'Oh no, you can't!' he said in a voice like Sean Connery's. 'Not when you've come so close.'
The balcony on the front of his house looked out over the harbour, and every day, just at the same morning hour, a very large ferry left for the Outer Hebrides.
'You must see the Islands while you are here. They're amazing.'
And he was right. Such wild, treeless islands of wind and ghosts. I stood on a bluff and looked out over the sea and hills and could see nothing made by man. I could have been standing there at any point in history. It broke my heart and healed it all at once.
So I stayed with the daughter of the man in a kilt with the voice of Sean Connery, in her cottage attached to a haunted manor. And we cooked rustic meals of produce bought from farmers, and went looking for ghosts, and fended off Jehovah's Witnesses who knocked on our door-at-the-edge-of-the-world, and we sat around and knitted. There was a book there, too, all about an island even further out in the uncaring sea, which had once had inhabitants who had more in common with the Norse, than they did with the Scotts (although they still had to pay the Laird their taxes). I didn't read all of this book, I left before I could finish, back to a part of the world just a little less magical.
This is not that book, but it is about that furthest-flung island, St Kilda. It is a fictionalised account of the time that a missionary and his wife went to save the natives from themselves, much to the detriment of everyone concerned. It's not a bad book, but it's not that good either. Mostly I keep reading it because it is about my favourite part of the world. And my knitting skills have progressed somewhat since sitting in that cottage too. This is the first of a pair of legwarmers, lace stitch, knitted in the round. The wool came from a jumper I bought at the op-shop and unravelled. It's going well.
