©Julia Welstead July, 2021

16th July 2021

Yesterday I achieved a hat trick, a set of three outcomes, that has taken, rather poetically, three years to come to fruition (or you could say thirty years, if you take the longer view). It was unwitting, unpremeditated, unintentional, but having achieved it I suddenly see its meaning, power, message and consequence.

The first thing I feel is freedom. I’m 59 next week and for all of these years I have lived by expectations (of parents, school, community, education, qualifications, employers, all those scripts). I haven’t always lived within those expectations – anyone who knows me would say I’ve actively bucked those trends, run free of those rules – but they have defined me, whether through obedience to them or anarchy from them, they’ve been the framework, the leather and buckles, the constraints.

[must get that cartoon from Dot]

Yesterday saw the birth of a new me. I know that sounds crass, but please bear with. I feel sure I won’t be alone in this feeling of re-birth. But perhaps re-birth is wrong: it’s more a feeling of emergence from a carapace aka a caterpillar or mayfly larva. Air is being breathed, light and colour perceived, wings are unfurling, flight feels possible. Not the flight of fleeing – I’m an expert in that – nor the flight of Tinkerbell flitting and hiding from her own mischief – I’m familiar with that too – but the glorious flight of unfettered, curious exploration. A whole new world has opened up. Blue sky, storm clouds, sun, rain, wind, distant horizons, high hills, deep oceans, the jolly lot has hove into view. 

Before I get too fanciful (too late, you say?) let me put a pin in the map of time and place. Now, here, is 16th July 2021, in a sun-windy doorway at the top of outside stone steps belonging to an unfurnished flat on a busy corner of a less than salubrious area of Inverness, Scotland. I am here to work, in a full-time permanent contract as a healthcare support worker in the Acute Admissions Unit of Raigmore Hospital. Not so fanciful after all, this cog in the NHS wheel of blood, sweat, tears, life and death.

I’ll not bore you with the gory details of a hospital environment (or not now, perhaps later) dealing with a pandemic on top of all the usual pressures of human illness, frailty, accidental damage and general stupidity. The selfishness and the selflessness, the heroes and the villains. That stuff is in the news every day. I mention my work because a) it is pertinent to the hat trick and b) it provides an example of random beginning times because c) I’m about to leave.

Ok let’s unpack that hat box. But first I need to describe the box itself (the backstory, if you’re not getting my whimsical metaphors). Three years ago* I had moved into a time and place (more detail later (and perhaps that phrase should be on my gravestone)) where/when (this is getting like gender assignment) I was (yet again (and now I’m just willfully employing brackets)) looking for a way to keep food on table, wolf from door etc. I consulted my CV. In amongst the rampant jungle of my zigzag life (thank you Robert Twigger, for this turn of phrase in your helpful book “Walk”) I can claim three more clearly defined paths: nursing, environmental research/wardening and writing/journalism. I decided to give each of those a whack on the chest, to see if there was still any puff in their lungs, any beat in their hearts.

Hat one. A journalist’s trilby, rim pulled low over the forehead, minimal jaunt to the left. This shady persona has no official qualifications for the job, but has, in happy-go-lucky fashion, chanced upon various writing jobs over the years. 

In the beginning (somewhere in the mid 70s) some travel writing was offered, and leapt upon, in exchange for a Europe-by-train season ticket. Rapid learning curve = tickets get you places but don’t buy food. A half-starved waif returned from that summer to begin her nursing training. More anon.

In the midst (mid 80s to mid 90s) she hitched a ride on the production of a series of bird books: ‘where to watch’ type tomes. A talent and liking for map production (does anyone remember lettraset?!) proof-reading and editing was unearthed.

In the new millenium (the 00s) you could say she found her own voice in the writing of a weekly newspaper column of the ‘lifestyle’ ilk. Six years of weekly column writing, I have it on good authority, is enough to permanently ink the routine of writing, and the housekeeping necessaries of word counts, grammar, house-style, deadlines etc into one’s muscles, bones, nerve endings and fascia.

In recent times (the 10s) work was found in the writing of newsletters for organisations and the creation of blurb for glossy mags. Minimally remunerative and scantly creative, there seemed little chink of opportunity for ones own ‘voice’ in these underwhelming tasks. Enthusiasm waned. An injury (yea yea, more later) rendered sitting at a desk even more onerous, and writing was dropped in favour of more physically satisfying work (painting houses, as it turned out).

Hat two. The eponymous nurses’ cap: white, starchy, perched and held by the miracle of perfect posture (and hidden hairclips). Sequentially adorned with one, two, three blue stripes, then one fatter blue stripe, then frills of increasing quantity and majesty, denoted three years of studenthood, followed by staffhood, then sisterhood, and culminating in matronhood (I never achieved frills). Although they were ridiculous, and have rightly been binned along with the gender-ist terms, they absolutely did their job – there was no doubt who were the minions and who was in charge.

In the beginning (1979) was three years of studenthood, interrupted by that old teenage heffalump trap – kissing disease – otherwise known as Glandular fever. When reflecting (and I try not to overindulge in this dubious exercise) I sometimes wonder if this interruption triggered a lifetime’s bad habit of interrupting myself from whatever I am endeavouring to stick with. But there’s also the curious incident of the acromegalist in the Metabolic unit – a story of meeting a man that will not be what you expect (more, yup, later).

