Border control?

Monday 28th September, 2020

I was asked if I had been made to quarantine as I had crossed the border from England to Scotland. I wondered if it was a joke but was told that the question was serious. No I was not, is the answer. However I decided to have a few days on my own in semi isolation mode so that all was being safeguarded. I am fortunate to have friends who allowed such. They have a house wherein it is possible. It is also a house in the middle of the countryside with neither light nor noise pollution.

Having been alone in middle England away from houses and in the midst of sheep infested fields and beside a canal I have been isolated in an equally special place. The local surrounding activities have been purely rural and at present the potato harvest is in full swing. The great machines drive up and down the potato field. They are followed by tractors pulling containers for the product. Lorries trundle up the lanes and are loaded with them and within an hour of harvesting the potatoes are on the way to appropriate factories or storage centres. It is highly efficient. As I was once told: ' to judge the size of the farm look to the number of portable lavatories in use'. I had noticed three when the cauliflowers and broccoli were being handled by workers last month but for the potato workers only one Portaloo.

I have spent much of the day reading. Three books: Donne's poetry, William Johnston's 'Being in love' and Neil Gunn's ' The lost glen'. All three require long meditative pauses and considerations. Those pauses have been aided by a sunny day with the cut corn fields aglow, the Scottish pine disporting their pink trunks and the patchwork of fields illuminated intensely.

My afternoon stroll took me across two harvested corn fields of golden stubble, passed the potato field undergoing harvesting, passed a pond filled with wild duck in boisterous mood and then over a grassed field and a recently planted winter corn field in to a large copse. Evidence of deer in the copse and many pheasant pullets in the corn fields. I suspect they are bred, as with the duck, for shooting as hives were visible. Gulls following the tractors and ploughing. When I reached the highest point I looked out across Fife. The patchwork of fields was almost like a mediaeval map. I could see tractors and ploughs galore as well as potato croppers and straw bales as well as a few fields of sheep and some horses grazing. Also gorse and heather patched hill sides. In the very distance I noted the North Sea.

Strangely I felt very humbled. Equally I recalled a poem of Donne I had read earlier. I finally found it:

" Why are wee by all creatures waited on?

  Why doe the prodigall elements supply

  Life and food to mee, being purer then I,

  Simple, and further from corruption? "

It is 7pm and the sun is setting as I finish this short piece. I have looked out of the window across a garden of roses allowed to be wild and intermingled with clematis and monkshoods. The furthest hills are starkly lit, much seems to be in silhouette and the brightest stars are replacing the lights of day. It is breath taking.