Warm

5. Come on inside where it's warm (Feb '04)

The weather here is like one of those boxes of assorted teas, where you can have a different one every day of the week. This last weekend we got Cold Snowy Blizzard Ginseng, with enough white stuff dumped down (partly snow and partly hail) to make snowmen (or snowcats), which Angeles and I did.

I did a lot of driving in the snow because it was another harp-teacher-from-Edinburgh-blitz weekend, so I had to transport Alison up and back from Stornoway for lessons on Friday and Saturday. Driving on the road in the dark after the snow had just fallen was like driving on the moon. There are no lights for large stretches of the road, so all you can see is what's illuminated by your headlamps: whitish/grayish dust stretching out in front of you with various-sized lumps like moonrocks; nothing but moors vanishing off to either side; and two thin tread-tracks in the dust in front of you, where the previous lunar rovar passed this way three years earlier, but the atmospherelessness of the moon hasn't erased the tracks yet.

To be fair, that was only the first night. After that, the gritters passed by, plus a large number of cars, so the roads were clear and safe, and there was just snow on the hills to either side. Sheep look so brilliantly, Tide-commercial white when they're grazing on a green hillside in the sun. And they look so three-year-old sweatsock grey when they're bumbling up a snowy hillside.

Yesterday was Mildly Rainy Ginko Biloba and I went hiking up hills with my new housemate, Frances. Frances is a med student who's spending six weeks on the island shadowing Laura for her Rural GP Training Option, so she's staying with me while she's here. She's a very sweet person, and although we're not very similar in personality (she played rugby in school, and likes cutting peoples' hands open to stitch up their carpal tunnel problems) we get along quite well. She's a lovely housemate: neat and considerate, a teller of really bad jokes, and a good cook. She even plays the flute, so we've been having some harp/flute duets.

She's from Newcastle in England (grew up in Milton Keynes, if any of these towns hold any meaning for you; for me they're only names from Monty Python sketches), so she's almost as much a foreigner as me, complete with wrong instincts about Scottish things and a funny accent (she sounds a bit like the guy from Red Dwarf, the one with the dredlocks, if that means anything to you).

So yesterday we poked our finger at the map and went to Siabost (pronounced "Shawbost"), which is a town just north of us with a nice beach and a headland from which to watch the waves crash. She had brought a thermos of hot water and some fruity tea bags, plus some Hob Nobs (oaty cookies with a layer of chocolate on top) so we had a little picnic in the misty spray. Then on the way back we saw a very steep "road" going up the hillside (just a clear grass path, really, with boulders lining either edge), and wondered where it went. So we parked the car, and climbed up it. I believe it was a peat road, a road to the peat bogs where people would cut their peat in the summer to have fuel in the winter.

It was still icy and snowy in places, and there was a thick ice sheet on the lochs we encountered. Frances, being adventurous and plucky, clambered down to the edge of the ice and poked it quite forcefully with her walking pole, trying to smash through the crust. She wasn't able to, so she decided to test it with her foot, at which point the bog fairies removed the supports, and she broke through, her leg plunging down until she was hip-deep, sitting down on the shore. She scrambled back quite quickly, and so avoided becoming a Francescicle, and, being the plucky and adventurous sort that she is, we continued on with our hike, and even visited *another* beach before we made our way home.

Today we had Sunny Warm Loganberry and Lemon Zinger. Clear skies, puffy clouds, and all the snow melted as if it had never been. I had a fairly full day of teaching today, some recap of what Alison went over with them this weekend, some new stuff. Alison was very pleased that most of them came in knowing the tunes she had taught them last time, so that she could focus on technique, interpretation, theory, etc. and not spend the time reminding them, "no, no, that's an A, not a G." Which, of course, is one of the main reasons I'm here. Glad to know it's working.

I'm still finding teaching to be rewarding and fun. It's sort of like playing harp myself but by remote control. I know what I want to be done, but I can't do it with my own hands, so I have to communicate clearly to the person who controls the hands what they need to do to make the tune come out. So not only is it a success for them when they manage it, but it's a success for me, because I've managed to communicate my intentions clearly enough to see them appear in their fingers. It's a neat trick.

Love,
Andrea

Andrea Blumberg