In which I form a spiritual covenant with the crows.
In this week, haunted by ill health, the spectres of my trauma, and my late grandmother, I am guided to a new way of looking at life. Also, I cry a lot. This is how the week happened…
Monday:
The new week brought strife, disease and apathy to me immediately. I started the day coughing and wheezing, with a headache and a sense of dread settling in my weary bones. Rain pounded the house most of the day, but I worked on and gave myself fully to the endeavours of the work-day. By the time I finished I decided I needed a good country walk to save me from collapsing into a formless slump of tears.
I set off on a walk, my most usual route around Castle Loch through several versions of woodland, passing the castle and looping back to the town. By the time I had gone a little over a quarter of the route, my wireless headphones announced that they were going to die from lack of battery. Curiously, even though I had been on the edge of a breakdown, I suddenly felt the hand of providence in this unfortunate Happening; or, more likely, the spiritual interference of my grandmother who must always express her involvement in every matter, even across the veil between worlds.
I somehow knew in my waters that there was a message for me here: stop listening to melancholic and menacing soundtracks and instead listen closely to the natural world around you. In fact, I somehow knew that there was a symbolic message for me. I also, inexplicably, suddenly knew that there was something very important about “crows” tied to the message.
I pressed on, listening intently; and all the more so for specifically trying to pick out the doleful caw of the crow against the rustling ocean-roar of the wind in the crisp autumn leaves. When I reached the Castle I decided to follow the track up and around, coming to rest at the threshold between the back of the ruins and the expanse of forest between there and the loch shore. I listened intently: no crows, but there was a high cracking of undergrowth and dry-fall, rhythmic almost. Like footsteps? Frozen in place by curiosity and a smidge of terror I resigned myself to fate, to being confronted and ravaged by the infamous and much debated Lochmaben Vampire who captured the attention of the late Michael Jackson in the 1990s. Channelling my best performance of Lily Rose Depp in Nosferatu I steeled myself and squared my bosom in anticipation; but the crashing of undergrowth drawing ever nearer came to a more benign conclusion when a young doe leapt out of a thicket and pranced before my eyes through the small glade and back into the woods.
As I continued on the rest of my walk, I reflected that none of the spectrum of emotions I had just allowed myself to feel would have been felt if my headphones had stoically held up to the job. I’d have completed the circuit in a fog of introspection and despair. Already, messages were being received. And, as I rounded a bend and felt myself defrosting in spirit a little, I happened across a whole murder of crows who suddenly took off from a proud oak tree. Justified, I carried on into the night giddy on research into all romantic and terrifying symbolism associated with crows.
Tuesday:
When I woke in the early hours of the morning my chest was leaden heavy, constricted, and there was no air getting into me. Thrashing and coughing I brought up phlegm, but the fullness and the wheeze wouldn’t go. I coughed and coughed until my ribs felt like they’d split and my head ached like it had been cracked with a hammer. This is an escalation of a pattern which has been plaguing me for years, worse in the autumn months but also never really going away. Reaching a threshold and drawing on a reserve of self-preservation and will for life likely found in the woods the night before, I called off work and phoned my doctor.
I passed the day in a fearful state of invalidity, laid out on the sofa in the drawing room. I continued for a while with the game I’d installed last week, and to my excitement and fascination, the characters immediately started dialogue about “crows” which I took as a very important sign that the messages carried for me by my corvid friends may be arriving in multiple formats, even digitally by way of the PlayStation 5.
The doctor has agreed to see me on Wednesday and we have agreed it’s time to talk about my mystery allergies instead of fobbing me off with another prescription for amoxicillin and a diagnosis of “acute sinusitis”. I reminded the doctor of the numerous occasions on which I have been hospitalised due to mystery food colouring allergies in the past, most notably when I was removed in a wheelchair from The Scottish Parliament after taking poorly to the signature cafeteria Lasagne, or when I laid out to die on my engagement trip because I took a reaction to a glass of wine at Cafe Maison Rouge and fully believed that I’d die that very night in a hotel in Marne La Vallée.
Feeling marginally better in the evening, I gathered myself, wrapped up, and decided to follow through on plans to join my mother, aunt and sister at the cinema for the new Downton Abbey movie. I couldn’t help but feel that more messages were being received from Granny who really was in absolutely every conceivable way an avatar of the Dowager Countess of Grantham, notably absent from this movie but none-the-less felt. The whole experience was enjoyable except for the self consciousness I felt on account of being told by my sister that my nose was whistling and could I please breathe through my mouth.
