March. Isle of Harris. A moaning gale blows over lonely moors and white capped kyles. Boulders lie strewn across a lunar landscape like crumbs from a giant's dinner party. I have two weeks left of my year away and am happily where it all started on this wondrous Hebridean Island.
It has been an immense gift to spend a year without 'have tos' or 'shoulds', and revelatory to have had real space around thought processes rather than always having to push things aside or make them fit in to a schedule. So much has happened. I have seen so much, and the experiences are now embedded in me like emeralds under the silent sandy bowl of beauty that is Luskentyre bay.
If there is only one place that you make a special effort to visit before this life ends I would urge you to come to this island. It is a place where the changing colour,light, and tides, fill one with so much wonder and love that one could happily accept death in that instant.........the experience of being in the landscape is so intense, one fears the dullness of everything after. A white sandy basin between purpley-brown hued hills empties and fills with crystal turquoise sea, revealing subtle sand sculptures every cycle. In the distance the hills of North Harris glow with a colour never before seen. They are some of the oldest hills on the globe, once on a Himalayan scale, worn down over the billions of years. They are all that is left, them, and the relentless aeons, the cycle of days and nights and tides, and the lives lived, the weavers and the coffin bearers and the barefoot children. It is all there, potent, spellbinding.
I am telling you that Harris has got under my skin. It is hard to leave.
Let's wind the clock back a little as I have been neglectful of my blogging duties. Was it October or November last year that I flew to Brazil, Chile, and Argentina to play concerts with Peter Gabriel? Whisked away to a very nice hotel indeed to play fabulous music with this kind and gorgeous and gifted man. The gig in Brazil was a wash out ...it was a festival....it rained and rained but that didn't dampen the spirits of the crowd. Between the rehearsal and show I wandered around in the pouring rain in and out of tents throbbing with beats and lights. The next day we flew to Santiago ; a spectacular trip over the Andes. They announce 'Ladies and Gentlemen please fasten your seatbelts as we are now about to cross the Andes' as if we are on a fairground ride. These mountains really know how to show off! Breathtaking they are....jagged and forceful, majestic. What struck me was the power, the impact of them. Even though I was looking down on them, I felt the same respect and awe as if in the trough of a huge wave looking up at a towering mass of water and surf in a storm. Jutting wild snowy peaks for miles and miles. They made the Alps seem like well behaved European cousins.
The crowd in Santiago went mad and we met some lovely local musicians. A highlight was having the time to visit Pablo Neruda's house . I love his writing so much. Being in his home was very moving. We caught the funicular up the hill and looked at holy messages and the view over the city. It was hot hot hot. Beautiful people were laughing and smiling and the trees were lilac coloured against the clear blue sky. I would like to go back to Chile.
The next country was Argentina and the seductive elegant Buenos Aries. I was very sad not to have found the Tango venue I had been to a few years back. Its name is Confiteria Ideal where couples move around the floor in the dusky shadows clutching each other in passionate embraces with a peacock like poise we English are unaccustomed to seeing. It is fabulous. It is not the domain of the young and beautiful and unformed but the older more experienced Argentinians who have lived and have built up their regrets, who have seen difficult times. The music and movement has so much sorrow and hope. Makes me feel a kind of naivety, almost uncomfortable. We ate legendary succulent steak and drank full dark red wine and stayed up all night looking for Tango but just missing it somehow. The next day I was back to the freezing UK and drove straight to a gig with Kuljit and John in Bradford on Avon. I hugged the familiarity of the landscape to me like a warm coat....the M4, leafless trees, flocks of emigrating birds and the rythm of the windscreen wiper as I drove myself , mildly jet lagged back to Somerset in the middle of the wintry night.
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