From The Road

I can find Scotland rather uninspiring through the long winter. I know I’m not supposed to say that. Nature should make us feel good no matter what, be beautiful in all its seasonal forms. I think because so much of my engagement with the outdoors is through photography, the brown, dead, soggy, muted, flattened tangle that lines most of the lanes around the village, just doesn’t do it for me, even when I don’t have my camera on hand.

So, a morning of hoar frost, or the promise of snow, is always an exciting visual prospect. This last week, we were lucky to get both. Here are some images from my local area. You can click to expand them.

Perimenopause has created the conditions where my body feels emboldened to act up. More than it already did. Walks have been much shorter and slower as of late. I try to not let this get me down, but it does. It does get me down.

At the moment, I am carefully choosing any excursions. I need to go places that have fairly easy access, places that don’t require a five mile walk in. During the snowy days, I realised that Glencoe met all requirements. Ever been awed in a layby? Walked 100 metres but felt like you are in the middle of nowhere? Glencoe allows for both. Lochan na h-Achlaise (Loch of the Armpit), the Black Mount, Buachaille Etive Mòr, the Three Sisters, all visible in full, panoramic view from the road.

I haven’t taken photographs for many, many months, and in quite a decisive way. My camera hasn’t even left the house. It’s not just my health that has been getting in the way. Book promotion has been all-consuming, as has processing the fact that my book is out there and strangers know lots of things about me. Sometimes I meet someone for the first time, tell them a detail of my life, and they respond with, ‘I know, I read your book’. That will never not feel entirely surreal and exposing. Not in a bad way, but I forget all the time that I wrote a memoir and that people have read it.

Two weeks ago, I left the house with my camera around my neck. Now that promotion feels less urgent, now that I’m trusting the book to be out in the world and do its own thing, it was almost unthinking, muscle memory. An easy return to the clarity and connection photography gives me. A reminder of why it was my first creative love.

I was a photographer long before I was a writer, but I find it interesting how much my words and images have in common.

In both photography and writing, I’m more interested in looking carefully than in trying to make something happen. I don’t set out to create a mood, or to draw a particular emotional response from the viewer or reader. I’m interested in what it’s like to be somewhere, or to be in a situation, and simply be present.

A lot of landscape photography is about making the viewer feel something immediately. My photographs aren’t really doing that. My writing isn’t either. Both practices are centred on restraint. On not pushing too hard. On trusting that careful attention is enough, and that things don’t need to be heightened, made prettier, or more meaningful to be worth spending time with.

Life is moving at a slower pace than I’d imagined, largely out of necessity. I’m still working out what direction makes sense from here. Still looking carefully, noticing what draws me in, trusting that something will take shape in its own time.