By the time this very short post is published I'll be somewhere in North-West Scotland. It's probably fifty years now since I first heard the poet, Norman McCaig reading a poem on the radio, and forty years since I wrote out one of his poems on an index card and pinned it to my noticeboard. It has been pinned to various noticeboards ever since, along with a couple of other items that have somehow survived.
Here is the fisherman's cottage on the shore at Diabaig in Torridon where I spent a week with a friend in 1993. We paid £30.
Then there is this little cutting from The Guardian from a similar era which I bring out from time to time when I want to show someone the wonderful possibilities of the language of football.
But the poem is a different kind of thing:
Between mountain and sea
Honey and salt - land smell and sea smell,
as in the long ago, as in forever.
The days pick me up and carry me off,
half-child, half prisoner,
on their journey that I'll share
for a while.
They wound me and they bless me
with strange gifts:
the salt of absence,
the honey of memory.
McCaig spent a lot of time in Sutherland, in north-west Scotland, and had a special relationship with the strangely-shaped mountain, Suilven, that rises from the watery moors behind Lochinver. I recommend that you go and climb the mountain from Inverkirkaig, where you'll see the moving monument which the Friends of Norman McCaig have erected at the start of the path. You'll also have a wonderful day out, if the midges aren't biting and the weather is fine.
The Poems of Norman McCaig, edited by Ewen McCaig is published by Polygon/Birlinn
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