© Julia Welstead May 2012

There is much barking by a bouncy young hound on the other side of the glass door, and a teenage girl appears from a set of stairs. She tries to pacify said hound, whilst also heading for the door, but before she quite gets to me, my friend appears from another internal door and says, ‘it’s OK Annie, I’ll get this, this is my friend’. Mary then comes to the door and Annie can be seen half dragging a reluctant hound back up the stairs. We hug our greetings and as an afterthought Mary calls up the stairs, ‘Annie this is Jules, my good friend Jules.’ and to me, ’Jules that’s Annie, she’s 16’ and there’s an ‘aha’ in my head as the penny drops. Annie is the Annie I’ve just been writing about, except that she’s 16 years older.

Part of my freelance writing work at the moment involves transcribing a set of diaries for Mary. They span 35 years of her life on a Scottish island, where she lives and works as an artist for half of each year. Her work is ongoing, the diaries are still being written, and it’s my job to catch her up. My visit today is to deliver the print-out of 1995 (that includes mention of baby Annie) for Mary to proof-read, and to collect the tiny, closely written notebooks that represent 1996. I love these visits. Mary and I sit in her walled garden (she inhabits the garden flat of this grand Edinburgh house, with her son and grandchildren living and working in the house above) or by her kitchen fireplace, depending on the weather, and we eat delicious home cooked things and talk non-stop about the island, the people, the Gaelic words and ways, the wildlife and food. For two bone-thin women we talk about food a lot: growing it, finding it in hedgerows, shorelines and ditches, storing, preparing, and cooking it. We are usually eating it while we talk, because Mary cooks me up some fabulous nosh and, because I always walk across town to her house from mine, I arrive with a matching fabulous appetite. On arrival and departure I walk through her house admiring artworks that resonate with familiarity, because I have transcribed the details of their inception many years ago. 

Mary and I have three children apiece, although hers are my age and mine are the age hers were when she started the diaries. We talk about our families too, because we have a serendipitous connection. We met two years ago because my mother attended a book club meeting and met up with Mary, whom she hadn’t seen in a long time. They talked of many things (cabbages and kings perhaps) and reminisced about their summer holiday trips to the island way back in the 1960’s, where their children had played together on the beach. Mary mentioned her diaries and her search for someone to transcribe and edit them. Mum mentioned me. Serendipity: ‘a happy accident or pleasant surprise, specifically the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it.’

A coincidence (the occurrence of events simultaneously, in a striking manner, but without any causal connection between them) brought us together, as I had booked a holiday that July, on the island where Mary spends her summers. One exquisitely blue-gold summer’s afternoon, all blissed out on sun and sea and sand, I cycled across the island to her coastal cottage and we met in a swirl of sausage dogs – hers, but we both own them – and had tea sitting on a length of bleached driftwood supported on pillars of beach boulders, in a wind-sheltered, sun-drenched neuk at the gable end. There was instant recognition, a comfortable rapport, I felt I had known this woman all my life. We even look alike, spare and wild-haired and distant-eyed, and possibly a tad fey in the nicest of ways, and we dress in similarly baggy, faded old clothes, all slightly unravelling at the edges. 

While we sat there Mary’s son appeared from the next-door-cottage and enthusiastically gripped my hand. Oh my goodness, my mind leapt back forty years and there stood wee Angus – we used to play in the dunes together when we were four, five, six – three summers in a row. We practically share a birthday, mine late July, his early August, so always when we were on the island. Perhaps that’s why I love islands so much: the backdrops of those delightful childhood summers are firmly etched in my memory banks and are the first to come into focus when I pattern-match for happy places.

Currently my working day involves sitting at my kitchen table deciphering Mary’s tiny, slanting handwriting, sometimes neat, sometimes wild, and committing it to screen and hard-drive and memory stick. Which is the more lasting state, I wonder, the worn-with-age notebooks of paper protected by cardboard covers, or the words floating on a digital screen, saved on circuit boards and in a virtual ‘cloud’ at some undisclosed location? It’s a moot point. Through Mary’s diary notes and stories I am yet again living the island life, albeit vicariously, and by the time the boys come home from school I have that faraway look in my eyes and find it difficult to re-focus on to physics test results, broken sports kit and the immediate need to get to swim training.Was the coming together of Mary and myself coincidence or synchronicity: meaningful or just pure chance? There are several definitions of synchronicity, but I like the one in my 1983 Chambers 20^th Century Dictionary (not everything has to come from Google): the bringing together in one picture of different parts of a story. I can’t help but feel that we were meant to meet and meant to work together. In addition to the delight of immersion in all things island, this work has kick-started my own writing, which had ground to a halt through the interference of all sorts of other life events, which ironically had themselves culminated in my move back to Edinburgh and taking a summer holiday on the island. The world goes around and life comes around.