Embarkation again – threatening its blues.
Or when the sea-legs fail on the Scillonian, its blue-greens – blame last night’s beer and the early crossing.
Off the mainland a few days with the three-cornered leek and narcissi, outlandish, outsized aeoniums, shearwaters calling the year back to life.
Springtime on the islands.
First stop on the road to the lodge –
Scilly stonecrop, the problem pittosporum, verges full of onion-funk, gorse and wireplant.
Fencepost stonechat and wild camomile on the capstone at Innisidgen.
The wind throws its weight around, props up the gulls while it has the nerve – lesser black backs and, so the expert tells me, behaving as they ought to – no bin-pilfered fish ’n’ chips.
All the talk is of invasives, which here means shrubs from the wrong hemisphere, misplaced shelterbelt, running their own rampage with nothing to browse them.
Strata of habitation – a taxonomy of foliage and standing stones, bronze and Bakelite.
Entrance graves and sea-goddess cults, the Duchy, dead reckoning and longitude.
Harold Wilson’s holiday telephone, one number – 10.
Roman sources all in the key of “S” –
Silumnus, Silimnis, Siluram insulam.
Later (who knows?) a corruption of “salt ling”.
Washed up words for rock, cut, gannet – all in there somewhere.
The urge to name turns manic when the sea’s at hand.
Every ship and its wreck, every farm, e
