Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     Scotland, and when I say Scotland I mean the highlands, is a psychological state, a breathing space where one loch begins as another ends and mountain becomes mountain in an endless succession without boundaries.

     In contrast my hotel bedroom is a tiny white box. From the small window I can see similar windows and where they end, a strip of water with children bathing. From the radio on the wall beside the bed a man’s voice explains how he selected the prize-winning bull in the Aberdeen Angus category at the Highland Show. He looked for good carriage and traditional lines. I cast a judge’s eye at my bed. It has been made with a highland winter in mind. The lump at its centre proved to be an electric bulb in a metal cradle, a novel bed warmer. The temperature is a sweltering 80 degrees and so I remove this device and then tackle the four blankets and the heavy woollen coverlet.

     As I pull back the third blanket a big black spider makes his run. I don’t  want to kill it but neither do I relish the idea of sharing a small space all night with such an unpredictable companion and so I coax it onto one of the blankets and carefully and loosely, but not too loosely, wrap it in the woollen folds. The sun is setting and the children are beginning to leave the water but there will be no darkness. At this latitude and at this time of year it will be light throughout the night. Down in the bar there will be more than twenty different kinds of whisky to choose from. 

     The stories here are disconcertingly vague. I am shown the ruins of a castle, hardly more than a wall and a portion of tower, which belonged to a wicked princess who married a king from Norway called Haakon. And there, there she is buried! High up on the summit of a mountain I can just make out a grey pimple which must in reality be a very large cairn of stones. Why was she wicked? Nobody can tell me. Nobody can tell me her name either, there is just her castle down here and her cairn up there and the mist of centuries in between.

     On the second day, as warm as the first, an unimaginative but well disciplined chambermaid has re-made my bed complete with the four blankets and the heavy coverlet. Unbelievably, as I start to strip them away, the tenacious descendant of Bruce’s spider scurries out and this time succeeds in losing itself in an invisible corner.

     It has become my habit in recent years not to examine things too closely, not to go looking for things. Indeed I have found myself making a conscious effort to keep my attention withdrawn like a man at a roulette table who tries to remove his mind completely from the number on which his chips are riding. The intention behind this mental game, and it works, is that, of their own volition, certain things should rush in to fill the vacuum that you have artfully created. Things of special significance. Unable to bear your inattention they reveal themselves. They clamour to be heard. They say, yes, you can ignore everything else but not us.

     It was by using this technique that Sergeant MacVicar and Sergeant MacTaggart shouted to me from the war memorial beside the still loch. There were many other names cut into the stone, column after column but only these two sergeants made themselves heard. I walked with the sun glinting on the water, watching the big herring-gulls perched on the rocks with pink rubber feet and cruel yellow eyes and as I walked the two names accompanied me like a marching song.

     Was it sheep that I counted last night? Sheep sheltering from the unaccustomed heat? Sheep bleating through the paper-thin walls of the hotel bedroom, making the wooden floors creak under their weight of wool? Whenever, from somewhere nearby, water was suddenly released from a tap to a bowl, the salmon leapt frantically in their half submerged cages and all night long, keys fumbled into locks along the rhododendroned corridor.

     Five days of fresh air as rare as the language of the clans. Five nights of Famous Grouse drunk in a tartan lounge. It’s time to leave. The children are splashing in the water, their voices caught in an arc of sunlit beads.