Happy Place

We are all supposed to have happy place where we go to when we feel under stress. In our heads, that is, I don’t mean that we get to just leave the car at the traffic-lights and walk off, people indifferently watching us go, maybe saying to other passers-by ‘look that guy’s probably off to his happy place’.
And I mean ‘go’ inside your head at an appropriate time, too. Not when you’re driving a train or piloting several hundred people over the ocean, just getting to that really fiddly part of the brain surgery. No, in those cases it’s probably just as well if you stay in your nasty place and leave the happy place to later, when going there won’t result in any sudden deaths.
I have several happy places, maybe more. I thought that that was a good thing but, then, maybe there’s something wrong if I need so many happy places to go to. To which to go. Now I’m stressed.
Anyway, I thought that maybe there are lots of people who don’t have a happy place to go to, and so I thought, well, why not let them have one of mine? I mean, If I go there and someone’s already there, it doesn’t really matter, I can go to one of my other places. Nice of me, isn’t it? I am thinking of someone sitting in an office, maybe, one of those big, open-plan places where everyone can see everything that everyone else is doing all the time. The kind of place where everyone has to come in early and leave late or they’ll be the next for the chop in these harsh economic times. Where the air tastes like it’s been pre-breathed by a hundred halitosis-sufferers after a lunch of garlic sausage and slightly off milk. Someone, maybe, who lives in a drab, faceless suburb and commutes there along dreary, characterless streets. Maybe they live in Beechwood Avenue. The beechwood was cut down to build the street. Not many orchids on Orchid Drive either. Maybe you.
So that person, maybe you, can accompany me now to one of my HPs. I think it is best if we travel together because getting there is an intrinsic part of the being there. I mean, I don’t just want to describe it as if we’ve been dropped there by parachute. How you want to go there in future is your own business. Let’s go.
It just occurred to me that my kind of HP maybe isn’t yours. But this is such a place as I think you’d have to be a bit odd not to be able to be happy there. At least compared to that crummy office you work in. All I can do if offer my kind of happy place, (I’ve had to stop using HP as an abbreviation, makes me think of beans all the time). You can bail out quickly if you don’t like the prospect as it opens up.
So: we are on a Scottish island. A wooded one, not one that’s too bleak. This one has mountains and glens and woods and streams. Here we call streams ‘burns’. Unless they are big like rivers, in which case we call them ‘rivers’.
We have just disembarked from a bus. We have not driven because, 1. I do not drive and, 2. Do you really think I will let myself be driven by someone who may be cracking-up? We set off across the moors. The going is quite hard, the heather is straggly and tough, entwined with bramble and bracken. The ground is alternately hard and soft. Boggy patches are disguised with beard-like rushes. Watch that root on your right. Your other right. The sky is clear and the sun high. Our efforts soon make us sweat profusely, attracting myriads of black flies of several species. Happy yet? A family of linnets watches us from a willow. They fly off. I take a map from my pocket, yes they are big pockets, to check our route, but do not show it to you. It isn’t easy to go in a straight line because of detours around pools and particularly thick patches of bramble. The moor begins to dip down. We are heading for a river which we will have to cross, but it is not very deep. You are beginning to look rather dishevelled and you bitterly regret wearing shorts. I am calm and would be bronzing nicely if it were not for my face being shaded by a broad-brimmed bush hat. My shirt is long-sleeved to spoil the flies’ lunch and my trousers army-style, with those big, map-sized pockets. The effect is rather spoiled, perhaps, by the large ‘San Francisco’ sew-on badge on the front of the hat. End of season sale on Fisherman’s Wharf, couldn’t resist. The jungle wear comes in useful as we disappear from the Argus view of satellites into a small but dense wood that pulls and tears at my clothes and your peeling skin. I extricate us by a judicious change of direction and we emerge into a small meadow.
Over there is the river. We move toward it.
The only sound is of bumblebees and grasshoppers. The meadow is thick with tall golden grasses and tangle of low, purple of vetch. From the waves of vetch arise beautiful little moths called ‘chimney-sweepers’. They are velvety black with wings tipped with white. For all their darkness, they look more like butterflies than moths. But so do many moths. There are more here than I have seen anywhere and they move to the accompaniment of the slow music of other insects like black-clad jazz dancers.
We make our way leisurely to the riverbank. The river flows beneath us, heading toward the sea a mile or so to the west. It bends slightly, we are on the bank on the apex of the inside of the bow. To the left are thick shrubs that must be descended from plants imported for some land-owner’s parkland. They are shedding scarlet flowers onto the water. The flowers drift past slowly. The petals test the surface tension of the water, bends the water which then catches sunlight, surrounding each flower in a halo of intense light. Beneath them, like live shadows, move trout fast as arrows.
I think you are a little happier now. Across the river and beyond some beech trees, I can see the stone circle which was my intended destination the first time I came this way and discovered this place. You can go there if you wish and think about your life, but you may be interrupted by tourists disguised as druids or druids disguised as tourists. No-one knows this place, no-one much. You can come here on a hot summer’s day like this one, or on a snowy day when the chimney-sweepers will be huddled deep below you. Or you can come here tonight when the river will just be a sound and the stars will be your only moths. The Plough will leave no furrow, Lyra the harp be still as the night itself.