15 July 2024

Unable to contain my need to clear out rubbish, I walk a rucksack load of bottles to the recycling point at the jetty. It is pathetically inadequate for the volume at Vicky’s place – but a blow for freedom.

I have been here almost a week. If I don’t get into the sea soon this fantastic opportunity will slip away from me. So I set myself the intention of a dunk, specifically at 11 o’clock (I know I will wriggle out of it, otherwise). Apart from the wind, and lack of sun (the story of Orkney), conditions are ideal. Gorgeous sand slopes gently into pristine, rippling, freezing-cold water. But all references for temperature have changed since my winter swimming off Rum. I remember this and force myself to stay in for two minutes. The pain dissolves. But I don’t hang around – it is blooming cold.

I sit at the picnic table by the beach, with a soundtrack of curlew and oystercatchers, watching two ringed plover on the beach. On the horizon grey-green tongues of land. Directly across to the east is Eday, with minuscule Muckle Green Holm island to the south. Between the two, almost invisible, must be Stronsay. Eday practically fills the horizon but at its northern I can see the southern end of Westray. It would be a complicated journey to get to any of these islands from here: a boat to Kirkwall and then out again. 

A little Loganair plane passes overhead. And I wonder whether it was a mistake to avoid air transport this trip. On departure day what I will do with myself in Kirkwall until 11 pm, prior to the night sailing to Aberdeen? I have definitely made my travelling unnecessarily hard!

A bit of tidying in the kitchen – like objects together, receptacles matched to lids, food items combined when two of a kind are both open. As much to keep warm as anything else, I play in the veggie garden. Vicky has invited me to do whatever I feel like. Against my better judgement (low chance of success so late in the growing season), I prick out some congested little broccoli seedlings. Hopefully, their chance of survival will be increased. And I impose my obsessive need for order: weeding, gathering up rubbish and a couple more plates and saucepan… 

I’m curious about how the wildflower-nursery experiment will evolve. It looks as though Vicky has done it off her own bat. There are virtually no tools (e.g. no trowel) and I haven’t found any propagating kit – not even seed trays and growing modules. I guess it is at the edge of her job, with zero budget, so it would be pointless to dream of a polytunnel and a more organised operation.