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The Edge of the Sky | Oir Nan Speur is a theatre project in Gaelic and English, produced by sruth-mara and supported by the 2022 Hebridean Dark Skies Festival. It’s a uniquely Hebridean theatrical adaptation of a book by Italian astrophysicist Roberto Trotta, which attempts to explain some of the most complex ideas in astronomy with only the 1000 most commonly used words in the English language.

As part of the project, sruth-mara commissioned Peter Mackay, Elspeth Turner and Rody Gorman to create new pieces of writing in Gaelic, each inspired by Roberto Trotta’s book and, wherever possible, restricting themselves to only the 1000 most commonly used words in Gaelic. The commissions were supported by funding from Bòrd Na Gàidhlig.

Illustrations by Laura Cameron-Lewis.

Fìor Mhòr
Pàdraig MacAoidh

Tha an sgeulachd mhòr
a’ ruith fo na faclan
mar uisge tro abhainn.
Chan eil crìochan oirre.

Mar liosta de lusan
a chuireas tu nad chuimhne
airson deuchainn-sgoile,
chan eil i fìor

ach bidh i a’ fàs unnad
fo smachd na maille,
an sàs anns gach rathaid
de do smaoineachadh.

Chan eil i idir idir fìor,
ach bidh thu ga creidsinn co-dhiù
gun doigh ann coimhead seachad
air làn-mar’ aice:

“Aon latha bidh coltas ann
eadar dòchas ’s eachdraidh”.
“Aon latha bidh co-chomharran
iomchaidh

airson ar cùis.” Ach an-diugh
siud i,  a’ coiseachd tro ar beachdan,
a’ gabhail òran uabhasach.
Chan eil i fìor ach –

ag ithe an fhìor bheag ’s an fhìor mhòr –
bidh i a’ dèanamh ath-leasachadh,
a’ togail teine-leabhraichean,
a’ leigeil oirre, mar gum b’e.

Real, Big
Pàdraig MacAoidh

The big story runs
through the words
like water through a river.
It has no bounds.

Like a list of plants
you’d store in your memory
for a school-test,
it isn’t true

but grows in you
powered by procrastination,
pushing through each road
of your thinking.

It is not at all true,
but you will believe it anyway,
with no way of looking
beyond its high-tide:

“One day hope and history
will look something
like each other”.
“One day there will be

fitting emblems for our cause.”
But today, there it is,
wandering through our thoughts
humming a terrible song,

eating the real small and the real big
redeveloping,
building up its book-fires,
carrying on as if.

Crann-àraidh na h-Oidhche
Elspeth Turner

Ma ‘s math mo chuimhne
bha sinn a-muigh
ri-taobh an tigh-bidh
air an t-eilean ainmeil ud
a bha air an t-eagal a chur orm
iomadh seachdainn.
Sin far an do sheall thu dhomh iad –
na seachd dhiubh
air theine
shuas an sin:

Nìghean Righ
is a h-athair
is an dithis a chumas i an cois
(is nach iongantach
gu bheil clàr ann
gu bheil an dithis aice nan laighe
ri a taobh, na leapaidh
gun dragh –
a’ reir an dealbh seo, cò-dhiù)

Is an tè a lorg fìor-uisge dhìth sa’ mhadainn
is am fear ìosal a chuireas gach nì ceart
is a sròin beag air ceithir casan
nach tèid fada air falbh bhuaipe

Agus a-staigh
tè bheag nad làmh
tharraing thu dealbh dhiubh
a th’ agams fhathast

Ged a tha mi a’ tuigsinn
gu bheil a h-uile càil a th’ ann
a chì ‘s nach fhaic
soilleir neo nach eil
shuas an sin
neo a’ gluasad tromhainn –
gu bheil a-huile càil an sin
ga tarraing às a chèile:
na lorgan seo a dh’ fhàg thu –
cha dèan às e

Cha tèid seo à sealladh idir
Is na faclan sgriobhte an seo
a’ dannsa
mar na ballaichean teine fhèin;
na lorgan seo
tro mo chuid chloinne
gan leigeil às

Nocturnal Sky Plough

If I remember rightly
We were outside
Beside the restaurant
On that famous island
Which had frightened me
On many a week.

