Diary of a Shopkeeper, 5th June
After two and a half years of dodging the Covid bullet, it hit me fair and square this week. I won’t go into long descriptions of shivers, sweats and hacking hoasts. More than likely you or someone close to you has had the virus and you’re all too familiar with the symptoms. I’m lucky. After experiencing just 24 hours of severe discomfort I passed into another 24 of exhausted grogginess. And by the third day I felt strong enough to pull a kitchen chair into the garden and sit in the sun.
My need for rest and recuperation coincided with several warm, windless days (even on this West Mainland hilltop.) It’s been the best medicine imaginable to sit soaking up the sun and watching what’s going on around me.
The first thing I noticed was that my staccato coughs were scaring away the birds. It didn’t seem to bother the insects though. Why is that? Are insects deaf?
I’m no entomologist.
So I watched the bees. What’s not to love about bees? They’re so colourful, so absorbed in their buzzing from flower to flower, and so improbably agile. You can watch them going about their business for hours without being able to guess what they’ll do next. Up, down, left, right, forward, back: all directions seem equally attractive and in need of urgent visitation.
What goes on in the mind of a bee? Do bees have minds? I’m no entomologist.
Later, when I came inside, I looked up what I’d seen and can report that our borders are abuzz with the Garden bumblebee (Bombus horotorum), the Common carder bumblebee (Bombus pascuorum) and one with a distinctive white bum that was either the White-tailed Bumblebee (Bombus lucorum) or the Heath bumblebee (Bombus jonellus.)
The next day, the sun was still out, and so was I. My cough had eased: if I sat quiet and still the birds paid me little heed.
Pied wagtails, expending incomprehensible effort on wagging their long tails. Blackbirds, flying in bursts of wing-beating and coasting, landing with a melodious chuckle, then moving across the grass in bursts of hopping and pausing. Goldfinches, insisting on perching on the tallest twig of the bush, no matter how flimsy, as it lets out its single querulous pleep.
High overhead, a skylark, the original music streaming service.
Some black headed gulls and some herring gulls. Hoodie crows. Whaaps and shalders. Bold spruggies. A gang of starlings quarrelling on a telegraph wire then chasing each other into the garden and bickering on a fence. Off in the distance a pheasant squawking like the social-climbing chicken that it is. Two owls: one in the morning definitely a cattie face and one in the dusk that looked a lot browner, almost bronze. Could it be some other, more unusual species? I’m no ornithologist.
I do know a hen harrier when I see one, which I do most days, including this one. It’s usually the male: black, white and grey, sleek and deadly. He stoops the length of the garden about 20 feet up, peering down into the bushes. I shout – don’t want him making off with a blackbird – but it comes out more of a croak. I wouldn’t mind if he made off with the rabbit that’s found a chink in the fence to sneak in and head for the vegetable patch.
In the field, two hares run circles around each other. And, for the first time in 25 years in this house, I hear a cuckoo in the trees at the bottom of the brae.
Nature brought the virus, but it also provides all this solace. I’m lucky, I know I am.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 8th June 2022. A new one appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.