Revenants

An interesting couple of days full of flashbacks to the past. People always return to this area, even if just to check out it’s still here, but more likely to revisit a sense of hope or expectation that the place once gave them. When I say ‘here’ I mean specifically the Findhorn Foundation. They leak out into the neighbourhood whilst visiting that institution though so I come across them.

I very rarely go down to the main FF campus nowadays except to raid the shop for goodies I can’t get in Tesco, but when I do I nearly always see a returnee or two. This time I followed my shopping with a visit to the café to have coffee and a slice of the chocolate roulade (I’m sure I have mentioned that delicacy in this place before) and there met J who first arrived in the area about 18 years ago and has been blipping in and out ever since. He is, he claims, a pensioner now but seems as rootless as ever. Looks the same. Talks the same. I always enjoy having a conversation with him, he’s a good listener, his opinions make so much sense and he is a fluent orator. He would strike a newcomer as a frood who really knows where his towel is.* This hasn’t save him from getting thrown out of the place for inappropriate behaviour (don’t know what that meant in cold hard fact, the word ‘inappropriate’ is grossly overused in these parts) or from having to sleep in his car between rents.

On my way back to the town I picked up an ageing hitchhiker and wished I hadn’t because he turned out to be someone I happen to dislike very much only I’d failed to recognise him because I don’t see him often. He and his wife (who I do like) are around the FF a lot, mostly harvesting cash from his expertise at spinning a line of guidance from the stars. I believe they always house-sit for people whilst they go on holiday, looking after cats, dogs, plants and so on, thereby dodging all sorts of boring things like rent and council tax. They winter in warmer climes doing the same thing. I could have that wrong so don’t quote me, but he did once call their way of life ‘living lightly on the planet’ which I silently translated as living heavily off those who actually work for a living. Sour grapes? Maybe.

Then M appeared in the shop. Now she was a pleasant face to see again. She was at first completely baffled at my unsurprise, but I explained about everyone who has ever lived here returning and as I have been seeing her face on the High Street lately (it seems there’s a flicker of clairvoyance going on in my synapses) I was totally prepared. She was only here for the day so we went for coffee and caught up on children. M bought the caravan I lived in for the first six months of our move away from Brussels and her two boys, the eldest about the age of my second daughter, went to the Steiner School until M got exasperated with all the folk stories about oxen (I can still remember her indignant, heavily accented and very attractive voice railing about the absence of oxen in everyday life and what good was it doing her sons to be reading about them?) She was also unconvinced by the lack of any useful learning of the basic reeling, writhing and fainting in coils.

Though M is from the Tyrol and claims Italian heritage, she married a German and until he died and she moved to Scotland her boys spoke only German, so quite apart from anything else they had learned a foreign language fluently (with a Scottish accent) by the time they were eleven. That has to count for something surely. The eldest lad got a place at Oxford but declined it on the grounds they are all snobs there. He went to Heidleberg and Harvard instead. No snobs at Harvard I bet.

We talked about writing. She asked me if I was still ... how it was going.... ? Nothing to report of course. Her tutor at a recent writing course claims that a person has to write 100,000 words before they can even begin to think they are any good. Hm! Do these words have to be coherently joined together? Did J.K.Rowling write that many before she launched Harry on the world? I believe not. Still it is a skill, and the lack of skill does show in some works. J.K.Rowling got better at it as she went along. Luckily she is a born story teller. I’m not. It would be nice to reel off a few books before I shuffle off though so - winter is coming.

M has always had extreme views - is passionate about things. She embraced NLP , which personally I think is brainwashing by another name and used for very dubious causes, but each to his own. She has been a social worker in Germany I believe, and an educationalist, says the German system of schooling is atrocious - can this be true? The Germans bad at something? She’s now working in a University in Berlin giving courses to adults; she tried to work with the students but when one day she was telling them about how she got her very laid-back and education-shy second son to buckle down to learning by locking him with her into the house for three hours at a stretch, they threatened to call the police - in fact I believe they did call the police. Knowing M as I do and knowing how much she cares for her sons, this just made me laugh, but it can’t have been much fun for her.

The boast of the FF used to be that it was a place where ‘change could come in the twinkling of an eye.’ I’m sure that’s why I was so attracted to the place. I really wanted not to be me any more. 25 years from my first contact I don’t think I have changed. Only become reconciled to me. The folk I have met and re-met over that time - it seems that they have gone through the same process of not-change but are more settled in themselves.

I suppose that’s something.

*’Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ for the illiterati.