Bog Myrtle & Peat

A hot day in the clipping sheds, with swallows crackling in the sun. We turned the sheep inside the shade and grabbed them one by one. These boys are fast, and that serves to highlight my clumsiness. I can do one in the time it takes them to do three, and my spectacles slip in the grease of my nose. I don’t dare to wear a sleeveless vest like the Australians or the Kiwis do. My arms are too white and feeble for that. And I don’t wear felt boots either, or hang suspended from a band, although I know this would surely help my back. I choose to suffer with the pain because the alternative is to be killed by mockery.

So, crooked and swearing, I find a gap beneath the rise and push the clippers into it, reeking of woolfat and slavers. From where I’m working, it’s too bright to see outside. The light’s a bleaching white, but I know there are seventy more to come in the beal of lambs wailing and the awful crump of grinding teeth. At least these blackies have been in the heather. Their bellies are clean like they’ve been combed, and that saves a measure of work.

At lunchtime when the ewes are done and the tups brought in to stand ready, the radio comes on and we sit by the woolbags to learn there will soon be another referendum on Scottish Independence. One of the boys spits and says “She’s bloody shameless”, and the other can’t believe it. Then there are segments of interviews and people speaking for and against the idea. “It’s just revenge”, the other says at last. “They had their hearts broken last time, and now they want to break ours back”. Big news rushes into the shed on a small speaker, and then a collie comes to lick for the fragments of a Quaver which has fallen between two slats of a pallet.

I agree it’s hard to make sense of national happenings out here, miles from the next living soul. You can’t believe there’s anything bigger than the work before you, much less imagine a nightmare of Ukraine or the latest American shooting . Even radio waves are weak by the time they’ve travelled this far into the hills, dodging the haggs and the baffling screens of cotton. There’s nothing but grass and tall hills to the far horizon, and if we’re talking about moving power from Westminster to Holyrood, both are differently far away. Water runs through the peat-dark pools, catching the underside glow of monkey flowers. It will be in Glasgow tomorrow, but after so many bends and widenings you’d never recognise it in the shade of a crane.

Like that water, News only flows in a single direction. These boys will shout back at the radio, but it’s only an eddy and nothing like a conversation. The things they say won’t travel far enough to be heard above the racket of lost lambs, and that’s maybe why they reckon nobody’s listening; it’s certainly why they feel able to cheat at PopMaster. The world is only incoming to our black tin shed in the high beyond of Lanarkshire, and the sole chance to reply comes once a year in a crop of lambs; a few drops squeezed out of the moss and into a bucket so large it makes your head spin just to think of it.

The first boy lights a fag and stands to his clippers, complaining again. “She said it was a once-in-a-generation vote”. Then with strange reciprocation, a voice on the radio replies “…But things have changed beyond all recognition since then”.

“No they fucking haven’t”, he says, rolling the first tup onto the point of its arse like his father showed him.