapiens is decidedly shaky. Hominid brains appear to have remained fairly constant in size for a long period from some 1.8 million years ago until about 600,00 years ago. But then, from 600,000 to 150,00 years before the present, fossils show that the cranial capacity of our ancestors skyrocketed. Brain mass peaked at about 1,440 grams (3.17 pounds). Since then brain mass has declined to the 1,300 grams (2.87 pounds) that is typical today.' (Chapter Two, 'From the Forest').

So, get this: our ancestors of 100,000 years ago had bigger brains than we do. What the hell were they doing with all that brain capacity? This, you would have imagined, would be hot news indeed, with every scientist and academic worth her/his salt rushing to develop an explanation for this extraordinary element in our prehistory. A vital link in the quest to discover 'who we are'. Not so. It's a reality that does not fit comfortably into the neo-Darwinian worldview that shapes so much of modern mainstream society. It is generally quietly ignored.

In 'Return', Tony Wright proposes an answer. Our ancestors, in a prehistory stretching back over several million years, lived for the greater part of this duration in tropical forests, where their diet consisted overwhelmingly of fruit. The effects on our biochemistry of such a diet are complex and many, and are outlined in some detail in the book. Tony Wright posits that this diet would have initiated a positive feedback system, promoting physical health, psychological well-being and, as a by-product, a rapidly expanding brain size. Conversely, when they eventually left the forests and by necessity abandoned the fruit diet, the hominids brought into being a reverse process of all-round degeneration. Which is where we are today.

While any theories about the distant past will necessarily remain speculative in these times when effective time travel is a rarity, the notions put forward in 'Return' appear more convincing than any of the highly dubious ideas put forth by others. Though working within the overall framework of evolution theory, Tony Wright and Graham Gynn introduce a few vital twists of their own, ones which make all the difference.

Some of Tony's ideas and research can be explored further on his website, but the book is best. In the meantime, I'm off to eat a mango.....

To be continued.

Image: Africa Bike

        

        

A Note For Samhain

Over recent years, and with erratic degrees of diligence and enthusiasm, I have marked the main festivals in the 'pagan' calendar: the solstices and equinoxes, along with the four great intermediary days. Should you live with at least one foot out in the natural world, you soon realise that these festivals all denote a significant turning point in the annual cycle, along with the accompanying human psychological attitude. And of these various festival days, it is Samhain that has the deepest impact on me.

Despite having lived for almost a decade in this northerly place, I am still caught off-balance by the speed with which the days shorten at this time of year (and conversely, by the fast-growing hours of daylight in March and early April). Ignore the shift at your peril. Should I not permit my body and mental habits to catch up, I will be in a state of exhaustion by the end of November, feeling painfully alienated and 'out of touch'. About a fortnight ago I started to feel the discomfort typical of this change in the year. Making the adjustment is not, for me, straightforward: it involves shedding a skin, renouncing the persona of busy outer activities in favour of a more inner attitude. Actually, this is a change in ego identity, from one who 'does' to one who 'sits' and 'is'.

So we enter the time of year when darkness has the upper hand. We live surrounded by blackness, and must make whatever provision is necessary. It is the time for magic, mysticism, penetrating the depths. For the feminine to come forth. For gazing long at a moon-and-star embroidered sky. For setting out on the kitchen table the Tarot cards of the High Priestess, the Moon, and Death. It is the time for watching what we considered to be strong and stable fall apart, or dissolve. For material to slip back into the void, into the darkness and nothingness, whence it came. A time for brews, unguents, and magic potions.

Though horribly commercialised, Hallowe'en remains as a faint reminder of this unique time of year. Witches, ghosts, ghouls, weird things. It is indeed the time when the veil between the worlds is thin, almost inviting us to tear it asunder. This is something that I find quite tangible as I walk through the woods, or even gaze across the trees and gardens out of my back window. The enforced busy-ness of the weeks to come, as the western world of humans winds itself up for the fake merriment of Christmas, bears witness to the alienation of modern mainstream culture from our authentic, natural rhythms.