In the midst (the early 80s) were a couple of staff nurse roles, in departments as distant as ENT (ear, nose and throat) and what we now call Mental Health (but used to refer to in much less positive terms). Geographically those aren’t so far from each other (all in the head) but there the proximity ends. My first major flight was from here (to an Australian outback cattle station – and an Antipodean millipede of stories reside under that particular rock of ages), when it occurred to my flighty young mind (thank you John) that I didn’t have to stick to the script.

In the end (late 80s) nursing two nights a week at the local hospital earned me my food and rent whilst I undertook a Biology degree. My heart was no longer in it. My head wanted more. My soul wanted different. My spirit wanted adventure.

Hat three. Water and windproof, fleecelined, peak and ear flaps, hillside heather and grassland camouflage. Multi-purpose, as I discovered when my dogs required water on a long dry hillwalk, or when birds (harriers, skuas, terns) wooshed past my head in warning flights, or when something precious (a skull, a shell, a feather, a leaf, a chick) needed to be safely carried.

In the beginning (1990). Newly graduated and wondering what next, a job up a hill fell into my lap in the form of Alpine plant warden in the Angus Glens. A swift re-focus was required: my degree choices had all leaned to the sea, and here I was being expected to find, identify and protect tiny flowers up big mountains. I lived in a caravan unconnected to anything mod (electricity, for instance). Although so different (wind, water, wellies, woolies) it reminded me of my time in a remote Australian shack (heat, dust, sweat, shorts), the similarities lying in a fabulous sense of freedom from the trappings and expectations of modern life. And mice. So many mice in my caravan. So many mice in my shack. These fellow inhabitants taught me more than any Biology degree (not least, to use sturdy tins for food – if my sons read this they will finally understand my ‘tin thing’).

In the dog days of that summer, as alpine flowers nodded their last, a deer fence painting job around the Corrie was offered. One heady day of running from mountain plateau pillar to post (bog to rock) whilst a chopper fetched up the next load of post and wire (and gave me the ride of my life as a thank you) was followed by many weeks of brushing Hammerite onto angle-iron with Radio 4, curious eagles and occasional chatty hillwalkers for company. I finished just as the November snow was threatening finger and toe frostbite. From alpine to arboreal, mountain to coast. A season as Ardnamurchan RSPB reserve warden presented itself, with an upgrade from damp, mouse-ridden caravan to damp, mouse-ridden cottage. Electricity. Sea views. Midges. Trees. Birds. Rhododendrons. My main mission, alongside birdy walks for RSPB visitors, was to rid the woodland of its Victorian legacy – a stifling, native-plant-throttling, infestation of Rhododendron. Previous attempts to mechanically clear having failed, our attempt involved sawing gashes into thick stems, then drilling holes into which we injected poison. From fresh mountain to dank woodland, from cherishing to annihilating (ironically, with a Nepalese volunteer, for whom Rhody is a national emblem). A tipping point was reached when I returned to the cottage one evening to find a mouse drowned in my crock of culturing yoghurt, having entangled itself in the muslin. Death seemed omnipresent, and I the perpetrator.

In the midst (the 90s). The Hebrides. Life reasserted, threefold. Babies carried to eagle eyries, plonked in goose fields, abandoned in the chase to catch lapwing chicks, shooshed whilst watching hen harrier nests, too close for comfort. All in the name of research. So many stories, of hares, of otters, of peat fires, of cameramen in very small tents, of friends and colleagues from Shetland to Sweden, Israel to Iceland, Australia to Antarctica, Michigan to Manchester (well it was all sounding too hedonistic there, it had to land).

In the end (the 00s). Moves, separations, endings, beginnings. A farm in Orkney beckoned. A house, a garden, a flock of sheep, a newspaper column. You begin to see the shape? The connecting up? The circularity? The meeting of the hats?

Those hats are tricky to wear all at once, although, like a Venn diagram, they have their overlap.

Where was I?

Ah yes, the hat trick. Three years ago* (do keep up). 

Hat one. As I was pondering, on yet another small island, what to do next, a job advert was put under my nose. Newsletter editor. Part-time, perfect. I scrolled through my CV and highlighted all the writing-related bits. My application was turned down. Over-qualified? Too old? Who knows. These things happen.

Hat two. A few house painting jobs later, the local ranger job came up. Perfect. I dusted off my environmental credentials, did a whole heap of local research and presented myself. No dice. Bit of a wildcard probably, out of the field for too long.

Hat three. Having learned from the first two, I decided to get some experience (as a private carer, then as a healthcare support worker (we used to call them auxiliary nurses)) before applying for a return to nursing course and placement. Result? Nada. That was yesterday’s news.

Being a competitive person, I was fairly appalled by the first and second failures, but also being a natural rebel, I am exultant at the third. If one is going to fail, one should do it thoroughly and utterly.

The sense of freedom came as an unexpected silver lining, an iridescent glow, hidden in that carapace perhaps. I awoke to its radiance warming my face like morning sunshine. I am now free to officially rip up and burn the script, the CV, the latent expectations and indeed any sense of failure. Now I can refind myself in all those off-script pipedreams that have lurked in the shadows of my mind since forever. For my next trick, I merely have to remember what they were and indulge the dreams. 

I’ll get back to you soon. Don’t hold your breath.