Wednesday:
I woke again to the crushing fullness in my chest, the boneyard rattle of fearful distress adding unwanted percussion to the stillness of the early pre-dawn morning. The anxiety of the impending inspection by the doctor began to play on me and I lay in the dark in dreadful anticipation of what they might say to me.
I passed the time until the appointment with more digital ghost-hunting and crow chat, until the time came to commend myself into the hands of the good doctor. I have a very rocky history with my doctor’s practice. It begins with them losing my medical records in 2016 and then trying to blame me for their clerical error. When I had an emotional breakdown after all my anxieties came to an alarming and emotional head in Tesco in 2019, I was referred to a practice-based country therapist who, during Covid, then announced she couldn’t see me any more and asked me “Will you be okay?” on her closing phone call to me, to which I naturally responded “aren’t you supposed to tell me?”
This trip, however, was a triumph. We discussed my issues and the waking in the morning unable to breathe, and we discussed the other allergy symptoms I experience regularly. Although my chest was clear at this stage in the afternoon and my breathing was “tip top condition”, I expressed that I can’t weather another spell of waking in the morning unable to breathe, not like Tuesday’s episode. I was finally prescribed a strong anti-histamine and advised to book in for blood tests to see if we could learn anything else about the providence of these mystery allergies.
Pleased with the result, I decided in the afternoon to take another one of my long forest walks. This time, my headphones were fully charged. But when I got about a quarter of the way the rain began to fall. Sheltered for the most part by the canopy of trees, I stayed somewhat dry. But, huge raindrops dripped down periodically. And, the hand of fate working again, one such raindrop landed providentially on my ear-bud, triggering it to announce “power off”. I switched them back on and took a few more steps when, suddenly, “power off” was announced to me again. I couldn’t help myself from laughing to myself as I packed them away and agreed to continue on my walk without headphones, again listening intently to the sounds around me.
There were crows, huge flurries of them flying around busily above the trees. Maybe they’re always there, but maybe I haven’t noticed them before, maybe I haven’t been paying attention. I got back to the castle and resumed my spot under the threshold Lime tree, peering into the woods. In a clearing a little ways in I saw the doe, again. Today she was leaping and prancing in a wide circle around the clearing, just unbridled whimsy and woodland panache. It made me smile and I continued on.
For dinner I made a Lancashire hotpot, full of the warming joy of autumn.
Thursday:
I woke in the morning with an implacable sense of freedom and optimism. I couldn’t understand why until it dawned on my that for the first time in literal years, I had woken up freely and unambiguously breathing, without restriction. There was some tightness and restriction, but this felt like the possible remnants of a sickness bug hanging on to me and not the crushing weight of my own body trying to murder me as penance for weakness against airborne irritants.
The joy of my survival did not extend beyond breakfast when I made the regrettable decision to go back to work. The day passed in a veil of pain, stress tears, strife and misery. I raised a number of my core complaints with my boss, biting back tears. Thankfully, my employers are excellent and I have renewed faith that the issues which did for me today will not be carried into future working days, but it did underscore for me the fact that I should allow myself to take the full scope of time for rest in the future.
In the evening I settled down to sort out some matters and was personally delighted to receive a message from a friend asking if I’d be interested in being involved in some charity work through an organisation he is very involved in. I was delighted to accept, and on researching the organisation and its application process further I was interested in one of the questions asking if my family is Armigerous. The short answer to that question is yes, but as no one has matriculated since the death of my grandfather in 2007, I wondered what that actually meant and, also, reminded me that I know precious little about the meaning and the process behind it. I’d thought that my father’s decision not to matriculate cadet arms had meant that I and my sisters would be “locked out” but it turns out that is not the case and I may matriculate if I so wish; and, further, that not doing so does not actually change anything in terms of whether or not the family is or is not Armigerous. Excited and reenergised about my own history, I was only shaken from my exertions genealogical by Derry unexpectedly swinging into the drive in a new car which he’d spontaneously managed to identify and resource.
Reeling from the emotional peaks and troughs of the day, I retired.
Friday:
An office working day. The day itself as far as work goes was fine, and mostly productive. Storm Amy raged fiercely around the building during the afternoon. Come 5pm it was necessary to wait for a break in the rain before making a mad dash to the Douglas Arms for an event starting at 7pm.
The event: a viewing of a new YouTube series produced by and starring some of the dearest drag queens on our social scene. The premise sees them visiting haunted locations across Dumfries and Galloway, engaging in spiritual discourse with ghosts but all the while they’re in drag. A simple concept but utterly charming and funny.