That’s where you showed them to me
the seven of them
on fire
up there:

The Princess
her father
and the two she keeps close
(and how wonderful
this record that she has two
in her bed
and no fuss
according to this drawing, at least)

And the one who brings her fresh water in the morning
and the ‘all jobs man’
and her little nose on four legs
who won’t go far from her side

And inside
a dram in your hand
you drew a picture of them
which I have, still

Though I understand that
the all-there-is
seen and unseen
bright or not
up there
or moving through us –
that all of that
is pulling away:
These markings you left cannot flee

This can’t disappear
the words written here
dancing
like the fireballs themselves
and these marks
through my children
released

An Reul-Iùil Sa Charade / The North Star in the Gloaming
Rody Gorman

air mo shligh’ air ais, an Reul-iùil
sa chiaradh aig Àrd Gunail
is air chruaidh san Linne, na siùil

on my way back, the North Star in the gloaming at Ard Gunel and hard at anchor on the Sound, sails

caora leatha fhèin air a’ Bhealach
is gun aice de threòrachadh
ach na rionnagan ‘s a’ ghealach

a sheep on its own at the breachpass of Bealach and only the stars and moon to guide it

anns a’ chiaradh, air mo mhealladh
is air Beinn Bhràghad thall a’ ghealach
is na neòil a’ dol à sealladh

in the dusk mistaken and the hill at Beinn Bhràghad the moon and stars going out of sight 

air tolman sa mhadainn air Cnoc Fionn
a’ gabhail beachd air na rionnagan
a dh’fhaodadh a bhith os ar cionn

on a hillock on Cnoc Fionn thinking about the mackrelstars that could be up there above us

an aigeal na h-oidhche nam chaithris,
a’ sealltainn thairis air a’ chaolas
agus ceòl na mara ga aithris

in the dead of night up on my own looking out across the sound and listening to the music of the sea

nach e sin cnag na cùise –
mun Artaig eadar an fhionnairidh ‘s an oidhche,
fàileadh lus-na-tùise

is that not the heart of the matter – round the tussocks at Artag eitherbothbetween the lilacwhitewatchingevening and the night, the common lavender’s airscent

aig Dùn nan Eun aig deireadh na ràithe,
an ceileireadh a bh’ ann gu meadhan-oidhche
a’ falbh nas tràithe ‘s nas tràithe

aig Dùn nan Eun at the end of the season, the birdsong that was there till midnight going earlier and earlier

air gach taobh,
na speuran a’ ciaradh –
na feannagan aig Tobar nan Craobh

all around the skies darkening the lazy-bedhoodie-crows at the well of Tobar nan Craobh

bir! sgaorr eun-leadain
a-mach às an adhar os mo chionn
san Dùbhlachd an Glaic an Fheadain

honk! a flock of barnacle-geese out of the air above me in the dark in December in Glaic an Fheadain

breacadh-rionnaich
is mi falbh san fheasgar don mhonadh
thar Chàrn an t-Sionnaich

mackerel sky as I go in the evening to the heathermoor past the cairn at Càrn an t-Sionnaich

a’ mhuir gu h-ìseal na h-aon chobhar
agus de neòil anns an speur
sa mhadainn bho Dhruim nan Gobhar

the sea below me foaming and all those swooncomplexionclouds in the sky in the morning from the ridge at Druim nan Gobhar

aon uair eile, breacadh-rionnaich
os cionn Loch an Iasgaich
anns an iarmailt ghlionnaich

once again, a mackerel sky above Loch an Iasgaich in the hazy heavens  

cha lèir dhomh ‘n t-slighe
‘s an ciaradh a’ nochdadh air an linne
‘s a’ Choille Bheag a’ fàs nas tighe

