I live in Kent where it's perpetually noisy with traffic and clogged up with consumerism. Our home is a 200 year old semi-detached house built of red brick and kent peg tiled roof with too busy a road at the front droning cars most daytime weekdays, and a larger southfacing garden to the rear chock-a-block with fragrances and birdsong. Originally it would have been a mile beyond the city walls of Canterbury and well within view of the magnificent cathedral of sandy stone but now post war suburban homes tie us into the city and also divide us from the open country.

As I look out from my window I see beyond the fragranced garden's golden sunlight a tall and ancient Scot's pine tree atop which this year a rook is building its twiggy nest. I hear it cawing early in the morning and love this sound of rurality come to my suburban garden and I watch it flapping its raggedy wing' ed way across the blue towards the old rookery up the hill a quarter of a mile distant where the ever-so English rolling green countryside begins. Between our nook at the bottom of the hill and the aforementioned rookery lies a bewitching memory park of childhood bygone days - in actuality the University where my father is Dean of Humanities but in memory a green sward I used to consider wild as we daily walked our dog up there when I was a small child, and we flew our kites and sledged our sledges and watched the flags burst into yellow bloom, collected frog spawn watched kingfishers fishing and wandered the bluebelled groves. There is a very tiddly sized stream where we used to play poohsticks on a farm bridge and I dreamt sunny dreams of future songs and choral works (now written out on paper) and a pretty country church with a terribly English churchyard and skylarks wittering merrily overhead....the sea lies on another five miles north, lined by little colourful beach huts and endless bungalows full of retired folks and amusement arcades and steeply shelving, relentlessly moving flint-stone beaches - a far cry from the wilderness quiets of Scotland.

I like the elemental. Now to someone who actually lives all the year round with the reality of bold climate, I may seem naive and overenarnoured of the imagery, the romance, the supposedly glamourousness of man v wilderness....and I detest the cold and find it thwarts my yearning need to be out of doors. Yet I feel more myself under the sky than at any other time and breathe deep of the fragrant winds of song that seem to fill me with a sense of unaloneness: I suppose I find my spirituality fed by quiet wilderness and stressed by urban blare. I love to visit the Hebrides in Scotland treading in my mother's childhood steps and gleaning from the greys a buoyancy. I used to find it incomprehensible how my mother grinned and felt restored by barren drizzled chill stone but I had a truly awesome summer two years ago when I made a journey of the soul through shimmering silver sealochs and whispering ocean's gentle lulling song brought close by impenetrable mists and wildly whooping whaups, and ravens clacking overhead in huge black swinging flight and a seal close by transferring weighty blubber from rock to silent deep with the strangest of balletic movements and scarce a ripple. The mind has grown a ballet for oboe piano and cello plus dancer and narrator out of this summer in the isles and it was being rehearsed for performance of musical extracts by fellow students at the Royal Academy of Music postgraduate concert when my place there abruptly terminated last year and threw me into deep depression. For music is the medium I got funding for as soon as I found a way to spell out my need, but it's also been a tremendous frustration because of the attitude of ABs to a crip in their midst and because of my precociousness. Physical disability hurts.

I cried long and bitter tears the day I realised I was disabled but since my disability mutes my voice noone knew the significance of the day to me. All hope of talking walking being like my brother drained as if his words had cut off my air. This hurt is of a veil made of inpenetrable glass coming into view and muffling me so that I am seen but not heard, waving as I drowned in my own immaterial tears. My brother pulled me out of bed when I was scarce 2 with his usual daily routine words "come on poor wee Hewo". I thought therapists were teaching me to talk and walk. I thought if I did what I was told it would come to be. I knew that others learnt more spontaneously but I thought I was stupid and needed lessons. It hadn't occurred to me that there was anything but a temporary hitch until that morning when my bro did exactly as he always did but I wanted to ask mum if I would ever talk and I couldn^'t of course and I started to cry, and not being noticed as I cried made me sob gulping sobs that even then could not be seen by my loving family who carried on with breakfast and sandpit play and responded not one iota to my emotional state....

If there was a day that turned my life to art it was rooted here, and was recognised by me as I found blaring hurt in paintings that linked me back into humanity: I adored seeing huge canvasses on the walls of a gallery in Edinburgh when I was still 2, and responded so avidly that I was allowed to linger long beyond my brother and father who returned to the sunlit pavements while I danced my spirit around a Monet haystack of subtle bruised dawn daubed with panache and an identifiable obsession. The hurt of being mute is a dull ache that I live with continually like I live with numbness in my bum from sitting overlong in one position and the reason of course that it's a dull backcloth aching and not the screaming foreground is because my dearest mother devoted years of patient time to building a release mechanism that buoys my mirth into glee and permits via fast spelling unimaginable freedom celebrated daily.... a joy in language, a feasting never complete.

I've visited the same Hebridean village two further times since being cast from the warm Academy, to search again for silver seas - but ne'er a drop of silver is there but more and greater love. The community we stay in natters madly from hour to hour and everything hinges on the school, shop and kirk. I meet with folk who include me. It's novel after Kent and London. But it's not at all a quaint community because it's hitched up to net and fax and revitalised by in-migrants and it's thrivingly aware of its difficulties, and its mesmerising qualities. The natives stand and watch the storm clouds rolling by and talk about how truly lucky they feel to be living there. One bus driver stood in the rain in darkest February and said that he felt as if he'd died and gone to heaven when his boss arranged a birthday treat of a job transfer to Mull. This sort of palpable happiness is amazing to a girl brought up in stiff upper lip southern England where the idea of living by choice amongst blizzards and winter gales seems perverse in the extreme.

The glittery blue days of summer sun run the mind back into celtic traditions of sailing from isle to visible isle and drawing sustenance from the plenty in the sea. There's a wonderful fringing of machair where the peat is overlain by windblown sand from ocean's grinding shores that lends itself to fragrant wild flowers and grazing herds and wintering homesteads of sturdy hewn rock solidly sheltering in modern cosy comfort the sailors home from the sea. The sea is the ancient highway respected friend not foe and its bubbling songs stir me to a frenzy of delightedness, the bounding boat like a leaping dolphin (that brought sickness to my mother) brought real gleed laughter from my throat and rippling piano music to my mind.

When I am thus content my disability is but a nuisance, a thwarting of my running free and wildly flinging out my songs, a thwarting of my deep desire to put up sail and bob forever free of cumbersome land. I adore the tonal equalities of sky and sea, of rock and cloud, of shore and sunset - the balanced above and below and self poised betwixt the two. So there you have it. I sit in suburban calm feasting from such memories....

__________________________________________________________________________________

hojoy@herojoynightingale.me.uk ................. "FROM THE WINDOW" ................... FTW diary

please see my curriculum vitae or e-mail me for more information