wonderful exchange

One of the joys of living in Dunblane is that all of my friends come to see me.

So tonight, I await the return of friends + godchild on their way home from Skye.  These friends had a rather harrowing journey North.   The Sat Nav chose the most likely route without any regard for ferry timetables, and they found themselves travelling a long and winding road around the lochs back to very near where they had set out because they arrived in time for the ferry to cross them into the wilds, but not for the next ferry to carry them over the sea to Skye.

So tonight, they came armed with insider knowledge:  a better faster route, with not a ferry in sight.

And what an adventure.  Fords, and streams, and narrow bridges.  Crackeling phone lines, and a revised arrival time.  So, I’ve been trying to figure out where they were (unlike last time, when I was trying to figure out where they could stay for the night if it got really bad).

I found this charming description of their route.   Not quite the highway they were hoping for, it seems.

The A889 is quite narrow for a primary route. It’s certainly wider than single-track, but isn’t quite wide enough for two marked lanes. I would guess it’s just over 4 metres wide on average, which should be enough for two cars to pass easily, and wide enough for a car and a truck to pass with care. Some bridges are likely to be narrower, but will have warning signs.

The A889 is also neither straight nor level, and in that respect is just like most of the other older roads through the Highlands. It goes up, down, left and right, always following the line of least resistance across the hillside. If I remember correctly, the road edges have painted white lines, and there are plenty of red/white reflective posts along both sides – so the line is easy to follow.

The road also unfenced for part of the route, with hill sheep and deer wandering unrestricted across the road. Again, this is not unusual for a Highland road.

However, the biggest problem with the A889 road is probably the drivers who use it.

Pray for them, reader.

It might be a long night.

Update:  I was wrong.  It turns out that the road described was indeed reasonable.  The one that really caused trouble was the Old A889, which is kept by the forrestry commission and no longer on the map.  How exciting.

Elizabeth has returned with good questions on old posts.  And since my blogging-brain continues to play hide and seek, I’m going to pull one of her questions us front and centre.

The context is liturgy (Cramner, Dix & Mayhew) and the way we speak of Jesus’ life, death resurrection and ascension:

What’s particularly interesting to me in this post, is that when you move from past to present tense, death drops out. I can say ‘Christ is incarnate for us’ ‘Christ lives’ ‘Christ is raised’ but I’m not sure I can say ‘Christ dies’. Does Christ still die in the present tense?

I suspect it might be worth taking the question as it stands before we jump to what ‘present temse’ means in relation to God.

What do you think?

I miss fireflies.

The setting sun did its best to turn midges into gold dust for me by the river, but the midge will never have the same power as the firefly to enchant the evening sky.

A certain smell, the way the light fell in the undergrowth sent me back to childhood:  to rare summer evenings when my father would take me down to the local ball park to watch the baseball game.

Before you conjure images of Uncle Sam and Apple Pie, let me say that I didn’t like baseball, and those evenings stirred all sorts of complex emotions.  On the one hand there was the excitement of a little girl out in the world with her father.  No small thing.  Also, the excitement of walking so far into places that I was normally not allowed to go, across places that seemed dangerous and unfamiliar.

But that’s where the complexity starts, because (you see) I was never allowed out that far.  I can remember distinctly the first time Dad took me:  I got more and more nervous as we transgressed one boundary after another and I seem to remember saying repeatedly:  are we really supposed to be here?  Are we allowed to go?

He didn’t understand.  To him it was a simple thing to cross the neigbourhood and go to the game.  To him it was a simple thing to assume he would belong:  that he was ‘allowed’ to go even though we didn’t know anyone there, and had no credentials.

My world was not so free then.

Comfort zones are so blithely transgressed by those who believe that the world is fundamentally safe, and that there is space enough for all.

I thought of all this as I walked by the river, unafraid.

It is too easy to push people out of their comfort zone without even realising that you’re doing it.

But to fully respect such boundaries?   Well, that can leave us trapped in the prison of our fears and the failure of our imaginations.