About Elvers by Moonlight
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.
Like many people, I lead two lives, have led two lives for as long as I can remember. I write in order to maintain a causeway between these two strands, to prevent them from either drifting too far apart and into madness or crashing into one another in destruction and confusion.
One life began as a small boy, released into the wild at the confluence of three rivers; the Wye, the Monnow and the Trothy. There I roamed like Ted Hughes’ Wodwo, in the water and by the side of it. Never more than a stone’s throw from it. I gawped at grayling and gudgeon, conversed politely with water voles and grass snakes, shuddered at the horror of the motionless pike still holding station beneath the long-defunct slaughterhouse which had super-charged its ancestors. Mayflies danced. I was exposed to all these before my skin closed. Before there was an artificial boundary built between reason and imagination. The codes of creaturehood and the algorithms of humanity were spliced and jumbled, grown into and over one another so that they could never be untangled again.
The other life began to sprout at about the same time. A precocious ability to memorise and do sums gained a scholarship to board at the regional public school when I was nine, lifting me out of my class and expectations like a character in one of the Hermann Hesse novels I devoured in my early teens. Then onwards to Oxford at the age of 17 to study physics and philosophy. I so badly wanted to leap off the ground and soar in the upper atmosphere of philosophy. But my feet were heavy and my thinker’s boots stuck in the mud. So instead I learnt to fly in my third year, with the university gliding club, and then took a turn which surprised everyone who knew me as a bookish, skinny, physically uncoordinated loner: I joined the RAF as a pilot and flew for a living for the next 25 years. I had little aptitude for it. I have seen ‘natural pilots’ and it was painfully clear that I am not such a creature. So I grafted, for years, and became competent in the cockpit of a Tornado, the steady war-horse on which I spent my career. Eventually, my reports said, rather more than competent. My time came to lead formations ‘on operations’, as we say, to avoid the unnecessarily emotive phrases ‘to war’ or ‘into battle’. I published a collection of poetry about all this in 2008 – Meeting the Jet Man – and it received some positive reviews, flirted with a couple of short-lists. There are some poems in it which I still enjoy reading once in a while.
Shortly after that, things got interesting. I left the RAF, met and soon married the writer Sharon Blackie (who was just Sharon Blackie back then), became a crofter on a Hebridean island with a flock of little black Hebridean sheep, learnt to train and work with a sheepdog called Nell with whom I fell profoundly and eternally in love, heard a poet reading poetry in Gaelic, with which I also fell in love.
But at the same time I nearly succumbed to the brutal and often fatal wasting disease that falls on many lost souls who are long-term addicted to the brutal clarity of military life. It was touch and go. Sharon packed my wounds with first a partnership in her publishing company called Two Ravens Press, then an editorial job with her magazine Earthlines. Slowly she weaned me off these substitutes and I finally stood on my own two feet again, studying and speaking every day the Gaelic languages of Scotland and Ireland, their history and literature. We lived for more than a decade in the places where the languages still live – on the Isle of Lewis, in the north-west of Donegal and in south Connemara. Endless diplomas and two MAs later I am now doing a research PhD at Edinburgh University into the sociolinguistic history of the Gaelic spoken on Achill Island in County Mayo. I have just finished the final edits to a translation of a collection of modern Gaelic poetry, Agallamh sa Cheo by Ceaití Ní Bheildiúin, into English and the bilingual manuscript has just been accepted by arguably the foremost Gaelic publisher in Ireland, Cló Iar-Chonnacht.
We needed to move again recently, so that Sharon could finally return to her homelands in The North and I could be within striking distance of Edinburgh. We are now perched on the left bank of the upper River Eden, into which we peer respectfully every day. Many of the creatures I shared a world with as a boy are here too, though they speak with a different accent and move with their own rhythms. My two lives run parallel and maintain cordial relations, partly through the mediation of the pieces of writing collecting here.
In this twice-monthly Substack I will try to share some of the moments when the conjuring trick of language fleetingly comes into alignment with the lives of the tameless creatures in the world around me, here in the Mallerstang Valley and wherever my feet might take me.