The viewing was a delight, but I over imbibed on red wine on an absolutely empty stomach and became a victim to the lunacy of strong drink. I inexplicably reached out to the girls group chat (The Coven) with a string of unintelligible messages including “recast me” and “chicken nuggets”. Devoid of context, devoid of sense.
Saturday:
A day spent recovering emotionally and physically from my Friday. And, I think, the whole week. I spent the whole day on the verge of tears and feeling incredibly emotionally unstable. I think perhaps that the realisation that the medication I’ve been put on has made an actual, physical difference to my life has overwhelmed me. I don’t speak about it because it terrified me, but the fear of losing control of my breath, of being exhausted struggling to breathe morning and night, of simply giving up after the next bout of serious respiratory distress and slipping away into the unknown, has haunted me for years. Years. Waking up that Thursday morning and every morning since with the ability to breathe, without the fear meeting me first thing face on every day, has been emotionally intense; and I can’t talk about it! Not because there’s no one TO talk about it with, but because I chose not to because of fear. Fear of being pitied, fear of being seen as attention seeking, fear of speaking life into a nameless terror of my mortality. But I know now that I will survive it, that there are solutions and there is help - it only takes finding the courage to ask the doctor outright to look again, or to think twice.
My wobble at work on Thursday also underscored for me how emotionally low and under resilient I have been. Mean spiritedness, slyness, myopic behaviours. I see them everywhere and they build up on my spirit like limescale. I push them down, squash them in the hollow places inside of me but focus on them in my quiet times. Instead of walking the loch route and listening to the world around me, I find myself carried off on daydreams, meditations. Always I’m begging, begging to be given more of a chance, a break emotionally; in my worst times, I’m begging for vindication, for the people who have hurt and upset me to finally feel the weight of their transgressions.
And then comes the weekend where I carry myself away giddily on a tide of revelry and wine. And, if the circumstances match up, like my trauma-trap is full and my stomach is empty, I find myself in a dark pit of despair. And, in those moments, I feel myself literally let go of the rope clinging to consciousness. In those moments I don’t want to be conscious, I want to be released. I want to be gone. I want to be nothing physical but pure formless emotion. To cry and cry and cry and have no one else get uncomfortable by it for fear of not knowing what to do to calm the flood, or to rage and scream and wail without it being socially unacceptable. Or to laugh hysterically, bitterly, coldly and not be seen as unhinged. There’s so much to feel and so limited a way to express it in this mortal format, in this cultural moment. But, I think I’m ready to reclaim control of that, which should be exciting news for anyone who has ever had the harrowing and perplexing experience of having me try to answer “how do you feel” with honesty and colour.
I feel now that I’ve been focusing on loss. The loss of my breath, my health, my agency, my company, my apartment, my opportunities. Or of the things I can’t seem to achieve, or the obstacles that present themselves. It’s strange how in a week where I let myself be open to signs, they seem to be everywhere. This week I can start to breathe again, literally and metaphorically. This week I learned that not everything is always taken away from me as finally as I might think. That there was a background process in my brain which imagined that even something as socially ephemeral as my “nobility” was “taken away” because of another person’s choice underscores how loss-focused I have been. As it happens, neither socially, spiritually or, in fact, legally, can one’s nobility be taken away.
I may have felt loss before. But, crows are always gathering shiny things, accumulating them, weaving them into the fabric of their nests. Perhaps this is the message I should be carrying into my thirties. Be like a crow - misunderstood, frightening to the narrow minded townsfolk, and continuously bedazzling your life with precious jewellery and trinkets.
Sunday:
I’m writing from the kitchen, where I am alone. I sit where I have for thirty years, on Granny’s left. Her space at the top of the table, latterly occupied by my Aunt, appears empty. My aunt is with my mother and grandfather at Kelso races which I have foregone due to a mixture of having chores to catch up on, a lack of suitable wardrobe, and sheer emotional exhaustion.
Although I’m alone in the house, aside from my two slumbering children, I often feel like Granny is never actually far away. I do feel like it was her interference this week which wrested my headphones out my head on two occasions, forcing me to listen. Literally ripping the cotton wool from my head and making me experience the full sharpness of the world I occupy. If she were physically here now we’d be watching Catchphrase and eating squid; or talking about topics like Napoleon and the Empress Josephine, the merits of good shoes for appropriate dancing, or the amount of sugar contained in the average banana. It’s easy to be loss focused when I think about it; I could slump down and let myself cry about it, about how I miss her; or, I could be grateful that even something as fundamental as death can’t stop her from reaching me with important guidance - whether that be about how I experience my life as a constant opportunity for enrichment, or with a ghostly warning about over consumption of modern genus bananas.