I can’t make out the way as the glooming nakedappears on the sound and the woods at Coille Bheag wastegrow dullfoggythicker

a’ coimhead na gealaich is nam blàth
os cionn a’ Bhealaich Bhàin sa chiaradh,
dìreach mise ‘s mo sgàth

at tsukimi and hanami above the mountain-pass at Bealach Bàn in the dusk, just me and my dreadshadow

sa chiaradh agus na speuran a’ glanadh
os cionn a’ Mhonaidh Mheadhanaich –
manadh

in the twilight as the skies clear above the moor at Monadh Meadhanach – an owlappiritionlight

Julia Taudevin tells the story behind Move-Gluasad. This piece appeared in Events magazine in January 2020, ahead of the show’s world premiere on the Isle of Lewis.

Loss and migration have been two major themes in my life. I was born in Australia and moved to Papua New Guinea when I was two weeks old. At four years old I moved to Indonesia where I lived until I was 18. My mother was born and raised on Lewis, leaving the island at 16 to train as a teacher and then move to Africa and then Papua New Guinea where she met my father. My father is second generation Australian. His father’s parents migrated to Australia from France and his mother’s parents migrated from Guernsey. When I was growing up my parents always called us expatriates but really we were economic migrants. 

Most summers for the first 17 years of my life I travelled back across the world to stay with my Seanair in Stornoway. This annual pilgrimage was hugely significant for me. I loved my grandfather and felt a deep connection to the island that I was of but not from. I spent long hours considering how similar the two halves of my world were, even though one was a rock in the Minch and the other an equatorial archipelago. And the connecting factor was always the sea. I remember chasing my brother Robin over the dunes at Bhaltos as a child and stopping and looking at the horizon and thinking that the sun would soon be coming up over Sambolo, my favourite beach in Indonesia.

In 2006 Robin drowned off the coast of East Timor. I was touring Europe with a show at the time and we’d just got into a town on the North Sea when I received the news that he’d gone missing. I remember looking out at the horizon and willing the sun to go down so that it might come up over East Timor and warm Robin’s body and maybe even save him. And in that moment the memory of looking out at the horizon from the Bhaltos dunes all those years ago came back to me.

Then, in 2015, a photograph hit the news of three-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi, whose small body washed up on a Mediterranean shore. It felt like, for a moment at least, all eyes were on the refugee crisis which had been a crisis long before Aylan’s death and still is one three years later. I couldn’t stop thinking about how incredibly privileged I was to have been brought up skipping back and forth across oceans without a second thought and here was this dead child whose family’s search for refuge had come to this most devastating loss.

I found myself thinking about mourning. When Robin died I felt a huge pressure from my immediate family not to cry when all I wanted to do was wail and tear my hair and beat my fists against the earth. I found no acceptable social outlet for the depth of my grief. And I thought about this time we are living in right now where so many people are displaced and so many others terrified of losing their place and I wanted to create a space that unites us in mourning for all of our losses: loved ones; identities; home; hopes; dreams; traditions; lives. A space that mourns universally – across borders, cultures, languages, experiences. A space that mourns this growing sense of isolation from each other and ourselves so that we might open up our hearts to moving forward with more compassion. 

In 2015 the Playwrights Studio Scotland gave me a research grant to begin collecting songs of loss and migration in languages indigenous and migrant to Scotland. The Lewis-based arts organisation sruth-mara then gave me a two-week residency to experiment with putting those songs into a performance context. That very early work in progress was shared with Lewis audiences in the summer of 2018 and it was so well received we got funding from Creative Scotland for us to make the full show.

Move~Gluasad is inspired by traditional Gaelic keening rituals where five multi-ethnic performers tell stories about migration, through spoken word and song. A keening ritual is expressly designed to aid a bereaved community to begin the process of grief. The performance creates a space to connect with the common human experience of grief, through Gaelic song, stories inspired by the testimonies of loss and migration that have collected through my research and – you may be surprised to learn – a hefty dose of humour, 

And so here we are, preparing to start rehearsals and bring the final show to Lewis audiences in January and Celtic Connections in February. The two-week residency last year was a chance to experiment and play but when faced with the task of writing and producing a full show my engagement with the work has necessarily changed. My main concern has been cultural authenticity of voice. Both in terms of traditional Gaelic culture and language – to which I am connected to through my heritage but of which I have very little lived experience –  and the representation of non-white migrant cultures.

