Deborah Richardson-Webb / Solo Time #1a – The Mystery of Balnaboth

“How hard it is to escape from places.  However carefully one goes they hold you – you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences – like rags and shreds of your very life.”

Katherine Mansfield

Fluttering on the fences during my first solo are the bright memories of my visits over many years to this glen with my husband, sister and my nine year old niece.

The Mystery of Balnaboth

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I set out,

I know where I am going.

The gravitational pull is too strong,

It guides my feet back to this place,

And there you are unwrapping the knife from the clean, checked tea-towel with a flourish, brandishing a salami.

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Here the grey clouds promising rain speed across the sky,

But time has collapsed and I’m there on my back dizzying myself watching snowflakes as they fall,

Climb upwards and fall again.

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Today the mist rolls off the Hill of Strone

And the perception of dusk falling seems impossible.

I wait,

And the memory of her little perfect snow angel comes, bright and white.

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I meet these memories as they rise and burst like tiny bubbles on the smooth surface of my solo time.

I try to greet them, to say ‘hello, see you later’ but they are legion and irrepressible.

You are laughing as you press the salty salami into my mouth, a strange promise of the distant Italian sun on this snowy Perthshire hillside,

The sweet sloe gin that follows seems a kind of perfection.

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She has walked across the sacred boundary of yews and pauses with her hand against the ancient wooden door of the chapel ruins,

Fully knowing what lies on the other side she whispers,

‘The Mystery of Balnaboth!’

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