Orcadian Tales

[ewein2412]

 

There may be somebody out there who will be amused by this. Everyone else will go… What is she TALKING about?

The first time I went to Orkney a shepherd named Iain tried to seduce me. I was a girl alone, he was travelling with his mother; I was tempted, but naïve and a little scared. They tried to get me to come on a trip with them to the outer islands. I fled, as fast as I have ever fled from anything, to my beloved Pennines for the next season. It was nearly 20 years before I went back.

I went back because the Orkney Islands Council asked me to come. They arranged and paid for my journey, they provided food and a comfortable place for me to sleep. (I swear I saw no ghosts of ANYBODY.) But it was very windy. My children followed a day later, when my interview was over and we would be able to explore. When my four-year-old disembarked the adults had to make a barricade around him to keep him from blowing over. He had to creep to shelter bent double, hair blown flat against his skull, laughing hilariously the whole way.

I didn't get the job. I wasn't entirely disappointed, as it would have meant staying there, without the children, for two seasons, and not the light ones.

But we had such a marvellous visit, that time, that the following summer my husband and children went back without me, taking grandparents along for the ride. I was at WorldCon in Glasgow. (I'M NOT MAKING THIS UP, YOU KNOW.) Thus, when  sdnor  ellen_kushneror someone asked if my children were around, I was able to reply truthfully (and not without some small amount of hilarity): "No, my entire family is in Orkney." 

This post brought to you courtesy of the fact that I've been reading some of the HIGHLY UNPUBLISHABLE stuff I wrote in high school.  By "unpublishable" I don't mean "Viking wouldn't buy it"--I mean that it should be burnt, and that I would spontaneously combust of shame if anyone ever read any of it. Not that they would understand it if they did. I myself had some trouble with it, having forgotten, for example, that the boy magician was in fact a sort of transgender Orlando creature, and that his twentieth century arch-enemy does turn out to be Mordred. Or that he and Telemakos have the same birthday. Can I possibly have done that on PURPOSE?  It really is a miracle that I subsequently ever wrote anything remotely readable.

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