I connected with two Gaelic scholars: Dòmhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart and Virginian Blackenhorn. Their enthusiasm for the project has developed it in ways I never imagined it would and I am deeply grateful to them both. Less straightforward has been my considering of my whiteness in relation to the stories we tell in this show. I wonder if I, despite my own deep connection with the trauma of unexpected bereavement, I will ever be able to fully empathise with the historical wealth of suffering that comes with being born into a body of a different colour. I hope for all of our sakes that I am, and that those like me are too. This performance is one way to finding empathy as families in every corner of the globe continue to be devastated by the brutality that comes as mainstream culture swings to the right with ever hardening borders.

This is a performance about hope – hope that we can still find ways to connect with each other across our differences. I hope you will join us.

Move~Gluasad is at Kinloch Community Hub, Old School, Balallan, Monday 27 January, Carloway Community Centre, Wednesday 29 January, Uig Community Centre, Thursday 30 January and Back Football Club and Community Centre, Friday 31 January. Each performance begins at 8pm, with an optional Gaelic singing workshop at 6.45pm which is included in ticket price. To book tickets, call An Lanntair’s box office on 01851 708 480

Kirsty Law on her sruth-mara residency. From Kirsty’s blog

It’s the first days of September, I’m here on the Isle of Lewis and coming to the end of my solo summer tour. I’ve been performing solo arrangements of songs from my latest project, ‘Young Night Thought’, as well as the beginnings of things that are new – at this stage tentative and curious.

It’s the perfect time now to focus on some writing. So I’m very excited that Sruth-Mara – arts promoter based in Uig, on the west side of the island, conceived by Andrew Eaton-Lewis – have heard the call. I will now not only be performing in the Uig Community Centre but in the three days leading up to it I’ll be ‘resident’ there, writing, experiementing, meeting the folk that come through its doors. 

This is the kick start of my new project – working title [Mark-Making]. It’s at that embyonic stage, all questions, no answers, destination: unknown. It starts with some basic lines of enquiry. These are:

• In this ever-scarier global world, how do you make a difference, a mark, an impression? Is it all about the large scale, or, is there a strong sense of empowerment to be gained by refocussing our attentions, placing value on the ‘audience of one’ and acts of sharing?
• Feild recordings – questions and study around field recordings form the basis of this project. One of the ways I fell in love with traditional songs was through hearing them alongside the ticking of the clock in the room, the preamble of the singer, the questions of the collector, the bird outside the window, the clink of the tea cup. These little sounds were signifiers that, although this singer was performing to the tiniest of audiences, this small act of skill and generosity was part of a bigger, complex picture.
• The tactility of music – how can I, right from the beginning of the writing process, gain a sense of place/space in my composition? What ‘noises’ can make, use, take, play with?
• Contemporary sounds/writing: when I have explored all of these recordings and ideas and delved into the past, I hope to ask – what moves me to sing now, from where I stand? And what what will those songs sound like?

Eilidh Whiteford of Heb Events interviewed Andrew about sruth-mara – and Move ~ Gluasad in particular – for the magazine’s June 2018 issue – our first media coverage! Here is a full transcript of the interview.

What was the inspiration behind establishing sruth-mara?

Sruth-mara came about because of a few different things. I’ve been developing new theatre projects for a while now as part of my work as arts lead for the Mental Health Foundation and as a programmer for the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival and I’m keen to do more of this as an independent producer. I’m especially keen to do projects on Lewis because my wife and I moved from Edinburgh to Timsgarry recently with our children and we love it here. And Uig has a fantastic community centre with a main hall that is already used for performances but has the capacity to be used more. When I found out that Uig Community Centre were keen to have more events going on in the hall I thought there might be an opportunity for me to make myself useful, so I started to put a proposal together. The idea, in a nutshell, is to develop new theatre projects from Uig, with the involvement of my community, which can premiere on Lewis but also have potential to tour more widely – to festivals like Celtic Connections or the Edinburgh Fringe as well as across the UK or even internationally. Sruth-mara is Gaelic for sea current, and the idea is that the organisation itself will be a kind of sea current, carrying ideas and people back and forth from Lewis to the mainland in a spirit of equal exchange.

