The birdie house
The sky has never been bluer.
You turn the corner and wham –
the sea just bites you.
It’s your typical but and ben
but the attic’s done and dusted –
no smoking fish.
It feels like a haven here,
that perfect port in a storm.
And it is.
The kingfisher flash on the door
may be a little misleading;
it’s still there.
RF 2021
Video/audio for this one here.
We moved to Scotland in 2002 (I was 35) and our first home was a little rented cottage in a small village called Auchmithie on the east coast. The village sits at the top of a cliff and our spot had the most amazing views (particularly when you were washing dishes). The roof leaked (literally inches of water in the sitting room at one point) but the view was worth it. After living in congested areas for years this was such a change – fresh air, space, sea! The fish reference in the poem is because Auchmithie is really the home of the famous Arbroath Smokie (so they’ll tell you in Auchmithie anyway). I couldn’t get a good street view photo for this house from google – this one is from Wikipedia. We lived in the house with the three skylight windows, just to the left of the big central building in this photo.
We didn’t know a soul when we arrived but we all had family connections with Scotland so it felt a little bit like home right from the start. After a two-week holiday to explore the beautiful (almost empty) beaches in both directions, Mark was straight off to work in Dundee (he’s still there) and I did a part-time adult college course where I made at least one good friend and got to know local areas like the Angus Glens (all via the college minibus). The course was something completely different for me (ecology/geology/other ologies) and taught by some great teachers. My natural history knowledge was pretty thin (and it’s not exactly impressive now) but as the almost full-time mum of a toddler (Heather was two when we moved here, four when we left this house) I was just glad to be talking about something other than The Tweenies (or The Singing Kettle, to add a more Scottish reference). We threw ourselves into Scottish everything as new arrivals often do so our Singing Kettle knowledge is pretty impressive, even today (why is it my brain retains that information but not the natural history?).
But back to the village. I was mostly dependent on public transport to get to things like playgroup for Heather in the nearest town of Arbroath (the peak-time service being a bus every 2 hours) but the bus was a good way to meet people. There were quite a few empty houses in the village (holiday homes, people working away, places just left empty after someone had died) and so there weren’t that many folk about on your average day (or evening – the only pub had closed, to some outcry, and there is still a popular restaurant but you wouldn’t be going there every night). We were strongly encouraged to contribute to the village by joining local committees so I did that (and some of it was hilarious, it must be said, village committees are just something else, wherever in the world you find them and this one had its Dibley moments for sure). I hadn’t lived in a village full-time since I was about 12 so it was a big change but I made friends at one of the committees so it was worth every bizarre minute (and I had the job of taking the minutes for a while so they probably were a bit bizarre). One of the friends I made here has been one of the biggest cheerleaders for my writing and her artwork has featured on the covers of both of my two publications to date (you can read a little about her here). I was also on the playgroup committee (there was no bus home and back in time for the morning session so really it was just a place to wait) and this one could be lively (someone ran off with ‘a bloke off the internet’, taking all the money we’d raised, and other stories). The playgroup was held in one of Arbroath’s two secondary schools and the village bus got us there far too early so Heather and I just joined in with the friendly breakfast club they held in the same room (she’s never been a girl to turn down toast).
I have some wonderful memories of living in the village, for example, clambering down the knackered steps to the pebbly beach with Heather to find the tiny bit of sand to play on and then carrying her back up the (steep) knackered steps and trying not to break myself (or her). We did quite a bit of cycling locally too (Heather in a seat on the back of Mark’s bike, she found it very soothing and often nodded off in there) and loads of friends and family came to stay (not surprisingly a beautiful Scottish seaside village was more of a draw than previous homes). The house was tiny so visitors had to squeeze in (particularly in the kitchen/dining room where we were in Baby Belling territory once again). Sometimes we would get visitors to stay in B & Bs in town or the local campsite or even the not-officially-open hotel next door. Auchmithie is so bonny it’s the kind of place that people will comment “that is my favourite place in the world” if you post a photo of it on Instagram. It is staggeringly beautiful. This was the view out one winter's day for example (this pic is one of ours, the bit behind the green fence was our garden):
Around this time it became apparent that my Mum (she was nearly 80) was not always managing on her own back in Nottinghamshire and I started talking to her about moving to Scotland to be near (or with) us. She had been born in Edinburgh (her parents had pretty much eloped, her Mum not the required match for her quite well-to-do Dad) and she had lived there till the age of about 21 but I don’t think she ever planned to return north of the border. Plus she was pretty settled in Nottinghamshire, knew a lot of people and had heaps of activities going on but eventually the draw of company (“I never planned to live alone you know, dear”) and care at home in her last years (she hated institutions) persuaded her to make the move. We were starting to plan how it would work, Mum packing up her house and so on when our Auchmithie landlords rang in late Spring 2004 to say that they were selling the house and we would have to move pretty much straightaway. Suddenly we had no time to plan and my first reaction was to sit on the garden steps looking out at the sea and sob. I did that for about five minutes then it was off to (literally) run round Arbroath letting agents to find somewhere temporary that would take us three quickly (and my Mum … and her dog … and all her stuff …). So, next time – Arbroath!
This poem is part of the annual Fun A Day Dundee project where participants try to do something creative every day for the month of January. You don't have to be in Dundee to take part and there are other Fun A Day projects around the world. People post as much of their work online as they want to (largely on Instagram but it can be elsewhere too). This year I am posting a whole poem a day (one poem for each of the 31 addresses I have lived at, covering the period 1967-2021). Videos/photos of the poems show the places remembered in the poems but were mostly taken from recent Google Street View. The videos are on my Instagram, maybe elsewhere too. Use the hashtag #fadd2021 on social media to see other people's online contributions.
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