Hello again, after a short break of four years!

How on earth do I catch up on so many years? I won’t. Instead I shall carry on as though the intervening  years were just a stream of yesterdays, which I suppose they are. Spring is nearly here, and tonight the clocks jump forward and we return to the long bright evenings of summer. Outside the garden is waking up and John has been out thinning and weeding and we have both been merciless in yanking out plants that have been allowed to stay, for just another year, just in case. No more. Out goes the orange blossom that never produced one bud, out goes the sad lavender that isn’t even pretending to be alive. Instead the tortured hazel has been tenderly removed and placed in a more sheltered spot as a reward for carrying on against the cruel sea winds, and the spindly flowering currant has been placed in a larger bed and will soon be lopped and turned into a pretty bush. So much for the new season, my thighs are in agony from weeding, standing, squatting and bending, all in all doing more stretches than a morning in a gym class.

I have been very pleased with myself. John rolls his eyes, if I’m not pleased, then I’m in a murderous gloom. I have finished my fifth book, ‘The Fish in the Tree’ and it is to be published on 1^st July. Set in Scotland and Kota Kinabalu and Kuching, it is a story of a life, and a loss and is waiting to be read!!!!

I have also written a play, ‘Piping for Victory’, the story of Bessie Watson, the youngest Suffragette, and one act of it had an airing in November in Edinburgh, and a full play read with Leith Theatre last week. We shall see what becomes of that. I do hope it will be performed in next year’s Edinburgh Festival.

I finally finished reading all seven volumes of ‘In Search of Lost Time’ by Marcel Proust. It was amazing, pages and pages without a full stop, sentences and descriptions swirling around, and I have never been so absorbed or captivated by a book. I loved the characters, the one liners, the wit, the surprises. I was at a loss when I came to the end.

I have also completed the reading of the Bible, the James V1 version, and now I am half way through the New English version. I read a chapter or so of the Old and New testament each day.  Sixty six books in all. Some are amazing, some are dysfunctional, repugnant and violent and some are inspirational. And some are just the most sublime poetry.

   ‘Who walks on the wings of the winds’.

   ‘He that goes down to the sea in ships and does business in great waters’.

   ‘The grave is the end of riches’.

I write down the words that captivate me, and sometimes as John and I poke about in cemeteries on our walks, we see snippets from the psalms carved into the old stones, mottled and covered in moss, that have been standing since the seventeenth century.

Just recently we came upon the old Crombie Churchyard, isolated and overgrown overlooking Torry Bay, quite close to Torryburn on the Forth. The old church is a ruin and the burial ground is the resting place of many of the Colville of Ochiltree family.

We stepped through broken masonry and overgrown grasses, and spied a stone dating 1640 with the name Philip Laird, a ‘mediciner’. Etched on the stone is a hand holding a stemmed medicine vessel with three pills.

Dominant within the broken down walls is a large stone, with the names of Andrew John Colvile and his family. Obviously very well to do. In the shadow of this large stone we came across a pair of stone slabs. They were covered in moss, dirt and grass. We were quite intrigued because we could make out fancy carving, identical on both stones. We tried to pull back some of the grass but could make out very little.

We returned a week or so later with brushes and cleaning products and scrubbed and scrubbed and managed to remove most of the moss and dirt. We found exquisite text and filigree carvings of a cross on each of the grave stones. The text and carvings were all enclosed in beautiful lead in-lays. They looked delicate and very precious. We wondered if they might have been a couple, but no, the words soon became clear. They were sisters, and they had died a year apart. Alice Colvile died in 1845 at the age of fourteen and her sister Caroline died in 1846 aged 19. We were intrigued. Who were they? What kind of lives did they lead, and how did they die?

We called into the Limekilns graveyard, enclosed by a stone wall, and nestled away from the glittering Forth River. Here was another intriguing place full of graves from different eras and beside the grey wall there is a morthouse dating from 1825. I thought it was a shed for grave digging tools until John enlightened me. It was to keep the bodies safe before burial. In the times of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh, where bodies were snatched and taken for experimental work and dissection, grave robbers would dig up freshly buried corpses to sell for good profit to surgeons for clinical studies. These houses were a cheaper option of keeping bodies safe, compared to mausoleums. When the notorious grave robbers were caught, other robbers decided to cross over the Forth into Fife and snatch bodies from there. Hence the morthouse in Limekilns.

As I was reading the inscriptions and dates, I became aware that several graves had ‘2 rooms’ or ‘3 rooms’ carved on to the stone. I had never heard that terminology before, though I know it is common  to buy a graveyard plot that will become the lair of at least three people.

I liked this terminology. A room with no view!

It is all very intriguing and people do write some very different things on their loved one’s graves, usually instructions to ‘sleep in peace’ and so on. Shakespeare had quite a different idea, for on his gravestone in Stratford are the words which form a curse:

   ‘Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear

   To dig the dust enclosed here

   Blest be the man that spares these stones

   And curst be he that moves my bones’.

Sadly Kris Kristofferson died in September last year, a singer of songs that seemed to punctuate each stage of my life and I read somewhere that he wanted to have Leonard Cohen’s words etched on his gravestone:

   ‘Like a bird on a wire

   Like a drunk in a midnight choir

   I have tried in my way to be free’.

So, enough. A new start, a new blog showing appreciation for the lives of those who have gone and have left their mark. It is spring and in these ancient graveyards are blackbirds, blue tits, crows and magpies, all  busy nesting in the yew trees that form a protective guard around the old cemeteries. New life begins.  Thanks to us, after stumbling upon two overgrown slabs in an old tumble down kirk, the sun is able to shine once again on the names of Caroline and Alice. RIP