How do you feel the work by Julia, Mairi and Anna reflects/complements the ethos of Sruth-mara? Are you pleased with Move-Gluasad as the performance to launch the new arts organisation?

Move – Gluasad feels like a perfect first project for sruth-mara. Julia is an award-winning theatre maker whose work is well known across the UK, and her mother is from Lewis so she has strong family connections here (she has also done TV work  here as an actor – you may have spotted her in an episode of Katie Morag!). Mairi is also from Lewis and is well known here, whereas Anna will probably be a new face to a lot of people on Lewis, so the team we’ve put together feels like a good mix of the familiar and the new.  The idea behind Move – Gluasad is to explore songs and stories of migration and loss across different cultures, to look at the common points, for example, between Scots emigrating across the world because of the Clearances, and today’s refugees from places like the Middle East. Both Julia and I were keen to develop the project here, partly for personal reasons, and partly because migration has had such a huge impact on Lewis in particular over the centuries – I’ve seen it described as a kind of death, because sometimes you’d never see or hear from the people who left the island again, or not hear anything for years. The story of St Kilda is obviously very resonant too, and we’ll be working on the show just a few miles from the site for the proposed St Kilda Centre.

What do you believe the work will bring to audiences? What do you hope the project brings to Uig and its residents?

I hope lots of people from Uig will come and that they’ll feel entertained and inspired! If you want to go to the theatre on Lewis, you generally have to go to An Lanntair – although Rural Nations have been doing a great job of programming events at other venues on Lewis, including a theatre show earlier this year. So this is a relatively rare opportunity to see an artistically ambitious show by a really experienced team of professional performers, in a community hall in Uig – with the added opportunity to help shape that show before it goes into final production. The show will also be performed partly in English and partly in Gaelic, which will hopefully add to its appeal. If it gets a good response, I hope to do more events like this next year.

During the open rehearsals in June – what can those interested expect when they attend? What/who are you hoping to attract to the open rehearsals? What would you say to encourage anyone who is interested in joining in?

The open rehearsals are literally that – rehearsals you can come and watch and see the show coming together. Everyone and anyone who is interested is welcome, and Julia is very open to talking about the show before and afterwards and hearing comments, suggestions and any stories and songs that people would like to share with her. It’s a bit of an experiment, to be honest – my hope for sruth-mara is that we can create shows that my local community feels invested in, shows that grow organically out of this place, nurtured by the people who live here. Julia, Mairi and Anna will be here throughout the week and I hope to introduce them to as many people as possible – it might be that new ideas for the show come out of conversations we have during the week, not just at the open rehearsals but before and after the performance, or in places like the community shop. Julia is very friendly, approachable and collaborative, so what I would say to people is, come and say hello and don’t be afraid to express an opinion, whether you’re an Uig resident or a visitor passing through.

Is there anything I may have omitted to ask that you feel is important to mention?

Just a couple of things! While the development week and first work-in-progress performance is in Uig, and it would be amazing to get lots of people along to that, there’s also a performance at An Lanntair on Saturday 30 June, which will hopefully make it easier for people from Stornoway or other parts of the island to see it.

Also…. There is another sruth-mara project in development this summer, a theatre adaptation of Alastair McIntosh’s fantastic book Soil & Soul. The playwright and performer Alan Bissett has already had a long conversation with Alastair at his home in Glasgow and will be doing research for a script while he’s on Lewis in July performing a Moira Monologues double bill at An Lanntair. Like Julia, he’ll be living in Uig for a few days and while there won’t be a Soil & Soul performance – we’re too early on in the process for that – we’ll be visiting some of the places described in the book and hopefully talking to lots of people about it. Alan will also be doing a ‘meet the author’ event at Ann Lanntair where he’ll be talking about the project, so please come along and say hello!

