Bog Myrtle & Peat

Storms rode in from the sea and forced the cattle to the dykebacks. The thorn trees cracked with the weight of the rain, then bales burst on the bike and wasted themselves in tumbling piles which flew before the sheep like gulls. It wasn’t light until after eight and the day was done by half-past five; dull and forfochen with the whistling wind in the overhead wires. Here in the broken heart of February, the world has spooled itself down to a bleak conclusion.

But amidst the battering rain and the bitterness of ice flecked in every seventh drop, I had found myself indoors in a bloom of kitchen steam. I was making marmalade, and the act lay crazily against the grain of gloom and flat colours in the depths of ancient winter. By some extraordinary failure of synchronicity, marmalade oranges are shipped to Scotland in January, and if we have nothing to match the mad and fiery gleam of citrus fruit at the best of times, these objects shine like fire in a landscape of blue and grey and bitter red.

At imbolc and Candlemas, the world is briefly brightened by a spark of flame which rears against the darkness. In the same bleak days, oranges do identical work, and although they lack the power to burn us, the fright they cause our licked-out tongues is similarly provocative. The two are a challenge to the darkness – the glimmer of light and the sunburst tang of sugared jam.

Imagine how our ancestors were dazzled by these scandalous objects when they first arrived in Scotland. For the first orange-eaters, it must have been impossible to imagine the kind of planet from which an orange or a lemon might have descended. To guard against the risk of pleasure, they say that the first oranges in Scotland were reserved for medicinal use – and when Mary Queen of Scots felt queasy and required fortification from a simple orange compote, her French-speaking maids would rush for the jar, whispering “ma’m est malade”. Nearby Scots mistook the sentence for a name, and perhaps that little story isn’t true – but nothing as strange or exotic could have landed in Scotland without a certain number of wires being crossed.

If Scots needed any further reason to fret about the lavish profligacy of Iberia, the orange was its clearest expression of bawdy excess. While we grovelled in a mash of rainsoaked oats, Spaniards were reclining in the sun and relishing the zest of citrus fruits; and how much sectarian fury is simply jealousy anyway? Here in Galloway, there’s a tendency to unplug the connection between oranges and their point of origin. The best marmalade oranges come from Seville. We use the word but mispronounce it, and our grannies call them SAVille with all the emphasis on the first syllable as if it were a surname. It’s a full-stop and a drawing short on lines of enquiry. It implies that Seville isn’t a place and you cannot learn more about it – so stop asking questions. 

And to be sure, it’s an extraordinary thing to hold an orange in your hand today. Fruits which originated in China and Myanmar were new to Spain once – and now there are oranges which tumble from trees from Badajoz to Barcelona and are wastefully crushed by the wheels of passing cars. They’re just oranges, and it turns out that we can learn to take anything for granted. Even Scotland’s used to oranges now – until one day when we look from the bitter, salivatory steam of boiled oranges and stare out of the icebound window. It’s only reasonable to be astonished by fruit which has no place in this sour-faced world of granite, haws and bending silver birches. 

If we really rack our brains and dream up something of our own to send back to Andalusia, what would it be? My eye is drawn to Ailsa Craig, and the image of a polished wad of granite dressed as a curling stone. And now I’d like to send one south, knowing that in a land without ice, the gift will land as strangely there as theirs land here.