Vulture Culture

After the vastness of Orkney’s skies, the profound peace and quiet, the gentle pace of life, and of course the fact that I was on holiday, coming back home has been a bit of shock.

 I’ve never felt such a jolt in the face of urban life since I returned from Japan and found myself almost in tears trying to negotiate the monolithic complexity of a London branch of Sainsbury’s. The amount of choice was both ludicrous and appalling, and my brain simply couldn’t cope.

Modern life is an assault – and an assault that is difficult to escape as we go about our quotidian concerns and obligations. We might bemoan the fact that people disappear into their digital devises at the expense of interacting with the world around them, but if that world is abrasive, aggressive and demanding, perhaps one of the ways to manage our sanity is plugging into Facebook, or Angry Birds or a digital soundtrack to your inner, more peaceful life.

I wonder if I have something to learn from being on holiday – should I try and see my home through the eyes of a stranger, with mindful wonder at the objects, the traces of history and humanity that surrounds me? As I write, I am sitting on a bench in a quiet tree-lined Georgian Square. A semblance of tranquilty in a busy city as people make their way to work or college. The street hosts a parade of pretty girls on bicycles, paint splattered tradesmen, hipsters in tweed caps and peg-leg jeans. One or two professional types pause for a brief and precious moment to savour their take out coffee on the bench across from me. Then they steel themselves, get up and stride away to the other world where whatever they do to earn a living suddenly becomes the most important thing in the world.

I can feel the physical manifestation of my objection to ‘real life’. My body aches, my shoulders are rigid and the space between my shoulder blades is twisted into knots. Not even eight hours on a train had this result – but twelve hours of normality did. My travelling companion started to feel the shock when we hit Inverness on our way home, but she resolved to keep the sense of rediscovered tranquility within herself as long as she could in the face of grocery shopping, washing machine repairmen and the tying of emotional loose ends.

So the next step is to convince my body, with a massage, that it really is all right, and perhaps this morning of chill sunlight and falling leaves will carve a little happy space in my consciousness. Perhaps if I can still find places where the trees and the birds are louder than the traffic, I might just stand a chance.