What does it mean to ‘belong’ somewhere? It’s a question I’ve wrestled with throughout my life, and it’s particularly difficult to avoid when I’m on Lewis. As Madeleine Bunting observes in Love of Country, a book about the Hebrides that has helped shape much of my thinking about sruth-mara, the way you greet somebody in Gaelic is to ask ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘Who do you come from?’, in contrast to the English ‘How are you?’. In English, Madeleine points out, belonging is defined as a matter of property,  as in belongings, or status – ‘having the right personal and social qualities to be a member of a particular group’. But in Gaelic culture, ‘the identity of place and family matter more than personal wellbeing or health’. In a crofting culture where survival has long been reliant on co-operation and the sharing of skills and resources, identity is bound up with the land, the language, and your community.

Early on in his book Soil & Soul – another influence on this project – Alastair McIntosh refers to the Lewis phrase ‘What are his earmarkings?’ It refers to the practice of identifying sheep – which outnumber people on Lewis – by their clipped earmarks. Applied to people, it means ‘Where’s he coming from? What’s she about?’ It’s a question I’ve often been asked, in various forms, by people I meet on Lewis – usually out of lively curiosity rather than suspicion, although Hebridean people have no shortage of good reasons to be suspicious of the intentions of a visitor with an English accent.

So, like Alastair, one of the first things I should do is declare my own markings – they may help explain, at least in part, why I ended up on Lewis, and why I wanted to create sruth-mara.

I grew up in Houghton, a village near Carlisle in the north west of England (my dad was a deputy head teacher of a big comprehensive school, my mum ran the family home, I have two older sisters). I always wanted to make art – music, theatre, books, anything I could turn my hand to – and as a teenager I remember feeling, a little resentfully, that the place where I lived had no obvious cultural identity of its own. I remember, very clearly, that there didn’t seem to be any famous writers, artists, musicians or filmmakers from Carlisle – even now, the brief ‘culture’ section on the city’s Wikipedia page doesn’t name any. I also remember feeling that the cultural identity of ‘the north’, something I was drawn to in my search for a sense of identity and belonging, didn’t really relate to Carlisle. The northern English writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians to whom I related were from Manchester, Sheffield or Newcastle. These cities, not Carlisle, were the ‘cultural north’ of England. (Tellingly, whenever I told people I was from Carlisle they would say ‘I went through there once’ – Carlisle felt like a place you passed through on the way to somewhere else) The result is that I grew up with little sense of belonging, which was partly why I wanted to leave.

I sometimes wonder whether I have been unfair in my rejection of Carlisle – that if I felt it lacked a cultural voice, I should have stayed and tried to help give it one. But instead I adopted Scotland as my home. This was an easy decision for various reasons. My mum was from Glasgow and I spent most of my summer holidays in Scotland (Arran in particular). Also, it was just a few miles away, and seemed much more interesting culturally than Carlisle.

In the years since, I have immersed myself in Scottish culture and, through my work as arts editor for the Scotsman, championed it as much as I could. While I have found some comfort and belonging in this, it has never quite felt like my own culture, and I am always very conscious that I didn’t spend my formative years here or have the same reference points as a lot of the people around me. For most of my adult life I have felt like an outsider, and I have learned to embrace that – modelling this aspect of my life on the Scottish writer Nick Currie (aka Momus), who has spent much of his life in Japan, precisely because its culture is so alien that he knows he will always feel like an outsider there, a feeling he says he enjoys.

