There’s Tredwell and there’s the Traills, who for centuries were the lairds of Papay. Their big pile, which weights down the middle of the island with its austere vernacular chunkiness, is dubbed ‘Holland’, because of some Traill’s dubious notion that this green lozenge resembled the fertile polders of the Netherlands. The Traills were your typical vile, Highland landowners, racking the rents of their tenants and putting them to work on the noisome and foul business of kelp-making. The Traills are long since gone, but their legacy remains all over the island in the form of abandoned crofts, many of them falling to pieces. Of course, Antony can’t see an abandoned croft without wanting to re-tenant it.
So, Antony rummaged around in a tumbledown cabin, while I sat and smoked. He emerged with some lurid recipe books from the 1950s, featuring Day-Glo illustrations of vegetarian cutlets. Oh, and there was also a needlework guide. Finally we reached Beltane House, a B&B-cum-hostel run by the island co-op, to find that ‘he’, our culinary nemesis, was waiting with the chicken. Lots of chicken and lots of gravy — boat after boat of it sailed to our table and slathered itself over croft-sized mounds of potatoes and chapels of roast fowl. After a wedge of gateau leaking refined sugar, we called for mercy and set out to burn some of the calories off.
The sea mist had rolled right in by now, and the windsock at the dinky little airport (the shortest scheduled flight in the world is from Westray to Papa Westray: two minutes), hung limp in the gloaming. Apart from ‘Him’ and ‘Her’ at Beltane House we’d met no one on the island. We wandered through the farms, past old threshing barns. Even the cattle in the fields looked like isolated figures: all of them cut off from the herd. At this latitude it never really gets dark at night, only eerie. We came upon St Boniface’s, an austere little kirk on the seashore, four-square, its churchyard planted thick with carious headstones.
‘I’ve got to admit,’ Antony’s normally resolute basso dropped to a whisper, ‘that this place is starting to get to me.’ I peered in through the grimy window and stared at the kirk’s interior, then turned to my companion: ‘Would it get to you more,’ I said levelly, ‘if I told you that my dead parents were sitting in one of the pews in there talking to St Tredwell?’
‘Yeah, OK,’ he conceded, ‘that is a seriously disturbing image.’
‘Not for St Tredwell,’ I laughed maniacally, ‘or me for that matter. It’s you she wants. I told you not to take that needlework guide from the croft.’
Sweaty Hearth
‘Extreme heat locates the individual within the natal cleft of existence,’ says Dr Thurm Angström, who I went to interview this week in his claustrophobic office at Reading University’s Department of Comparative Environmental Science. Dr Angström’s weighty tome, Sweaty Hearth: Transliterating Domestic Space in the Age of Climate Change, has been the surprise, beach-book hit of this summer. Apparently it’s being lapped up all the way from Ibiza to Mykonos and back again, although the reflective, gold-foiled cover has a tendency to slide from between well-lubricated fingers.
Dr Angström isn’t altogether surprised by his populist success, although a recent appearance on the Richard & Judy Book Club left him reeling: ‘I couldn’t understand why they insisted on larding me with make-up and then sitting me under intense studio lighting. It would’ve been so much more fitting to have interviewed me in the open air.’ Indeed, for open air is what Dr Angström’s thesis is all about: ‘In the future we will make love and defecate in the garden, while reserving our social life for airily appointed salons. .’ is the arresting opening to his book.
‘I’m not an apostle for this wholesale change in our use of domestic space. I am only describing the inevitable,’ Dr Angström told me, although on meeting him in person I found this difficult to believe; for the ‘Hot Doc’ — as he is known in academic circles — was entirely nude save for an Amerindian penis sheath, while a flocculent mass of beard squatted on his muscular chest, suggesting that he was continually nuzzling a small, brown bear. ‘We will find ourselves in the next half-century,’ he continued, while sponging down his equally flocculent armpits, ‘quite casually abandoning our overheated interiors in pursuit of an al fresco home life that will utterly transform our social relations. The garden, the allotment, the patio, the terrace, these will be our new living spaces; while in our houses we will engage in the sacred rituals of computer banking and on-line shopping.’
‘But what about people who live in flats?’ I objected. ‘Surely this brave new world will not be for them.’
‘Aha!’ The Hot Doc leapt up and began rooting in a filing cabinet. ‘That’s just where you’re wrong.’ He thrust an artist’s impression into my sweaty hands. It depicted Heath Robinson contraptions, cantilevered decks that extended from the façades of multi-storey blocks. On them men, women and even children cavorted, all of them wearing penis sheaths remarkably like Angström’s own. ‘Why are the women wearing penis sheaths?’ I objected, but he waved me away: ‘A mere detail!’
‘What about the children?’ I objected. ‘Surely they’ll plummet off these decks?’
‘But that’s just it!’ He began trying to pace up and down, although given the restricted floor area all he could manage was a side-to-side rocking motion, reminiscent of a caged animal. ‘In the future up, down, sideways — these will be but contingent facts; the only absolute will be space itself. Our children will be like the Navajo who have no fear of heights whatsoever; freed from the tyranny of interiority they will scamper about the city like the great apes they so manifestly are!’
‘Look,’ he continued, offering me a half-full bottle of warm Evian, ‘already the summer months are seeing you once-uptight Britishers bare as never before! You hang out in your Day-Glo cycling shorts, barbecuing fatty sausages and giving it — how you say — large. You oil yourselves then cavort in paddling pools — which are really only outside baths; can’t you see that you’re on the verge of a new age of primitivism and abandonment? Soon they will be selling timeshares in Swindon, I tell you. .’
I can’t deny that I was impressed by Dr Angström’s passion; yet before I boarded my waiting rickshaw and set off for Reading Station, I felt it incumbent on me to speak with one of his colleagues, Dr Maria Vargas Llama, and discover what this equally eminent environmental scientist thought about the author of Sweaty Hearth. ‘The man is completely off his chump,’ said Dr Llama, extracting a Cohiba Robusto from his gleaming silver humidor and lighting it with a spar of rare hardwood. ‘This has nothing to do with global warming — and everything to do with Angström’s office.’
‘When we moved to this new building,’ Dr Llama continued, sitting down behind his huge desk, squarely in the jet of icy air from his massive air-con unit, ‘Thurm got the short straw in the office lottery. Up until then he’d specialised in Inuit ice-building techniques. His doctoral thesis was entitled “Frigid Duvet”. You gullible journalists,’ he airily waved his stogie, ‘should dig a little deeper before you splash contentious environmental theories across the newspapers. Most of them aren’t about the warming world at all — only this or that stuffy, academic department.’