We enter the darkness. And there we shall remain, until, come the arrival of February and the festival of Imbolc, we may stand atop a hill and welcome back the sun, the light, the brightness that increases by the day. Happy, magical Samhain, everyone.

Image: fragment from Witches Sabbath by Michael Heer, 1626



        

On The Hillpaths

Ah yes, the hillpaths. Not any old hillpaths - these specific ones. I have walked them eight or ten times, and never met another person on them (save my own companion, on the few times I have not gone out alone). They don't climb up the hills as such (though they do reach a height of 1500 feet above sea level) but more lead right into the hills. To the heart of things; into the belly of the beast, even. As such, they enter land more lonely, wild and mysterious than many-a path that leads to a giddy summit.

The track sets off from behind the tiny village as one, before bifurcating a few minutes' walk up the hillside. The paths were originally deerstalkers' ways into the wild places, built during the Victorians' craze for such pursuits. Nowadays, from what I have seen, stalkers travel mainly in swanky modern dark-green all-terrain vehicles across marshland and moor; on a good day, they probably don't need to get off their bum in order to bag a stag. In truth, these old deerstalkers' paths have seen better days, and some are in danger of falling into total disrepair. The hillpath I chose last week alternated between stretches of clear stony terrain and deep puddles, before occasionally getting lost altogether in bog and temporary baby lochs. The west coast of Scotland had clearly experienced a little precipitation over recent days.....

I hadn't walk this particular hillpath for several years. While some of it was familiar enough, other sections seemed new to me; and the hills can be unrecognisable from season to season. At one point, the pencil-thin track through the heather took a sharp turn to the right, and began to climb steeply above a deep, narrow gorge accommodating a rapidly-flowing mountain stream. This didn't seem right at all, but I continued anyway, just to see where it actually led. Ten minutes later, it became clear that this was indeed the path, as I emerged onto flatter ground that my memory banks recognised from five years past.

As I climbed further, landscapes opened up around me. Behind me, the unmistakeable jagged outline of the Cuillin of Skye appeared. While sunshine was in short supply all around me, the Cuillin were bathed in the low ethereal glow of mid-autumn sun. It does happen from time to time.

A pregnant, almost disturbing, silence had accompanied me all the way. The hills hereabouts have the ability to unnerve and unsettle the individual, particularly in certain weather conditions. Around now, though, the silence began to be punctuated by a distant piercing bellow, followed by another spine-chilling roar. Stags were out on the hills, and not too far away. I scanned the hillsides, then scanned again, but nothing. Maybe they were really close, but their coats would merge seamlessly into the colours of the autumn around. Then I heard the sound of scree moving down a slope to my right: two deer were crossing the hillside, but females. I continued to walk quietly and attentively. The roars continued to ring through the air. Then, halfway up the hillside to my right, I saw one. He stood still, as is the way of deer on the hill, and looked. I too stood still and looked. He was a magnificent specimen, and I pondered how, should there be a fight between stag and human, there would be only one victor. Then, as if fatigued by this mutual gazing, he turned his back and moved away. Swiftly yet silently, with grace and dignity, and without the slightest sign of anxiety or panic.

I reached the top of the pass. The afternoon sun was already beginning to set over the Cuillin skyline. I looked into the glens and mountains below and beyond me: some of the most isolated peaks in Scotland, normally requiring an overnight camp to be visited properly. I climbed to a small nearby peak before retracing my steps out of the wildness. Several deer peered down at me from a ridge above, a bit like cowboys out for an ambush in a 1960s spaghetti western. Twilight was descending as I rounded a corner and saw the familiar and somewhat comforting outlines of the few dwelling places of the village. I gave thanks, crossed the little river by the haphazard collection of rocks loosely arranged as stepping stones, shed a final glance hillwards, then was gone.