This formative experience has made me very interested in the complex ways in which the culture of a place defines us, and in how much control we have over how we define ourselves within the dominant culture. One of the things that most interests me about Uig is the tension between the way it is regarded by many outsiders (exoticised as a remote, empty place, far from the centre of things, on the edge of the world etc) and the way it is regarded by people who live there. It reminds me a little of how differently the north of England is regarded by those who live there and by people from the south of England. Uig is only far from ‘the centre’ if you define the centre as London, or perhaps Glasgow or Edinburgh. In terms of shipping lanes, though, the Hebrides have long been a gateway to the world – on the cultural route between Scandinavia and Ireland, in particular. Love of Country is full of thoughtful observations on this subject, finding parallels, for example, between Lewis’s connection to the wider world – the international cultural legacy of the many crofters who have emigrated to the USA, Canada and other countries – and the formidable cultural influence of Iona, whose monks once travelled all across Europe. My neighbour Malcolm Maclean, interviewed by Madeleine for her book, likes to show visitors a map in which Lewis is shown as a gateway to the north Atlantic – with the ‘mainland’ (what a loaded term that is) on the periphery.

Like me, Madeleine Bunting is an outsider on Lewis, and while she is respectful of its history and culture, she is aware of the urge to romanticise it in a way that only outsiders do – the whole premise of the book, after all, is that it’s a personal ‘journey’ through the Hebrides, the final destination being her home back in London. Much of the book explores the various ways in which outsiders project their own views of the world – their own fantasies about it – onto islands whose inhabitants have an entirely different view of their home, their culture, and their history (it is particularly tempting to do this with islands, given how powerful they are as metaphors – see Malachy Tallack’s book The Un-discovered Islands for another good analysis of this subject).

A central theme of Love of Country is the role the Hebrides have been forced to play in British (or rather English) colonial identity in particular – the Hebrides, in her analysis, have long been thought of as an outpost of the British Empire rather than a place in itself, and sentimentalised, exoticised and patronised for centuries because of this. I thought of Madeleine’s book again recently when reading Brexit is a collective English mental breakdown, a provocation by Nicholas Boyle in the Irish times which argues that England has never, until quite recently, had to think of itself as a nation on equal terms with other nations. As Nicholas puts it:

The EU challenged England not to give up a national identity, but to acquire one – to give up the illusions embodied in a United Kingdom that never was a nation, but was always a device to conceal England’s colonial relation to the other nations inhabiting Great Britain and Ireland. Instead the EU offered England the opportunity for equal partnership in a common endeavour, which is nowadays all that nationhood can mean. On June 23rd, 2016, the English rejected that offer and opted to continue living the fiction of splendid isolation that sustained the UK and the British empire before it, and to continue denying the Scots and the Irish a will of their own.

In hindsight, I wonder whether some of what I felt about Carlisle as a teenager was connected to my youthful unawareness of this aspect of English culture – a culture whose colonial history has left it with a tendency to think of itself as a ‘default culture’, like Grayson Perry’s ‘default men’, middle class, educated, white, heterosexual men who think of their own identity as the norm and everything else as ‘other’, and so are often blissfully unaware of their many cultural assumptions, their power and privilege, and their tendency to dominate, control and patronise. Default men are taking something of a battering at the moment, and about time too. The cultural assumptions of the most powerful people in our society should always be challenged.

I will probably always be an outsider on Lewis.  I am increasingly conscious that full immersion in – and understanding of – Lewis culture relies on a deep understanding of Gaelic, and the way in which the land has shaped the language and the language has reflected its people’s relationship with the land. While I am attempting to learn basic Gaelic (mainly to keep up with my children, who are at a Gaelic school), I will never speak it like a native, and I am ok with this; hopefully Lewis is also ok with me. My hope is that, while I doubt I’ll ever feel qualified to speak or advocate for the Hebrides, or for Gaelic culture, I can at least aspire to be a human ‘sea current’ of ideas, a kind of cultural go between, playing a part in bringing other people’s stories to Lewis and bringing stories of Lewis to the world, in a spirit of mutually respectful exchange – the kind of mutually respectful exchange we should all aspire to as human beings.

I am struck by how many people in Timsgarry in particular are also outsiders, in a sense – people who are not native to Lewis, or native Gaelic speakers, but who have made their home there and are contributing in important ways to the community. I hope I can do that too.